theCryptofishist wrote:Although I may have wished MP hadn't pushed in quite the way he did on line, I basically find his position sane.
As I haven't been to the Tribe's forum, I'll concede the possibility that MoisturePup may have written something sane while he was over there. That would be a pleasant change of pace for him, considering the stark staring looniness of the position that he's been arguing here.
My specific beef with him, far more than anything else, is to be found in what he tried to do to Camp Arctica. I think that we ought to remember that those guys put themselves out financially, every year, until that ice is sold. What happens to them, financially, if Pup manages to rouse the Politically Correct rabble, and get people to not buy that ice? The members of Camp Arctica are then left with a large amount of expensive meltwater, because there is no way that they can return the ice. At that point, their reward for having dug in deeply into their own probably not-so-deep pockets in order to provide the community with a needed service, and to raise some money for a variety of charities and causes will be to be deeply, personally screwed.
That's a lousy trick for one burner to try to play on another, and the message it sends is a destructive one. What it says is that if anybody makes an effort on behalf of the people at Black Rock, he'd better watch his back, because if somebody he never even heard of has a perceived personal grievance with somebody, anybody he gave money to or otherwise associated with, that he will become a target for any anger directed against that person or group whose path he crossed, at some point in the past.
Count the number of people or groups you associate with in a day. If you have real money to give, go further and count the number of groups who were beneficiaries of your generosity. Could you possibly keep tabs on all of them? Would it be sensible or even appropriate for you to try?
If this community, as a group, sits back and sends the message that it thinks that this kind of behavior that we saw out of MoisturePup is acceptable, then BMORG might as well just fold up the Center Camp tent and go home, because on those terms, ANYBODY could be the next person targeted, ANY group could be the next group bankrupted, never knowing what hit it, because it ran afoul of some unknown stranger's hyperaggressively pushed personal agenda. On those terms, how many people are going want to bother to make an effort, and just where does Black Rock end up if people end up being afraid to put themselves out, because they're too busy wondering "what's next"?
theCryptofishist wrote:BSA is a very powerful group that because of its huge cultural prominance has a certain moral authority that it is (in my opinion) violating. I certainly understand the depth of Moisture Pup's anger--it's close to a life and death issue.
I can understand your desire to empathise with somebody who seems upset, and up to a point, that's a commendable desire, but listen to what you just said. MoisturePup wanted to harass a camp for making a charitable donation. Now, you're defending his hostility against the recipient of that charity on the basis they (the BSA) should be denied their freedom of association, because by exercising that freedom in a way which you personally disapprove of, they're communicating their disapproval of a particular group, and others might be influenced by that implied disapproval. The act of exclusion, then, in part becomes a kind of communication, and your objection to that free exercise of their right of free association is that you don't like what it is that the BSA has decided to say to the rest of America, through their actions.
If this is anything akin to the argument that was used against the BSA in court, no wonder they won. The free speech provision of the first amendment was crafted with that specific type of abuse of the system in mind; one does not ask the system to help one's cause prevail in the court of public opinion by silencing one's opposition. That's not a loophole or a technicality that the BSA would have had to fall back on, in response to such an argument, it's the whole point of the damn amendment in the first place. If my books were completely uncrated, I'd be quoting a few choice passages out of the Federalist papers right now.
If you're really concerned with the way America is going to view gay people, then may I suggest thinking on this image - the reaction of an American public that gets used to seeing its democratic institutions subverted by a select few who've decided that since their intentions are so good, that they have the right to (in effect) do the general public's thinking for it, and make sure that the course of discussion is channeled only in the direction they want to see it proceed in, with as much force being brought to bear upon those dissenting from their views, or even upon those daring to associate with those daring to dissent from those views, as is needed to beat them down into silence or submission as needed. Now imagine that public, having watched its most basic personal liberities getting trashed, collectively coming to view the gay population as being among those on whose behalf those freedoms were trashed.
This is not going to make for a loving response. Try "cold, icy rage"; I can imagine few strategies likelier to backfire, short of a push to create a national holiday in honor of NAMBLA. People do not stay browbeaten forever, and the longer one keeps them down, the angrier they're going to be when they bounce back up, and the more severe the backlash. If this attempt to silence or control the BSA fails, those pursuing it have wasted their time, and so far, that is all that their side has accomplished in this. Should they succeed, God help them and their hapless beneficiaries, because nobody on earth will. This isn't about job discrimination, because these aren't jobs. This is about parents having the freedom to decide who they will or won't entrust their children's safety to, and about the freedom of the individual to freely associate with, or not associate with others, as one pleases.
A freedom that one can not use foolishly is no freedom at all, in practice, because who is it that gets to define foolishness, and how does one keep such a broad discretion from being abused? The reality of the situation is that outside of the persecution fantasies of a few gay activists and their apologists, most people couldn't care less who somebody else wants to sleep with. The sad irony of this is that by getting itself identified with the act of oppression, the gay community is in real danger of creating the very hostility that some of its pushier advocates have chosen to perceive, in order to justify their own meritless prominence, more quickly than one can say "self-fulfilling prophecy".
You want a real life and death issue, try pushing on that one.
