by matttbastard
Shorter CBA establishment: “Lighten up and let teh menz have their little circle jerk!”

Yes, damn wimminz and darkies, always having to ruin the fun of teh poor, put-out white menz. Newsflash: no one is holding anyone h…

by matttbastard

Earlier this year, the upstanding, freedom-loving folks at FrontPage magazine and the Terrorism Awareness Project proudly announced that, from Oct 22-28th, that ever-so-lovable wing-nutty Islamophobe modern-day Cassandra, David Horowi…

http://forums.delphiforums.com/TheRainbowTribe/messages?msg=6514.1

[Second note from Mandolin: If you are interested in tracking back to this post so that interested parties can look at your argument, please place it in one of the open threads.]

I REALLY appreciate this post.

A metaphor, but not a military one.

I have found the best way to deal with this asswipes is to interrupt them right after the I-know-I’m-going-to-get-hit preamble: “I guess you’d better not say it, then.” They have absolutely no idea how to react.

There’s a big difference between “please don’t be offended by what I am about to say” and “I know I’m going to get killed for saying this.”

Actually, they’re identified as the privileged. You’re doing exactly what the “don’t kill me!” guys are doing, Blade: you’re pretending that the topic is violence and anger toward the privileged, and diverting the discussion towards whether we are or aren’t attacking privileged people unfairly

Now, fanfiction is mostly — overwhelmingly — written by women. And a lot of women got very angry at what they saw as exploitation of their community. They got angrier when the CEO spammed some of their LiveJournals with a “We’re good people! Don’t hate us because we’re capitalists!” message and then refused to actually engage any of their criticisms. Apparently the poor thing was afraid for his life:

“It’s a great idea and we’re currently working on something along these lines. However, engaging our “most strident critics” may be dangerous to our health. I’ve read some pretty violent posts. How about we go for just “strident critics”? ”

This guy doesn’t just make a specious comparison between criticism from women and violence; he actually says that the posts *are* violent and claims to be afraid of the posters.

(By the way, he did finally agree to answer some questions from his critics — on the blog of male MIT professor Henry Jenkins.)

I think that, generally speaking, a lot of men just want to be good people. But in this topic, the individual white man is the default villain, simply by virtue of existing. “I was born - that makes me the bad guy.”

Really, if you think about it, it’s a form of discrimination. One that is far far less pervasive than what women or racial minorities deal with, obviously. But it’s the same mechanism - individuals are being put on the defensive for shared traits (biological, racial, or social) that they have no control over. And they react in ways to deflect it.

I understand where you’re coming from, Blade, but men who don’t want to be personally associated with oppressors only make up half the story. A good number of them probably get offended because they don’t actually believe white men have undue power anymore - which from there is only a few finger steps away from more blatant forms of racism. Because if white men don’t have undue privilege, how to explain their fairly obvious overrepresentation in all areas of power, wealth, and prestige?

Probably that genetic essentialist stuff that keeps women simple, Asians short, and Arabs suicide bombers.