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[personal profile] fpb
I do not want to return to this disgusting topic again, except to answer any question, but I am in this whether I like it or not. The storm of insults allowed and encouraged by the contemptible Pirate Jenny, she who is neither a Nazi nor a Communist, continues unabated; most of them, with the classic moral courage of these creatures, being anonymous - while our non-Nazi friend continues to allow them and not to allow me to answer.

Now the point is not so much that this stuff is repulsive - of course it is; but that some people on my f-list seem under the impression that I have done something to deserve it, or that there is something to be said for the trash concerned. So I will publish, behind a cut, a representative letter, from a typical anonymous backstabber. You may judge whether this sort of nonsense can be explained by anything except mental problems on the part of the coward concerned.

This was my comment:

I once wrote a fic called GAY BAR, which featured a strangely subdued bar populated mostly by middle-aged or elderly gays, into which a drunk and unhappy post-war Harry Potter barges in to make trouble. Believe it or not, hundreds of people THINK they have read it and THINK that it features a nasty gaggle of threatening sexual predators endangering a virginal Draco Malfoy. They were told what to think, you see, and they would rather believe their friends than their own lying eyes.

This is the Nameless Wonder's response.
Subject: *hands you a clue*
How about you have a look at this sentence, and then claim you weren't actively trying to piss people off?

Draco could not know that Harry, who did not ordinarily drink to excess, had just been dumped by a boyfriend.

This manages to offend on two levels. First of all, there's the sudden, clunky change of perspective halfway through the narrative, which is one of the FIRST things the "How to Write" books tell you not to do (you've never read a "How To Write" book? Why is this not news to me?)

More importantly there's the use of the phrase "just been dumped by a boyfriend". It's highly offensive in its implications that gay men have nameless "boyfriends", not relationships, and that such relationships are casual throwaway affairs whose end merits no more serious description than the word "dumping".

And how about your statement that gays are fundamentally unhappy in the line "Millicent was telling me about the people who come into her counselling service, and a lot of the gay men either have no fathers or some sort of tragedy in their family history"? Or that disgusting "We'll have your children yet!" stuff, showing beyond all doubt that you believe gay = paedophile?

You write this shit, and then you stand there with your index finger to your lip like a five-year-old and say "Who, ME give offence? ME?"

We laugh at you, you pathetic, silly little man. Now go find something better to do with your time.


Let us assume that this rant is intended as an argument. The Nameless Wonder seems to imagine that to say that someone has "just been dumped by a boyfriend" implies an endles series of promiscuous relationships. Well, even if it did, the Nameless Wonder knows as well as I do that this is a pretty good description of the lifestyles of a fair few male homosexuals, especially when young. Yet the Nameless Wonder takes offence. The point however is that to anyone whose eyes are not glazed over by hatred, the expression means nothing of the kind. As if I could not say, as I indeed do say, "At the time I had just been dumped by a girlfriend" or "once I was betrayed by a friend." Does this imply that I would regard either girlfriends or friends as nameless and expendable? Anyone with the slightest notion of how human beings speak would say no. But our friend the Nameless Wonder is vigilant: he goes out searching for the tiniest little statement that may give offence, even if he has to deafen himself to every natural content and shape of the English language. And this person has the sheer chutzpah to lecture me about style! Vanity certainly rears its ugly children in strange places.

His folly unsatisfied by this display of aesthetic incompetence, he takes words which I had put in the mouth of Draco and his wife - when the ending of the story proves abundantly that they are unreformed criminals with a hankering for Dark Lords and mass murder - and assumes that they represent my position. As well imagine (si parua licet componere magnis) that Iago is the vehicle for Shakespeare's views. He then proceeds to do the same with a character who is raging drunk and desperately unhappy, and who is saying the worst things he can in order to spread around some of his own unhappiness - an unhappiness caused not, as the Nameless Wonder seems to imagine, by being homosexual, but by just having been dumped by someone he loved. All that the Nameless Wonder has managed by this attempt at a reading is to show that he has never in his life been in love, that he has no idea that being dumped can hurt, and that he has no notion that people in pain do strange things - especially if they are drunk.

And so, the Nameless Wonder, without the courage to sign his name, without the life experience to know love and loss, without the aesthetic understanding to tell the difference between the character and the author, and with less manners than a monkey, concluding his display of ignorance, folly, persecution-mindedness, and yelping stupidity, with a closing rant of which a Neapolitan street kid would be ashamed - pretending at some sort of superiority even as his shrill tone and empty verbiage condemns him to the dustcart of near-illiterates - and wanders off, his folly unpunished and his rants undisturbed, because his enabler, Pirate Jenny, wants this sort of behaviour to go on. And on. And on. This is what I am meeting, and while it would be nice to believe that the sheer meanness of these creatures would condemn them, I would remind anyone willing to take that easy way out that these are the same people and methods who produced Charitygate and the rest.

Date: 2006-06-22 08:33 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com
True enough. And the problem with [personal profile] dreamer_marie was just that she was not really able to defend her position. So she threw herself into moral blackmail - if I am your friend you must not hurt me - attacking my country hurts me - I used to be mocked as a child. Pardon me, but what on God's green earth does any of that have to do with euthanasia? These things are to be judged on their own terms. If you think they are right, defend them. If you disagree but feel unable to argue, say so and I won't push the issue. But do not, for the love of heaven, make demands of me in the name of friendship, because if you do, it is not friendship, it is manipulation.

Date: 2006-06-22 08:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] prylliepwns.livejournal.com
As do most people, I have quite established and solid opinions on certain issues. I'm pro-death penalty, but at the same time I have to wonder if it's really doing what it's meant to do. There's another psycho born every minute, and aside from the massive cost of housing criminals who've already been sentenced to death and appeal for 20 years, how do we really know that all the people we're executing are actually guilty?

I'm pro-choice because as a woman who's been in certain situations, I don't believe our government should ever have the right to dictate what a woman can do regarding her own body, and anything implanted in it, whether accidentally, or by force.

And I am pro-euthanasia, mostly because in my life I have seen entirely too many animals and humans alike suffer. For no reason. One of my close friends' grandmother was hit by a car. She had absolutely no brain activity. No spontaneous movement. She would most likely live another 15 years or more on life support, draining the hospital of it's resources, taking up space in a convalescent facility, using her and her husband's life savings and everything else her family could spare just to keep her alive by machine. Thankfully she had an advanced directive. Her husband, though completely grief-stricken, honored her wishes. He had her removed from life support. And though I don't fully believe in supernatural occurences, he swore that the day after she died as he was sleeping, she visited him in the night and thanked him for his selfless decision. It's reasons such as that which keep my mind open when it comes to euthanasia.

I do recognize that there are exceptions to every rule, and while I do not militantly espouse these views, I would do my level best to defend them, were I attacked for them. So I was quite in agreement with you vis-a-vis your stance on how she chose to try and defend her position.

Date: 2006-06-22 09:05 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com
The one thing I want to take you up on is your icon here. Read this: http://community.livejournal.com/fpb_de_fide/1203.html#cutid1.

Date: 2006-06-22 09:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] prylliepwns.livejournal.com
That icon was used by accident, as I was intending to use the one below it in the list, which is the one in this post.

That icon was made from a remark made by a jewish character from a roleplaying game I'm in, and was not made by me. It's an icon I usually only use in connection with the OOC comm for that game. I didn't read all of the essay you linked me to yet, as I should have left the computer 2 hours ago, but I will definitely save it and read it at a later date.

Date: 2006-06-22 09:15 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com
With reference to your last icon:
Happiness is friend-shaped.

Date: 2006-06-22 09:18 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] prylliepwns.livejournal.com
Yes, it is. But in honor of your arguments about the Dutch, I thought I'd use the pot icon in reference to their liberal and legal views on marijuana use.

I don't smoke it myself, but I've said more than once that I hardly see the harm if a bunch of potheads want to get stoned out of their minds. It's the least likely of all the drugs to cause violence and hysteria. Virtually every person I've ever met stoned has been mellow on the stuff. And to top it all off, it's not a physically addicting drug such as speed, heroin, cocaine, and crack.

Date: 2006-06-22 09:45 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com
I'm with you there, at least. I am in favour of legalizing most drugs - I would make an exception for LSD, which I have known to ruin someone's health permanently after a single use. But in general, seeing that we retail wine and whiskey, I do not see why other kinds of drug should be illegal.

Date: 2006-06-25 11:48 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] super-pan.livejournal.com
FPB, I was frankly not strong stomached enough to say anything to you while this was going on, but as as a friend to both you and Dreamer_Marie, I feel that I should tell you that I think you were were wrong in the way that you spoke to her, as she was your friend. I'm not saying you were wrong to speak or defend your beliefs, or argue with her, or even defriend her, because you are passionate and strong in your positions, but I still think you were wrong about the way you acted towards her. You treated her the way you treat the assholes that troll your lj whenever you get fandom wanked, and while they often deserve what you dish out, she didn't. I wanted to stay out of it, because you are both my friends, but I should have said something.

I don't like to have my friends trash each other, even though technically people have a right to say whatever they want. And I personally wish you guys would stop saying shit about each other publically. That's just my personal opinion, and I plan on saying it to everyone now when my friends talk about each other publically.

As I've said before, you were my first friend and you are important to me, but I wanted to tell you how I feel.

Date: 2006-06-26 01:27 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com
Excuse me, who defriended who, exactly? And who, for that matter, reported me to the mods for hate speech (to their great mirth)? And it was open to d_m to say, at any time, I disagree with you but do not feel up to (or, do not want) to discuss this. In that case, I would have stopped. She did not do that, and she did not discuss things in a fair way, either: she pulled the emotional blackmail stunt, which does not work in the case of state-sponsored murder, because there is so much more to get emotional about than whether or not she was teased as a child. (Was she now? Welcome to the club.) Frankly, I do not think you are thinking about this matter very clearly.

Date: 2006-06-26 03:03 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] super-pan.livejournal.com
I'm just letting you know how I felt, for whatever it's worth to anyone.

It's hard to know when to say nothing, and when to speak up, when watching the fur fly between my friends, and I don't know always know the right thing to say, but sometimes I feel I should speak up.

I don't like the public fighting among some of my friends, and I'm just letting them know. They can do what they like with my opinion.

I'm not going to let anyone change my feelings about my friends, including my other friends. Which I've said to some others involved in the fighting amongst my flist.

Date: 2006-06-26 04:55 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com
It is a point of honour with me not to force a debate on anyone who does not want it, or who is unable to answer it; just because I know that I am both aggressive and difficult in debate. The point is that d_m neither showed any desire not to argue nor to argue fairly. She just wanted her way by any means, including emotional blackmail, including reporting me to to the mods for hate speech. Is that how scientists are taught to debate serious issues these days?

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