Evidence of enormous vitriol
Jack Halberstam on intersectionality at Reed College.
In 1999, just six years after the rape and murder of a young gender variant person, Brandon Teena, and two friends in a small town in Nebraska, Kim Peirce released her first film, a dramatic account of the incident. The film, Boys Don’t Cry, which took years to research, write, fund, cast and shoot, was released to superb reviews and went on to garner awards and praise for the lead actor, Hilary Swank, and the young director, Kim Peirce, not to mention the film’s production team led by Christine Vachon. The film was hard hitting, visually innovative and marked a massive breakthrough in the representation of gender variant bodies. While there were certainly debates about decisions that Peirce made within the film’s narrative arc (the omission of the murder of an African American friend, Philip DeVine, at the same time that Brandon was killed), Boys Don’t Cry was received by audiences at the time as a magnificent film honoring the life of a gender queer youth and bringing a sense of the jeopardy of gender variant experiences to the screen. It was also seen as a sensitive depiction of life in small town USA. Kim Peirce spoke widely about the film in public venues and explained her relationship to the subject matter of gender variance, working class life and gender based violence.
In recent screenings of the film, some accompanied by Peirce as a speaker, others just programmed as part of a class or a film series, younger audiences have taken offence to the film and have accused the filmmaker of making money off the representation of violence against trans people. This at least was the charge made against Kim Peirce when she showed up to speak alongside a special screening of the film at Reed College in Oregon, just days after the Presidential election. Unbeknownst to the organizers, student protestors had removed posters from all around campus that advertised the screening and lecture and they formed a protest group and arrived early to the cinema on the night of the screening to hang up posters.
They removed posters that let people know about the screening and lecture, so they deprived Peirce of a potential audience and they deprived the potential audience of the screening and lecture. I remember Boys Don’t Cry as a very powerful movie, and certainly not one that was hostile to trans people.
These posters voiced a range of responses to the film including: “You don’t fucking get it!” and “Fuck Your Transphobia!” as well as “Trans Lives Do Not Equal $$” and to cap it all, the sign hung on the podium read: “Fuck this cis white bitch”!! The protestors waited until after the film had screened at Peirce’s request and then entered the auditorium while shouting “Fuck your respectability politics” and yelling over her commentary until Peirce left the room. After establishing some ground rules for a discussion, Peirce came back into the room but the conversation again got out of hand and finally a student yelled at Peirce: “Fuck you scared bitch.” At which point the protestors filed out and Peirce left campus.
Fuck this cis white bitch??? Because she made a sympathetic indie movie about a young trans man 17 years ago? That seems…hostile.
This is an astonishing set of events to reckon with for those of us who remember the events surrounding Brandon Teena’s murder, the debates in the months that followed about Brandon Teena’s identity and, later, the reception of the film. Early transgender activism was spurred into action by the murder of Brandon Teena and many activists showed up at the trial of his killers. There were lots of debates at the time about whether Brandon was “butch” or “transgender” but queer and transgender audiences were mostly satisfied with the depiction of Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry. The film appealed to many audiences, queer and straight, and it continues to play around the world.
The accounts given of these recent protests at Reed College give evidence of enormous vitriol, much of it blatantly misogynist (the repeated use of the word “bitch” for example) directed at a queer, butch film maker and they leave us with an enormous number of questions to face about representational dynamics, clashes between different historical paradigms of queer and transgender life and the expression of queer anger that, instead of being directed at murderous enemies in the mainstream of American political life, has been turned onto independent film makers within the queer and LGBT communities.
Is this how intersectionalism should work? I don’t think so.
Is the problem that Pierce made the movie at all? That she dared to make a movie with the intention of finding an audience and earning money with it? If she was enriching herself at the expense of others, isn’t that what filmmaking often does? I guess documentarians should give all their (I’m sure typically meager) earnings away. (No, I know “Boys Don’t Cry” wasn’t a documentary.)
I’m struggling with all this stuff. I want to be a good person. I want to be respectful and decent and accepting. But I’m increasingly unsure of how to accomplish that. The trans activists (the ones who show up in the “pages” of Butterflies & Wheels, at least) seem indiscriminately and reflexively outraged, mostly at feminists. So supporting them feels… wrong. But not supporting them feels wrong, too.
I welcome any advice.
The putative problems are more a pretext than anything else.
Some trans “activists” are horrible – horrible the way Trump is horrible: belligerent, shouty, unreasonable, mindless. I blame Twitter, mostly. I hope eventually that will work itself out as trans people become less beleaguered. But the horrible “activists” don’t represent trans people as a whole, so I don’t think they’re an obstacle to being respectful and decent and accepting.
I’ve just been reading about this on Jerry Coyne’s blog, and it seems that one of the protesters’ many problems is that Hilary Swank isn’t herself transgender! It’s as though they think an actor playing a role has to match the character in real life.
I say give the little darlings some cuddle cushions and a nice safe darkened room………then lock the door and lose the key until they grow the fuck up!
Sorry, but some people take everything just that little bit too far, with the result that they swing so far to the left they become indistinguishable from those too far to the right; they close the circle, if you will.
I know of a production of Sister Act (the play) where the main character was played by a transwoman. So a non-transwoman is played by a transwoman….and this probably would get no protest from the activists, because the transwoman is completely a woman.
Double standard anyone?
Double standards? Be very careful where you suggest that, iknklast, people have been known to swoon over such a thing; swoon, I tell you.
Meanwhile, (and not at all related to double standards!) on a certain blog over at Ophelia’s previous home, some people (by ‘people’ I do of course mean ‘arguments constantly looking for somewhere to happen) are getting very upset about a rock that is far more important than a cracker because Catholics are silly but Native Hawai’ians aren’t, or something.
By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask about your ‘nym; does it mean anything specific? Tell me to mind my own business if you wish, I promise I’m not easily offended.
I was a teenager living in Europe when this film came out. I was still very, very sheltered by my fundamentalist evangelical parents, but managed to see the film. It was difficult to watch, but certainly and undeniably shifted and shaped the way I understood the idea of gender. I mean, maybe young people today think they don’t need that, to hear a story to understand a thing. But hearing (and seeing) the story holds value, I believe. We’re in trouble, is all I can think.
When the movie came out, the film critic and ultra-right pundit Michael Medved described this movie on his radio show as the story of a person, and these words burned themselves on my brain at the time, “who got herself raped and killed.”
“Who got herself raped and killed.” The tone he used made it clear that Brandon was to blame for what happened to “her” (Medved of course would never acknowledge gender variance then, and probably still doesn’t).
That was the view of transgender people held by so many at the time this film was released. These shitheads have no fucking clue how important it was that the movie was made. And now they’ve chosen to resort to extreme misogyny, just like Medved and his ilk. Funny, that.
So using a movie format to examine – and perhaps pass commentary on – some event is bad, because that means the creator is treating that event as a source of income. Don’t profit off the backs of my social group! Our lives are not $! And so forth.
Effectively, a ban on all social commentary by way of film… and why stop at film? If the problem is that profit was obtained in the course of that work, then this means no less than a total ban on artistic exploration of fucking anything.
Ben at #1, you’re wondering how to go about this particular minefield in a respectful manner. That’s too bad, because the activists aren’t interested in anything approaching reasonability, and your attempt to think your way through it puts you at odds with them by the mere fact that you are being thoughtful. It’s astonishing to see, but these truly are Trump-esque in their reactionary belligerence.
Bullshit. The discussion is about where respect is worthy. PZ’s cracker attack was about the church coming into everyone’s home and telling them what to do. He can do whatever he wants to crackers in his own home and nobody gets to tell him otherwise. It’s not the same when you go into someone else’s home and they ask – or even tell – you not to do various things.
There are various such points there. Someone, for example, felt sad because he was asked to take his hat off in a church. While we can all see the horribleness of forced respect, keeping one’s fucking hat on in a church in england is not exactly an attack on the awful things churches and religions do worldwide. While we don’t respect the reason we’re told to take off our hats, we don’t win anything by refusing to do it.
They’re just rocks, but deliberately rubbing one’s arse against them in the full knowledge that it will piss people off and with nothing to gain is not the same as destroying a cracker. It’s the difference between being a dick and not being a dick.
Acolyte – nothing offended by the question – it basically means iconoclast, but not in the way that ISIS is iconolastic. I don’t really go in for destroying historical property so much as I like to tip cows – sacred cows.
latsot, It’s the difference between arbitrarily deciding whose beliefs to respect and whose not to. Millions of Catholics view the wafer as the body of Christ and treat it as such. Deliberately destroying one as PZ did, in the full knowledge it would piss people off and with nothing to gain is exactly the same as scratching an itch on a rock, if not worse as the rock was not destroyed or harmed in any way. Also, I do wonder how many people have rubbed or touched that rock over the years with no hint of an insult being given or taken, or how many tourists have sat on those rocks for a photo. Is scratching one’s buttock on a rock, especially when said buttock is encased in a rubber diving suit any worse than touching the rock with a bare hand?
You will have noted, of course, that the horde are inventing parts of the story to heighten the supposed insult. It isn’t a grave as some are claiming, neither is it a standing stone of the monolith type, and nor did the rock become dislodged and roll down the mountain.
Sure, she may have dislodged the rock (though not in the story as she told it as far as I can gather), but if the rock is small enough to be shifted by a skinny human it’s small enough to be picked up and put back.
At the end of the day, a woman scratched her rubber-clad bum on a rock because it’s nigh on impossible to scratch an itch through a diving suit with one’s fingers. Yes, she made a bad decision as to which rocks to use, but to make her out to be almost the equal of the ISIS vandals permanently destroying ancient monuments as the horde are seeming to do is taking things just a little to far, in my opinion.
I’m not denying that those who revere the rocks were insulted, nor that Jennifer Lawrence should have known better, but I am saying that it’s no worse than PZ’s cracker stunt. In both cases, people were offended because their beliefs were insulted.
PZ and the horde are just being their usual hypocritical selves by using the ‘punching up / punching down’ argument, but a deliberate insult to the ‘silly’ (as PZ acknowledged in his post) beliefs of a group is a deliberate insult, no matter how big or small the group in question. To add to the hypocrisy, posters are being shouted down for voicing opinions on this matter that deviate from the official line just days after PZ ran a post saying that it’s important that all opinions be heard…..except when those opinions veer from the PZ Party line, apparently.
iknklast, thank you for the explanation; it’s pretty obvious now you’ve said it. I was seeing your ‘nym as having something to do with ink and wondered if you were a writer or dabbled in printing, or that maybe it linked in some way to your day job as an educator.
Overthinking things, as usual.
Part of the anger over the film is that a trans man was portrayed by someone other than a trans man. This issue is consistent with common complaints that Asian characters are portrayed by non-Asian actors. This second issue is driven partly by low employment for Asian actors; if they tend to get calls only when the character is explicitly Asian, then they might feel wronged when such opportunities are not sent their way. There is also a shameful history of stereotypes in portrayals of Asian characters; in theory, Asian actors might avoid the problem. A charitable reading, were one in the mood to provide one, might see similar issues regarding trans characters.
I’m not in a mood to be charitable. This is nonsense. The job of an actor, a writer, a filmmaker, involves learning about things outside of their experience and using what they’ve learned. We don’t demand that only accountants write about or portray accountants. Ditto lifelong single people, people who speak three languages, or most other characteristics. People don’t magically gain creative skills by being part of a described group. (People don’t magically gain comprehensive knowledge about a described group simply by being part of the described group, either, but that’s a rant for another time.) There are other ways to address employment issues for certain groups of actors than to demand they be typecast.
Years ago, Linda Hunt played an Indonesian male in ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’ and won a well deserved Oscar for her efforts. Would such a feat even be possible these days?
I think I’ll get a head start on these nascent Nazis and declare ‘Some Like it Hot’ *Far Right* and *transphobic*
Yeah, yeah….’jello on springs’…
Movies in which men play women and women men are as old as Hollywood itself.
Some are very successful and others, like ‘Sylvia Scarlett’..ummm…not so much.
*Exactly*? Are you sure? Do the rock worshipers prevent women from using contraception or having abortions? Do the rock worshipers try to dictate what gets taught about reality in schools? Do they buy hospitals and impose their own rules about who can be treated for what? Do they buy schools and impose their own rules about what gets taught? Do they have a long history of aiding and abetting child abuse?
I think there’s a difference. PZ was attacking the horrific institution – as he made abundantly clear at the time – not the fact that the beliefs happen to be stupid. There is no hypocrisy. Go back and read his crackergate posts and perhaps you’ll understand the difference.
I feel so old criticizing these people because it really seems that this is a case of arrogant kids who don’t know what they don’t know. How can they not comprehend that the discourse and terminology available to them today evolved out of a time where those things didn’t exist? Do they genuinely not know that even the kindest, most innocuous support of transgender people 20 years ago was met with derision at best? They are criticizing the people who have actually done something to improve the lives and circumstances of gender-nonconforming people because they’re too self-absorbed to recognize that they were still running around on the playground thinking the opposite sex was icky when it happened.
Exactly. I have been abused, as a playwright, (Yes, Acolyte, I am also a writer!) for not including people of color in my plays. When I include people of color in my plays, I am abused for “cultural appropriation” and told to “write what I know” – so I guess my play called Middle Aged White Women is the only one I should write? But I really have never lived the experience of the middle aged white women in my play, as they are both stay home mothers who have centered their lives around husbands and kids and are itching for more. I have never been in that situation, but no one will challenge me for writing it, because…white…middle aged…but not woman, that’s not important.
To clarify the last point – I was given this abuse (pardon me, constructive criticism) over writing (or not writing) people of color. Meanwhile, all the men in our group are freely writing women into their plays, sometimes plays totally about women, complete with all the usual stereotypes, and everyone is congratulating them for “stretching themselves” – because women are so much harder to write than men? Who knows. All I know is we are facing the same damn thing, over and over.
The conclusion I drew from my experience is: white women shouldn’t write plays. I, however, being a rebel and a fierce feminist, will not sit down and shut up.
@Sagan: It’s the “nothing to gain” part you’re willfully ignoring.
A scratched arse is a gain, I suppose, but there are other ways to achieve it. PZ was making a protest about an undeniably terrible institution by showing that the things it considers sacred are nothing to do with helping people and quite a lot to do with hurting them. That’s the “gain” part. He was making a point. An important point that needed working. He wasn’t scratching his arse.
They’re just rocks and people will get over an arse being on them. It’s no big deal in the great scheme of things (although that’s easy for me to say). But it’s not the same thing as the cracker and your original post at #5 is pure clueless bullshit.
Re. PZ & The Cracker vs. Lawrence and the Rocks, these are not equivalent situations. It’s not about beliefs as such, it’s about boundaries, and respecting them.
As I recall (and I was reading PZ during the whole episode), the impetus for the cracker stunt was that a Catholic student violated Eucharist protocol and the local Church PTB tried to have him expelled from his (secular) college for it. To my mind that attempt to overstep their bounds — to levy a secular punishment for an ecclesiastical crime — justified PZ’s response (whether or not PZ framed it that way). The RCC has a *very bad habit* of overstepping their bounds, and should receive pushback every time they attempt it.
By contrast, it’s no big deal to stay off someone’s sacred rocks, or doff or don a hat when visiting a religious building.
latsot, it matters not whether PZ was trying to make a serious point or indulging himself and his ‘shock jock’ personality in a little self- promotion; as the horde were so fond of chanting, ‘intent isn’t fucking magic’…..or does that not count when it’s the great and mighty Myers?
I remember the wafer incident well enough to not need to re-visit it. For all of his justifications back then I got the impression that what Myers was really doing was playing to the crowd with a public show of contempt for the millions of Catholics who don’t abuse children and don’t set church policy on schooling or other matters.
As for gains, PZ got his publicity and enhanced his reputation as the scourge of religion (or as a petty-minded publicity seeker, depending on one’s view) whilst telling people nothing that they didn’t already know about the Catholic church: Lawrence, on the other hand, gained relief from an annoying itch and an anecdote that backfired 3 years or so after the actual incident (filming was around 2013, I think). Which incidentally makes one wonder why there was no big outcry at the time; it had to wait for her to go on a chat show and tell the story.
It’s almost as though her real offence wasn’t her using the rock as a bum-scratcher as much as her making it into a anecdote and giggling whilst telling it.
Again, in horde-speak intent isn’t magic, their reasons for doing what they did is irrelevant if their actions were deliberate. I’m sure that Lawrence wasn’t thinking of showing the rock-worshippers what she thought of their belief, she just wanted to scratch an itch, but if the outcome was offence to others then her reasons count for nothing. PZ might have been trying to make a serious point but there’s no doubt he understood that he was going to offend a lot of people. So what’s worse? Deliberately offending people with the excuse that one is making a serious point? or offending people as the unintentional outcome of an act of flippancy?
I guess it’s just a matter of opinion, I doubt there is a definitive right answer (horde infallibility notwithstanding) .
Acolyte of Sagan: A few points:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/09/entertainment/jennifer-lawrence-hawaii-rocks-trnd/
If you’re going to accuse others of fabricating their story, you might start with double-checking your own facts. Lawrence’s own account describes the rock being dislodged, rolling down the mountain, and almost killing someone.
There is also a key difference between PZ’s action and Lawrence’s, which is worth noting. PZ did this very specifically as a protest and attack on the Church. Lawrence’s story, which paints the native Hawaiians as superstitious savages, offended through a lack of understanding.
****
As for the original story, which I agree is horrific, I’m reminded of efforts to remove Mark Twain’s books from the curriculum because they use the N-word–not understanding that Twain was deliberately trying to show how ugly the word was at a time when it was far more commonplace. It would seem that we’ve moved much, much faster on transgender issues than on gay rights, and faster on gay rights than on racism and sexism.
She was laughing about almost killing someone?
That’s…not impressive.
I know one shouldn’t attribute to the actor the virtues (or otherwise) of the character, but….damn. I did like Katniss Everdean.
@latsot
No. The original “offender” in the Cracker brouhaha went into a Catholic Church and desecrated the Holy Eucharist by walking off with it. He failed to show the proper respect.
You do understand that believers believe, most sincerely, that that cracker is the body of their Holy Savior?
@Steve Watson
As I recall, the young man was not Catholic. He received the Eucharist (which he wasn’t supposed to), and then kept the thing instead of swallowing it (strike two.)
He was then subject to lots of abuse, not just from Church officials, but also from many ordinary Catholics around the world who were furious that he treated their holy object with such lack of respect. That he behaved, in in latsot’s words, like a dick and an asshole, toward an object considered holy and meaningful.
And PZ responded by publicly desecrating another Host, and proclaiming, “It’s just a cracker.”
PZ’s response was not calculated to make a point about the Church “overstepping its bounds.” Go back and read him. His point was, It’s.A.Cracker, and it’s silly and wrong to abuse people for failing to respect “holy” objects, because “holy” objects are just objects and shouldn’t be invested with magical imaginary meaning.
He underscored the point by “desecrating,” at the same time, a Bible, a Koran, and a copy of The God Delusion.
I’m with Acolyte of Sagan here. Getting all het up over sacred rocks is no different from getting het up over sacred crackers or sacred books, and if the Horde make a distinction, they’re engaging in special pleading.
@Ophelia
After the fact, scary mishaps can be funny–if the person who was in the line of fire is laughing, too…
The original offender was a young college student who was in the student union with a friend and a Catholic mass was being held (at a public college). He had been brought up Catholic, his friend had not. The friend was curious about the Catholic service. They went in. The young man who was brought up Catholic took communion, and brought the wafer back to his seat with it to show the friend.
I have been assured by others that it is not that abnormal to not swallow the wafer. I don’t know, having not been raised Catholic. However, this particular young man (the one brought up Catholic) was known, and had apparently been involved with the Student Senate (or some similar body) in a case where he was attempting to assure that student activity fees did not go to religious groups. Someone there got ugly about him doing something that, as I was given to understand, other people do, because of his connection with that group.
The school got involved, and I don’t know the final outcome, but they were threatening him with loss of several things. It’s been a few years, so I don’t remember exactly what all they were threatening to do to him, or what became of it.
I do tend to agree with this. I just wanted to set a few things straight, because the young man was not, as I understand it, being deliberately provocative or desecrating anything. Nor did he go to a church to do it, but to a mass being held at a public college student center.
@ikonklast
Thanks, iknklast. Didn’t realize the mass was not being held in a church. It was still a mass, though, and the kid and his friend chose to attend. And, deliberate or not, from the pov of true believers, the Host was desecrated.
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=326814
(I looked that up and have posted the first link I found, but I remember the point about the badness of keeping the cracker being emphasized at the time. And btw, you may chew the Host, but if you don’t swallow it, you haven’t received Communion. Not Catholic, just have always found this stuff oddly interesting.)
Re the laughing about almost killing someone thing: I understand this happened on the Graham Norton Show, a medium known for flippant storytelling and gallows humour. That context is quite important, and in my opinion renders the whole story less serious; it isn’t worth revising one’s opinion of JLaw over.
I’m still trying to figure out how a ‘huge boulder’ that has presumably been in place for donkeys’ years, withstanding all that the Pacific weather and regular trembles from the active volcano it sits on, can find itself dislodged by having the slightly-built actor rub her bum on it. Exaggeration for dramatic / comedic effect*, maybe?
I’m also wondering why those Hawaiian witnesses to the scene didn’t raise the roof at the time, or why there was no backlash of her first telling of the story on a US chat show in 2013.
*by Lawrence, of course, not the rock.
Acolyte of Sagan, Jennifer Lawrence is a White Feminist. So, now you know. How dare she.
Intent isn’t magic and I’m not saying it is. But it’s clearly relevant. Intent obviously matters, if only because it can so easily be misconstrued. But it’s not magic in that good intentions don’t automatically get anyone off the hook for doing bad or dubious things. I don’t think anyone involved with this discussion is saying they do or should. I’m certainly not.
All I’m arguing is that there’s a difference between these incidents. Intention is part of that difference. Ignorance and lack of it is another. A well-reasoned dismount is still another, although we can argue fruitlessly about the details.
Then perhaps you don’t remember it as well as you think. The proximate trigger was a student who took communion and retained the wafer to show to a friend. That’s not what you’re meant to do with the wafers and is no doubt rude. But the church intervened with the student’s university to get him expelled, which is a little bit more than rude, isn’t it? It’s the difference between someone coming into your house and acting inappropriately and you marching into theirs and taking away their stuff. Or their potential livelihood.
This seems like a good reason to protest about foolish suspicions.
That’s an oddly uncharitable way of putting it. I’ve disagreed with PZ any number of times, but I’ve never had occasion to question his motives.
Perhaps few people knew about it until she giggled the anecdote. Or perhaps people were upset at the giggles. I neither know nor particularly care. That was never my point.
My point is that they are different. One certainly seems to be punching up while the other punches down. Apparent thoughtlessness even after being told that you’ve pissed people off is different to calculatedly pissing people off because they’ve done people harm.
I am getting very tired of your constant insinuations that I somehow believe that PZ’s supporters are automatically right or infallible. You’re wrong.
Sorry, should have indicated that I was replying to Acolyte of Sagan.
Lady Mondegreen:
Yes, that was rude, certainly. Offensive to many, for sure.
But then the church had him expelled or at least made life ugly for him. That was the proximate trigger which led PZ to ‘desecrate’ a cracker.
I do think that offending people for good reason is better than doing so thoughtlessly because something good might come of the former.
Yes, I do. But I still don’t see the two incidents as the same, let alone “exactly” the same. This has to do with various things including the entirely corrupt nature of the catholic church, its prominence in society (and the tactics it used to get there) and the complicity of millions of the church’s supporters in its many monstrous acts. I find this to be rather different to a bunch of people who don’t want people to wipe their arse on some rocks, equally silly though that superstition or cultural artifact is.
Nobody has the right to not be offended, after all. Just… fight the battles that are worth fighting and ignore people’s silly beliefs unless they do other people harm. I don’t think asking someone to take their hat off in church or not wipe their arse on rocks constitutes harm. Doing something supposedly bad to a wafer *might* constitute harm, yes, because lots of people get very upset about that kind of thing. But for a uniquely powerful organisation to respond by harming that person’s future…. We’re talking about very different types of “harm” here.
He was being a dick either intentionally or through ignorance. I can understand why people might disapprove or be offended by his actions. But the the threats of death and violence he got were not appropriate. Believers are entirely at liberty to criticise him, if they must. They may try to ‘educate’ him if they are especially sadistic, but they are not – regardless of the sincerity of their beliefs – at liberty to threaten him – which they did – with violence and death. They are not at liberty to harm his future career because he isn’t sufficiently – in their minds – respectful of their foolish beliefs.
It doesn’t mean he wasn’t a dick. It doesn’t mean people shouldn’t have criticised his behaviour if they wanted to. Are you beginning to see the difference between these two events yet?
Exactly. Silly and wrong to abuse people. Wrong to abuse people full stop. Protesting that abuse (which is what PZ did) is entirely appropriate.
As I’ve said about nine times, I agree that in principle silly beliefs are silly and none is worth more than another. I find getting het up about arse rocks as silly as about wafers. But it’s not about me, is it? It’s about how the believers act toward everyone else. Criticising someone for a largely media-orchestrated bit of outrage theatre is one thing. Systematically causing harm to – at last count – everyone for two thousand years is quite another.
Gee, I wonder what PZ would say. Oh, silly me, I don’t have to!
@silentbob:
Yep. What I said. And… what I stupidly didn’t quote despite PZ being far more eloquent and educated than I.
Now you’re just being flat-out disingenuous.
Even if Lawrence did embellish the story, or even invent it out of whole cloth, the horde using those elements in their critiques is NOT lying, which is what you blatantly accused them of. You got basic elements wrong, precisely because you were so inclined to assume the worst of the folks at FtB, rather than do your own research. (Finding the original clip was literally a matter of clicking the first link on a Google search.) Making up false accusations undermines your position, not theirs.
My mistake, Freemage, I did mean to correct that part but sumply forgot. Yes, it appears that a rock was dislodged, but that doesn’t distract from my original point of double standards.
latsot,
I’m saying that the horde believe the horde are infallible, they decide what is right or wrong and that becomes the de facto answer. I made no insinuations about you. Please don’t put words into my mouth.
latsot and Silentbob @33, 34
That’s what he says now.
What he said then:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/08/its-a-goddamned-cracker/
latsot
latsot @33
Sure. But PZ was not just criticizing the abuse. He was also criticizing the foolishness of investing objects with magical significance.
That’s why, when he performed what he called The Great Desecration he included a copy of The God Delusion.
Look, I get it, about punching up vs. punching down. But I don’t find this story worth the outrage. Lawrence wasn’t trying to punch anybody. YMMV
I’ll leave it at that.
http://www.vox.com/culture/2016/12/13/13936078/jennifer-lawrence-itchy-butt-hawaii-sacred-rocks-jimmy-kimmel
(Investing objects with magical significance is what leads to the abuse.)
Ok I watched the video clip on Vox and she wasn’t actually laughing about almost killing the sound guy. I mean she sort of was, but in that way you can do long after the fact when the sound guy wasn’t in fact killed – a kind of horror-laugh.
Vox says she didn’t actually know the rocks were sacred when she perched on them and scratched her butt on one – she found that out afterwards.
Yes, but she’s still a Terrible White Priveledged Person because reasons.
Priviledged!
Aaaagh!