Oh, wow. Oh, Jebus. I step out for a day and this is what I come back to? Where to begin? Business first-- cool your jets, people. Personal attacks are a no-no, be they overt and colorful or insidious and constant. No one gets testy, no one gets a mod-boot to the testes. (As a catch-phrase, it's lacking, I know. I'll work on it.)
And now, for something completely tedious:
So you call her a conservative, and this is shown to be incorrect, so then you say: "Yes but under these specific conditions I'm right though."
Whoa. Pardon? I entreat you to read my posts again, paying special attention to WesDude's only post between them.
- He expresses bafflement at why people are labelling her as a conservative.
- I answer, acknowledging nearly every point of nuance that he (and yourself, to a lesser extent) keeps insisting those disagreeing with him are intellectual untermenschen for ignoring and being unaware of.
- He posts something that, quite literally, boils down to "I'm sorry you guys are worse debaters and researchers than me, here's a handwave at a bunch of things I said or posted that have already been addressed."
- I realize we may be having a difference in terms and try to re-answer the question point-by-point rather than in broad strokes.
Then you accuse me of gross intellectual dishonesty.
I've personally been reading her shit lately, and haven't seen anything remotely conservative. I do like that her name is Dabitch though.
Dabitch =/= Christina Sommers. Easy mistake, given the context. Sommers has articles up in quite a few places, most of which have been sited by WesDude and Sander or alluded to by yours truly, but if you're interested and don't want to do the legwork the bulk of her online output is crossposted to her page at the
American Enterprise Institute, the famously conservative thinktank where she is employed.
I don't want to belabor a point, but the posts tend to have a moderate-conservative bent to them (which, apparently, a moderate-Democrat-with-Libertarian-leanings' views are capable of doing).
I'm sure the other mods and admins will immediately jump in to support you, but I think people like Akratus, Alec, and WesDude would support me on this (at least silently, in fear of retaliation).
Chip on the shoulder much? Look out, big messageboard gub'mint comin' ta getcha!
Naw, I kid, you're good people. The Roshambo era is long over, though, and we don't make a habit of letting personalities trump rules in the modding process around here. Bad calls aren't left to stand, by and large. Trust me, I know. (Though if accusing all authority sight-unseen of corruption and incompetence is how you generally tend to open your interactions with them, I can see how you might have had a few negative experiences with them in your day.)
Hell, we've stopped arguing about gamergate arguments and anti-gamergate arguments at least a week ago. But it's a nice job of narrative spinning, I'll admit.
Yeah. As Sander has already pointed out, this is a completely different thread now. Literally. As with so much other critical context in this discussion, a lot of people seem to be largely overlooking that.
Wesdude--
I'd like to afford you the respectfulness of a point-by-point reply, but there's just too much to respond to at this point, and I do honestly apologize. But jumping Jesus Christ on a crutch, man, where to begin? I'm not sure we're even in the same debate. You keep posting the same "proofs" over and over. I'm not even being reductive. The exact. Same. Proofs. We've read the interview. I read the interview before I knew this benighted thread existed. And a few of her articles. And her twitter, which conveniently contains nothing but Gamergate links and her own socially conservative brand of feminism right up to the point where public opinion started tinting her as a conservative scholar and risked pigeonholing her in the eyes of the huge number of potential new readers only recently hearing of her.
All of those things were largely conservative-moderate in content. Not stridently conservative (by and large), not overwhelming, in-your-face conservative. Political dictionary conservative. Even that's a pretty nebulous label. It's not an insult by any means. Most people are a little conservative. The things she puts forward make her look a little more conservative than most on the whole. Her beliefs on abortion don't change that, nor can any non-specific "Democratic leanings" magic it away.
That tweet you keep pushing doesn't actually deny her conservatism, or even say anything about her beliefs aside from the fact that she's not a "right-winger"-- a very staunch dyed-in-the-wool stripe of conservative. She's a "former sixties flower child/socialist" (an entire generation of which have grown into suburban conservative baby boomers) and a "registered Democrat"-- like, again, Zell Miller and Orson Scott Card. It's not illegal for registered Democrats to have conservative views-- we know this, because she is and she does. And that interview she gave-- again, where's the beef? She talked about her parents' liberal political leanings-- and we KNOW no one has ever grown up to be politically at odds with their parents, yes? She called Adlai Stevenson a great man, just as I've done in the past for Dwight Eisenhower even though I'm an avowed (if grey moderate) liberal. There's nothing of substance there.
You're railing at Sander and I for the arrogance of claiming to know her beliefs better than she does when
nothing you're citing has ever actually told us anything concrete about her beliefs. You're giving incredibly broad reading to every point you can use in your favor while accusing us of not questioning the things said about her
enough. Her beliefs
are in her statements, as you say-- the statements in her articles, and the ones she makes through her online conduct and associations every day, which I am broadly familiar with. I was as unfamiliar with her as you were, as most of the internet was, before Gamergate erupted, but I've done my homework, just as you have. Except, for some reason, not having read her entire oeuvre is a repeated point you use against Sander and I when, what, you're supposed to get brownie points for admitting that you're better-read now than you were when you knew nothing about her at all?
You are not the only one in this thread that knows how to read. You are not the only one who has
done your reading. You
are one of the only people in this thread who refuses to give even an inch of ground in debate, even when not doing so means that you have to willfully ignore what the other person is saying and focus entirely on the fact that they're not agreeing with you, so they must not understand the issue. You know there are members of the enemy tribe on the other side of the hill, so you throw your rocks up in the air trying to land them where you think the other guy is standing, and when they come down on empty ground you throw more
at the exact same trajectory.
If you choose to take that as an unwarranted attack, report it, and I will personally issue the strike against myself. I actually quite like you, and your perspective and presence on this board add a lot in general. You're typically a man of good taste, and I agree with you on a lot where politics isn't concerned. For the love of God, though, I don't think I can debate someone whose answer to every point raised is "nope, I'm still right."
(And for the record, I'm a registered Democrat with some Libertarian leanings myself, coincidentally enough, so I might know a thing or two about what that says about a person-- and precisely how much itdoesn't.)
