Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
And that’s being charitable.
What do I really think about it? The anti-bullying movement is all about bullying. Were you bullied in school? I was. First rule of bullying: Try to look like a victim. Bullies have always done this. Put up a mirage that makes it look like the other guy is the bully.
Dan Savage, LGBT activist and anti-bullying guru making a living off playing the suicide card, decided to do some bullying of his own.
Woke up to Sarah Palin’s voice. She’s taken up chewing tobacco now cuz LIBRULS or Bloomberg or something. Now seeing upside of oral cancers.
— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) May 4, 2013
So he’s a fake. It’s settled. Savage doesn’t believe in getting rid of bullying, any more than anyone else. He’s a bully himself. I’m going a bit out on a limb generalizing this across all this anti-bullying fever going on right now; they all look to me like a bunch of bullies accusing others of being the bullies. I know the signs, because I was a short little shrimp until I hit a growth spurt, summer between sophomore and junior years. That pretty much stopped it, but it was a shitty summer I won’t want to go back and re-live again. That gets into another story that’s off-topic here, but up until that point, there was a lot of bullying going on.
As blogger friend Phil pointed out, though, it’s all disingenuous because it’s all just a maneuver before a guaranteed-argument-win, and guaranteed-argument-win is the refuge of scoundrels who don’t know or care about how to actually discuss anything. It’s just silly to open up any kind of “discussion” about bullying or take an “anti-bullying” position, when nobody’s really pro-bullying.
I might come close to it though, since I dread a future in which there’s zero bullying. Not that I’d miss the bullying — I’m wondering what else got zeroed out while we were getting rid of the bullying. I was forced to show some resourcefulness when I got bullied. Had I not been bullied, I would not have been forced to develop the qualities I developed, and there’s nothing special about me there at all. This is actually a very common situation. So are the kids more capable of learning, and approaching maturity with some genuine grown-up ability, in a zero-bullying environment in which they’re spared from the distractions that come with bullying? Or, does this make them into thin-skinned sensitive little useless geldings, fated to waste away their twenties in their childhood bedrooms which are crammed full of trophies and plaques awarded just for showing up?
Perhaps both will happen?
It’s a worthy argument to have. Let’s have that argument. But the anti-bully brigade isn’t about discussing anything, of course; they just want to win, win, win. I guess in this day and age that’s what everyone seems to want. Win win win, without actually providing support for anything, discussing anything, exploring anything in detail. Just be on that winning team, and do a serviceable job of pretending to care about the losers you just beat, beat, beat into the dirt.
I see Women, Action and Media, whose initials are WAM! — oh, that’s nice — is doing a great job acting out exactly what I’m describing here. Yay, they won! Win, beat, trounce, pummel, tenderize, bludgeon, beat beat beat beat beat. But the product of all these beatings is nothing more than a bunch of confusion, as noticed by the New York Times. Facebook’s little blurb, from their Vice President of Global Public Policy, is quite an amazing thing. It’s a wonder of meaningless bureaucrat-speak. “We will complete our review…we will update…we will establish more formal and direct lines of communication…we will encourage…include representatives of…these are complicated challenges and raise complex issues.” So many words about nothing! No answers at all for the questions most pressing, first and foremost of which would be: Is the medium going to move toward a more strict, or less strict, policy of censorship? I’d be inclined to guess more strict. Seems an easy call to make, although I note that this is not actually declared anywhere.
Looks to me like yet another struggle between clarity and agreement, with clarity losing. Like I said, a wonder of meaningless bureaucrat-speak. Worthy of being enshrined in some kind of museum or something.
The Times continues:
David Reuter, a spokesman for Nissan, said in an interview on Tuesday that the automaker has stopped all advertising on Facebook until it could assure Nissan that its ads would not appear on pages with offensive content.
Nissan typically buys Facebook advertisements that target particular demographic groups, like men age 30 to 35, Mr. Reuter said. In Facebook’s system, those ads follow the users onto whatever pages they visit, potentially including those with offensive content.
“We are working with Facebook to understand this situation better and opt out of advertising on any pages that are offensive,” he said.
The observation about the clarity/agreement divide is apt. The one thing that emerges from the mess with any kind of clarity is that anyone who has any kind of authority in anything here, desires to be anti-bullying and anti-offense. That applies to all the identifiable players with any clout at all. So what’s up with the slippin’, slidin’, bumping into each other and falling down? Why all these false starts, if everyone who has any pull agrees about the goals? The answer is: Definitions. Clarity, in other words. You see that phrase “offensive content” being repeated multiple times. What is that, exactly? Does a Kate Upton photoshoot on a farm, constitute offensive content?
Some would say yes, some would say no. And that’s why they’re having an embarrassing problem that they don’t want to have. So you see, clarity is their friend. But their effort is becoming a laughing stock because they’re not for clarity, they’d rather have the agreement.
Agreement-over-clarity people are bullies by nature, usually. Very few people will say something like “the agreement is so important to me, I’m going to let go of this thing I care about so that we can have agreement.” That’s almost never done. That would be called “compromise,” and you have to value clarity in order to reach compromise. So no, people who value agreement over clarity, wish to have the agreement, with everyone else involved agreeing with them. They want to win win win, beat beat beat, just like Dan Savage wishing oral cancer on Sarah Palin.
Just saying what everyone knows to be true. But of course, if the wrong people see what I’ve had to say here…take it to the bank, they’ll call it “offensive content.” Now we know why.
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I really appreciate the working in of the Kate Upton photo. Just gettin’ that out of the way 🙂 What a pretty shot.
Everybody understands that what they mean is what they mean … until they have to start telling someone else how to tell what they mean from what they don’t mean. We run into that problem all the time around here.
Back about … 15 years ago, someone had the bright idea that every student here was going to have a University email address (about 2 or 3 years after having an email address ceased being a “perk” since everyone and his dog had a hotmail, AOL, or yahoo address … or all three, but that’s a tangent there).
But then the question came up, who is a student? Someone currently enrolled this semester? Someone who’s applied and been accepted? What about interession? What if they’re not taking summer school classes? What if they’re taking a break this winter session but plan on coming back next summer or fall? Do we pull their email? When do we pull their email? How do we determine if a student on the St. Louis campus isn’t the same student as a student on the Columbia campus or the Rolla campus? And if we want exactly one email address per student, and they cease being enrolled here but they are enrolled there, or they plan to enroll there …
Who is a student?
Easy question to ask. But it turned out when pressed, people had a lot of different answers, and even then all of those were not apparent in the data.
- philmon | 05/29/2013 @ 07:24Ms. Upton has a remarkable talent for wearing a swimsuit while looking like she’s wearing something else.
- mkfreeberg | 05/29/2013 @ 07:39Same same with diversity, inclusion, racism, tolerance, etc. Hell, one could go through the whole stinking playbook of Liberalism and destroy it using the agreement-over-clarity argument.
Shit, look at what they call themselves now, Progressives, as in progress. Really? Where the bloody fuck has this country progressed one iota when “Progressive” legislation has been implemented? Social Security? Check. Welfare? Check. School integration? Check. Racial quotas? Check. Gun free zones? Check. Obamacare?
More like regressive.
- tim | 05/29/2013 @ 10:56Apologies in advance. This is going to be a bit incoherent — it’s one of my first attempts to articulate something that has been bouncing around in my head for a while — but it sounds like this “bullying” thing highlights something fundamental about liberals: They’re power worshipers.
Rank-and-file liberals are liberals because they’re desperately insecure. I’ve been around for a while now, and I’ve never met a liberal who wasn’t a) thoroughly middle class, and b) completely ignorant of how she got that way. They’re all very nice people who pull down $80K a year because they went to college and got a degree in a cushy liberal art, because that’s what people do, right? I mean, doesn’t everybody work as an intern at a nonprofit and backpack around Europe for a semester to “find themselves” before going to law school?
They can’t admit, even for a second, that this isn’t the right, natural, and just order of things. Because if success is earned — if they’re just freeloading on their parents’ accumulated cultural, social, and financial capital; if they just got catapulted into a lifestyle that would be the envy of Queen Victoria by dumb genetic luck — then they might not be such special precious unique snowflakes after all. And that simply won’t do. They’ll do anything for anyone who can make those awful feelings go away.
George Orwell wrote:
That’s why they can’t stop, can’t compromise, can’t concede a single point — even rhetorically, even when it would actually advance the larger argument they’re trying to make. What’s now is forever, and any loss, any setback, is catastrophic. The charge — the fact — that Dan Savage is a hypocritical, hateful, bullying little troll wouldn’t bother him in the slightest, because in his mind he’s not. He’s winning, and that’s all that matters. So, too, with all the lefties whose only problem with Pharaoh Barack’s innumerable scandals is that he got caught.
- Severian | 05/29/2013 @ 13:28You have to wonder if it ever occurred to Savage that he got trolled.
No, of course not. “Sarah Palin troll us? Troll me? She’s not smart enough to know how. Inconceivable.“
- Rich Fader | 05/29/2013 @ 13:57“Same same with diversity, inclusion, racism, tolerance, etc.”
Ah geez if I had just scowled down a bit I would’ve seen you already made this point (on a earlier post).
Doh!
Great minds and all that…
- tim | 05/31/2013 @ 12:21[…] We will probably never get rid of bullying entirely, and that’s fine with Morgan: […]
- dustbury.com » Bully for you | 05/31/2013 @ 15:01[…] BELLING THE CAT– The Anti-Bullying Movement is Completely Fake … […]
- Steynian 472nd | Free Canuckistan! | 06/07/2013 @ 16:24