A: Catholics shouldn't be leaving the church in protest; it would be more effective to put pressure on the relatively small hierarchy who are knowingly abetting the abuse.Even in a long thread, I think seven instances of such a twisted, disingenuous potshot is overdoing it. Especially if the exact same potshot was showing up multiple times in every other thread on the subject.
B: Keep chokeslamming those nuns, A! You'll destroy Christianity in no time!
Three days ago the left was all up in arms about how Obama got played. Now they are accusing him of being the evil mastermind. You can't have it both ways, people.OK, so first we have a statement from Ironmouth suggesting that Glenn Greenwald et al. are essentially contradicting themselves from one day to the next. That's an opinion one might disagree with, but it points out the basic dichotomy which is the subject of the FPP - that it doesn't make a lot of sense to call Obama a milquetoast one day and the antichrist on another.
Starting the hippy punching early this thread, eh? Democrats approved of this plan more than anyone else, there is no imaginary liberal "they" for you to accuse of hypocrisy, there is a disagreement among some people on the left.
The term "punch a hippie" has been around for decades, although it's recently cropped up again on the right blogosphere. It's considered a pastime, fun, a sort of recreation for ignorant neanderthals. [...] It's one of those primitive, sadistic forms of wingnut entertainment like blowing up frogs or tying cats tails together and throwing them over a clothesline. [...]This backstory just makes the line even more repulsive. Maybe it had some relevancy describing triangulating cynics like Rahm Emanuel who were angrily denouncing lefty bloggers for political reasons. But that's not how it's being used on here. It's not just a knee-jerk rebuttal -- it aims to redefine honest criticism from other Mefites as some kind of dastardly betrayal akin to backstabbing or gay-bashing or racism. It says: "Who cares what you have to say? You just think we're dirty fucking hippies and want to beat us down! Well, go right ahead, you big bully!"
Unfortunately, the Democratic political establishment, timorous and afraid of their own shadows as always, are petrified that Real Americans might make that same absurd connection [between hippies and liberals]. So nearly forty years on from the chaotic '72 Democratic convention, the left, whether Netroots or "Professional" are still seen as disruptive, scary hippies and it is assumed they are loathed by all decent people. Just like the idiotic right wingers, they conflate "the left" with that carefully nurtured anachronistic wingnut fantasy of the "smelly, dirty, hairy" leftist and are scared to death of being tarred by it. And it is why many in the left blogosphere defiantly took the moniker "DFH" which stands for Dirty Fucking Hippie.
The blogosphere's subsequent adoption of the term "hippie punching" is a shorthand to describe how Democrats like to debase the left in order to appeal to so-called Real Americans. It's a sort of proxy bullying, in which the Party attempts to prove their middle of the road bonafides by attacking what they believe Americans see as their out-of-the-mainstream fringe. (It's like a gang initiation where you have to beat up your childhood best friend to prove your loyalty to the new crowd.)
This thread is closed to new comments.
No, the direction is that the thread needs to not become
- a referendum on one user's opinion on everything
- Ironmouth being shouty and sort of increasingly ascerbic with people
It's tough because in a fast-moving thread, removing a comment before three people have commented on it is really difficult and fairly unrewarding. That said, MeTa is a much better place to have this conversation than in that thread. We removed a few comments from both Ironmouth and everyone else.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 1:43 PM on August 5, 2011