Thursday, October 06, 2005

Think about images we've drawn, think about all those empty songs

Over on the Official Shrub.com Blog , a woman named Andrea Rubenstein has written an impassioned, lengthy but worth-reading entry "On Being An Oversensitive, Man-Hating, Embarassing Feminist/Liberal/Whatever."

Under this discourse, if you say “[group y] did bad thing [x]” then they tell you how “not all people who belong to [group y] do [x], so stop attacking them!” Does this mean that people shouldn’t voice their opinion on things because someone might think that they’re unfairly targeting an individual? Do we all really need to put a disclaimer up every time we talk negatively about a group to assure people that “not all [group y] are part of [x]”? If someone is talking about male dominated areas, are they attacking all men? What about speaking out about homophobic hate crimes, are they accusing all straight people of hating gays? Is it hard to see the difference between criticizing an idea or practice and engaging in an ad hominem attack?


Warning: It's a little "inside" in places--it was apparently sparked by "some recent events in the blogsphere." In those places it does resemble more of a comment in a flamewar than an entry that can be read on its own, but can be thought-provoking nevertheless.

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