Offensiveness

[fpb]

Now I know that I have angered and insulted people. The point is, I meant it when I did it. I knew what I was doing. It may have been the wrong thing - in some circumstances, I know it was - but I did not just blunder into injuring someone's self-esteem or besmirching their public image.

And that is what is so really bewildering about the progressive mind. There can't be one progressive in fifty who is even aware when he or she is being offensive. We get the most outrageous statements plonked down in our faces in public with the blandest air of self-regard; and our prog friends - or acquaintances - are surprised, often downright shocked, sometimes even angry, that we should find any of it even mildly irritating. Their minds and experiences are so narrow that they genuinely don't know that they are being offensive.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Of course there is no point telling you that this had nothing to do with you, since I made it a general statement - "progressives" as a category - and as it is a category to which you belong, you are quite right in taking it personally. And your health problem (I know one very wonderful person who has Asperger's, and she is one of the finest people I ever met) being one thing I didn't know, that makes it one of those things in which one can be offensive without meaning to. In the circumstances, I can only be grateful and appreciative for the polite tone you have taken.

What caused the outburst is a transcendentally idiotic statement by Clint Eastwood that is going around Facebook. I don't want to quote it in full - for one thing, it is repetitious and unstylish - but the gist of it is that since HE can't see any such thing as "sanctity", those who claim to should just shut up and let everyone live as they wish. Yes, an elderly man, a man in his seventies, with what one might imagine to be a lifetime of experience, really has said this. He really has made it an argument against any sacramental conception of marriage or anything else, that he doesn't understand it; and he has added that any human being should live as they please.

Now, without bothering with paedophiles or the like, that is the Mafia ideal. It is actually the case that any Mafioso who hears anyone complain or snitch feels, more than anything else, hard done by. Why should anyone interfere with their business? What business is it of anyone else's? That is actually the meaning of the words Cosa Nostra - our own business. That Clint Eastwood, at the end of his life, should adopt the tone and views of the average mobster is certainly deeply ironical.

(It is not, however, surprising. All the movies of his maturity - Unforgiven, Mystic River, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Million Dollar Baby, White Hunter Black Heart - are made from a position of increasingly evident nihilism. Of course he can't understand the concept of sanctity; the only thing he treats with any sense of transcendence is destruction, especially the cowardly suicide of Million Dollar Baby's protagonist. To be frank, I never took his macho attitude altogether at its face value; he has always struck me as a deracinated, caricatural version of the Hemingway version of heroism - which itself has more than a few bugs.)

What set me off was just the sheer imbecility of making one's own inability to understand the opponent an argument to demand that the opponent shut up, and the incredible fact that this was not even seen as the offensive, villainous rubbish it so obviously is. And of course it's far from the first time that such utter, abyssal ignorance of the mere possibility of disagreement is slapped in my face like a wet and rotting fish.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Heh. I avoided the cut in question, for all the reasons you can imagine, plus that I didn't feel like starting another debate.

I think that Eastwood's views are consistent with his work as a director, which can even be said to be distinguished and artistically successful - if in the service of ideas I detest. What is stunning is the complete unwillingness to engage with someone else's opposing viewpoints: at his age he still hasn't come to grips with the existence of opposing viewpoints? or is it just mental lazyness?

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

It's funny you should have written about this in time for me to see right after I got into a bit of an argument on Facebook that basically boils down to this very point.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It's exactly Facebook that set me off - see above. I wonder, indeed, if it might not have been the same thing.

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

Actually it was commentary on FB friend's wall about this that set me off:

http://www.thei75project.com/page7.html

(Context:
http://www.thei75project.com/page3.html )

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Ha.
Ha.
Ha.
Well, they're lucky it was you and not me, that's all.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

I will, inevitably, post something that offends you at some point - and probably I will know that you will disagree (hmm, is 'disagreeing' the same as 'angering and insulting' people? I disagree with you regularly, but it was only when you appeared to suggest that I was racist that I felt it was specifically distressing). However, I offer an apology in advance for that..

What I would ask, however, is that if you want to challenge my point, please do it with sensitivity. I'm almost CERTAIN that I've said something with which you profoundly disagree already (and I'll probably go on doing that on a regular basis) and you have already been kind enough not to be angry and insulting in my direction. Which I appreciate more than I can say.

But also, I actually *do* want to know (usually) when I'm being accidentally offensive, so would appreciate a gentle comment telling me why. But - I'm human, and weak, and the emphasis therefore is on GENTLE :)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

My dear, you are the incarnation of manners, and the last person I intended to involve. If you want to know the sort of thing that makes me blow up, look at the insulting and utterly ignorant "jokes" my friend eliskimo, above, links to.

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

Are you sure it is unintentional? That the innocence and surprise of the progressives is not a pose or a mask? I have always sort of assumed that it is intentional, just part of the progressive pretense that their abnormalities are norms, and always have been.


On another topic, have you seen this book? http://www.amazon.com/dp/0956395244/

An excerpt is here: http://thoughtprison-pc.blogspot.com/

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

Some from column A; some from column B. I see no reason to think all are alike -- there are even some who aren't oblivious, you know.

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Any difference of opinion on big issues is going to ruffle feathers on both side of the debate...as someone who you might call a 'progressive' (depending on the issue but definitely with regards to issues of contraception and gay rights, being gay myself), I acknowledge this.

The problem is the often irreconcilable ways that both parties have of looking at the world: for example, the differing priorities given to certain ideals (i.e. freedom, property, happiness, dignity, love, life, etc.) often lead to exasperation. Same for when two people define a concept in vastly different ways and/or differ over what they classify under that heading.

Sometimes it's best not to argue: for example, I'm not going to get anywhere in a debate with someone who is a substance dualist, idealist, theist and believer in teleology. Their worldview and mine are too incompatible to even agree on how the world is constructed let alone on the specifics.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It's not about having fundamental disagreements. It's about not realizing that a disagreement might exist. That is what makes me furious.

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Ah, well, that's just being oblivious. I avoid debating such people since I cannot have a meaningful exchange with them, let alone convince them of my position.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

This very phenomenon has boggled and irritated me for years. That someone may've been offended by their statements usually is met with at first a measure of condescension and if that does't make them drop it, self-righteous indignation.

I put it down to passive-aggression, personally.