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[Golfhaus]

I believe I kinda said that, toast.

I agree with the Mr.-Bear-is-defending-Philippe's-sweet-virgin-ass hypothesis, but I prefer to think of it as him summarily rejecting all of the stupid shit that the Internet makes possible.

Yes, I believe he's protecting Philippe. But I WANT to believe that he's so pissed off at what stupidity the Internet promotes that he needed to take a cricket bat to the Internet. Or the nearest physical manifestation of said Internet.

[oball]

That's pretty much what I got from it.

[wombat]

Wombat, what the fuck? I'm very disturbed by your indifference here. I, for one, see the problem quite clearly, as I'm sure everyone else here does. Just imagine your own child in Philippe's place, and maybe then you'll get it.

You know what I realized is, the deal is, this is Achewood.  It's going to turn out that this has nothing to do with pedophilia but with some cartoon-cat kind of weirdness that we can't even imagine at this point. And Philippe will have lost his thousand dollar dinners for nothing.

But, I guess since Mr Bear is inside it, he can't see that. So I suppose it would be disturbing.

[Bimmicus]

The main thing to understand here is that Philippe has always been a jerk.

[theinevitable]

The main thing to understand here is that Philippe has always been a jerk.

I feel like there is an age threshold for declaring someone a jerk. He is acting perfectly reasonably for a five year old otter.

[littlefallsmets]

But perhaps this is part of the point...

Little kids are kind of jerks by nature.

They don't understand the idea that anything other than them is real quite enough to not be jerks.

They lack the perspective to not be jerks.

[theinevitable]

I mean, I think that means that they are not jerks, then. To me, being a jerk means being conscious of what you are doing, and doing it anyway because you just don't give a shit.

goddamn, I end up having this conversation once a day for like a month now. Mostly with my friend who is really into saying that people are racist, misogynistic, sexist, anti-semitic. and it's always in situations where... the intent is not there at all. I can understand that, as a person of the Jewish faith, she is uncomfortable with public prayer. But I don't think that this means that people who support public prayer are "anti-Semitic." It's not like they're saying "man, let's mention Jesus in a prayer at school. Goddamn, I hate those Jews so much." I think that there is a difference between doing something through ignorance, and through direct intent. To her, there is not this distinction.

She is also just really big on throwing around those labels in general, which pisses me off so much. but I never know enough about the issues she is discussing to debate her intelligently on the matter. She pulls out all these statistics and shit and basically tells me I don't know what I'm talking about. She is also really big on discounting any sort of fact I can pull out because I can't cite where it came from.

I mean, I am also pretty big on giving people the benefit of the doubt. I can put up with a lot of shit from people who are doing their best and don't know any better.
As my high school Latin teacher used to say, "Ignorant" should not imply a moral judgment. It just means you don't know. How can you blame someone for not knowing something?

[lprkn]

Sounds like a swell person to hang out with.

[littlefallsmets]

Well, just to play Diablo's Advocito here, 'Nev...

With the big problems, sometimes you kinda have to let yourself paint with a wide brush because... if you go around understanding all the sides of every issue and sympathizing with even the positions that are entirely wrong...

You never fix anything because you're too worried about hurting someone's feelings.

If a problem is awful enough, sometimes the only way to get it fixed is to disregard the feelings of the willfully ignorant and worry about that all later because the problem is so pressing.

Basically all the failures of the American Left since the middle seventies come down to being SO understanding and SO non-judgemental and SO fair and SO meaningful-dialoguey that... anyone with any ability to run a con whatsoever can slow them down for years and years, just be pretending to be hurt.

You can't be neutral on train rushing inexorably in one direction, you know.

If there's an elephant and an ant, to be "un-biased" is to be biased toward the elephant because it's a fuck*ng elephant and has nearly all the advantages to begin with.

Now, I am fairly sure that from the way you describe her ideology... her arguement comes not from understanding when to transcend nuance but rather from a naive inability to SEE nuance but... sometimes that attitude is worth more than being frozen out from real action BY nuance.

Perhaps you and her can find a middle ground, between your c*ck and her pu$$y.

[theinevitable]

I dunno. I think a lot of it is that now that I am pissed off by it, I purposely get into conversations with her about things that I know will make her say dumb things so that I can call her out on it.
It's like poking at a cut in your mouth with your tongue.

I have a tendency to do this. This is how I made my first two girlfriends start hating me. It's a problem I have. Also, once I start thinking this way about a person, I have a tendency to misunderstand what they are saying in a way which makes them sound even more radical and ridiculous.

LFM, considering which specific girl it is, it is funny that you are saying I should pursue her sexually.


I would actually argue the opposite. I feel like the problem with liberals in this country, especially the ones who tend to be in college, is that they are really big on painting people they oppose with a wide brush. A lot of the social conservatives I know are, on some level, reacting against a movement which constantly tells them that they are racist, sexist, bigoted assholes. "Change what you think. The way you have been raised has made you incapable of not being racist." This is not a way to convince people, it's a way to brow-beat them into mindlessly agreeing with you, and then thinking that they're not racist because they support Obama or have joined in in condemning all use of "The N Word" or whatever. And then you get a bunch of douchebags reacting to this, saying "I know this isn't PC, but... (something unacceptable and broadly racist)."
It's no different from browbeating people into supporting you because you are Standing Strong against terrorism. It's no different from accusing liberals of hating America and supporting the terrorists.

I don't know. I don't think that trying to understand people is a weakness. It's really all we have. Intelligence, ingenuity, perseverence-- all can lead to destruction. Trying to understand another human being? Never.

[littlefallsmets]

Understanding is the best thing. The best thing in the world.

But... inaction based on that understanding is one of the worst things in the world.

That's what I'm saying in terms of the difference between understanding nuance and being able to know when to transcend it because of the greater good.

How many times do people try to defend Christofascism, for example, by saying that respecting other faiths or a lack of faith is a slap in their face and... how many good liberals wanting to be understanding of everyone get frozen in place because they don't know how to go forward without hurting ANYONE'S feelings?

That's the whole bag behind Fox News always having a weak-willed liberal on their panels to make fun of.

It's very easy for The Bastards, whoever they are this week, to prevent or slow whatever action is against them this week by pointing out a little way that Men and Women of Good Conscience might be hurting a few people a little in pursuit of the greater good and... buying the time to create a new Bastard Lie.

Framing it so that... in Good Conscience trying to end a terrible pointless war... they point out that you might slightly demoralize the Americans that are being slaughtered by the carload in the act of getting them out of the slaughterhouse and...

Too many People of Good Conscience get stuck running circles in their minds, trying to figure out some kind of impossible scenario where everybody wins in every way and... the Bastards have bought time to evade again, to slip through the hands of justice again and et cetera.

As bad as it was that some veterans of Vietnam were ridiculed upon coming home... and as much as The Bastards point to that to defend the war against the Iraqi people... part and parcel of that ridicule was the forces that also got them home alive.

Sometimes the Idiot Firebrands get it right because... at least they're screaming, at least they're yelling, at least they're trying to get ideas out there, even if they're flawed... for the same reason why it made sense for Spock to kill himself in the warp core.

The immediate needs of the many sometimes trump the feelings of a few.

Where wisdom comes in is figuring out WHERE to be an Idiot Firebrand and WHERE to be some half-life Solomon, trying to parse out a fully-equitable solution.

Also:

I was simply suggesting that you have sex with... a girl. You mentioned a girl and so I suggested you have sex with her. Your self-destructive tendency toward overthinking matters of the heart requires some sort of action, even a half-bad action, to move forward.

Actually, it fits the same political/cultural theory I'm talking about above.

That's... that's kind of rad. I must be really awesome, despite myself.

[jay-ell]

Can I step in?  I don't want to get in the way of all the sloppy kisses, but I can't stay out of this.  It's too sexy. 

I think there is middle ground here.  Ignorance takes many forms, some of them willful and deliberate (e.g. "those damn homos are all alike" or "Mexican men come to this country to steal our jobs and our women") and some are genuine lack of adequate information (e.g. "he's autistic?  Is he going to grow up to be like Rain Man?" or "You're from Lebanon, shouldn't you be in a mosque praying right now?").  People who haven't had much exposure to people outside their own cultural groups can't be expected to be PC all the time.  Their prejudices might offend people, but in the grand scheme of things, they aren't really causing lasting harm.

But I think our legislature should protect the civil rights of people who are a minority in this country, within the boundaries of those things which are actually rights and not just hard feelings.  ("Rights" being things like life, liberty, purfuit of happineff, as well as those pesky trivial details like due process and equal treatment under the law.)  People are going to be jerks, and jerks have a right to be here too.  Besides which, some people are born jerks, some achieve jerkiness, and some have jerkiness thrust upon them.  It's not our call.  All we can do as enlightened people is teach our children well and try to make the jerks feel a little bad about being such jerks all the time.  Legislation for the big stuff, social pressure for the rest. 

But then, that's me -- big-goverment, socially-conservative freak of nature that I am -- with waaaay to much faith in humanity. 

So feel free to pick this apart from both sides.  I'm prepared for that. 

Just...be gentle.  It's been a while since I've been tag-teamed on a political debate. 

[theinevitable]

oh, no, I am saying that this specific girl was someone you told me to get the hell away from.


There is a difference between Understanding and knee-jerk sympathy. I refuse to believe that understanding what makes people tick, how they think, what motivates them, can ever be bad. This is our strength. What would the point be of "winning" if in winning we lose our understanding? We end up with a nation of people who say "there's no difference between blacks and whites" without understanding what that means-- there is no difference because everyone is different. Judging any person, of any race, based on anything other than knowing them is impossible. But do we teach our children this? To understand people as individuals, and not as members of some group or ethnicity? Not really. We've just shifted from a society that judged people based on race to one that pretends not to.

Browbeating people into agreeing with you, without attempting to understand them, without teaching them the same skill, is worthless. I would think that you, of all people, would realize this. Browbeating people into agreeing with you about Tolerance, about Love and Fraternity, is impossible. In the majority of cases, the options seem clear-- trying to understand the problem, trying to teach people, trying to further the human cause, or refusing to understand, refusing to understand-- not only refusing to understand, but painting those who try to as america-haters, homosexuals, drug-users, terrorists, and communists. Do we wage a "war on drugs" in Columbia, or do we provide treatment options for addicts? Do we put inner-city kids in jail for having half a gram of coke, or do we address the issues in society which create the "drug issue?" To me, it seems like there is only one reasonable option.

[CortJstr]

Phillipe's candelabreptre is so cute. Not only can he hit disloyal subjects with it, he can also use it to find his way to the bathroom at night.

Either that or he's like the bishop from Battle Chess. That guy would use his flaming cross staff to set other pieces on fire.

But anyway, panel one wins.

[Drastic Action]

Judging any person, of any race, based on anything other than knowing them is impossible. But do we teach our children this? To understand people as individuals, and not as members of some group or ethnicity? Not really. We've just shifted from a society that judged people based on race to one that pretends not to.

Goodness.  I don't know if it's the late hour or what, but this seems like an important realization.  How many people do I know who would preface some remarkably racist thing with a comment such as, "not that I'm racist, but..."