“Oh, the civility!” is of course the catchcry of pearlclutchers everywhere, especially on that subset of socially-conservative blogs where a bit of cussing is viewed as inherently and self-evidently an order of magnitude more offensive than calling someone a pervert or a traitor.
Here’s a couple of comments from another blog which point out just how much this “civility” standard is rank hypocrisy, which cuts right to the heart of our Civility Guidelines here at Hoyden About Town.
Rheinhard:
Consider 2 pieces of writing:
1. A lengthy screed written by lawyers and statisticians explaining, with numerous polysyllabic phrases and data extrapolations galore, the benefits that would accrue to the national discourse, the economy, and morality in general should the polity choose to put all of the citizenry who happen to be of Jewish extraction into cleansing facilities (which, it is explained in a technical footnote, will contain only the most humane and sanitary of gas chambers and crematoria)
or
2. A short flyer posted on lamposts telling the Nazi Punks to F**K Off.
Which set of writers would you prefer to dine with?
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: blogging, conservatism, culture wars, ethics, moral panics, peeves
Although I am, to quote an old Sandra Boynton gag, “eruditer than you” (or at least most), I still found reading through the composition quoted below involved more than a handful of false starts and reversals. Via Making Light, via a comment quite a way down the thread about the sudden emergence of the word “whinge” instead of “whine” amongst citizens of the USA online.
Some USAns at ML purported to find “whinge” usage as “affected” as a means to sound “posh”, an argument which falls oddly upon an ear which knows the word’s origins as far removed from any part of British society which might be so described. (For the USAns playing along at home, “whinge” is part of the Northern English dialect, and when used by middle class Oxbridge alumni, such as the Monty Python mob, is an example of verbal “slumming” amidst a more colourful vernacular than that which their tutors would have approved.)
English pronunciation test
While most of you non-native speakers of English speak English quite well, there is always room for improvement (of course, the same could be said for every person for any subject, but that is another matter). To that end, I’d like to offer you a poem. Once you’ve learned to correctly pronounce every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.
If you find it tough going, do not despair, you are not alone: Multi-national personnel at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters near Paris found English to be an easy language … until they tried to pronounce it. To help them discard an array of accents, the verses below were devised. After trying them, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months at hard labor to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.
English is tough stuff
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: conservatism, fun
I’m looking at you, Pavlov…
Once there was a boy who had no arms, legs, or torso. In other words – he was a head. He used to roll to school, and roll home again. He was teased unmercifully, and the girl he had a crush on wouldn’t give him a second look.
When a fairy godmother appeared and offered the boy one wish, he asked to be turned into an orange in the girl’s lunch box. (Obviously a rather dim bulb, this one.)
So, long story short, girl forgets to eat her orange, goes off on school holidays, and at the end of the school holidays the girl discovers the mushy mouldy orange in her lunchbox, and throws it against the wall, splat!
The moral is: Quit while you’re a head.
In the US, conservative culture itself is the lame joke. As Lauren at Unsprung explains: “A janitor who watches too much 20/20 was chagrined when he learned that the bag of human fetuses he found in the girls’ locker room was actually a sack of rotted oranges. …pro-life group protesting outside sadly put down signs and went home“.
Amanda Marcotte:
Imagine you’re a junior high school janitor and inside a girl’s locker you discover a Ziploc bag full of goo and rot around some unidentifiable object. What do you assume right off the bat it must be? A discarded and rotten lunch? At worst, a bag of puke? A prank of some sort?
Try a human fetus. (H/T.)
As you imagine, the bag of goo turned out not to be the discards from some sort of young teenage sex cult, but was in fact a rotten orange, though they had to verify this through the Dallas County Medical Examiner. (Well, the medical examiner probably had quite the laugh over this, so all is not lost.) And in retrospect, it might have seemed a little unwise to assume straight off the bat that junior high students are collecting fetuses in bags, but that they might be doing what kids do and being a bit sloppy in cleaning up trash left in their lockers. But let’s cut everyone involved in this a break. We all know that females are born naturally duplicitous, craven and immoral, and that they get a rise out of having all sorts of sex so they can lie about it and avoid the consequences of forced childbirth….
…Anyway, Bush-appointed members of the FDA believe that there’s a likelihood of emergency contraception-based teenage sex cults, so why would it be such a leap to imagine that junior high girls are running around having sex with the boys and escaping the due punishment by with Sapphic abortion parties in the girls locker room? It’s not like the Bush administration would have members that had a poor grasp on reality, right? The way the war is going certainly demonstrates that. Why I bet these teenage girls today with their girl power and their Title IX are able to self-abort by playing Britney Spears records backwards. That’s how far this country has fallen, due to the feminist infiltrators.
Lends a new meaning to the word loinfruit, doesn’t it.
(Boom-tish.)
Guest post by Helen
Filed under: conservatism, fundies, moral panics, reproductive freedoms
So he got his threescore years and ten, then. TANJ, except that he simply won’t get the glorious afterlife he’s been expecting.
The Carpetbagger Report has a timeline of various highlights of his bigoted authoritarian ranting career.
(via Ginmar)
Filed under: bigotry, conservatism, fundies
You’re not alone. The problem is that John Gray knows very well how to hit all the socially constructed hot buttons on male entitlement and female submission so that readers infer the message that Venusians have only themselves to blame if not being a doormat drives their Martian away, without ever letting a hint of blame attach to the Martians for being bullying control freaks. Thank the Invisible Pink Unicorn for Kathleen Trigiani and her marvellous essays ripping away the veil of Venus. The latest, at Feminista!: As Long As Men Like Mr. Mars and Venus Exist ~ By Kathleen Trigiani (or How John Gray Helped Me Change My Mind About the Feminists People Love to Hate)
The feminists that people love to hate are, of course, Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, whom Trigiani once denigrated herself for their polarising (and maliciously mischaracterised) views. Her conclusion:
Activists need to relearn what the radicals taught them in the 60’s: The personal is political. And there will be no way they can avoid the radical feminist analysis of heterosexuality. I’ll be the first to admit that radical insights are often harsh, but they also make it much easier to figure out why a John Gray is so oppressive. If I hadn’t read Dworkin and MacKinnon’s works before tackling the Mars and Venus books, I would still be playing a pin the tail on the donkey game with Gray’s advocacy of quickies. I would have sensed something was wrong and said, “What incredible selfishness!”, but I wouldn’t have been able to articulate the political dimension of the offense. Needless to say, I would have never been able to write essays like Crown Him Patriarch. As I look through feminist history and see how the mainstream women’s movement and even non-feminists are finally recognizing such controversial nineteenth century activists like Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, I feel hopeful that someday, all feminists will appreciate the groundbreaking insights that MacKinnon and Dworkin have contributed. If it actually happens, it’ll be a pretty good sign that most heterosexual intercourse will finally deserve to be called “lovemaking”. But even if “those two” always remain controversial, I will never waver in my hard-earned conviction that “As long as men like John Gray exist, we will need feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon.”
The whole essay is, as usual when Trigiani takes on Gray’s purulent misogyny, fanfuckingtastic. Read this, then visit her website devoted to deconstructing Gray’s shameless advocacy of pure male selfishness throughout the Mars and Venus canon: Out of the Cave
Filed under: conservatism, urban legends
Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo
This is the frothing, eye-bulging reaction from some of the screeching warmonkeys pounding their keyboards in the US to the peaceful resolution of the British sailors’ hostage situation in Iran. Michelle Malkin, who has described the British personnel as “cringeworthy”, links approvingly to Townhall.com, where Dean Barnett commences the outrage:
A few weeks ago, 15 British seamen and marines, soldiers of the Royal Navy, found themselves in a similar quandary. Belligerent Iranians had surrounded them and threatened them with both words and actions. Just as the passengers on Flight 93 had a choice, so too did the British seamen who ultimately spent a couple of weeks as hostages of the Iranian regime. Why did these soldiers, the products of military training and representatives of Her Majesty’s flag, make the decision to surrender themselves? Because, according to their Captain at a Friday press conference, “Fighting back was simply not an option.”
What a strange and dismal trip it has been for the Western world, going from “Let’s Roll” to “Fighting Back Was Not An Option” in scarcely more than five years. One can only hope that when the history of our era is written, the former will turn out to be the immortal quote, not the latter.
Why yes, how absolutely awful for outnumbered military personnel who know their country is not at war with another country taking them into custody, to not open fire when that is explicitly against their own country’s Rules Of Engagement (ROE) and they know that it’s only their own lives at stake. A situation more exactly like the passengers on Flight 93 could hardly be imagined, could it?
Sticking to the ROE during and after capture, including conciliatory gestures, to keep a volatile situation down to a diplomatic incident rather than becoming an unplanned military venture is for sissies, obviously.
It gets worse in the comments: Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: conservatism, ethics, law, moral panics, war
From a comment at LP by cam of South Sea Republic:
The muslims are the current beating pad for conservatives, yet immigration statistics suggest that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the Australian born (Victoria IIRC is the only state that records the country of birth). Interestingly the next generation, the children of immigrants, get integrated so well that they commit crimes at the same rate as Australians.
I can’t find a cite for this information on cam’s site, and would be interested indeed to find one. Not because I disbelieve or am even surprised by the data, simply that I would like to be able to point to a source before I use it in an argument anytime.
Filed under: Politics, conservatism, islamophobia
February 23, 2007 • 12:05 am
February 21, 2007 • 10:24 pm
There’s always some low-level antagonism towards Ann Coulter going on amongst the socially progressive bloggers, and fair enough too. The woman is a hateful bigot who deliberately stirs up anger and fear towards anyone not fitting into her conservative WASPangelical worldview (I really wouldn’t trust her not to believe that Catholic Marian veneration is actually Satanic, although as long as the American Right needs conservative Catholic votes she’ll never say it).
But I could really do without the inevitable handful of oh-so-helpful lefty men, self-professed allies of feminists, who inevitably come up with some sexist and transphobic slur: “Mann Coulter” the drag-queen etc.
Slurs against Coulter-wannabe Michelle Malkin based on her Filipina heritage, as well as alleging that she is her husband’s puppet, are sexist insults as well. Malkin’s journalistic career was all her own work while her husband was off working for thinktanks: sure they probably discuss topics together and toss ideas around, but she owns her own words, every spiteful one.
Calling a woman whose opinions you despise names based on her appearance is good old-fashioned misogyny. It doesn’t matter if she is a rancid warmongering boil on the buttocks of humanity: distilling it down to appearance is sexism, plain and simple.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Politics, conservatism, peeves
February 20, 2007 • 5:31 pm
Spare me.
Michelle Malkin patting some hack on the back for doing a search and replace on a few paragraphs from the of a George Orwell essay, doing the usual strip-the-context bait and switch, as if he has made some profound intellectual point in comparing Orwell’s excoriation of the ineffectualness of the English left-wing intelligentsia during WW2 and the current anti-Iraq-war movement in the USA.
The original essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, is well worth reading if you’ve never seen it before, or rereading it if you have.
Then and only then go and read the hack from American Digest, with his Updating Orwell for Presidents’ Day. His search and replace on Orwell’s text is pure point-scoring without acknowledging the careful placing in context by Orwell during the preceding 4 and a half parts of Chapter 1, and also the conclusions he came to in the following two chapters.
Orwell deserves more respect than to be abused like this.
Filed under: conservatism, interblog, vitriol
