Please, you were obviously running defense for him (we can quibble over the semantics of "furiously"– your word, not mine, mind– but that's a strawman), what you've just said is fair as far as it goes but is also clearly a backpedal. As for disingenuous, I'd take a look at your own characterizations of feminism (and seeming willingness to always give their critics the benefit of the doubt, but never vice versa) first before you start throwing around accusations.
Also, nice sig. I still don't have the time to properly respond, IRL is busy at the moment, but fine, at some point I'll necro that thread and give it the thorough response it apparently needs.
I was defending him insofar as I was giving my opinion on what I felt was ignorance about him (which continued, you know; he lives in Ohio, not Louisiania as one poster said, and BRTD accused him of being a Randian, which is completely off base and once again something you can only know by not watching anything about him) but I feel no personal attachment toward the guy. I'm a pedant who gets easily animated over small things, if anything. I do the same thing whenever there's a thread about Bill Maher, actually. When you say 'running defense' I think of Libertas' obsessive paragraphs-long screeds to every tiny thing ever said about him. And saying that he's a dick isn't a backpedal if I've always thought that.
It isn't so much that I insist on giving people the benefit of the doubt for biased reasons, but merely think if you're going to hate on someone you should have a basic amount of knowledge about what they've actually done themselves that's worth disliking. You seem to have some sort of really f**ked up perception of me; I'm interested in these topics because they fascinate me and I like reading about them, not because I'm in this to hate on people, so it does get me upset when someone like Beet implies that
of course I would like/be a rape apologist, because I... criticized statistics on wage gaps? What an outrageous drive-by character assassination. Arguably s**tposting. But
I make dishonest characterizations?
And if you want to know the reasoning behind that quote in my sig, it wasn't to bait you into responding, it was because it reminded me of something Madeleine said awhile back:
You "disagree in ways that are strong but hard to coherently articulate" because you disagree in ways that are emotional and based on a slew of unfalsifiable claims, many of which you have already concluded were true before you ever tried forming the argument in the first place. This is largely why most of your disagreements with me that you did bother posting were nitpicks, clearly separate from the thrust of my point, disagreements that invented things I didn't say out of thin air, or drumming outrage over my use of certain terms (like my use of "clean cut" in reference to a fictional scenario, instead of directly responding to the thought experiment, which you basically just ignored).
For me, the idea of "disagreeing strongly but being unable to articulate why" is a kind of terrifying notion (as it was for Madeleine), because that could potentially mean I've either lost the
ability to substantively demonstrate the validity of my beliefs and are no longer keeping my thoughts grounded, or that my beliefs can no longer
actually be logically demonstrated in real terms to begin with. I would humbly suggest to you the idea that it might be worth reflecting on.
If you ever do return to that topic (which, seriously, is not that big of a deal, dude) I hope you do so with an interest in actually having a genuine give and take on what I was saying, instead of just trying to make a flashy coup-de-grâce. Because I actually really like reading discussions on those topics when all parties involved are being honest with each other, and I don't think we really disagree on much at all when it comes to the substantive things we need to do for women in society, or the things that can at least be clearly demonstrated to exist.
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