http://www.dailykos.com/user/snafubar
Diaries published: 178
Comments posted: 12177 (6 days since last comment on Tue Jul 05, 2011 at 10:24 PM EDT)
Diary frequency: often
Comment frequency: frequent
Total Recommends: 3160
Total Comment Ratings: 29547
Most Recommended Diary: They're gone. I was close. I'm still curled up in a ball. (UPDATE), 492 comments, 436 recommends
People Following snafubar: 60
There's a little skull and crossbones where there used to be five bars out of five that measured "mojo"
Here's the comment I'd like to ask the blog moderators (or the one who created the algorithm that triggers the autoban)
When someone says
"That you would uprate a piece of shit diary like this tells me all I need to know about you"
That means someone else wrote a diary, it pissed a lot of people off, but I thought it made a valid point. Five others did; about 190 voted against it.
Now - regardless of what the subject of the diary was (it was about the use of the word "pussy" by men in locker rooms and whether or not it makes sense for women to go on crusades about sexism when that happens)
what is a more significant measure of why/how our society is coming apart
Men using "pussy" in the locker room to insult other men (by *gasp* comparing them to women) and ignoring that women take offense to it
or
A community so shallow that after five years, 12,000 comments, 192 essays/diaries, and 60 people "following" me
that a person's entire worth, character, contribution, or value to anyone can be determined by one or just a few comments on a blog.
If our society is that shallow
if all it takes to learn "all one needs to know" about another person
can be learned by having actually experienced so little of what constitutes them as an individual
perhaps I will be so bold to suggest that the shallowness is our bigger problem.
Simon and Garfunkel wrote a song in 1970 called "The Boxer"
People go where they know they will like things. They avoid things they don't like. Surprisingly, they get the impression that things work pretty well and everybody gets along....until that moment when something rubs them the wrong way and they say
"HEY! That upsets me, we don't want that here"
Well, the other guy obviously did, so now it's a competition over who belongs and who doesn't.
This is not new, this is not unique
but if the answer is always to scatter off where we all see things the same way and build a fence to keep out anyone who doesn't
or make it easier to pick off anyone coming over the top
"community" is starting to lose it's meaning.
That I can be summarily judged a sexist - a person who denigrates, opposes, hinders, ridicules, belittles, or otherwise obstructs to a person just because of their gender - all because I say that the use of the word "pussy" does in itself NOT make me a sexist -
That some people do
may I suggest this may have some bearing on our problem.
I think we've lost the plot
I also told a story how the political left takes a lot of shit for their hysterial overreach on matters that DO have legitimacy; when the minutae is carried so far that somehow the legitimacy of the more important hunt is lost because too may people have been lost in the weeds on a red herring.
Someone who turns down a job candidate because he's a male and she's a female - that's a sexist
The kind of guy who says a woman is nothing more than a life support system for a cunt - that's sexist
the guy who says to become apoplectic because two guys in a locker room where no women were even close called each other "pussy" because - well, that seems to be what guys in locker rooms do -
both those guys may go home and treat their wives and daughters and mothers and bosses and employees with all due respect
And yet still people insist that from the conversation in the locker room, they know all they need to know
Someone who says that it's a fools errand to try to control people's language because it saps energy from other more legitimate sources of the problem
that's not a sexist.
So to dismiss the entire value of one person's contribution to the effort,
to say that such a simple and brief encounter tells one "all (they) need to know about you"
may I suggest that could be a bigger part of the larger problem.
People congregate because we have greater strength together than we have individually.
That the minute we gather we start sequestering ourselves again into smaller groups within the whole
and talking about people as "them" who only moments earlier were part of the "us" that was in league against the other "them"
well, when you meet a guy like me who has few friends and now spends most of his time alone no longer daring to make others
perhaps this example will
nah, who am I kidding. it won't mean a thing
That I do not hate women
that I have stood with them in their defense
that I have given to help them
worked to help them
on an individual basis as people who had as much need as I did and I recognized it
...and never have tried to exclude them merely because they were women
somehow I'm still a sexist because I think it's a fool's errand to go apeshit because some guy used the word "pussy" to describe -
who cares
it wasn't to a woman, it wasn't about a woman
but some woman who had no dog in the fight
was sure that there was a larger fight that needed fighting that day
and knew - without knowing anything else about me -
"all she needed to know about me"
from a dozen comments on one day about one diary
that made sense to enough people to send me on my way.
It's amazing I was able to keep all that a secret for five years, 192 diaries, 12,000 comments, with 60 followers in tow.
For those of you who know me, I have a story that I tell, and I made some overtures in this spirit during the pissing contest that ended in this banning,
you can find examples of this not only in psycology, sociology, history - or your local new outlet -
if a person who is NOT ostensibly a real example of some label he keeps getting slapped with
enough people slap that label on him over and over
enough people ignore him when he says that label is not enough to describe all that he is and what he's about
some day
some moment
some trigger is pulled inside that man (person)
and the words
"well, if I'm going to be taking all the shit for this thing that I don't believe I am,
regardless of how hard I'm trying to show that I am not this thing I am being labelled
I might as well start going out of my way and deliberately engaging in all those things that will surely get me labelled as this thing people are sure I am
and get some fucking mileage for all this grief I'm taking now."
...cross his mind.
My only real strength in this life, being the spiteful bastard I am, is to not become that which people assail me for being, just to prove they didn't get me.
That some people still bang their drum to gather a crowd and scream to them "THERE'S THE WITCH!"...
...to our sober and astute readers, is how people get pushed into places they had no intention of ever going
and why I have little sympathy and less forgiveness for those rubberneckers who slow down at a car crash and say
"Holy shit, look at that! Wow! I wonder how that happened?"
Don't bullshit yourself -
they don't care how it happened.
Because you know
that two miles earlier on that very same highway
only a short distance in time and space from that wicked and horrible wreck that "shocks" them
they were likely engaged in about five of the seven bad driving habits that led to the wreck that now has them stuck in traffic and going so slowly that they can see the mangled bodies bleeding in the mangled cars.
When a guy snaps
either homocide
suicide
or just plain "you're fired, we don't tolerate that"
all the people who think whatever it led to was just unacceptable and unforgivable
...five minutes earlier would have been the very same people who were arguing with that same person for 59 rounds...
...who drew a line somehow at round 60 and said that the OTHER guy had gone TOO far.
and so it goes.
1 comments:
...I went back and did a search on my username to see if any comments were made in ex post facto and one of them was
"Well now we know the real snafubar"
...at least you think you do
and that such a measure of who I am was enough for some people - like I was Dr. Jekyll able to keep Mr. Hyde from view all those years and left everyone unawares to the REAL person...
I really don't exist on this planet.
Everyone else is so sure of who I am and what I'm all about, I'm entirely unneccessary in this effort
go figure that somebody would ever contemplate suicide.
it surely could not be from all the people who want to make good and goddamn well I know that I'm not a person anyone could ever want, need, or tolerate.
It's a beautiful thing, freedom is.
everybody is so busy using theirs to scream that nobody else should have any
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