My apologies. I was letting emotion get the better of logic at that point.
SA, the emotion was getting in the way because you were upsetting me. Not intentionally. I know that, and knew it then. But I just got fed up with something that is, alas, endemic to your posting: You do condescend. A lot. In threads discussing entertainers expressing political views, you go on and on about how they do it just 'cause they want to tell us how to think 'cause they all think they’re so much smarter and good-looking and cool and popular. In this thread you hector those expressing outrage at repugnant views to lower their voices and be more polite.
I’m sure, SA that you don’t mean it that way. I wouldn’t regard you as a friend if you did. I’m sure there are aspects of my posting that annoy folks, that I’m completely unaware of. But this is what I perceive, and I have to tell you, this aspect of your posts is why a lot of people get steamed at you, in my opinion.
I will retract my retraction to Sol just a wee bit to propose this analogy to you:
If you encountered a middle-aged guy yapping about how prepubescent girls should be initiated into sex by guys like him, you’d be repulsed, but you wouldn’t be likely to make a scene about it. If you encountered such a guy and he was headed for your 1o-year-old daughter, your reaction would be, shall we say, a lot more visceral. Right?
Please, think about that, then go back over this thread with that in mind.
Please also keep in mind, SA, that this Coburn scuzz is not merely some random braindead bigot mouthing off. He’s in a position to actually do something about his hateful views, and he’s seeking election to another position where he will be able to propose and vote upon legislation that will affect the people he loathes and denigrates.
I do hope, with a night’s sleep and time to think over what’s been said, you’ll see why I’ve spoken as I have (and why others have reacted so strongly). I’ve been meaning to take up the condescension topic for quite a while (had meant to do it offline, in fact), but I feel it’s better, at this point, to lay it out here. I’m sorry to have upset you, but you do need to hear this. (Just as I, no doubt, need to hear some plain talk about my own flaws.)
I’m doing this for your own good. It hurts me more than it hurts you.
:: Mote plucker signing off to extract beam from own eye ::
By the way, SA still my friend, do you object to NoClueBoy using scathing language about Coburn? I mean, NCB is rampantly hetero. Does that excuse him from having to moderate his expressions of outrage and disgust in order not to derail the struggle for full acceptance?
EddyTeddyFreddy, of course I’m still your friend too, and I thank you for your posts.
You know, probably the thing that is most aggravating and frustrating for me here is the fact that I have to spend so much time bogged down trying to explain what I really said vs. what I’ve been accused of saying, or denying points of view and/or motives attributed to me that are blatantly false.
I think much of what you perceive as condescention is in fact a result of my having to go back, over and over again, and explain what I really meant vs. what I’m accused of. In the case of the celebrities speaking out, yes, I said over and over again the things you mention as to their motives. The reason? Because no one was addressing it, choosing instead to attribute false motives or false beliefs to what I was saying, and/or claiming I said things I never did. So yes, I kept coming back to it in an attempt to try to get someone to address it. I still believe what I attributed to them to be true as I see no other logical explanation for it. I asked anyone who disagreed with me on it to offer their opinion or analysis as to celebrity motives for speaking out, but over and over, no one did. Instead, they’d come back at me with some other spurious accusation. And when I find I am constantly having to do battle with people who appear to me to be deliberately missing my points or making false accusations as to what I’m saying, I probably do indeed become condescending, probably more out of frustration and impatience than anything else.
In regard to this thread, much the same thing has gone on. I’ve just gone back over every one of my posts to this thread and I honestly confess I don’t see anything that appears to me to be patting anyone on the head, or telling them to smile sweetly at their oppressors, or telling anyone to lower their voices and be more polite. Nor have I said anything that could possibly be honestly construed as my being a person who would deny rights to gays. Yet I’ve been accused of all of these and more. If people would respond to, or even argue with, me over what I actually say instead of extrapolating all sorts of ridiculous things I never said, or attributing motives and opinions to me that I don’t have, much of the back and forth in the threads I become involved in would be more productive.
I came into this thread because I felt people were letting their hate and rage get the better of them. And while I didn’t think to say so, the hate and rage I’ve been seeing are all over this board and not just in this thread. I was thinking that if these people acted this way in public, and their opponents did too, violence would surely be the result. It was then I thought of the Gephardt quote I mentioned about politics being a substitute for violence. I then came in here and expressed these feelings, and tried to point out what I still believe, which is that great progress is being made in regard to gay rights, and that perhaps all the hate, bile and outrage that I’d been seeing was counter-productive and could even lead to violence if left to go unchecked. You have seen the result.
You know me well enough to know that I’ll admit it if I think I’ve been wrong. And certainly there have been times when I have been wrong. But upon going back over my posts in this thread, and remembering why I said the things I did, and looking at how I said them, I honestly can’t say I see where I’ve been wrong or done anything to apologize for.
Why? Because everthing I’ve been able to see that people have jumped on me for have been things that I never said or motives I never held. If someone wants to jump on me for what I actually said, or ask me if I mean a certain thing they think I mean, it would be a much more productive, satisfying and friendly experience all the way around.
Having said that, I remain grateful for your posts today, and for your friendship. But I would ask that in the future, if you’re going to get mad at me, don’t put words in my mouth (or attribute to me actions such as head-patting) that I haven’t spoken…and then get mad at me for the words or actions you yourself (and not only you, by any means) have come attributed to me.
Very many regards, my friend. I know you probably aren’t very satisfied with the explanation I’ve just given, and I really do hope our friendship will continue to thrive despite our disagreement here.
Ah, well, here’s what I believe you’re not seeing: that you attribute motives to others with no basis in fact, yet get irate when others do this to you. You say you see only one possible motivation for celebrities to speak out on politics. How do you know? What do you know about those stars’ background, education, intelligence, out-of-limelight involvement, etc., etc.? Nothing. And yet you assert as incontrovertible that your opinion is the only possible explanation. Then when other posters offer their own interpretations of why celebrities speak out, and point out that you have no grounds for such statements, and that celebrities are as entitled as any other citizens to hold and act on political beliefs, you call their counterarguments spurious. Yet you are oversimplifying and have no support for your position beyond uninformed opinion. Can you not see the fallacy in this?
Deal – if you’ll promise to stop attributing beliefs and attitudes to people (like entertainers) when you have no grounds other than antipathy to their politics for doing so. (You DO recall admitting that you’d applaud, not jeer, an entertainer who stuck it to Ted Kennedy, right? ) I have no problem admitting that my own take on what others say is colored by my political beliefs; it’s equally likely that your perceptions are filtered through your very different wolrdview. The trick is to understand how that affects your reaction to arguments and events.
Oh, no problem. I’m aware that you’re no mindless neocon attack dog, and really do wish to engage in honest debate. I just think that, now and then, you need some mote-removal, and I’m always glad to help when the beam sticking out of my own eye doesn’t get in the way. I very much appreciate posts like this, for example.
Obviously, this wasn’t addressed to me, but you did post it publically, so I’m going to say a couple things here, if you don’t mind. I hope you don’t take any of them personally. I’m going to be critical here, but I’ll do my best not to be insulting.
If this is a re-occuring problem for you, it might be because of something on your end. If people are consistently misreading what you’re posting and coming up with conclusions about you that are completely at odds with how you view yourself, there’s a pretty good chance that it’s because you’re not expressing yourself very well. I mean, I can count on one hand the number of times my meaning has been totally mis-read on these boards. The fact that my politics and beliefs tend to be more instep with the majority of other posters on this board undoubtably factors into it to some degree, but a big part of it is that I make an effort to try and see if anything I’m writing could possibly be interpreted in a way I don’t intend, and if so, I reword it to eliminate that meaning. Doing that, however, requires a better understanding of context and subtext than you seem to possess, at least based on your postings in this thread.
Take the “threat to our freedoms thing,” which I interpreted as a back-handed comparison between the gay rights lobby and Al Qaeda. To me, this was a stunningly obvious interpretation. I could understand not catching it right away, or disagreeing that it was intended, but your response to me on that one indicated that you didn’t see how such an interpretation was even remotely possible, to the extent that you were going to give up on the thread entirely. Now, I could certainly be mistaken in that Coburn intended no such comparison. But to interpret his remarks as such is by no means unreasonable: he’s not the first homophobe to make such a comparison. Jerry Falwell, shortly after 9/11, said that God had allowed the WTC attacks to succeed because we hadn’t done enough as a country to keep down the gays and the feminists, the implication being that if we wanted to prevent another attack, we should focus on fighting those groups, and not the ones who were flying the actual airplanes. And he’s not alone. A lot of rhetoric in the debate on gay rights is done by innuendo and inference, not direct statements. No, Coburn never said anything about Al Qaeda, but the subtext was pretty clear, at least to me.
Are you kidding? That’s all you’ve done in this thread. You say our reactions to Coburn are “hate-filled,” but you don’t know how you’d respond if someone said the same things about you. That’s patronizing. That’s telling us to “smile sweetly at our oppressors.” That’s telling us to lower out voices and be more polite. How else are we supposed to read that? If that’s not your meaning, what is your meaning?
And this is where you demonstrate that you don’t really understand context. We have a candidate for a fairly important political position calling gays “the greatest threat to our freedoms today.” Even with the Al Qaeda inference, that’s a devastatingly insulting thing to say. But you didn’t say anything about that, you showed up in this thread to tell the people responding to a direct, personal insult that they were over-reacting. That comment, in this thread, sounds an awful lot like support for Coburn.
That’s patronizing, right there. You aren’t the arbiter of how outraged we’re allowed to get. You aren’t Yoda. We don’t need you to prevent us from turning to the dark side. You’re talking to people who live this debate, 24/7, and you’re an outsider for whom the outcome of the debate is almost entirely academic. Don’t tell us how we should react to a direct insult.
And that’s something you should have said right at the beginning. You have a good point there, really, and I can think of a half-dozen threads where it would have been an entirely apt and cognizant point. Unfortunetly, this thread isn’t one of them. If you’re talking about stuff you’ve seen “all over the board,” post it where you actually see it, or make it clear you’re talking about an over-all trend.
And that’s just stupid. Is there any pit thread where that observation doesn’t apply? Again, this is incredibly patronizing. The posters in this thread are adults. They know how to behave in society, and they know the difference between proper ettiquette in real life and proper ettiquette on an internet message board. It’s particularly asinine in light of the fact that there’s actually a damned good chance that a lot of the people you’re talking to have already experienced violence related to this issue first hand. It may have escaped your attention, but 99% of the time, when there’s violence related to the gay rights struggle, it’s a bunch of homophobes beating the hell out of some poor guy they saw walking out of a gay bar. There are not a whole lot of gangs of leather dykes lurking around Christian bookstores, waiting to jump some innocent divinity student and wail on his ass for being a Baptist. To lecture gays about not inciting violence against homophobes takes a truly staggering amount of chutzpah.
Do you know how that progress has been made? I’ll give you a hint: it didn’t have much in common with the advice you’ve given in this thread.
Generally speaking, if you’ve poorly expressed yourself and given insult where none was intended, the honorable thing to do is apologize, not to become defensive that other people can only read what you write on the boards, and not what is written in your mind and heart. None of the interpretations of what you’ve said here are, to my eye, unreasonable. If they are incorrect, it is because you have not expressed yourself as well as you should have.
[QUOTEcommunity has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power…[/QUOTE]
So who’s gay? Bush or Cheney?
What a moron. I have to thank my American friends for finding politicians who make me feel so much better at the morons that we breed locally. Thank you with all my heart. As a token of my appreciation I offer to send down shiploads of moronic politicians if you ever find yourself in a dangerous shortage.
How can a former American AIDS czar and current candidate for Senator from Oklahoma affect you at all, let alone “shit all over” you, way up there in Canada?
Eh, be concerned or offended all you like, but it’s a bit over the top to say that someone is shitting all over you, when in reality, he has nothing to do with you, nor do you with him.
What happens in the US does affect Canada. Especially when it leads to stupid bullshit like not recognizing same sex marriages from Canada when they visit the US.
Well, I can at least see how it could seem like this to you. My point was, and is, that they have no motive I can see, and none that have been suggested to me, for thinking people should follow their lead other than for the reasons I said in my posts. I’ve never seen any celebrity come on a talk show or speak at a rally or make any other kind of public showing of support for a particular socio-political issue based on their background, education, out-of-limelight involvement, and so forth. If they were to do so this would give them more credibility in my eyes. But they don’t do this. Instead, they very much appear (and I’d be willing to listen if you think otherwise) to be of the opinion that the fact that they are well known celebrities is all that is required to get (some) people to follow their lead. Everyone knows this; it’s why celebrity support is solicited in the first place.
Well, I pretty much just answered this, but I will point out that I asked several times in the other thread for any other reason such celebrities might be speaking out other than they hoped to influence people to their way of thinking by virtue only of their celebrity. No one has done so. So it’s not that I’m certain of my point of view on this simply because it fits with my take on things; it’s also because no one has offered anything by way of an alternative explanation for them to be speaking out.
I do. But it would be more out of a “finally, someone giving it back to 'em” sort of a cheer, than a belief that they are qualified by virtue of their celebrity to do so. It would be fine with me if entertainers just stuck with entertaining. I have no particular desire to see any celebrities speaking up for my side either.
You are right of course. But I bend over backwards to try to be as reasonable and level-headed as I can in espousing my views. I don’t come into these threads spouting venom at liberals and calling people such as Clinton evil and acting like all liberals are air-headed idiots who couldn’t find their way home in the dark, even though this kind of thing is more than commonplace coming from the other side. Clearly each side thinks it’s right, otherwise, we wouldn’t think of it the way we do. So to the degree my perceptions are filtered through my worldview, it’s because the things I believe are what I believe to be right. I expect that my oponents realize this, as I realize it about them. But it invariably seems that if I don’t come around to the other side’s point of view, I’m thought to be stubborn and intractible and refusing to listen to reason. I’ve even brought this up before in posts. I’m not likely to come around to a liberal point of view based on a thread here and I don’t expect anyone of a liberal frame of mind to come around to mine. And while I can’t think of a single instance where I have ever accused anyone of stubbornly refusing to come around to my way of thinking, this has been said about me many times.
Thank you. I like being able to make posts like that. Ironically, my intent and tone when I came into this thread was intended to be much like that. :eek:
Starving Artist, I appreciate your peaceful attitude, but what you are saying is the third stanza of a very familiar song. Blacks should wait and be patient and be grateful for how far they’ve come. Women should wait and be patient and be grateful for how far they’ve come. Now, verse three.
No one should be expected to wait to be treated like a first class citizen.
The next time you hear someone say that a minority group should “wait and be patient,” I can almost guarantee you that that person is a white male heterosexual. It’s not that they don’t have problems of their own. But they’ve not had to wait, generally, for full rights as citizens.
The anger that you hear in the words posted in this thread is not that different from the frustration in the raised voices of patriots in Richmond and Philadelphia. Now there were your militants.
Here, you have only the words. It’s a good thing to speak up about injustices.
What’s worse, I think, is that any homosexual reading this thread has already been waiting at least fifteen to twenty years for equal rights. Probably more. Maybe thirty years. Maybe sixty. And your advice, SA, is wait longer? “Don’t worry, you’ll be a first class citizen when your ninety!” This is supposed to make someone feel better? This is supposed to calm them down?
Thanks. I will try to do my best to answer or acknowledge your points here, but I’ll have to try to be succinct. Time is short tonight.
Well, a couple of things here. I do try as much as possible to be cognizant of what you refer to as context and subtext, and sometimes it pays off, as in the thread ETF kindly linked to above. But by and large, this kind of disconnect is simply part and parcel of and goes hand in hand with being a conservative poster to the SDMB. All of us (all 6 or 7 of us, that is :p) come in for the exact same type of behavior. Even Sam Stone, who is about the most calm, reasonable and erudite of us all comes in for it regularly. I get emails from some of my other conservative brethren here from time to time expressing disdain over this aspect of the SDMB.
I snipped the remainder of this paragraph but I did take note of it. I regret I still have to disagree. To me, this is simply an impassioned extrapolation on your part and has nothing to do with the facts. The simple fact is that Coburn never said, nor in my opinion did he imply, that gays were worse than al-Qaeda. I can see from your explanation now why you believe it to be so however. But the simple fact of the matter is he never said that. It seems to me that in a discussion of opposing views, sticking as closely as possible to the facts is a good way to assure that there aren’t such misunderstandings. And what Falwell said was ridiculous, and I think it’s a good thing that things in this country have progressed to the point where he hardly got the words out of his mouth before he had to apologize for them.
Not by my understanding of the word. Hypocritical, maybe…but not patronizing.
Well, I’m sorry but I strongly disagree. It’s nothing of the sort. Telling gays to smile sweetly at their oppressors would be telling them that. What you’ve just said is extrapolation. It’s your take on what I said, but it’s not really what I really said.
It’s supposed to mean just what it says. I’m not being flip here, I’m being honest. It means exactly what it says! That being that in my opinion (and you may note I used IMHO in one of the more major of my posts), things are going well in the main for gay people in this country and that indulging in hate and rage toward the anti-gay segment of society is counter-productive. That’s all there is to it! Nothing else is intended. There is nothing here about being polite, subservient, smiling sweetly, going back in the closet, etc. But it seems that some of the people here have an angry sense of entitlement to their hate and rage and don’t want to hear otherwise, thus the false meanings attributed to my words.
And I have to say I find it ironic (and I know this will sound condescending but I don’t know how else to put it) that I’m having to, on a message board devoted to fighting ignorance (and presumable therefore, hate) I’m having to defend an anti-hate stance. One person after another has come on here defending their right to the hate they feel and belittling me for being critical of it. Isn’t the elimination of hate and hate speech one of the basic tenets of liberal philosophy?
Well, it wasn’t. The people in this thread, and the things they were saying, is what I was taking issue with! If Coburn had been here, you would have heard what I’d have had to say to him. But he wasn’t! Therefore, I directed my comments toward those who were.
See? Here we go again. I didn’t tell anyone how outraged they were allowed to get or anything else. I proposed that hate and outrage were counter-productive and attempted to show that things were going pretty well for the gay movement overall. This in an attempt to point out that victory was on the way. And why was I doing that? To try to offer encouragement to people who had been oppressed and try to make them feel better about the way things were going in this country despite the likes of Coburn. Sheesh, what an asshole I am, huh? And a nervy one at that! :rolleyes:
Sorry, but again…I have to disagree quite strongly. I think the kind of hate and outrage that has been in evidence throughout this thread is inappropriate counter productive no matter what thread it’s in.
You are right of course. But do you really think it would have made a difference? You yourself just said this wasn’t the right thread for it.
Thank you. I’m glad you’re trying not to be insulting.
Another mischaracterization of my words. (Are you beginning to see what I’m talking about, I hope, I hope?) First of all, I never lectured anybody about not inciting violence against homophobes. In fact, I never even mentioned it. In another fact, I never even thought of it that way. I was speaking of the fact that we have a political system for a reason, and I was trying to show that hate and rage on the part of gays, and hate and rage on the part of anti-gays, would result in violence as a means of settling the issue were it not for the political system.
Generally speaking, if you’ve poorly expressed yourself and given insult where none was intended, the honorable thing to do is apologize, not to become defensive that other people can only read what you write on the boards, and not what is written in your mind and heart. None of the interpretations of what you’ve said here are, to my eye, unreasonable. If they are incorrect, it is because you have not expressed yourself as well as you should have.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you, but as I said, I think the real problem is I’m a conservative and this is a liberal board. The most negative and critical interpretations of my words, along with outright misstatements and indignant, angry false accusations are the norm. I know many of the people who engage in this type of behavior are sincere, but they misrepresent what I’m saying nonetheless.
DAMMIT!!! YOU PEOPLE ARE DRIVING ME CRAZY!!! CRAZY, DO YOU HEAR???
You know what, waiting longer isn’t a choice. It will take time for things to get where they need to be. That is a simple fact of life! If any of you know how to acheive everything we would all like to see happen tomorrow, or next week, or even next year, I’d damn well like to hear it. If you can’t, I respectfully ask that you CUT ME SOME @#$%*& SLACK!!!
Ahem…thank you.
I very much appreciate posts 