What demographic do you think calling Bush 43 a chimp offends? Chimpanzees? While I personally don’t find childish insults to be my cup of tea, there is no rule that precludes insults of off board people.
I think you should familiarize yourself with the fallacy of equivocation. Being a welcoming board doesn’t mean welcoming without guiderails. For example, we’re not welcoming to spammers or socks.
I appreciate that, but the issue is that I don’t post very much on these boards. I get sidetracked by real life and end up away from the Dope for a few months; when I come back, I’ve cooled off, and am ready to address the posts I see as they come.
If you’re here day in and day out, though, making the same reasoned arguments to the same groups of people gets very tiring. Eventually, you don’t break down your thoughts and logic; you just say, “we’ve been over this in other threads, and if you haven’t gotten it yet, you’re just not trying”. I think that’s the point a lot of the people making the same arguments I am are at. Not to mention that I am a straight white male. None of this is personal for me; I look at these posts and think, “now, I am not personally offended, but if my wife was a poster here, this kind of thing would definitely drive her away. So I’m going to say something, because that is just wrong”. That’s an extra layer of detachment that helps me think about the issue rationally,though. If I felt personally attacked, keeping my posts “reasonable” would be a lot harder.
Have you looked at the messageboard banner right at the top of the page? The ultimate raison d’etre of this board is ideologically adversarial, not “welcoming”. In the last analysis, we’re here to fight ignorance and ideologies that promote ignorance.
Some “demographics”, such as Trump supporters, have voluntarily allied themselves with the deliberate promotion of not just ignorance but outright falsehood. You can’t really expect those attitudes to be welcomed here.
When it comes to basic facts, a board fundamentally devoted to fighting ignorance is supposed to be an echo chamber. Consequently, there are some subjects on which the SDMB is indeed pretty much unanimous: e.g., the perniciousness of antivax propaganda, the reality of the moon landings, the sphericity of the earth, and the mendacity and illogicality of Donald Trump.
There are still plenty of matters of opinion on which Dopers actively disagree all the time. But just because blatant ignorance and idiocy are becoming more socially acceptable in the Trump era doesn’t obligate us at the Dope to be “welcoming” to them. Continuing to be an echo chamber of consensus on the issue of condemning blatant ignorance and idiocy is something we ought to aspire to, not lament.
I voted for GWB both times and generally appreciated the job he did (though I disagreed with him on a number of his decisions and actions as president). I definitely do not hate him.
But the man does bear a striking resemblance to a chimpanzee, I will not lie.
I understand that. I just don’t see how it’s productive to employ dehumanizing language that targets folks that tens of millions have voted for relatively recently. It just leads to an environment where folks on the receiving end want to dish out in kind. So call Bush a chimp? Fine. Call Ms. Clinton a harpy? Well that’s misogynistic!
That’s the inconsistency that I personally do not like.
Actually you should want Trump supporters and other deplorables here. That gives you a chance to fight their ignorance.
How many missives of this sort have you sent Trump’s way?
Meh, you want us to forget that you did call us hypocrites and you did not take it back after it was shown that that was not the case. I would not be surprised that one can find some hypocrites in past discussions, but that was not the case here as Trump is a total cad. (And that “hypocrite” dis was directed at me too when you did reply to the comment that the other poster made to me)
Can we treat them they way they treat people at Trump rallies? Can we throw out all decorum they way Trump does with his tweets? Can we be at loose with the truth as they are at press conferences?
If I had a direct line to The Orange One that would be message number 210 on the list.
“Harpies” are screeching monsters from Greek mythology, half woman and half bird. They’re associated with a negative view of women – calling Clinton a “Harpy” is specifically an attack on her gender (and negative stereotypes associated with it, like being “screechy” or “bitchy”). That association doesn’t exist for Bush and Chimps. Yes, the idea is to 1) make fun of Bush’s own, individual appearance (harrdeehar, he has big ears!) And 2) insult his intelligence. Juvenile? Yes. Offensive? Not so much.
To test this theory – what if you called Hillary something else? What if you called her a baboon, for example? I doubt anyone would take offense. But “Harpy” for Hillary is a charged term. Can you call Bush a Harpy? Sure, you can. You can call Obama a harpy, too. But while you’re welcome to call Hillary or Bush a chimp, you shouldn’t call Obama one…
The point is, context matters! A lot!
This shouldn’t need explaining. But you’re attempting to explain it to someone who is dumber than a burlap sack of wet hair. So I suspect your efforts are in vain.
What inconsistency? Has anyone been prevented from calling H. Clinton a harpy? I did a search for all thread reports containing the word “harpy”. There were 5 such reports, and two of them had to do with Game of Thrones because the episode title was “Sons of the Harpy”. The others had nothing to do with the use of the word “harpy”.
It’s a childish insult to label H. Clinton as a harpy, but it’s not against any rule per se. It’s a childish insult to label Bush 43 as a chimp, but it’s not against any rule per se.
Personally, I find most of your oeurvre of criticism to be misplaced, or based on false equivalencies and equivocation.
I doubt he’s stupid, but I also doubt the choice of “harpy” as Clinton’s insult was coincidental.
I remember the Obamas being called chimps, but not so much GWB.
Oc, it would actually be more poignant if you used an example that was from this year. This is a different society than 10 years ago.
GWB was definitely called a chimp very often; not necessarily on message boards, but shirts depicting Bush’s face (and ears) on a chimp were very common, as were “evolution” shirts showing Bush as the predecessor to Gibbons.
I didn’t know anyone who called Obama a chimp, but I’m sure it did happen – I just wasn’t friends with anyone quite that racist.
I remember Bush being compared often to “Curious George” due also to the coincidence of his name.
http://www.indranet.com/potpourri/humor/curiousgeorgew.html
I don’t recall many comparisons of Obama to a chimp, because I don’t frequent web sites like Stormfront, but there was this unfortunate cartoon:
Just use Republican. It fits the same and is easier to say.
I’m not necessarily talking about Trump-era idiocy. I’m talking more about garden-variety political disagreements- the role of government, property rights vs. public good, defense spending vs. social programs, etc…
NONE of those things are fixed in stone, ignorant or idiotic, on either side.
But the progressive side has basically reframed the debate around here such that disagreeing with the party line about say… defense spending, and the debate takes on the feel that they’re trying to fight your ignorance.
Which is shit in the context of fighting ignorance. It’s ok, I suppose in the context of a hard-left political message board, but not in somewhere that’s supposed to basically argue it out and fight ignorance on both sides through that argument.
And I want to point out that I’m neither particularly conservative nor authoritarian on any of those various online tests that exist, and I think the Republican Party has gone off the rails hard in at least the past couple of decades, if not longer. I’m more moderate and centrist than anything else, and I frequently feel rather unwelcome here because I question the “accepted wisdom”.
More often than not, I just don’t engage when I disagree, because I don’t feel like arguing with a half dozen snarky and smug people about something. And who won’t listen or even entertain the thought that others may have equally valid points about stuff that they may disagree with.
Okay.
Find 'em.
Where are they, this mythical “intelligent conservative contingent”?
Are they hanging out with the Heartland Institute, a group that denies climate change and was previously pushing to turn back the clock on tobacco?
Maybe they’re out with Ben Shapiro, who can’t remember a single “significant” republican in the last decade who was a birther, apparently missing the current president.
Ooh, have you checked the folks in the streets of Portland, wearing neo-nazi LARP gear and trying to start riots?
How about those lovely folks who chanted “send her back” at a Trump rally?
The high water mark to date is Bricker, who was smart but also a dishonest shitbag whose reaction to widespread voter suppression boiled down to “Yeah, well, you can’t stop us, so neener neener”. Smart, maybe, but a gigantic fucking asshole who very often argued entirely on self-interest.
The “smart” conservatives are the ones who know that what they’re doing is wrong and do it anyways because they really love their tax cuts and think they’re going to be able to ride out the rest of their lives without climate change biting them in the ass. Everyone else is, in one way or another, deeply fucking deluded.
I dunno, we were having a pretty reasonable discussion about minimum wage and the effects of its increase, albeit one fairly short in the tooth on solid evidence for many of the claims made. It isn’t exactly a liberal scoldfest in there, it’s mostly talking about what effect the minimum wage has. Yeah, I get pretty pissy about low-quality arguments and evidence, but in that case it is actually an issue of fighting ignorance, not some moral badgering.
Basically, do you have some examples of what you’re talking about? Because most of what I’ve seen is that on subjects where there is reasonable disagreement, reasonable disagreement is generally had.
The problem is that there is a (disturbingly growing) field of the overton window where there simply is no reasonable disagreement, and the right is on the wrong side of almost every one of those issues.
Nazis are bad.
Climate change is real and a serious problem.
Trade wars are not “easy to win”.
Concentration camps are bad.
Trump is an embarrassment on the world stage that it will take the USA decades to recover from.
Antifa is not a domestic terrorist group.
Tax cuts for the rich during an economic boom time are not sound economic policy.
Major tech industry players are not “in the tank” for the democrats.
A 10-year-old Somalian refugee growing up to become a congresswoman is an example of an immigration success story, not of failure.
<Insert whatever lunacy Alex Jones is screeching about today here.>
And yeah, if you wanna bring up that shit, you’re going to get your ignorance fought. And it’s going to sound partisan and shrill, because intentional ignorance and insane conspiracy-mongering are largely a partisan phenomenon at this point. Democrats are not going to look at major news reports that look bad for them and instinctively scream “FAKE NEWS”, while here on the board, we literally have people saying that the concentration camps at the border are just that.
What do you expect? I mean, honestly?