Tag: Disgust

  • Brendan O’Neill is broken-hearted over Clarkson

    Yet again Brendan O’Neill says something more disgusting than I would have thought possible. Yet again!!

    I’m gutted to hear that the BBC has given Clarkson the big heave-ho over his fracas with that producer who didn’t have his dinner ready on time.

    Why? Because it’s further evidence of the Beeb’s self-emasculation, its sheepish, apologetic jettisoning of anything that might rile right-thinking viewers or make Hampstead-dwelling licence fee-payers choke on their Ovaltine.

    What?????

    Clarkson punched his underling in the face. He split his lip. He assaulted him. In what universe does that have anything to do with “right-thinking” or Hampstead? Since when is it “politically correct” to have rules that bosses aren’t allowed to punch their underlings? What the hell is this, Henry 8’s court after nine straight hours of boozing? How is it in any way “sheepish” for the BBC to fire Clarkson for punching an employee? Is the BBC supposed to allow its stars to punch employees? How is this decision the BBC “emasculating” itself? Is that what “masculine” means to Brendan O’Neill – top people being allowed to punch their subordinates in the face with impunity?

    Notice also that he too calls it a “fracas.” What bullshit. Call it what it is, not something nicer because you approve of it.

    With the elbowing aside of JC, we are witnessing not simply the sacking of an employee over a scuffle, but the willingness of a scandal-stung, crisis-ridden BBC to ditch anything that has the whiff of controversy and to bend its knee to the bland, larks-free worldview of the right-on.

    “Controversy”? “Larks”? What is the matter with him? What will he write next – “Hooray for Bullying, Bullying is Fun”? And again, why is he making it about political correctness? Is it only liberals who think the workplace should not be a boxing ring?

    In the oceans of ink that have been spilt over Clarksongate, or Punchgate, or whatever gate this is, the least convincing commentary has been that which tries to convince us this is just a workplace disciplinary matter.

    Just as you or I would be sacked if we walloped a co-worker, especially someone below us in the pecking order, so Clarkson deserves the boot too, says his army of haters in the media and on Twitter.

    Please.

    Please, Telegraph, stop paying this loathsome man to write this shit.

    And now, cravenly, like a hostage reading from a script written by his captors, the BBC has capitulated and got rid of one of the jewels in its crown, the man who made it millions of pounds and won it millions of viewers around the world.

    What gobsmacking idiocy. The BBC had already, in recent years, offered up its cojones for a public kicking, becoming an increasingly wimpish, risk-dodging sorry excuse for a public broadcaster.

    He forgot to say the BBC is pussy-whipped. What are you if you offer up your cojones? Pussy-whipped, definitely.

    Well done, liberal elite. You’ve won. You’ve made the Beeb as bland as you are.

    I won’t miss Clarkson on Top Gear, because I didn’t watch him on it. But millions and millions of people, here and abroad, will miss him. And all of us, Clarkson fans or not, should be worried that the BBC has finally been completely colonised by the dead, dogmatic, fun-free outlook of a minuscule, if hugely influential, section of British society.

    It’s a bullies’ charter. He gets more loathsome every time I read him. Next week I suppose he’ll be giving advice on how to burn children with cigarettes when no one is looking.

  • Disgust and closets and out campaigns

    Chris Stedman has a piece at Religion News Service arguing against the claim that atheism coming out of the closet is comparable to the movement for LGBT rights.

    Austin Cline claims on About.com’s atheism section that “atheists [are] hated more than gays,” and bestselling author Richard Dawkins has frequently compared the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) rights movement to the atheist movement—drawing heavily from the LGBTQ rights movement for his “Out Campaign,” which encourages atheists to “come out.” And these are just a few examples in a long line of well-intentioned atheist activists and organizations—who generally consider themselves LGBTQ allies—comparing the LGBTQ rights movement to the atheist movement.

    There are things about this comparison that, on the surface, make sense: atheists and LGBTQs are marginalized communities that deviate from normative ideas about how people should live, that often share an experience of needing to reveal our identities to others (sometimes with terrible consequences), and that experience social stigma.

    But.

    He’s right, it’s not a great comparison. Mind you, comparisons often work by comparing a single aspect of the X and Y as opposed to comparing the entirety of each, and in that sense, as Chris says, this one makes sense at least on the surface. But his point is to underline the reasons it doesn’t work as a comparison.

    Anti-atheist bias does exist, of course—particularly in other parts of the world—and it should be strongly condemned and combated. The prevalence of violence in the U.S. motivated by an anti-atheist bias, however, is more than eclipsed by violence motivated by heterosexism.

    In 2012 the FBI reported that the largest percentage of reported hate crimes were those motivated by racial bias. After that, the next largest percentages of hate crimes were motivated by bias against sexual orientation and against religion (primarily against Jews and Muslims). But of the reported hate crimes motivated by bias against religious belief (18.7% of all hate crimes), only 0.9% stemmed from an anti-atheist/agnostic bias. In other words, the magnitude of violence against atheists and agnostics does not begin to compare to what many other communities experience.

    There’s an odd thing about that FBI report though. It doesn’t include women as a category:

    By bias motivation

    An analysis of data for victims of single-bias hate crime incidents showed that:

    • 48.5 percent of the victims were targeted because of the offender’s bias against a race.
    • 19.2 percent were targeted because of a bias against a particular sexual orientation.
    • 18.7 percent were victimized because of a bias against a religious belief.
    • 12.1 percent were victimized because of a bias against an ethnicity/national origin.
    • 1.4 percent were targeted because of a bias against a disability.

    That’s it; that’s the list of categories. Because, what, there are no crimes in which the victims are targeted because of the offender’s bias against women? That can’t be right…

    Chris goes on to zero in on what I think is a very important point, which is that the root of a lot of violent hatred is disgust:

    A myriad of religious and political institutions have perpetuated and sustained anti-LGBTQ attitudes throughout history, and these attitudes are still frequently expressed and enforced through religion—but calling religion the source would be misguided. (Besides: if atheists consider religion to be human-created, then it follows that anti-gay attitudes come from humans who sometimes express them through religion.) Instead of originating from religion, studies suggest that negative attitudes toward gay people are influenced by intuitive, moral disapproval linked to the emotion of disgust. An important series of studies from Paul Bloom and Joshua Knobe at Yale University, David A. Pizarro at Cornell University, and Yoel Inbar at Tilburg University suggest a strong link between disgust and negative attitudes toward homosexuality. Because of this link, anti-gay attitudes are frequently articulated through the rhetoric of disgust or dehumanization—“homosexual activity just isn’t natural” or “homosexuality is an illness” being two common examples. Sometimes this rhetoric is religious, but it seems to reflect an emotional source that’s ultimately not.

    Yes, and that also very much applies to hatred of women. I’m lucky enough to be reminded of this any time I want to be (and often when I don’t); I can just look up what people are saying about me on Twitter for instance. (And if I don’t there will always be someone new who tweets some friendly disgust at me.) Like “Mykeru” for example.

    mike

    Mykeru @Mykeru
    @chsvns You just dropped that into #feministselfie By the way, do you know Ophelia Benson queefs talcum powder?

    Sexual disgust at its finest. Wholly irrelevant to anything, just an expression of sexual disgust for the sake of it. Once you notice that kind of thing, you notice how pervasive it is. It’s sad. All the little baby girls napping in their cribs today…they’ll all grow up to be the target of sexual disgust sooner or later.

    Anyway I think Chris is right about this. Chris is right and Leon Kass is profoundly, horribly wrong. Disgust is not a good source of moral intuitions.

  • I agree with this sentiment

    Oh hai, I found that photoshop of me – the one that Michael Nugent reported on last week in his post Slymepit members struggle with the ethics of removing photoshopped naked image. I wasn’t looking for it, I was looking for something else, but the location of the something else was the location of the photoshop. I had vaguely thought it was gone, but no, it’s just that it’s not embedded there any more. That was clear from Michael’s post, but I had read it somewhat hastily.

    Members of the Slymepit website have spent the last few hours struggling with the ethics of whether to remove a photograph, newly posted, of an identifiable person’s face photoshopped onto the body of a naked woman.

    The Site Administrator’s decision: “I have deleted the tags which embed the image, but left the link. Note: this is a picture of a naked old lady’s body onto which the head of [named person] was photoshopped. Feel free to visit the link and see for yourself, but there is nothing useful to be gained by doing so.”

    Oh, sure there is. There’s the pleasure of feeling contempt and loathing for a woman you hate. Totally useful!

    What I was looking for was the origin of a cryptically quoted phrase in a tweet.

    blackford2Now that’s what I call feminism. Also guts. Find somebody calling me despicable, then quote it without attribution on Twitter. Free speech at its finest. Philosophy on the front lines.

    So I was curious, so I googled the phrase, and it went to a page at the slime pit where they were discussing the photoshop, so I found the photoshop.

    Trigger warning, if the body of an old women is the most disgusting thing you can think of. The photoshop.

    I apologize to whoever the woman is in that picture. I don’t actually find her body disgusting, believe it or not. What I find disgusting is this kind of shaming.

    [Note: don’t run to the tip jar. You’ve been doing that lately as it is, so treat this one as off the record, or something.]