You realize that you’re insulting your mom and not me here, right?
If one wants to be a freak, who am I to judge?
Please see Post 414. I think I’m comfortable leaving it at that.
Is this like the tree falling in the forest? Very Zen. Or very “Since Smartass isn’t here, let’s talk about him.”
Well, that’s putting the “Great” in “Great Debates”, isn’t it?
I think that argument has been made as well as it can. I understand that you reject it; I hope you understand that the people you’re talking about don’t (well, a material portion of them don’t).
Not sure. Latest news item I can find says it’s being debated, which is definitely good. However, I seriously doubt that this debate is happening because of people calling South Carolinians assholes.
In my real life, I have found a sizable positive correlation between not insulting people and being able to influence them. And you can be sure that there have been more of the “insult” data points than I could ever be proud of. Of course, YMMV.
“With all due respect, I think you’re making counsel’s point for him.”
Ironically, this is a quote from From The Hip, part of a courtroom argument over an objection to witness testimony, “He’s an asshole.”
Actually, you’ve elided a bit here, but what I was asking for was acknowledgement that the “neither” group exists. Whether you think the distinction matters is, well, up to you.
That’s an impressive amount being read into a fairly short statement by me that didn’t include most of those words.
-VM
I think the important distinction in this case is not the descriptors, but the verb phrase, whether you say, “You are” or “You are acting like / being”. In a lot of cases, if you use the second one, the FIRST response would more likely be, “Why, what did I do?” Not to say that an ass-kicking might not still follow.
I DO think that people all over–including the south–make a distinction between being called a name or being called out for a specific behavior.
-VM
I think the first two questions have been answered enough times. As for the last question…because there aren’t a bunch of currently living Germans who think the Swastika is a symbol of Teutonic pride.
I think I’ve already agreed with this several times.
I’ve also said that this formulation is much more acceptable to me, because it’s something other than just name-calling. It’s becoming obvious to me that what I see as important nuance is, to a number of posters here, a trivial distinction. All I can say is, I still think it’s an important nuance.
And if this had been the way it was originally presented, I wouldn’t have been vigorously objecting to it.
I don’t see anything in the whole block of text (which I’ve abbreviated) that I disagree with.
-VM
I don’t know…I wonder if someone could pull it off if they used a different color scheme and orientation…no black or red, for sure.
-VM
What Zen? Literally no one has shown up in this thread who’s copped to flying the Confederate flag. So they’re not part of the conversation that’s happening in this thread. And how does that equate to talking about you when you aren’t here, given your repeated declaration that you don’t fly the Confederate flag?
I accept that there’s a substantial number of people out there who display that flag, who don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. There’s also a substantial number of people out there who litter, and don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, or text and drive, and don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, or catcall women, and don’t think they’re doing anything wrong.
Regardless of how they view their own actions, all of those people are assholes. They’re not assholes 100% of the time. But they are assholes when they do those particular actions.
My mistake: it was Alabama.
Problem is, it doesn’t. Which you’ve already acknowledged, when you said you had no problem with the “rude, obnoxious, and un-neighborly” descriptor. Because someone who is rude, obnoxious, and un-neighborly? That guy’s an asshole.
Well, let’s look at the exchange: I compared flying the Confederate flag to people who think they can say “nigger” if they’re just talking about “bad” black people. You said (sarcastically, I assume) “Clearly, the South is just full of assholes.” So, if I’m reading a meaning into those words that wasn’t supposed to be there, I can honestly say I have no idea what meaning you were intending to convey.
How do you know? And why is this relevant? If there were a bunch of living Germans who thought this (and there may well be), would you agree that displaying the swastika and displaying the Confederate flag are comparable?
But it’s the same verb phrase in both situations: “You ARE an asshole,” versus, “You ARE rude &c.”
Also, this:
…is incorrect.
I know that people will sometimes interpret my posts in the broadest manner possible, and sometimes will be narrowly literal-minded. However, I find it impossible to predict which will happen for a given post. For example, it never occurred to me that you would read this as if I had suggested you were talking about ME when I’m not here, because I thought YOUR prior sentence used my name rhetorically.
Let’s try it algebraically: Say that X stands for people who fly the confederate flag. Now substitute X for “Smartass” in my sentence.
I don’t see anything here that I disagree with.
As an Alabamian (who obviously doesn’t follow the local news), I have to say that is pretty awesome. I’m personally more pleased with that than I would have been a South Carolina announcement. Thanks.
This part of the discussion has now run full circle. I don’t see any benefit for either of us in pursuing it around the loop again.
There’s has been a whole bunch of round-and-round in this thread over different versions of “Flying the confederate flag is just like doing X, and people who do X are assholes,” and this just looked like another iteration of that. Seems to me, if we list enough of these examples, we’ll have managed to cover every bad behavior that southerners might do. Rather than repeating the same argument over yet another version of X, I decided to just create a facetious summary of them all.
-VM
I think you might need a few more scenario adjustments, but I think you CAN get to an imaginary place where I would agree that they are comparable.
But in the non-imaginary world, no, I don’t think they are comparable in the way that you are suggesting that they are.
For the record, I don’t see any value from trying to find ways that Nazi Swastikas are like confederate flags. Not to say that there aren’t ANY ways that they are similar, but there aren’t enough for the comparison to be enlightening, and in a debate like this, all they do is rile up both sides. Which is to say, if this line of discussion is as tiresome to you as it is to me, I’m perfectly okay with dropping it.
-VM
Round and round we go. Please refer back to LHOD’s comments about the Spanish (and Portuguese, by the way) variants of “to be”. It is the exact same distinction as I am making here, and you are suggesting doesn’t exist.
Are you suggesting that Neo-Nazis are to German society as confederate-flag-flyers are to Southern U.S. society?
Whatever, dude, this conversation is exhausting me.
-VM
The thing is, the distinction doesn’t exist in English. I might be playing Settlers of Catan with a friend, and they see I’m trying to get some points for building the longest road, and they deliberately build a settlement in a place that destroys my chances. I’ll laugh and say, “You’re SUCH an asshole!”
They understand quite well what I mean: I’m saying that in this particular case they’re taking an asshole action. Because in English, the verb “to be” has different meanings that depend on context. As someone brilliantly put it once, in a very similar context*, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”
The context here was a discussion of why someone might fly the flag. IN CONTEXT, it makes more sense to interpret “is an asshole” to refer to that specific action, the “estar” meaning of “is.” You interpreted it as the “ser” meaning, as if I were saying that this single act reflects globally on their personality.
I understand, now, the ambiguity. But when someone phrases something ambiguously, it is incumbent on the reader at minimum to ask for clarification; in general, a charitable interpretation is preferred.
(And before the obvious lame gotcha attempt shows up: there IS no charitable interpretation of waving the confederate flag. Or, rather, the “ignoramus” interpretation is the most charitable, given that of course I’m saying “ignoramus” specifically in connection to this act. The entire point of this thread was to explore whether there were other interpretations, and nobody’s been able to come up with anything more charitable than “they just don’t know about the flag’s history.”)
- Powerful government officials fucking someone
It’s about time, since they are rude, obnoxious, and un-neighborly. Or assholes. Same difference.
I use this comparison because it’s worked before, personally, with Southerners I’ve known (and I’m a Southerner too, by the way). It doesn’t change the way they feel personally about the flag, but it has changed how they feel about it’s display.
In my mind it works because of how obviously impossible it seems to criticize or complain about a Jew’s offense over the swastika – in such a comparison, when the real history of the Confederate flag is related, I think it similarly becomes obviously impossible to criticize or complain about a black person’s offense over the flag.
27% of black South Carolinians supported flying the Confederate flag on state grounds, when asked, in a poll this year. When you show me a poll where 27% of Jews (you know what, show me 5%) support flying a Nazi flag anywhere, then your comparison would be somewhat valid.
We don’t have distinct versions of “to be”, but I thought you very effectively illustrated an English version with “You’re being an asshole” and “You’re acting like asshole.”
I’m disappointed that you seem to be disavowing that now.
-VM
In that case, I’ll clarify my position: I don’t think the comparison worked in the way it was used here, and I don’t think it generally is useful in Web debates, particularly with the history of everything being “just like the Nazis” that we’re all familiar with. Having said that, if it WORKS in conversation with actual oblivious southerners, well, I’m fully in support of that.
-VM
I’m not disavowing that. “You’re an asshole” can mean either “you are in this particular case being an asshole” or “you’re irredeemably and forevermore in all ways an asshole.” I clarified later that I meant the former, where apparently you thought I meant the latter. But I think that in context it should have been clear that I meant the former, since it’d be absurd to suggest (for example) that someone who flies the confederate flag is an ignoramus in all areas of their lives.
I was glad to clarify for you, since you were confused about what I meant, but I don’t think the problem was with my initial phrasing, except that there was some room for ambiguity. Given context the ambiguity should have been resolved the way I intended; that you didn’t even realize there was ambiguity, and interpreted it in the incorrect and absurd way, is something you should take responsibility for. You went craycray on me because you misunderstood what I wrote; don’t expect me to apologize for that.
Oh puhleez, enough with the bullshit 27% figure. That number represents the views of 60 individuals in a state with over 1.3 million black people, drawn from a poll done over the phone last year.
Let’s see some recent poll numbers, now that it’s an issue front and center.