Thursday, December 20, 2012
FIGHTING WORDS. Before approving the protest of Erik Loomis' treatment, I went back to my Gabby Giffords rightbloggers column to see if I'd accused Sarah Palin of inciting murder. To my relief, I found I had not.
Maybe it means little more than that the liquor store closed early that night, but I flatter myself that in the main, though I am silly and snarky and snide, and sometimes come dangerously close to willful misapprehension of my targets (and by dangerously close, I mean I do it all the time, waving my Satirist's Immunity card), at least you can say for me that I don't gin up fake outrage over transparently bogus offenses and try to get people fired for them, as have the people who've come after Loomis for saying after Newtown he'd like to see the NRA President's head on a stick. (Hell, I didn't even agree with the drive to fire Rush Limbaugh.)
But enough about what a swell guy I am. There are real differences between the factions which, for want of better terms, I will describe as Us and Them. Though it is meaningful that we are right and they are wrong about nearly everything, how we go about defending our righteous beliefs is at least as meaningful. I suspect there are practical political benefits to not demanding apologies and retaliation like a butthurt asshole, but the main reason for not demanding apologies and retaliation like a butthurt asshole is that demanding apologies and retaliation like a butthurt asshole makes you a butthurt asshole.
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"You see the real reason why Loomis should be fired—or at the very least investigated for what he said—is that his comments are fascist."
ReplyDeleteNext they'll be saying that weeping is fascist.
Well at least calling for "a head on a stick" can't be construed as phallophobic.
ReplyDelete"Bear in mind, I
ReplyDeletedefine fascism as nothing more than a lack of belief in democracy
itself."
And this is how ve justifies going after a history professor. Which, by the way, is in order to protect freedom of expression. For someone who so hates fascism, ve certainly loves cribbing from their doublethink manual.
but the main reason for not demanding apologies and retaliation like a butthurt asshole is that demanding apologies and retaliation like a
ReplyDeletebutthurt asshole makes you a butthurt asshole.
I hate to nitpick, but ... Okay, I love to nitpick, so I'll just point out that this is simply a symptom of butthurt assholiolalia, not its cause. Most of these people were born butthurt assholes, and they'll die butthurt assholes ... ideally in an industrial-grade deep-fat fryer. Oh, whoops, now the goddamn sanctimonious shitblots at Popehat and Allergic2bull** will be demanding that I be fired, because hey, they have no way of knowing whether that was a credible threat or not. Because they're apparently fucking idiots.
**You know, if I were allergic to, say, wool, I wouldn't be spending my days making Merino sweaters.
Well, yeah, as sad as what passes for public discourse is and has been in this country for a while, the old heads-on-pikes routine doesn't have a lot to recommend it, even if Them don't walk back their similar rhetoric, a la Coulter and Palin. (Tu quoque? No, you quoque!) But I do think that part of being a decent person is a certain allowance for rough words in the heat of the moment, and if the worst that Wayne LaPierre ever has to suffer for being as responsible as any other human being for getting an AR-15 into Adam Lanza's hands is the evocation of a weedy professor desiring to get medieval on his ass, he'll have made out like a bandit. As others have pointed out, the ginned-up outrage over Loomis' comment has absolutely nothing to do with his comment and absolutely everything to do with his being a consistently pro-labor voice.
ReplyDeleteAlso, by way of contrast, what it's like to be a woman writing on the internet, pretty much all the time. I'm sure that most if not all of the female alicuratti can share similar stories.
well, let's wait a second here - if they fire him, does it bring back all those dead kids and teachers that were killed by a military-grade semiautomatic rifle with an extra long ammo clip purchased by an alienated person preparing for the end of days?
ReplyDeleteHere's my new slogan: "Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones...but Guns will Really Kill Me." I'm outraged by the outrage. Really, I am. Wayne LaPierre is committed to living a life in which he and all his besties are armed to the teeth to defend themselves against the Erik Loomis's of the world. They explicitly attack the police function of the National and Local Government and arrange their affairs as though law, custom, and social controls on other people are meaningless. My last resort is their first resort. So donne moi the world's tiniest violin, si vous plait, when someone farts in Wayne LaPierre's general direction. I think he's more than capable and, in fact, quite likely, of attempting to blast to death anyone who fails to show the proper deference to a man armed with the equivalent of a bunker buster. He doesn't really need Michelle Malkin's flying monkeys of tweaker rage to protect his amour propre or his rights. He's got the fucking right to try to lure Erik Loomis to Florida and stand his ground and blow Loomis's head off. What more do they want?
ReplyDeleteaimai
By this definition fascism and monarchism are the same thing, as are communism, monarchism, and anarchism. Neat!
ReplyDeleteI think you mean gl-assholailia.
ReplyDeleteaimai
I'm mainly amazed at the sort of conspiratorial leaps in logic conservative bloggers are going through to denounce the looming threat of Erik Loomis; because his Ph.D. dissertation was about miners getting sick at work, now workplace regulations are equivalent to decapitations, because they're both tendrils of Loomisite influence.
ReplyDelete"Bear in mind, I define fascism as nothing more than a lack of belief in democracy itself."
ReplyDeleteSays one of the guys trying to get Loomis fired for free speechgratuitous metaphoring.
Calling for a head on a stick is the putting of a head on a stick of liberal fascism.
ReplyDeleteThe bottom line appears to be that the scum are going to twist things (or just make shit up out of whole cloth) in order to make themselves appear as the only real victims here, no matter how unhinged or violent their own rhetoric (or actions), or however deadly the consequences of their political posturing. Heaven forfend the NRA have to take anything like responsibility in the fallout over this latest in a series of increasingly horrific atrocities.
ReplyDeleteAnyone remember G. Gordon Liddy chuckling to his audience of mouth-frothers about how to properly kill cops and government agents by aiming at their heads? Ah, but doesn't my clucking in disapproval make me the real fascist here?
I try to comfort myself (and it is admittedly easy in my position of "not being Erik Loomis right now") with the thought that this is the end of the candle: for all of the pissy white people in the world for whom writing a dissertation about labor is the moral equivalent of war, it's an improvement over the viciousness of their forefathers. It may be inaccurate but it helps me get up in the morning.
ReplyDeleteOT but Irony was just shot to death by the SEC filing by the Freedom Group when they discuss the prospects for capitalist growth as actual rural hunters decline in numbers:
ReplyDelete2. Men are as insecure as ever. On the upside, though, firearms makers such as Freedom Group have in recent years managed to offset the decline in demand from bona fide hunters by marketing military-style guns to men more interested in impressing their dears than tracking deer. The euphemism for this category is the "modern sporting rifle," and Freedom Group is all over it. From its 2011 annual report: "The Bushmaster and DPMS brands, established in 1973 and 1986, respectively, represent the largest and second largest designers and suppliers of modern sporting rifles, components and parts for the commercial market. Bushmaster was one of the first companies to introduce modern sporting rifles to the consumer market, a market that is growing faster than the general firearms industry." This shift away from the hunting market to the self-image market is what led Freedom Group to produce an ad campaign which casts buying the Bushmaster .223 as restoring one's "man card." Most unfortunately, the campaign includes one ad that defines "unmanliness" as being a man who "avoids eye contact with 5th graders."
"You said 'monarchism' twice."
ReplyDelete"I like it."
no i'd say this is kinda on-topic.
ReplyDeleteI think I didn't mean Irony...I think I meant 20 kindergarteners.
ReplyDeleteAnnual reports are kind of weird. They are both promotional literature for your stock and a legal document bound by SEC regulations. So it's more than just poor form to lie in one--actual criminal penalties can result. (I am sure the GOP will get around to clearing up this incivility once they resume power.)
ReplyDeleteHey, he's got his own historians. If you scroll down to the footnotes (yes, there are footnotes) he cites Prof. Loadberg for the proposition that fascism means whatever I think is icky.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that various House committees will have plenty of time, now that the State Department's Benghazi report is out. Right?
ReplyDelete...right?
...well, now, that's a hell of a thing--crickets in December.
Also, too: Charlotte Allen, fresh from suggesting that Kevin DuJan should run Palin's 2016 presidential campaign, digs a trench so deep to lower the bar that it would suffice for a cut-and-cover subway tunnel. I disagree with Weigel on a lot of things, but he acquits himself quite well with this dissection.
ReplyDeleteWeigel's basic problem is that he doesn't seem to get a lot of the liberal thought process (I gave him up for a while after he claimed democrats were shooting themselves in the foot by not caring enough about the plight of underemployed white 20-somethings), but he does basically mean well, I think.
ReplyDeleteAnd he's been keeping excellent tabs on the various state level ideas about splitting electoral votes to fuck over democrats, so credit to him for that.
And the WaPo fired him for making righties mad.
ReplyDeleteThat's got to earn him some cred, although Doghouse frequently makes the opposing case (rather well).
~
alexander cockburn once said that one of the interesting things about 9/11 was that you got a sense of where people's "secret safes" were - that when the lights went back up, you could really get a sense of what people valued in their politics and morality. and as josh marshall pointed out yesterday (i believe it was yesterday), as the lights come back up, what we're seeing is that one side in america has a politics and a set of values that is completely atavistic, and cries out for more and more violence - more guns, more men, more men with guns.
ReplyDeleteSomebody say Lush Pillbaugh?
ReplyDeletehttp://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/item/Tornoe-20121219-Limbaugh.jpg
~
Well, getting people fired is how the mouthbreathers keep score. (Well, that and getting federal appointments blocked.) Think of the cheering over Van Jones and Shirley Sherrod, although what happened to Juan Cole over his prospective position at Yale is much closer in tactics and motive to what's currently happening to Erik Loomis.
ReplyDeleteThe problem I have with the proposition that "there are practical political benefits to not demanding apologies and retaliation" is that in the current climate, there aren't practical political benefits. Twenty-five years later, the troglodytes are still using "Borked" as a means of protecting the influence of some of the worst reactionary dildos ever, while simultaneously screaming for the heads of every Democrat that doesn't agree with them, and a few that do. I can't think of a way to describe it except as feral Manicheanism. It succeeds because it gets media eyeballs and ears, and it succeeds in pretty much sucking up the available oxygen in virtually every debate over appointments, qualifications and political philosophy. Rational and reasonable seems to be inaudible in the din.
Loomis' present predicament is a perfect instance of the phenomenon. In the grand scheme of things, he's an untenured professor at an average state university and would be completely anonymous on the national stage were it not for the inordinately loud--and coordinated--conservative uproar over his metaphorical condemnation of Wayne LaPierre in a blog post. The normal physiological reaction to raving, maniacal behavior is to shrink back from it and to humor it, and the political analogue of that is to defer to and appease. What actually happened with Loomis after the deluge? Did the president of URI make a rational and reasonable statement saying that the right wing was engaged in manufacturing a tempest in a teapot, that Loomis was speaking figuratively, not literally, for emphasis, and deserved no opprobrium for that? No. The URI president agreed with them, humored them and publicly chastised Loomis by saying that hate speech would not be tolerated.
The point, I guess, is that the leaping screamers know that this works, and the more they do it, the better it works. They continue to drive, relentlessly, for a society made in their own crackpot image, and one of the most successful tactics in that drive is to shout down and if possible, destroy--in coordinated fashion--all voices other than their own. They also seem to have a sixth sense for attacking people who are in some way institutionally vulnerable, so that they may be visibly and materially punished for engaging in speech contrary to wingnut views.
Overall, I'd say that they're working the refs with alacrity.
The surest way to recognize a bully is by their unerring instinct for kissing up and kicking down. The tactics and arena may change, but that....reflex won't.
ReplyDeleteWorking the refs implies a conscious and willful decision. The flying monkeys of the right are more like the toddler who knows that enough howling will eventually produce a lollipop...
Roy: There are real differences between the factions, which, for want of better terms, I will call Us and Them.
ReplyDeleteYes, one of the main differences being that when We criticize one of Theirs we get death threats and when They criticize one of Ours we get death threats.
the main reason for not demanding apologies and retaliation like a butthurt asshole is that demanding apologies and retaliation like a butthurt asshole makes you a butthurt asshole.
ReplyDeleteThey cannot be other than what they are. It is our duty merely to point that out.
Indeed.
ReplyDeleteAs others have pointed out, the ginned-up outrage over Loomis' comment has absolutely nothing to do with his comment and absolutely everything to do with his being a consistently pro-labor voice.
ReplyDeleteThis is made quite obvious from the Twitchy entry on Loomis taking his Twitter down. (Loomis links to it after Roy links to him.) Malkin's armchair army retrieved some tweets that they thought showed him to be unstable, hateful, etc. These included some pro-labor posts that don't even neighbor on being violent.
Add ACORN to that body count.
ReplyDelete~
Don't let the Them get you down, Roy. Us are better badasses because of you than Them will ever be and Them resents it.
ReplyDeletebut the main reason for not demanding apologies and retaliation like a butthurt asshole is that demanding apologies and retaliation like a
ReplyDeletebutthurt asshole makes you a butthurt asshole.
They know that they cannot win with their ideas, so they attempt to destroy those they see as enemies. Also, isn't this "head on a stick" nontroversy following on the heels of a similar "heated metaphor" incident courtesy of Glenn Reynolds? Something along the lines of "I want to see them crushed to a pulp by a sexy robot army?"
sphinctering in tongues you mean?
ReplyDeleteMay I just say, BigBadBaldBastard, that you are awesome? Because you are awesome. I am the Pie Person, and I have spoken.
ReplyDeleteSomething's not quite right about the term "butthurt assholes." It seems backwards, or inside out.
ReplyDeleteThe proper place for La Pierre's head is, of course, the end of a bayonette.
ReplyDeleteI do love the long-form Montag.
ReplyDeleteThe quote that sprang to mind first was Nietzsche, of course:
ReplyDeleteWhoever
fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become
a monster. And if you gaze long enough into a butthurt asshole, the butthurt asshole will
gaze back into you.
Oh, hang on. My copy of Bartlett's just tried to throw itself out the window.
"It seems backwards, or inside out."
ReplyDeleteWell, what do you think happened when they shoved their heads that far in?
No offense, and pretty sure this has been covered already, but given Wayne's World of Flying Bullets' response to the fatal business in Florida earlier this year, absolutely no one should have been surprised by this response.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand. Wasn't Loomis just using satire? Wasn't he just using irony? Why don't any of the butthurt right-wingers see this? It appears they simply do not understand satire or irony.
ReplyDeleteThis kind of credulous crap isn't solely the province of the right.
ReplyDeleteI got banned at Eschaton for saying, in response to a comment about guillotines, "the guillotine - an idea whose time has come - again." This was purportedly construed as a "threat" by the host because of the long American history of lopping off people's heads, and because of the high probability that I would shoulder aside the Secret Service detail of some unnamed person of importance, kidnap the same, and then proceed to decapitate him or her with a guillotine that I had set up in a secret location for this exact purpose.
No...wait... it really had nothing at all to do with that, as evidenced by the failure to also ban the person who made the initial, just as threatening (which is to say, not at all), comment about guillotines, just as the butthurt assholes in this case know full well that Erik Loomis was not threatening violence. It's just a convenient excuse to go after or otherwise punish someone because for whatever reason you don't like them or their beliefs.
In short, this assholism also exists on "our" side. Which is why I've not given Eschaton even a click since late 2007.
Just watching Wayne LaPierre's presser. I wouldn't sully a stick, pikestaff or bayonet with the putrid head of the dissembling fuck. Solitary confinement for the rest of his unnatural life will do. I need a shower.
ReplyDeleteRight, he's just an "entertainer" like Rush or a "rodeo clown" like Glenn Beck! "Obama is just like Hitler and trying to destroy America, so arm yourselves! Har!" [slaps knee]
ReplyDeletemakes you a butthurt asshole
ReplyDeleteAh, but Roy, you're ignoring that their ideology says they should be butthurt assholes, thus you're not allowed to criticize them! Read Ayn Rand, and all will become clear...
Let's make one distinction here. Loomis was writing his own opinions at a site not identified with the URI brand. He was off the clock, so to speak. The work he performs for URI is not connected to his writings at LGM. Calling for him to get fired by URI for what he writes outside of the classroom is wrong.
ReplyDeleteLimbaugh is a professional political commenter, and when he speaks, he is speaking on his corporation's dime. Calling for him to be removed from his position as political commenter for uttering indefensible and vile comments is totally appropriate.
Heh, indeed. I got grief there years ago for giving shit to a complete asshole calling himself "incognito", who was the cute pet of the commenters at the time. Went back a year later and apparently he had fallen out of favor. I, too, try very hard not to click through.
ReplyDeleteDon't take anything the failed Mrs. Kimberlin has to say as anything serious. Now that he's not their mascot any longer, he's just another unemployed lawyer and no one except Roy and that Dustin fellow read his screeds
ReplyDeleteThat part was funny. At that point, I started wondering if Patterico's former side-kick was making a leap into performance art. Then, I remembered how ..."simple" the man is and the wonder died
ReplyDelete