2. I don't know Wright, other than having seen a few of his more offensive posts, but I'd wager that he's several degrees more hateful than I am. But I haven't claimed to be a peace-loving, fuzzy-wuzzy hippie; I can point you to my many posts on the virtues of intolerance if you haven't already read them. I think I express myself more coherently than he does and, yes, I'm probably smarter, but I don't consider raw intelligence to be an inherent measure of a person's value.
Someone who says "kill all the Arabs" would probably make a good Nazi; it isn't a huge leap in logic, and, as a child, I frequently made such pithy statements about my own grandmother. (Not to her face, mind you.) It's a much larger leap to say that if I argue that anyone who hates gay people for irrational reasons, whether or not he or she wants to kill them, is, well, irrational, then it follows that I am intolerant just like a Nazi. Nowhere have I advocated mass killing of homophobes; I've merely suggested that most can't be reasoned with, because if they responded to reason in the first place, they wouldn't be homophobes.
This is the same regardless of whether one is homophobic because one is personally squicked, or because one subscribes to a religion where some sort of deity commands you to be squicked. You have failed, in either your comments here or in your discussion with Wright, to provide any substantive difference between the two statements.
I was discussing your sort of thinking with a friend recently, in an entirely different context. I labelled it liberal, with the caveat that this might be unfair given that it's a modern construction that stems from a misunderstanding of classic liberal concepts of free speech. He labelled it post-modernism, which I took issue with as one has to understand modernism before declaring oneself a post-modernist. The fallacy is that because multiple points of view are held on an issue (let's say two, for the sake of convenience rather than strict realism), these points of view are all worthy of respect and consideration, and, in the worst cases, they hold equal merit.
I came across this today, which seems quite relevant. By fetishizing objective detachment (and it's only a fetish; you are hardly objective or detached), you have somehow reached the conclusion that strongly held beliefs must be wrong—concluding, as freshmen pseudo-post-modernists do, that either there is no truth, or as Washington investigative reporters do, that perhaps both sides have a point and the truth must lie somewhere in between. If I believe black, and Wright believes white, than ZOMG WE MUST BE EXACTLY THE SAME. And so on.
You really ought to have grown out of this phase by now. It's just as silly as the black-and-white logic you so often accuse me of using.
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Date: 2010-02-24 01:41 am (UTC)2. I don't know Wright, other than having seen a few of his more offensive posts, but I'd wager that he's several degrees more hateful than I am. But I haven't claimed to be a peace-loving, fuzzy-wuzzy hippie; I can point you to my many posts on the virtues of intolerance if you haven't already read them. I think I express myself more coherently than he does and, yes, I'm probably smarter, but I don't consider raw intelligence to be an inherent measure of a person's value.
Someone who says "kill all the Arabs" would probably make a good Nazi; it isn't a huge leap in logic, and, as a child, I frequently made such pithy statements about my own grandmother. (Not to her face, mind you.) It's a much larger leap to say that if I argue that anyone who hates gay people for irrational reasons, whether or not he or she wants to kill them, is, well, irrational, then it follows that I am intolerant just like a Nazi. Nowhere have I advocated mass killing of homophobes; I've merely suggested that most can't be reasoned with, because if they responded to reason in the first place, they wouldn't be homophobes.
This is the same regardless of whether one is homophobic because one is personally squicked, or because one subscribes to a religion where some sort of deity commands you to be squicked. You have failed, in either your comments here or in your discussion with Wright, to provide any substantive difference between the two statements.
I was discussing your sort of thinking with a friend recently, in an entirely different context. I labelled it liberal, with the caveat that this might be unfair given that it's a modern construction that stems from a misunderstanding of classic liberal concepts of free speech. He labelled it post-modernism, which I took issue with as one has to understand modernism before declaring oneself a post-modernist. The fallacy is that because multiple points of view are held on an issue (let's say two, for the sake of convenience rather than strict realism), these points of view are all worthy of respect and consideration, and, in the worst cases, they hold equal merit.
I came across this today, which seems quite relevant. By fetishizing objective detachment (and it's only a fetish; you are hardly objective or detached), you have somehow reached the conclusion that strongly held beliefs must be wrong—concluding, as freshmen pseudo-post-modernists do, that either there is no truth, or as Washington investigative reporters do, that perhaps both sides have a point and the truth must lie somewhere in between. If I believe black, and Wright believes white, than ZOMG WE MUST BE EXACTLY THE SAME. And so on.
You really ought to have grown out of this phase by now. It's just as silly as the black-and-white logic you so often accuse me of using.