I read the argument. I still say it’s stupid.
To clarify, I don’t have that worldview. I would say peoples’ two options with supporting such an argument of supporting homosexuals while mistreating other harmless but quirky groups is to
A. Be a hypocrite
Or
B. Think less of minority groups but think that they’ve “earned” their rights through their mistreatment.
It’s not a matter of earned rights or any other bullshit that I didn’t say in my post, the corpse of which you seem to have appropriated for your zombie resurrection, it’s a matter of who people really are. If you’re gay, you’re gay. For all of human history, people have been born loving the same sex. If you’re black, you’re black. For all of human history people have been born with whatever skin color they’re born with.
If you’re a furry, well, what would you have been during the entire course of human history, the last few hundreds of thousands of years? Or if you want to narrow the focus to what we might consider civilization, simply thousands of years, barring the last tiny portion where cartoons exist? You wouldn’t have been a furry. It never would have occurred to you to be a furry. You wouldn’t have felt a longing for a life denied you, because that life hadn’t been invented and you certainly didn’t invent it yourself. The walls of Pompeii are not covered with big eyed anthropomorphic mammals gazing invitingly at the viewer, the pyramids don’t contain frescoes of a muscular salamander frotting the cleavage of a slow loris. There is nothing in all of history, in any of history, to indicate that furry-ism is a natural predilection of human kind.
It is an affectation. A considered choice. It is the fedora of sexual preference, and I’ll be goddamned if I entertain the notion that it deserves the same respect as gay rights or racial equality.
Why don’t peoples’ choices, which in no way harm anyone, deserve respect? You’ve selected a 100% arbitrary dividing line.
Sorry, but if I can’t laugh at this then I don’t know that there’s anything left in this world for me to laugh at. And just a reminder, your argument to me was that this… whatever this is… is somehow analogous to gay rights or civil rights. That I can’t support those things and not support… whatever this is… without being a hypocrite. That is an offensive assertion. Your logic equates Selma with people who are into cake farts and you need to fix that bullshit right now. A fetish is not an identity, it is not a sacred cow deserving of solemn reverence.
It’s not a major civil rights issue. It’s just a personal preference in an artistic aesthetic.
You might as well ask, why the hatred for people who like Picasso? Shrug. Some of us really do like Picasso. If you don’t, that’s your loss.
There is a tiny minority of people who just have to hate. They get up in the morning and hate their breakfast cereal, and they go to bed at night and hate their pillows. Hell of a way to live a life.
Anyone individual who decides to hold an event that involves wearing a heavy fursuit in the city of Pittsburgh in freaking July deserves to be mocked, if you ask me.
**Sorry, but if I can’t laugh at…
**
I notice you like to speak in vague terms to obfuscate the issue. The entire original argument was about hating people, considering them “defective” in some manner, etc. Whether or not you get a chuckle out of something, nobody gives a shit about.
That I can’t support those things and not support… whatever this is… without being a hypocrite. That is an offensive assertion.
Offensive to you? Good. You need to be offended. I said you could be a hypocrite OR
A. you could be logically consistent in doing so by assuming that those other groups only deserve respect because they’ve suffered
AND/OR
B. that they only deserved respect because they couldn’t change what they are.
The point of view most decent human beings take is that you shouldn’t treat or desire to treat people like shit if they aren’t hurting or attempting to hurt anybody. That point of view precludes hating or treating with contempt members of other races, sexualities, musical tastes, fetish’s, what have you.
People who have suffered more of course deserve more care, and if they can’t change the quality about themselves that earns them scorn that makes it all the worse, so of course Selma isn’t the same thing as cake fart fetishists. Not even in the same galaxy. But if you treat the fetishists with contempt (you can laugh about it all you want if you find it funny, that’s fine), that means either you are a hypocrite or you don’t subscribe to the idea of not treating harmless people with contempt. Which just leaves behind amount of suffering endured and the inability to change as the only two reasons you care about things like Selma.
Well, I suppose that doesn’t *have *to mean that you only care about those other groups out of pity for hardship suffered and inability to change, but you’re the one playing up those two aspects as being the only relevant factors, so that’s how you apparently feel about those groups.
Has it yet been established that there is any notable degree of hatred for furries?
No. And that’s what so great about this. There is a subset of furries who get off on the notion that they are a persecuted minority but it’s simply not the case.
This is a slippery slope, next thing they’ll want is the right to marry.
You could just google it like a good boy. They’ve been pretty well known as the Internet’s punching bag for a while now. In any case, off of the top of my head there was the chlorine gas incident at a convention last year. One ‘little’ incident, sure, but it hardly exists in a vacuum. Think less severe civil rights violation and more giving the Star Trek nerd a swirly back in the 70’s and 80’s.
The fact that there are a couple of idiots who overinflate it into a civil rights issue gets thrown up as a shield to deflect attention whenever someone is being a dick to them. Not everything is about “persecution”. Sometimes people are just being assholes and need to stop crying foul whenever someone points it out.
Being the butt of an occasional joke is not being the target of hatred.
To my knowledge, it has never been really clear that that was an attack on the furries. It was “suspected” to be intentional, but there was no confirmation, and no evidence of specific targeting. If you have a better case to make, by all means make it, but it is no one’s job to do it for you. “Hatred” is a strong word; when you invoke it in a new context, the burden is on you to justify.
They’ve been more than the “butt of an occasional joke”, but it seems like you’re missing the point here and, once again, someone is trying to tease some argument for a civil rights movement out of me. That’s what people are consistently making this out to be, for whatever reason.
This is me talking to individuals that have said on this thread that they think there is something wrong with being a furry and that it’s fine to mock them. Nothing more, nothing less.
As if you wouldn’t just move the goalposts again. You’re the one asking about the “notability” of the hatred of furries; an ambiguous and largely subjective qualification. I’m talking to individuals who are trying to justify their hatred/contempt for the fandom. I don’t have a burden to prove shit that you are asking for when it’s not anything that my argument presupposes.
In any case, I don’t think they receive as much shit as they used to, and I think they get along just fine now. This isn’t an argument about how widespread it is, it’s an argument with people who do.
In the case of the thread, people ask questions like this all of the time such as "why all the hate for [insert band, video game, movie, etc] and it’s generally understood that they are referring to common cultural tropes and not talking about Hatred with a capital H, and they’re not rallying the troops to liberate Justin Beiber fan death camps.
OK, so… there is no actual hatred to speak of. Glad to have that cleared up.
Then, I’ll just say that I’m with those who find furries worthy of occasional mockery for their self-absorbed tweeness. Of course, they are, by far, not the only microculture so worthy. Nor are they interesting enough for such derision to be an abiding thought; anyone who thinks anything about furries more than once in a great while is giving them too much significance.
Such an Odd first post to the SDMB.
Join Date: 11-06-2015 Total Posts: 10
Its just so odd, because you post like you’ve been here… forever…
Wow. Any back-door excuse you can get to raise a mob to go after blacks & gays, huh? What about these guys? Now is it OK to go after blacks & gays? What about these Other guys? :dubious:
There was a rather well-known person in the US (… from someplace… south of Chicago?) who used to have that exact same style of drumming up hate. One reporter noted that with just 5 minutes of conversational probing,
he could have wait-staff spewing the worst hatred out of their mouths that you’d ever heard. He explained later that he just needed to find an ‘in’… a nerve. Something that they already hated & could get them to open up about.
Once he had that, he’d just nudge them towards where he wanted all that hatred to go. I remember the article because he too Really hated blacks and gays.
His name escapes me right now… what was it? David Baron? David King?
It was something phony & pretentious like that, but he isn’t worth googling to be sure.
What have we indeed.
I don’t treat the fetishists with contempt. I treat many acts of the fetish itself with mild, humorous derision. You yourself say that I can laugh all I want if I find it funny. Well, the entirety of my comments in this thread have essentially been “LOL,” or “Your furry fetish is not not on the same level as civil rights/ gay rights.” I stand by both of those sentiments and it seems like you do too, so what’s the problem?
Ok, to be fair I have stated that I think the people on the extreme end of the fandom have something off about them. Well, not every choice under the sun deserves equal respect, however harmless it may be. If you want to decorate your home with jugs of urine because you like the way the golden light plays off of the walls, you’re welcome to do so but don’t then look at me and demand that I ‘respect’ your choice. I’m gonna think you’re gross and that there’s probably something a bit wrong with you. I’ll still give you the basic respect you deserve as a person, sure. I’m not going to try to beat you up, I’m not going to key your car, or try to burn down your home, or make your life miserable. I’m not going to be ok with somebody else doing those things to you either. But if your piss jugs come up in conversation I am going to say something along the lines of, “Piss jugs? Seriously? Gross.”
As I’ve said before in this thread, if you like wearing a tail to anime conventions I’d never even bat an eye if you told me about it. Furthering that, if you like wearing a tail all day, everywhere you go, I might roll my eyes at your habit but fuck it, have fun, you do you. If you’re into fursuit dance parties or spend your days wistfully drawing endless cartoons of assorted animal-folk having sex, well, I’m going to laugh about it and maybe even post on a message board about how I laugh about it, and I’m going to think that there’s something a bit off about you. That’s pretty much the beginning and the end of my ‘fursecution’ towards the noble struggle of those who want to jack off in an otter suit so get over it already.
Yeah, I don’t care anymore. I’ve squeezed all of the fun out of this that I can. Mazel tov everyone.
Self-contradiction in one sentence.
From the Vanity Fair article linked back in post 93:
A drunk wanting to take pot-shots at participants in a furry convention isn’t hatred? Nor is linking furries to bestiality?