Swearing in reviews/articles

[EightEyes]

Thanks for the explanation, icycalm - your points are well taken.

Would you rather have someone call you gay or vermin? lol

"Gay", obviously! That was the point I was trying to make - it's not that I object to you using it as an insult based on its harshness or cruelty; on the contrary, I don't read it as an insult at all.

[icycalm]

Thanks for the explanation, Icycalm - your points are well taken.

I doubt it. See this:

Would you rather have someone call you gay or vermin? lol

"Gay", obviously!

Why, do you have something against vermin?


...


Try to answer THAT, my friend -- if you can!

[EightEyes]

Why do I feel as if I'm about to walk into a trap...?

Anyway, I'll take the bait. If I'm fundamentally wrong about this, I'm at least curious as to why.

Taking on board your earlier point that "no one is responsible for being constituted the way they are", it seems as if even vermin are in the same boat as you, me, the stupid, the retarded, and everyone else.

So no. I guess I don't have anything against vermin.

To say that we're all equally responsible for how we're constituted (i.e. not at all) is not to say, however, that we're all of equal stature. I'm certain that this is not your implication, either. Even individual people aren't all created equal (much as we'd like to think that they are), let alone all the other various forms of life.

So, as a mostly-functional human being, I guess I'm arrogant enough to consider myself at least a few rungs up the ladder from vermin. I'm more intelligent, and cleaner, for a start. Calling me "vermin" therefore calls into question my intelligence, my hygiene, and so on.

So while I don't have anything against vermin themselves, it's the comparison that would bother me. It's an insult.

A comparison with a gay person, however, doesn't bother me in the slightest, since I stand on the same rung of the ladder as what I'm being compared to.

[icycalm]

That is a wonderfully lucid reply. I only have one thing to correct:

To say that we're all equally responsible for how we're constituted (i.e. not at all) is not to say, however, that we're all of equal stature. I'm certain that this is not your implication, either.

That is exactly my implication.


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The moral of this discussion: One man's insult is another man's identity. There is nothing to be done about this, nor is there anything wrong with it. It simply is how the world works.

To put it another way, just as a gay person would not take it as an insult if someone called him gay, a vermin would not be insulted if someone called it vermin. Insults stem from value judgements; so when I, a man, am using the word 'gay' as a pejorative, I am making a judgement as to the relative value of men and gay males, just as Schopenhauer was making a judgement as to the relative value of men and vermin. Whether this value judgement is correct or not is sometimes easy to discern (men vs. vermin) sometimes harder (men vs. gay males). In the end, only nature can be the final arbiter of the dispute, in the form of the evolutionary process.

P.S. The above is a good example of what I call "harsh truths".

[icycalm]

"The truth is," writes Deleuze, "that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat….Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused" (p. 293).

This quotation naturally brings up the style of Anti-Oedipus. The book is an abstruse, jargon-ridden piece of work, interlarded with poems by, quotations from and references to Artaud, D.H. Lawrence, Nijinsky, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, etc., with a shocking use of vulgarities in such a difficult work. The style is that of a surrealist shock treatment, as if the sudden impact of the language would drag you out of your capitalist, Oedipalized, molarized, paranoid stupor and make you realize the truth of the auto-productive desiring-machine.

http://www.msubillings.edu/CASFaculty/P ... EALISM.htm

[icycalm]

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/o ... _criticism

[EightEyes]

Some of these videos from The Onion you've been linking to lately really are pretty great.

Comedians have a distinct advantage - it's amazing how effectively you can get right to the point if you're not weighed down by having to appear profound. (Or fair, for that matter.)

[icycalm]

"Fairness", in the way humans use the concept, is fundamentally unfair. Similarly, what humans mean by "unfairness" is the only way that fairness can be defined. I'll get around to explaining all this one day. Whoever cannot understand this will never be able to understand videogames, nor anything else about the universe we live in, for that matter.

As for The Onion, it is the only news outlet which analyzes imaginary events with any degree of intelligence. "Patajournalism", Baudrillard would have called it, and it is our only hope for the future.

[icycalm]

Something more on the subject of "garden-variety" stupidity vs. mental retardation:

Why has the deficiency of the mentally deficient become a cultural fact, whereas the very much more terrible fact of ordinary stupidity strikes no one as very odd?

The answer is simple. First, it does strike a few people as very odd: people like me and Baudrillard. Second, it doesn't strike most people as odd because they are not smart enough to perceive it. Because in order to perceive stupidity you have to be intelligent, which is to say less stupid than the stupidity of the subject which you are contemplating -- or, conversely, more intelligent than the subject's intelligence. Mental retardation, being nothing other than the most extreme form of stupidity, can therefore be perceived by almost anyone (except the mentally retarded, of course), normal stupidity can only be perceived by a few, and higher stupidity (the stupidity of, say, a Plato or a Schopenhauer) can be perceived by almost no one.

[ganheddo]

The normal stupids may at least find someone to tell them of their stupidities, but you are pretty much on your own.