This is the Lowest Point of Donald Trump’s Presidency

DavidTC in reply to Maribou says:

That said, couching your expressions of frustration in sweeping generalization insults, particularly those that are traditionally used in homophobic contexts (talking about how males are “rock hard” for some other male when that isn’t, at all, what you actually mean) is not actually helping anything. Please don’t.

I can see how that can be read as homophobic. I sometimes forget that implying that a man is attracted to another man is often read as an insult. I will try to phrase things better in the future.

I was trying to insult the conservatives defending Arpaio by saying they are aroused by someone who is a *monster*, not ‘insult’ them by saying they are aroused by a *man*, which isn’t any sort of insult in my mind…but is indeed an insult in a lot of people’s mind if I’m talking about male conservatives. So I’ll watch that.

However, I didn’t limit anything to just male conservatives, and I don’t know why you thought I did(1), but I think you missing that removed a lot of the obvious humorous intent from my comment, as my statement would include Arpaio-defending conservative women in the erection-having category…which makes my comment much more obviously satirical.(2)

But that was, perhaps, less obvious than I intended, and it is possible to read my statement as homophobic, so I failed there, and will try to phrase things better in the future. (At least until we live in a world where saying that a man is attracted to another male isn’t some horrible insult.)

1) Unless you thought that’s what I meant by ‘half’, but as I clarified, I just meant the ‘half’ of the ‘conservatives’ out there defending him. Which is, yes, randomly rounded, but if anything it’s low.

2) Which is, quite possibly, a slightly transphobic joke, perhaps. But not really.

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As for the rest, I’m not sure what sweeping generalizations you’re talking about. Are you talking about me talking about tribal behavior by ‘conservatives’ here? There’s a reason I put the word ‘conservative’ in quotes, specifically to make it clear I wasn’t talking about all the conservatives here, but only the ‘conservatives’ who had no ideology at all besides ‘Always side with Republicans’. (As I very specifically said.)

Defining two groups of mutually-exclusive people (Conservatives who are consistent and those who are not.) is not a generalization. A generalization would be saying _other_ things about the groups.

I.e., it’s a generalization to group bad drivers in one group, and good drivers in another, and say that the first group are, for example, taller. That would be a generalization.

But if I say the first group is composed of bad drivers…that’s not a generalization.That’s literally the grouping. I’m not ascribing possibly-incorrect traits to a group, I’m stating how the groups were divided to start with.

Same with me creating ‘ideologically-consistent conservatives’ and ‘ideologically-inconsistent-to-the-extend-of-even-defending-Arpaio conservatives’ groups. Defining those groups isn’t a generalization. It’s just set theory. Saying _anything else_ about them would be a generalization, but…I didn’t do that? (I said I was _tired_ of the second group, I guess.)

The only ‘generalization’ I made was to put George in the ideologically-inconsistent bucket. But that’s not a generalization…that’s me making a statement about George specifically.

And I’m pretty certain that ‘You are completely inconsistent in your political ideology, with your position being entirely based on what side of the political spectrum we’re talking about.’ is well within the bounds of statements we can make here about posters. I mean, yes, it’s technically an insult, but it’s well within bounds. (Weirdly, I’m not sure George would think of it as an insult.)Report

DavidTC in reply to Maribou says:

Okay, I can see all that.

So to be clear, I should stay away that sort of locker room talk, which make sense and is easy enough. That is not somewhere I normally go anyway, I was just finding the Arpaio defenders (Here and other places) who claim to be ‘conservative’ very absurd and I was trying to convey how absurd they were. But I will find other absurd imagery instead.

And also, instead of saying ‘conservative’, I should say…fake conservative, or conservative-in-name-only?Report

DavidTC in reply to DensityDuck says:

Like, if you’re gonna call people out, call people out. There is not a vast horde of commentors here on this website defending Arpaio. There are…two? Three?

I think perhaps people have mixed together my two statements about
fake conservatives. One of them was about posters *here*, and the other was just in general.

One of them, the first thing, is me getting annoyed at the tribal nonsense _here_, the literal IOIYAR that fake conservatives _here_ seem to do, like we have no memory at all and can’t remember them having the exact opposite opinion when the parties were the other way around. Uh, yes, we can.

This is not just about Arpaio. There is another poster I do much the same thing to, although his inconsistencies are more politically strategic than ideological. And some others I’m going to start calling out. And, no, I’m not calling out people who are not here.

Weirdly, the only other ‘conservative’ (And that’s in quotes because I’m not sure he even considers himself one, not because he’s ‘fake’.) I see here defending Arpaio is @notme , who isn’t really being ideologically inconsistent…I mean, as far as I can tell, he’s never claimed to have any sort of ideology.

The *other* paragraph, the last one, the one that went too far, was me talking about fake conservatives _in general_ who are defending Arpaio. There’s George here, but I was mainly talking about the fake conservatives out in the world.

Like the moronic fake conservative Ann Coulter, and others like her, people whose articles I was reading at the time but don’t recall now. And all the idiots on Facebook whose only ideology is ‘If the left doesn’t like it, it must be good’.Report