Hey Soccer Fans: Ann Coulter Thinks You’re Pussies
In yet another bid to maintain whatever relevance she has left, Ann Coulter takes on soccer fans in her latest column and proves that she knows about as little about the game as she does anything else.
Apparently, soccer is some kind of liberal plot to denigrate individual achievement and promote a genderless society while simultaneously boring us to death.
Real Americans don’t play, watch, or condone soccer. It’s for girls, whereas real sports are male only. Plus, it’s foreign, like the metric system. According to Coulter: “No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.”
If Coulter didn’t exist, The Onion would have to make her up.
And the funny thing is, it is one of the few, actually meritorious games out there. Ask any of the bottom few teams in most professional futbol leagues how socialistic or communistic they think the game is as they’re relegated to the league below. Our worst professional teams are rewarded with the number one draft pick!Report
@mark-boggs The draft pick order is a GREAT observation, and one I’ve never thought of in this context until now.Report
Our worst professional teams are rewarded with the number one draft pick!
Fortunately for the moral ordering of the universe, they’re generally too dumb to use it well.Report
I can assure you that near Pittsburgh, most of those great-grandfathers were playing soccer.Report
“No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer.” I can’t refute that. To my knowledge, all of my great grandfathers were born in Europe. I enjoy the World Cup and catching the USMNT on the TV from time to time. But I guess the red white and blue jerseys and chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and fans dressing up like imperialists just isn’t butch enough for Ms. Coulter. Which is kind of her problem, not mine.Report
Dirty Itals will never be real Americans.Report
Coulter has always had gender issues. Moreover, Coulter’s inexplicable hatred of the Other is one reason why we should Never Trust Ann Coulter – at ANY Age, a new book available at http://www.coulterwatch.com/never.pdf.Report
Coulter has always had gender issues.
Indeed.
And I want to be careful talking about this. I’m not one of those asshats who like to imply she’s a trans woman, or whatever. This is entirely about her *politics*.
She’s always seemed to me to be right up there with Ayn Rand. A women who idealizes masculinity, who holds it up to the world as perfection.
It’s hard to tell this apart from the normal idiotic ‘conservative’ gender nonsense, but it is different. She cares just a bit too much about masculinity, and not quite enough about femininity. Somehow, when she talks about it, you get the feeling she’s sorta holding herself (And women in general) up to that standard of masculinity.
Calling someone a ‘self-hating X’ is a bit of cliche, but sometimes they do exist. And Coulter really does sound like a self-hating woman. (Not in this article, per se, but in general.)
P.S. I especially like her dislike of the French revolution in this article. It goes right up there with D’Souza’s strange hatred of ‘anti-colonialism’ as an interesting moment where the mask of conservatism slips slightly and anti-democracy shines through for a moment.
Someone needs to straight up ask her whether she thinks the French revolution was a good idea, or if the French should have put up with unaccountable kings with supreme power.Report
Someone needs to straight up ask her whether she thinks the French revolution was a good idea, or if the French should have put up with unaccountable kings with supreme power.
How do you feel about whether we should have left Saddam in power?Report
I think Coulter is a character. Like literally — I think her schtick is a performance piece, basically. She knows “being Ann Coulter crazy” is, well, ridiculously well compensated.
She turns the dial up to 11, I think, because it’s a well paying gig. Maybe her dial is normally set to 6 or 9, but I have no doubt she cranks it up all the way until the knob breaks off when she’s working.Report
morat,
she wrote a post about how women ought not to be allowed to vote, didn’t she?
yeah, that’s crazy to 11, alright.Report
@jaybird
How do you feel about whether we should have left Saddam in power?
I somehow feel I should point out that taking out Saddam has resulted in the deaths of at least three times more innocent citizens than the French Revolution. And has gone on longer.
And I also feel I should point out that saying ‘during the brief intervals when they weren’t committing mass murder by guillotine’ is rather idiotic. There was a brief interval when the revolution became too violent, which is when the mass murder happened…and that government was rapidly overthrown. The French Revolution lasted for ten years, the Reign of Terror lasted for 11 months. It’s like taking a forty-year old with that spent four years in college, and describing their vacation as happening during the ‘Brief intervals when they aren’t attending college’.
So the analogy with Iraq is rather stretched. France was a country that simply got tired of their 1%, and overthrew them…and then got a little out of hand for one year with violence, and forcing the people to overthrow the overly violent idiots that they’d put in charge. Once they got rid of that overreaction, everything was fine. (Well, then the government was overthrown by Napoleon, but that’s hardly the fault of the revolution.) The Reign of Terror sucked, and would have been best avoided, but the Reign of Terror was not the revolution, it’s just the sort of nonsense you sometimes get during a revolution, and the French contained it.
Iraq is was a country that was kept back from violence due to a strongman we put in power, and then was nearly destroyed by us. They didn’t have a revolution, and the problem there isn’t an overreaction, and shows no sign of fixing itself. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Iraq is falling into unreparable disarray.
In fact, there’s almost no parallels at all. All ‘fights for freedom’ are not some fungible thing. The French Revolution was undeniably a good thing in history for democracy. The Iraq war? Doesn’t seem to be.
And, remember, the question isn’t ‘Knowing what was known at the time, should have those events started?’. That was a question you tried to invent. Coulter was sneering at the French revolution with full hindsight. She wasn’t talking about the Iraq war and saying ‘You can’t know how these things will turn out.’ She was simply expressing generic dislike of the French Revolution.Report
How do you feel about whether we should have left Saddam in power?
How would you feel if he’d been overthrown by Iraqis?Report
During? I imagine how I feel about Syria. After? I imagine how I feel about Egypt.
I imagine that the whole “civil war” thing would have happened under that circumstance as well.Report
I dislike Coulter and don’t want to defend here article.
But I don’t want to defend the French Revolution, either. Jaybird’s comparison to Saddam is probably wrong for a lot of the reasons you mention. But approximately 25,000 summary executions and approximately 15,000 executions by guillotine, even if it lasted “only 11 months” is a pretty bad thing, regardless of whether worse atrocities happened before or after.
Much of my (and Coulter’s) judgment is the arrogance of hindsight, I admit, even though some, like Burke, predicted something disastrous. And the ancien regime and the opposition from other European powers bore probably a majority share of the blame for how it shook out. But the people who lead revolutions tend to be fanatics, and in the case of France, the true fanatics took over for a brief period. And even in the non-fanatic period, they failed to establish a working state that could resist the appeal of a Napoleon, although to be fair, the reason why he was in the position to gain appeal had probably as much to do with the fact that other European powers waged war against revolutionary France as it did with the revolutionaries’ failure to devise a state capable of resisting that appeal.Report
There was no need for a French Revolution; someone could have just bought all the peasants.Report
Jacobins or Monarchists is one hell of a dilemma. It seems like there ought to be a way to make the monarchy mostly ceremonial without, you know, terror.
Report
I’m not *really* defending the French Revolution per se, although ‘during the brief intervals when they weren’t committing mass murder by guillotine’ is a completely idiotic thing to say about it. That’s not how the French Revolution worked.
And even in the non-fanatic period, they failed to establish a working state that could resist the appeal of a Napoleon, although to be fair, the reason why he was in the position to gain appeal had probably as much to do with the fact that other European powers waged war against revolutionary France as it did with the revolutionaries’ failure to devise a state capable of resisting that appeal.
Well, your history is all well and good, but stops at Napoleon. The French Revolution, although it lead to Napoleon and to the reinstatement of the monarchy, kept smoldering, and eventually lead to the first worker’s revolt in history, and another revolution.
And then they again got hijacked by a strongman, who again tried to build an empire. (This was probably, because, as you mentioned, the rest of Europe was rather…aggressive… against them at the time, so picking a strongman to defend them made sense. It just didn’t end well. Either time.)
France had to try three times before they actually ended up with a stable democracy. They went from monarchy to democracy to strongman to monarchy to democracy to strongman to democracy. (1) As you pointed out, this history has been rather sucky, because European powers did not want a democracy sitting next to them. But the French people demanded it.
There are time periods you can stop French history at that make it look pointless, if you stop French history in 1802 or 1820, yeah, the results of the French Revolution look bad. But either looking just at the revolutionary government itself (2) or looking at all of European history now, the Revolution was a good thing. The French people became officially ‘not happy’ with absolute monarchism, and feudalism was gone forever in France, and took a crippling blow in Europe.
1) It’s always fun to explain which ‘French Revolution’ Les Miz happened during. No, not the famous one. No, not the one that worked either. It’s the other, other French Revolution.
2) Yes, even with the Reign of Terror in the middle. Our revolution killed about the same number of our own people, and maybe 20,000 British. The Reign of Terror looks really bad if you pretend it’s just something that happened without context, but in terms of ‘overthrowing the government of a country’, it’s actually pretty damn low.
But those were innocent people, I hear people respond, ignoring the fact that pretty much everyone that dies in a revolution are innocent people. They were just innocent people that were executed directly by the government instead of dying while forced to defend the people at the top…and I have a lot of trouble seeing the difference. (Hell, I’d rather die by guillotine than of infection from a gunshot.) The real reason the Reign of Terror sucked is that it made the French Republic government not able to function after that, as no one trusted it.Report
“Waiter! I ordered an omelet!”
“Yeah, well, hindsight is 20/20, isn’t it?”Report
@davidtc
You’re right there.
I’m not so sure. The third republic wasn’t exactly stable, but it did last sixtyish or so years. I’d say the fifth is, or seems to be, the most stable, and was implemented by a strongman. But none of that is to really blame the revolutionaries for wanting liberty or wanting to put checks on what were tyrannical governments. I tend to believe that violence is usually not the answer, even in a regime as repressive as 1830, 1848, and 1870. Of course, before I tsk-tsk, I should recognize that the violence often (usually?) didn’t come from the revolutionaries.
I was going to quibble about the numbers, but the wikipedia article I read seems to agree, at least if we take the low end for the French casualties and the high number for the
traitorsAmericans. But I will say that I’m not an apologist for “our” revolution, either.Whether the French Revolution casualty figures are “pretty damn low’ or not, I’m not prepared to say. Part of it is a question of what the population base is (on that score, the American “revolution” was probably deadlier than France’s) and part of it is, I suppose, the “values” question of at what point is the goal so meritorious that killing justifies it. I’m inclined to place a pretty high bar on the “worth is” factor and am prepared to condemn the American Revolution on those grounds. As for the French version, I’m not prepared to endorse it, but it seems like a closer case to me.Report
A tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can’t, not without your help, but you’re not helping. Why is that?Report
What’s a tortoise?Report
Let me tell you about my mother.Report
I’m not sure if I like where this is going…can’t we talk about unicorns instead?Report
@dhex
The best answer I’ve heard to this came from Stargate SG1: “Because I am also a tortoise”Report
It’s so much more fun to attack soccer from the left.
“Whenever I watch soccer, I see players rolling around on the field in pain. Not once in a while. EVERY GAME. They aren’t wearing protective helmets or any protective gear at all, that I can see. Maybe we could put them in some gear that might protect them from the battery that leaves one of them writhing on the ground every couple of minutes. Here is a concussion study for soccer: http://www.neurology.org/content/51/3/791.short ”
“When will we find ourselves entertained by people being kind to each other?”Report
To nitpick:
1) They’re wearing protective gear on their shins at least, right? And probably groin protection, I’d imagine you’d wear that after the first foot or soccer ball to the gonads. Maybe pros don’t wear shin guards, but that’d be kinda dumb. It’s not — theoretically — a contact sport, except between player and ball but accidents do happen.
2) Given what we’ve seen of American football and cover-up of injuries and long-term problems, I can at least sympathize with someone who worries that other sports might be doing the same, although unless heading the ball is a lot more damaging than I’d realized, it can’t possibly be as bad as American football.
The occasional injury is inevitable in any athletic endeavor, even tennis and golf. 🙂 It’s the same for any physical job. That doesn’t mean protective gear can be ignored, but that also doesn’t mean it’s required. Depends on how often and how bad and whether the game itself is placing players in regular risk of that injury.
Maybe soccer players DO rattle their brains more than people think. I’m glad people are apparently studying it — hopefully with American football being flayed over the issue, soccer will handle any problems openly and fairly.Report
I don’t know about the professional levels, but I played soccer through high school and AFAIK groin protection isn’t really commonly used on most players (though maybe the goalies do?).
It would probably bring more overall discomfort than it prevents, since soccer is such a constant running/leg-twisting/slide-tackling kinda activity. Yeah, you do get the occasional ball to the ‘nads but it’s survivable. A kick that high is pretty uncommon, especially because if their foot is that high, the “balls” have probably already made contact.
Shin guards for sure though.Report
Most professional players wear shin guards, though usually the really thin ones, but it’s not mandated. Very few of them wear cups.
I’m hoping that some sort of soft protective head gear becomes common soon.Report
I haven’t looked into it, but I have trouble envisioning soft protective headgear that wouldn’t substantially change headers’ efficacy (since its intended purpose would be to absorb force) and therefore the scoring frequency of the game (already low for many Americans’ taste.)
If they do that, why not just outlaw headers altogether?Report
Is it appropriate to have our children watch athletes participate in a sport where they fail to wear adequate shin protection?Report
I’m not sure it’s appropriate to have our children watch a game where faking injuries is so common, unless we want to raise a nation of fraudster malingerers.Report
All professional sports put people at risk of injury, except perhaps for marksmanship. Anything encouraging people to extend themselves to their utmost physical capacity has precious little room for error.Report
I don’t know what I’m more amused by: JB’s initial funny comment, of the fact that it actually started a thread.Report
Tod:
The whole football concussion thing is kind of a big thing. I’ve watched some relatives of mine — die hard, football loving Texans who were chomping at the bit for their grandkids to get of age to play pee-wee Football move from “Football, AWESOME! to “*sigh*. Let’s go watch some kids get concussions” over less than a decade between their first grandkid (who tried it for a year and hated it) to their youngest (who is eager to start his second year playing).
I mean it seems kind of dumb to compare that to soccer, but…I’m not surprised people do. And as I said — I’m glad someone’s studying it, just in case we should change something.Report
@glyph I actually don’t think headgear would change headers all that much – I don’t see how it would be significantly different than having slightly longer, but far more stable, hair. I mean, we live in a world where Marouane Fellaini scored his first goal in an eternity last week, not with his feet, but with a header. Marouane Fellaini! I would think that with practice, players would be able to get sufficiently used to it that they’d understand how to direct their headers just as well with it on as with it off.Report
@mark-thompson – ideally, you don’t head with your hair, you do it with your forehead (though obviously you do what you can at the time). More control and power that way. Any soft helmet is going to have to be more shock-absorbing than hair, which is my actual concern – any soft helmet I can envision would probably allow you to “control” the ball OK, as far as trapping it, but its force-absorption qualities would presumably cause the ability to project/reflect/redirect the ball to be significantly reduced. Like putting cotton on your ping-pong paddle.Report
@glyph True enough, though I think you’re overestimating the percentage of headers that are cleanly struck with the forehead – an awful lot are more above the hairline (including RVP’s wonder goal against Spain) than below the hairline, and usually you’re trying to get it pretty much at the hairline. From what I can tell, it’s the headers closer to the crown of the head that cause the most concern for concussions, though, and the most realistic headgear right now probably would not do much to alleviate that problem (it would however probably reduce the violence involved in head-to-head contact a pretty good amount, which is not unimportant).Report
morat – I think the joke of Jaybird’s comment is that the people “rolling on the ground in pain” in soccer games are mostly faking.Report
On my father’s side, my family has been here since the 1690s. I doubt Coulter can top that. And on my mother’s side my great grandfather was first generation born in America.
And if we’re denigrating individual achievement, why is Messi–just the one name–a household world around the world?
Coulter increasingly seems like an attention starved child begging “look at me!” I could pity her if she didn’t take such delight in trying to hurt others.Report
1690s? PRIVILEGE!!!Report
Eh, el es un “Juanito-viene-últimamente”.Report
Real Americans are of Eastern and Southern European stock that came over in the great wave in the late 19th and early 20th century. ;).Report
I must admit that watching Lincecum’s no-hitter (on the computer; I was, alas, at work) made me realize how little soccer actually matters to me.Report
I grew up playing baseball and watching the Cubbies on WGN, national games on the weekends, playoffs, of course. Now I can’t get thru more than an inning or two. In fact, during last years playoffs I recorded quite a few games and rewatched them by forwardeding thu all the non-action. Took about 15 minutes per game and I saw everything that mattered. So I’m the other side of things: watching a futbol match is in general much more engaging.Report
All the scoring plays in the World Cup wouldn’t even take that long.Report
I think Still was referring to all plays and pitches. At minimum, that’s actually a pretty good estimate – the ball is only in play in baseball for about 18 minutes a game: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323740804578597932341903720
That same article points out that the ball is in play for only about 11 minutes a game in football. So for 90 percent or more of the game in baseball and football, you’re literally watching athletes do absolutely nothing at all. If you just want to look at scoring plays in an average baseball or football game, you’re probably talking about maybe 1 or 2 minutes a game where there’s an actual scoring play taking place. If you include buildup (and you have to), that’s probably about the same amount of time for scoring plays in a reasonably average 2-1 soccer game.Report
@mark-thompson
So for 90 percent or more of the game in baseball and football, you’re literally watching athletes do absolutely nothing at all.
Which means, for *more* than 90% of the time, the athletes are doing nothing, because they’re on either offense or defense and the other side is out, or they’re waiting in the dugout to bat.
As someone who is not athletic and didn’t like any sports, let me tell you, in school I much preferred playing baseball to soccer and basketball. (We didn’t play football.) Baseball…half the time you aren’t even standing up.
I always find it funny when people talk about how soccer is slow. It’s like they’ve never watched baseball or football. Football and baseball keep pausing and having to restart. Soccer pauses for maybe one minute every 10 minutes. The fastest game, of course, is still basketball, which is, when you think about it, basically soccer but with a smaller field and lots of scoring.Report
Ice hockey is faster then basketball fwiw.
I agree football and baseball are slow with incessant stoppages. But really, stuff is happening. It doesn’t take much to know that after the huddle there are formations being deployed and analyzed, shifts made and tension building. I’m not the biggest football fan in the world, that is for sure, but the talk about how little happens in football is a bit overblown.Report
@greginak That’s all true, but my point is more that if one is going to insist that soccer is objectively boring and that nothing happens in it because the only plays that matter are the goals, then it’s entirely fair to point out how little happens in baseball and football outside of the scoring plays. I love baseball (though a lot less than in the past – I just don’t have the endurance anymore to closely follow a 162 game season when my team is terrible) and am obsessive about football, but I find claims that they’re inherently more interesting and/or action-packed than soccer to be quite silly.
Players getting into position and formation in football is surely an important part of the game, but it’s hard to see how it’s qualitatively different from or more exciting than watching soccer players kick the ball around midfield probing for a spot to launch an attack.Report
@mark-thompson I agree. i don’t think soccer is boring. Enjoyment of sport is like art appreciation; somethings move us and some don’t. There isn’t necessarily any rhyme or reason to that. We can talk about what we like about certain sports and why we think they are good but its all a matter of taste. Trying to read to much into that is only good, if at all, for fun jibes over beer/wine and the salty crunchy snack of choice.Report
I think Still was referring to all plays and pitches.
Mark is more/less correct. I didn’t watch every pitch but I did watch when there were hitting counts and when guys got on base (still fast forwarding thru the non-action). And 15 minutes was a bit of an exaggeration, actually. The fastest I got thru a game was 15 minutes but it generally took about 20-25. In the later innings of a tight ballgame I’d stop fastforwording to let the drama unfold in real time.
But I’m with David about this stuff. (That line about enjoying baseball because you don’t even have to stand up half the time is quite nice.) One of the things I like about hockey is that there aren’t any long breaks in the action (except for commercial time outs), whistle-stoppages are only a matter of seconds, and (ultimately) the players on the field decide the action. THe same is true of basketball – except for the last 2 minutes of a close game, which are dominated by timeouts and coaches play-calls and substitutions and whatnot. Football is even worse. Soccer, on the other hand, has basically none of those things (what I see as) distractions. The game starts, and short of three substitutions (and some flopping/fake injury stuff), the result is decided by the players on the field.Report
Seconding that ice hockey is faster than basketball (and every goal makes a significant difference to the game, unlike every basket in basketball). It’s the only sport I enjoy watching.
And there is something appealing about watching a game whose ethos is, “Your face is bleeding? Get some stitches on the bench and then get back out there on the ice,” and where people have played in the finals with broken bones.
New rules to reduce concussion frequency are still a good thing, though.Report
Best column ever. ” After a football game, ambulances carry off the wounded. After a soccer game, every player gets a ribbon and a juice box.” Genius.Report
And what does everyone get after a Coulter column, besides a headache?
The second coming of P.J. O’ Rourke she ain’t.Report
P.J. O’ Rourke? She’s barely Mallard Fillmore.Report
Q: What’s the difference between Ann Coulter and P.J. O’Rouke?
A: One of them used to be funny. The other is a lawyer.Report
One exhibits all the worst features of male chauvinism. The other is a father.Report
One is an alcoholic who smokes pot. The other slurs out garbled nonsense all the time.Report
Wait, is it too late to change mine?
It should have been:
One is an alcoholic who smokes pot. The other is constantly killing brain cells.Report
Pinky,
You think comparing a professional American football game to a pre-school association football game makes for a great column? And in the vast space of cluelessness you and Coulter inhabit, do you even know why–or know that–Altidore missed the last game and Ronaldo was playing below his usual level?
Here’s a pro-tip for you: when mocking something about which you’re ignorant, the only people who will be amused are other ignoramuses. Hell of an accomplishment, ain’t it?Report
A comparison done right (unusually for Carlin, this is SFW.)
Report
James – Would you please reread that comment of yours in a calm moment and tell me if you think it’s entirely, um, proportionate?Report
Tell me straight up, Pinky. Were you being totally tongue-in-cheek? If so, I apologize. If not, I was overly polite.Report
Yeah, Thomas Muller got a juice box, a ribbon, and how many stitches?
http://larrybrownsports.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Thomas-Muller-bloody.jpgReport
@mark-boggs
So glad to see you commenting again. How’ve you been?Report
He’s European, though. According to Conservatives, he’s genetically conditioned to bleed at the slightest touch.
Clint Dempsey…not so much:
http://www.espnfc.com/fifa-world-cup/4/video/1887421/dempsey-kicked-in-the-face
Oh and by the way, the pride of Nacogdoches left the pitch for all of about 30 seconds to recover from that, and then proceeded to play for over an hour, non-stop without so much as thinking to ask for a substitute.Report
@james-hanley – I have been good. I read much of what is written around here just lack the energy and intellect to add much to the discourse.
.
@mark-thompson – You’d think a war-mongering German would garner a bit more respect for toughness. But I suppose it fits the narrative better if, in this instance, his European-ness causes him to bleed at the slightest collision at high speed with an opponents shoulder.Report
@pinky
Genius.
More like nonsense. But then again, you probably know that already. Unless you’re a Rush Limbaugh fan. Then, all I’ve got for you is pity.Report
Considering how many people are responding to the author of the column rather than the column, I have to wonder if this would have been lauded if the column had a different source. On another thread, Kazzy noted my fair play in a discussion about soup preferences. (“But there are some people, probably mentally disturbed or who grew up in isolation, who would think to use rice or leave out the spinach.”) It was funny because the degree of insult is utterly out of proportion for the argument. I’m telling you, the juice box line was funny. It plays off the fact that most Americans’ encounters with soccer are at the little-league level, but it does so with an outrageous comparison between football and soccer. While Michelle is working up pity for me as a potential Limbaugh fan, I’m snickering at a column that Dave Barry would be proud of.Report
The thing is Dave Barry knew he was writing comedy. Coulter pretends to serious political satire. This column is funny only because it’s so patently absurd. Otherwise, it would just another one of Coulter’s sexist, xenophobic, racist hate screeds.Report
Eh, I’ll split the difference here. I read the Coulter column, and don’t care about its purported political content (I’m aware that this is her “schtick”, and generally can’t really get outraged about her); but ’tain’t funny, neither.
Coulter can’t hold Dave Barry’s Miami-heat-sweat-soaked jock in the comedy department.
Whatever happened to Frank J.? He seemed like he had some budding potential as a conservative comedic satirist.Report
Michelle – Drop the expectations that pop into your mind at the name “Ann Coulter” and reread it. “I’ve held off on writing about soccer for a decade — or about the length of the average soccer game — “ Are you trying to tell me that’s not satirical?Report
No one is claiming it isn’t satire -Michelle even calls it exactly that. It’s just really crappy satire because she doesn’t have a clue about the subject she’s satirizing. The only people who will find it amusing are people who have never watched a soccer game above their kid’s fourth grade team and are such massive sports fans that they think a children’s rec league game gives them insight about a sport as played at the highest levels.
It’s not just bad satire, either – it’s bad satire that recycles pretty much verbatim the exact same punchlines that conservatives have been using since at least the end of the Reagan Administration. I mean, seriously, come up with a new goddamn joke at least once a millennium. Apparently, Ms. Coulter is so sharp-witted and cutting edge that it only took her 10 years to type out a 15 year old joke. Surely, she is the natural heir to George Carlin.Report
@pinky
Whatever merit the piece might have had as satire, she lost me with her lengthy rant about the metric system, which hasn’t been an issue here in ages. I know scientists use the metric system, but only because it’s more accurate, not because it’s some kind of liberal plot. Good satire is subtle and subtle this piece ain’t.Report
Good Lord. Dave Barry is hilarious, and it’s generally because he completely understands the things he’s making fun of. George Carlin too: watch the video I linked, and as much as he’s making fun of football’s love affair with military metaphors, you don’t doubt for an instant that he’s watched a lot of it, and not a word he says rings false.
Coulter’s just throwing around cliched insults. She’s good at turning them up to 11, but that’s the only skill she has.Report
And yet, you wrote this post. Just sayin’…Report
True. But mainly because I thought the column was unintentional parody and downright hilarious.
Mostly, I feel the same way about Coulter as I do about Palin. If the media ignored them for long enough, maybe they’d finally go away.Report
Here are my thoughts.
Firstly, wow, she’s getting paid to write this? Seriously, I can write better than this. I think I *do* write better than that, when I’m not even trying. It’s like an even more crappy buzzfeed, except about boring stuff.
Secondly, uh, is she a sport critic, hired to tell people which sport to watch? (‘Hey, you want to go watch a sport with me? I thought we could catch some lacrosse maybe? Or bowling?’ ‘Okay, but I heard those weren’t very good. Let me check’s Coulter’s column and find us something good to watch. I always like the sports she recommends.’) I don’t read sports critics, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work at that level, and, oh, incidentally, she’s not a sports critic.
Thirdly, who the hell cares what other people watch? Coulter has invented a completely dumbass view of the universe where people(1) are not ‘masculine’ enough, and that soccer causes that. Masculine she defines as defined as…uh…playing violent sports. You know, I think I didn’t realize until I wrote this post that this article wasn’t just stupid, it was evil. Wow. Toxic view of masculinity much?
Fourthly, wow, I had completely forgotten how conspiracy-laden the right’s opinion columns were. Yes, Coulter, it’s all a conspiracy by the left to make people care about soccer…and the metric system! (I was about to put a joke after the ellipse there, saying ‘to make people care about soccer…and clean air’…until I remember she literally talked about the metric system as a liberal conspiracy. Not as a joke. That actually happened, in real life.)
Fifth….that nonsense about ‘liberals demand everyone be a winner’ simply will not go away, will it? Even when literally talking about a tournament. I know nothing about the World Cup, but I’m pretty certain *someone* is going to win it. (It was funny having to watch her backpeddle on the ‘Soccer games can end in a tie’ when she realized that American football can too. I wonder if an editor caught that and made her change it.)
1) Yes, people, not men. See my other other comment here about her weird gender issues, but let’s just say, for Coulter, ‘society’==’men’. Women, in her mind, are bad people, all they do is water down REAL MEN. All hail the mighty penis!Report
It seems if we’re going to note Ann Coulter’s take on soccer, we should probably also post a link where people can see Fox News’s Dr. Keith Ablow posit the theory that the World Cup is a sporting event designed by Obama to distract people from his administrations scandals.
And kudos to the other Fox panelists, who responded with comments such as, “What’s wrong with you?”
Report
And kudos to the other Fox panelists, who responded with comments such as, “What’s wrong with you?”
LOL. Someone needs to start compiling a list of when reality intrudes into Fox News.
This one is right up there with Megyn Kelly asking Dick Cheney why we should listen to anything he says about Iraq.
And I love the way that literally every news story now is a way for Obama to ‘distract’ people about the vitally important made-up scandals Fox News is pushing, even stories that Obama couldn’t have possibly had anything to do with.Report
Rolls eyes. I’m glad the women on that show put that guy is his place. I can’t believe he really thinks that a regularly scheduled major sporting event is some kind of Obama plot. Just like I don’t think Coulter really believes the nonsense she wrote about soccer. It’s whatever they think will sell. They’re lightweight entertainment; soccer is far more serious.Report
Don’t you remember Dr. Lowblow criticizing the Super Bowl as an Obama Benghazi coverup? And the NBA playoffs? And what’s with setting up this months long “baseball” season, with grown men playing games all season long while there are real problems that need to be addressed?Report
Ah, he doesn’t really say that it’s an Obama plot, he makes a point that actually used to be a fairly common one on the actual left (I know Chomsky said something similar many years ago): spectator sports are used as a distraction to keep people from paying attention to the man keeping us down. Hell, people on the left used to use the very same gladiator analogy, too. Maybe that dude’s been reading Chomsky.Report
You’re letting accuracy get in the way of mockery, Chris.Report
(Not that the isn’t anything to mock here.)Report
That’s probably the centrist in me.
It doesn’t help that he tries to use Fox News speak to make the point, though he does ultimately end by saying “it’s a sociocultural thing,” which is how the point is usually expressed: it’s not a conspiracy so much as a sociocultural or sociopolitical phenomenon conveniently available to power as a means of distraction from social and political exploitation and repression. Unsurprisingly, I think there’s something to that, though I don’t think sports are unique in that regard.Report
BSDI!Report
More seriously, here’s Ablow on Fox’s Stewart Varney later that day:
“Why is soccer suddenly so popular? … It’s a little too convenient when we have a president who, I contend, has it in for Americans, and we elected him because we were fearful at the time — we better elect someone who’s not very patriotic because, God, we could have terrorists attack us for being Americans.”
I submit to you that regardless of what sociological history this idea has, that is phrasing that is very clearly made to insinuate a nefarious conspiracy on the part of the administration.Report
Tod, yeah, that’s very clearly an Obama conspiracy theory.Report
Here’s a nice response.Report
I was wondering who was going to be the one to write the quadrennial and completely ignorant and un-self-aware “Soccer is un-American and a socialist assault on manliness and capitalism” article this year. Coulter’s about a week ahead of Marc Thiessen’s equally comical screed last time around, which I mocked here: https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2010/07/02/salary-caps-are-the-epitome-of-capitalism However, she’s a full two days later than the article that Thiessen used as his inspiration: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/soccer_the_perfect_socialist_s.html
Change a few words and update a few statistics, and I could just repost my 2010 piece as a response to Ms. Coulter.
I have to say, though, that there are few things I find more entertaining than conservatives frothing at the mouth about soccer, and especially soccer’s gradual but undeniable growth in the US.
I have to give them credit, though – at least nowadays, they seem to have largely given up trying to use baseball and basketball as comparisons to show how unmanly, boring and socialistic soccer is. Instead, they now seem to think that anything that isn’t the NFL or college football is unmanly, boring, socialistic, and not a sport at all (where’s the risk of personal humiliation or major injury in baseball and basketball that is not also found in soccer?).
Of course, the notion that individual achievement is a particularly big factor in football (but isn’t in soccer) is pretty friggin’ hilarious, and shows a complete lack of understanding of football. I mean, is there any football player more “manly” than someone who plays on the offensive or interior defensive line? And is there any player in sports whose success is measured by anonymity and team achievement more than an offensive or interior defensive line? And anyone who thinks that blame or credit is “dispersed” in soccer has clearly never talked to a soccer fan.
I have to say, I’d pay money to see one of these conservative chickenhawks tell Jermaine Jones that he is both unmanly and not a real American. Frankly, in a fight, I’d take Mr. Jones over any conceivable baseball player, most conceivable basketballs players, and quite a few football players. He is, as they say, a hard man. I also quite doubt that the German-born son of an American servicemember would be terribly happy about being told that he’s un-American.Report
I love it when free market fundamentalists get indignant at the market reflecting people’s preferences.Report
I don’t even like the sport but yeah it is clear she has never seen it played by anyone over six and may not even have spoken with people who have. Just a few observations.
-Far from being some gender free liberal parody football (soccer) is sold the world over as a *boys* game and has ongoing problems with sexism and homophobia. At the very least she could have noticed the teams in Brazil are not mixed.
-It is perhaps the most capitalist sport in the world, where else are employment contracts sold on the open market?
-Not using your hands means more skill is required. Arguing that they should be allowed to hold the ball is like asking for basketball players to have steps up to the basket
-There are serious criticisms to be made of this world cup (evictions) and FIFA (corruption) but as long as people focus on not liking the sport these won’t get the attention they deserve.Report
It is perhaps the most capitalist sport in the world,
One in which jerseys have sponsor names on the Jerseys. Imagine the uproar in the U.S. If the Yankees took their name off their shirts and replaced them with a Goldman Sachs logo.Report
Here in the US we prefer to allow corporate sponsorship of stadiums largely paid for on the public dime.Report
MLB has considered putting ads on everything from uniforms to bases. They haven’t done so only because of the howls of protests from the fans, who are obviously a bunch of communists.
It also proposed charging Little League teams for using the names and uniforms of Major League teams. (The uniforms, of course, are already licensed, but they can be reused over many years; this was going to be annual fee.) That was also shouted down because so many fans, players, and even owners have warm, fuzzy memories of LL. It was also about the most penny-wise, pound-foolish thing I’ve ever heard.Report
Mike, obviously baseball fans aren’t real Americans. You and George Will are both liberal anti-capitalist elitists. Real capitalism loving Americans like auto racing.Report
My youth baseball league didn’t have official uniforms. Real team names were used, though it wasn’t limited to baseball team names. It varied by division. So our team went from being the Rangers one year to the 49ers. They also used fish (Dolphins vs Piranhas) and cats (Leopards vs Pumas).
Strangely, I enjoyed playing anyway.Report
NASCAR has become another conservative trope as a sport that Real Americans love but rootless cosmopolitans, umm, coastal elites, don’t. Coulter wrote a column calling the NY Times liberal, un-American, elitist scum because they didn’t write an obit when Dale Earnhardt died. (They had, of course.)Report
Mike,
Did you not click the link or do you not know your racing series? 😉Report
It’s a car with lots of ads on it. Since I’m a coastal elitist, anything past that was lost on me 🙂Report
“I want to be a race car passenger. Just a guy who bugs the driver.
‘Say man, can I turn on the radio? You should slow down. Why do we gotta keep going in circles?
Can I put my feet out the window?
Man, you really like Tide…'”
-Mitch HedbergReport
Mike, you should go to a race at Sonoma. View it as though you’re an anthropologist exploring an alien culture (Americana).Report
Heh. Speaking of which, I went to a monster truck rally once. Can you imagine!Report
With difficulty, Veronica. Even I haven’t done that!Report
I used to go now and then when I was in high school. It was something to do, and the racetrack is all of 20 minutes from where I grew up. The atmosphere wasn’t that different from any other local sports venue, it was just full of people who cared a lot more about cars than I do.Report
And you didn’t get hooked, Mike? The un-American is strong in you. 😉Report
Clearly he hates your freedom.Report
He must. He’s rejected all my invitations to come to Hanley’s Gulch and hoe medicinal marijuana.Report
I think it’s a marketing short sight. See, when selling to we bicoastals, you want to avoid calling your destination a “gulch,” unless you’re going for a quaint “fun visit but I wouldn’t live there” effect.
And manual labor? We have robots for that!Report
And here I was thinking y’all would totally associate it with Gucci Gulch.Report
How can true red-blooded ‘Merkins like NASCAR?
I mean, all they do is turn left all the time, and what kind of example does that set for this country?Report
@james-hanley — Is that a kind of handbag, ’cause I mostly wear Balenciaga. 🙂Report
It is perhaps the most capitalist sport in the world, where else are employment contracts sold on the open market?
Every major American sport does that. Though many of them (baseball in particular) used to go beyond capitalistic to downright feudal: once a player signed a contract with a team, he belonged to them forever. In American sports, the basic principle that a person can work wherever they want is called “free agency” and remains somewhat controversial.Report
Technically, I’m pretty sure that (without someone very high up pulling strings better left unpulled) MLB teams can’t sell contracts above a certain dollar value regardless of how much it might benefit all parties involved. But, hey, Bowie Kuhn got to rub Charlie Finley’s face in it that one time, so it’s all good.
In any case, trades are the norm in US professional leagues – even MLS. But they are practically unheard of in world soccer, where it’s cash on the barrelhead. Even when a player goes back the other way, it just has the equivalent of knocking his appraised value off the purchase price.
Re: free agency – it’s amazing how similar the history of labor relations played out in soccer and in MLB, from each having an automatic-renewal “reserve” era, to a Curt Flood-type landmark case that a player cannot be traded without his consent, to intransigent ownership losing any chance of controlling limited free-agency by taking the issue directly to the courts in an effort to stamp out the uppity players once and for all – and losing (leading directly to unlimited free agency.Report
Quibble: Curt Flood lost. The reserve clause is gone from baseball because of an arbitrator’s ruling on what the language of the standard contract meant, not because a court declared it illegal.
Your other point is a very good one. There’s often money involved in trades, either this guy for that guy and we’ll also throw in X dollars, or we’ll pay you to take this big contract off our hands, but you’re right that players are rarely if ever sold outright these days,Report
I probably wasn’t clear enough – the Flood case didn’t overturn the reserve clause system as a whole, but just like the George Eastman case in GB, it did mandate (something of a restriction) that players have to consent to be moved, in at trade or sale. A baby step that the owners should have taken into account, but in both the MLB and British soccer, they didn’t.Report
Huh? Even today, unless a baseball player has a no-trade or restricted trade contract, he can be traded without giving any consent. His only alternative is the same as Flood’s: not to play baseball.Report
For comparisons sake genuine old style foot-the-ball how it was played before all the modern variations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnHq1kzgs8gReport
Can I ask a general question about the title of this post, that’s kind of been bugging me?
I rather suspect that if I were to call people “pussies” around here, I’d be upbraided for using a denigrating, misogynistic slur.
I have nothing against the word itself – in the right interpersonal (VERY interpersonal) context, I rather like the word, it connotes just the perfect mixture of ‘a little dirty’ and ‘soft and sweet’; but it’s not a word I have ever really used to denigrate others (I’d reach for ‘wimp’ instead; or ‘wuss’, which is obviously sort of a combo).
So why would you use the word in its denigrating misogynistic sense (hell, maybe homophobic too, since the slur usually relies on implying a man is just an orifice that could be penetrated, and this is inherently detestable and risible) in a headline at OT?
Just for shock value?
And moreover (and this is the part that kind of bothers me, maybe more than just the simple use of the word) – why put the word in Coulter’s mouth, when she never uses it in her column?
I mean, if it’s a word you are comfortable using in that sense, then OWN it; don’t implicitly attribute it to someone else, no matter how crappy that person is.
I’m not normally a big fan of the language police, but something about this just seems…off to me.
Consider it a ‘house style’ question, more than a moral inquiry.Report
I used it because I thought that was pretty much the gist of what she was saying. It’s not like Coulter isn’t homophobic and misogynistic, not to mention racist, on a regular basis. Her soccer post clearly implies that soccer is unmanly and unAmerican. Real men play football.Report
And yeah, maybe there was a bit of shock value involved, but I wrote the post on a lark in about all of 10 minutes time so I didn’t really think too deeply about the title.Report
I’m not normally a big fan of the language police
No, of course not. It reminds me of the ole “I’m not a racist but…” line of reasoning.
don’t implicitly attribute it to someone else, no matter how crappy that person is.
Why not? If they say something crappy then why not use crappy language to capture what’s being said? I mean, I’m with Michelle on this one: Coulter is accusing soccer fans of being pussies. Michelle’s post title captures Coulter’s content perfectly.Report
“Hey, I actually made the mistake of visiting Stormfront today, and it was all ‘darkie this’ and ‘darkie that’.”
“…”
“I mean, they didn’t outright SAY ‘darkie’, they said stuff like ‘white heritage’ and ‘race realism’; but what they meant was ‘darkie’.”
“….”
“What? No, I mean, *I* would never use the word ‘darkie’. It’s denigrating to an entire class of people. Maybe several, in fact. I’m just reporting what *they* said, and it was ‘darkie’.”
“….”
“I mean, ‘they meant’.”
“…”
“Because they are terrible, but I’m not, and because I’m not, I would never say that thing, ‘darkie’, that they didn’t say either.”
“In conclusion, I’d just like to leave us all with one word:
darkiemalarkey.”Report“I don’t hate cops, I just feel better when they’re not around.”Report
Hmm, not sure I follow.
Anyway, maybe I’m just overreacting to a word that I personally never felt comfortable using or hearing used in *that* sense, even when it was a common playground taunt (and believe you me, I didn’t grow up in the most progressive of places); or maybe I am reacting that way because I think in that Yoko line (you know the one) she kinda had a point; or maybe some people might say I was just being a “pussy” about this whole thing (even though they might not use that word, I’ll know what they really meant, so here it is).
Hey, using that word, when I know that *I* have good intentions and can ascribe my usage to a paraphrase of someone else, is kinda liberating!
Sweet!Report
I think we’re getting closer to my complaint of your complaint. You accused Michelle of “not owning” a word she was willing to attribute to another. I think my complaint is that you dress up your own dislike of that word in a bunch of “language police” nonsense which attributes to Michelle some sort of egregious behavior when it seems to me what you’re doing is not owning your own sentiments.
You don’t like that word, Glyph. It’s just that simple. Why dress it up in some sort of “women get to use words men can’t” bullshit? Eg.,
I rather suspect that if I were to call people “pussies” around here, I’d be upbraided for using a denigrating, misogynistic slur.
You’ve done this before, as I recall. With DRS on TVD’s post where she said something about TVD “pulling” for Paul. Not cool, in my opinion.Report
Eh, the DRS thing was specifically in response to her own complaint just a few days prior about TVD using language she didn’t like, then her basically going the same route.
Yeah, I called that out. It was hypocritical, and it was outside commenting policy as I understand it.
Seriously, man, I don’t WANT to use the word in that context. I’ve *never, ever* liked it in that context, which is why I said something in the first place, after much internal debate. I didn’t use the word “egregious” anywhere. I tried to explain why it bothered me and asked why that word choice was made; Michelle answered fairly I thought, and honestly that would have been the end of it for me. I’m not dressing it up as something else.
(Though, honestly – if I did call people that – I guaran-damn-tee I’d get guff around here. And rightly so, IMO!)
You seem quite comfortable speculating about my motives, Still. Isn’t that a particular hobbyhorse of yours, when others do it?
Anyways, seems this is one of those days when me and you are just gonna rub each other the wrong way (why’s it always a Saturday when that happens?) and I gots stuff to do, so peace out.Report
Yeah, we’ll prolly not agree about this stuff – especially since it’s Saturday – cuz I don’t understand your complaint other than Michelle (as a woman) gets to say words that you (as a man) are prevented by the Language Police from saying. But since you’ve appointed yourself the LP in this case, I don’t think even that analysis is right. You’re getting on about something else, it seems to me. Like I said upthread.
Also, in my view you were way outa line in that DRS interaction, and I thought she handled it beautifully.Report
I am sympathetic to Stillwater’s complaint here, but I thought Glyph was absolutely right with regard to the DRS-TVD thing.Report
I gots no time to relitigate golden oldies today, man. Let’s just say “Go team, go”, that’ll probably cover all the bases. Or maybe these are just personality conflicts and little more.
Later.Report
You guys can actually remember comment-section arguments from years ago at that level of detail? I don’t know whether to be impressed or horrified.Report
Mike, think of it this way: comments sections to us are like sentences (even word choices) of literature to you. Unlike our field of memory, tho, we haven’t read everyfuckingthingeverwritten.Report
Yeah, you guys are a bunch of weenies.
Oops.Report
I dunno. I get to say “tranny.” You don’t. Does this bother anyone?Report
“Pansies” is PC.
I think.
Oh, hell. Now I gotta call the cops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iau-e6HfOg0Report
It’s been like forever since I heard someone call anyone a “pansy.” If it happened I think I would be more amused than offended. Like, yeah I’m a pansy, motherfucker! Gotta a problem with that? 🙂Report
Ha! I lied! I got ten minutes and I’m gonna use them!
@veronica-dire I dunno. I get to say “tranny.” You don’t. Does this bother anyone?
This wasn’t exactly my main argument, though I included it (I *was* pretty scattershot, and that’s on me).
My main argument is pretty simple:
1. Is “pussies”, when used in this way, a misogynistic (and possibly homophobic) slur? I think it pretty clearly is, unless anyone thinks “cats” when they use/hear it (do girls ever call each other ‘pussies’ when they mean ‘weak’?)
2. If yes to #1, does a slur, especially if not reporting a direct quote (like, obviously if Donald Sterling said the word, that’s different), belong here, especially in a headline? My thought is no. It’s just kinda…uncouth, I guess?
@will-truman – if you are sympathetic to Still’s complaint, if you have the time can you rephrase what you see it as? Past experience tells me that once me and Still start down these roads, we rarely converge; but if you see a “there” there, I am willing to listen, and sometimes a different voice helps clarify things.Report
@glyph I think too much was put into use of the word by Michelle. I don’t think the word is an unfair characterization of what she said. It’s not the word I would have advocated using, but here I don’t see it as particularly problematic. It may not be the word Coulter used, but it does convey the tone in which Coulter wrote (and not in any sort of dog-whistley way. Would there be an objection if a guy were to use the word? I don’t know. It’s more likely (though not a given) that it would, but in-group/out-group terminology rules do apply here.Report
II get to say “tranny.” You don’t. Does this bother anyone?
Well, it’s going to complicate communication down at the garage.Report
@james-hanley 🙂Report
The politically correct term is “power train shifting apparatus.”Report
@veronica-dire
I’ll make a note of it!Report
@will-truman – thanks for the response. Acknowledged that the in-group/out-group distinction matters, and apologies to all for bringing that bit in, especially as it has proved to be quite a distraction from what I originally meant to be getting at.
So let me sum up:
1.) Nobody has tried to argue that the word, when used in that way, is not the type of slur I interpret it to be, for the reasons I gave.
2.) The defense given in use of that slur, from you, Still and @michelle-togut (and Michelle, thanks for your quick, fair, thoughtful and thorough original reply, I got sidetracked by Still’s comment and forgot to say that) is:
a.) it’s an accurate paraphrase or tonal capture of the column (per Michelle, Still, Will);
b.) a little bit of shock value (per Michelle – and I should note that within certain parameters, I can’t fault anyone trying to grab eyeballs, and obviously it caught mine, though for different reasons than intended) and
c.) just didn’t think about it that much (per Michelle, and again, I certainly say stuff I don’t think too much about all the freaking time).
And, my objections:
1.) It’s a slur I really don’t care for and never have , as it seems to denigrate all kinds of people at once as I explained. It’s just, IMO, an ugly word, when it’s used like that (and a lovely word when used appropriately elsewhere). (And weirdly, I don’t feel the same about the use of “dick”, for reasons that aren’t immediately clear to me; but that can be explored another day, this discussion is long enough).
2.) It’s not a direct quote, which I would understand the justification for (re)using much better.
Seems like there should be another way to get at the same point without using an ugly word that the person in question didn’t even use (and to be clear: I am not, nor have I ever been, any fan of Ann Coulter, who I think is a pretty manifestly terrible person, and not funny to boot).
Since we’ve dredged up some other golden oldies, allow me to bring up another time when I questioned a headline here.
Old-timers may recall the infamous TVD piece that was the final straw for his tenure here: a picture of a bloody George Zimmerman, purporting to portray the injuries he allegedly sustained from Trayvon Martin, with a headline that read: “Well, Why Din’t They Just Say So?”, and nothing else in the OP.
I was one of the first (maybe *the* first, actually, IIRC) to question what appeared to be the use of so-called “ebonics” in the post title (“Din’t”), on such a racially-polarizing case.
(As an aside, I believe now that I was wrong about that – Tom was able to show that he had used the term before under different circumstances, and said it was just a term used where he grew up. However, the resulting furor was the straw that broke the camel’s back when it came to his controversial run, and had he included more post info, or showed more interest in the case’s racial nuances earlier, his explanation might have mattered more than it did; ‘too little too late’, basically.)
My point isn’t about the word “din’t”, or TVD; it’s that TVD was in no way a simpatico personality, political animal, nor gender to DRS and Michelle.
Yet when I saw something of his (in a headline, no less) that seemed to me to be a clear example of “too far!”, I said something.
I joke a LOT around here; and my trigger for “too far!” is often quite a bit farther out than other people’s (I recall a discussion on whether or not “douche” was a misogynistic slur or not, where I said “not”, for reasons I won’t go into here, for already-excessive length – suffice to say “too far!” is often a question of fine degrees and subtle distinctions).
My note here on “language police” was simply to acknowledge that it’s not a role I often find myself in, nor relish, when I feel I must say something. It brings my free-speech fundamentalism, and my dislike of scolding, in direct conflict with other things I may feel strongly about.
But I’m a human being; sometimes, even I will also hit what I see as “too far!”
When I do, and say so, it kinda sucks to have my motives called into question the way they seemingly were here.
I cannot recall, offhand, circumstances in which others said “too far!” where I disagreed with them AND also called their motives for saying so into question.
But I will certainly be on guard for that in myself in the future, since it is a crappy thing to experience.Report
Glyph:
The inaccurate title is par course given the liberal penchant for hyperbole.Report
Sure, the “liberal” penchant for hyperbole.
Right.Report
I like Hyperbole and a half. http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.comReport
@veronica-dire – Allie’s awesome.Report
I like her alot! 🙂
(It’s a very cute alot.)Report
Coulters gonna coultReport
Wowwhatagoal!Report
I appreciate the fact that you used “you’re” instead of “your”.Report
Coulter remains unrepentant, doubling down on her absurdity. Coulter makes it evr more difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff in her commentary. See Never Trust Ann Coulter – at ANY Age, a new book available at http://www.coulterwatch.com/never.pdf.Report