Are we at war with Marvin Minsky?

[bellatrys]

I know I've been AFIA for a long while, but has Minsky been gunning for fandom lately? I barely know who he is in mundane matters - some computer guy, right? - and I have no idea if he's jumped on the "Denounce Skiffy As Nekulturny" bandwagon - so many have, but I don't recall hearing anything outrageous about him. Did I miss the declaration of war

Comments

Or...

[bellatrys]

Some of them are even sincere when they say this and don't actually want to fuck the poor. These are the ones who end up defecting from the Republican Party and dissociating themselves from social conservatives, the ones who don't go on supporting the Anti-Sex League.

They keep on pulling that R lever year after year and get all butthurt when people call them stupid and acting counter to their own professed interests, because they have no reverse gear due to hubris / are too intellectually timorous to examine their own assumptions and shout "BY GOLLY WE'VE BEEN HAD! WHERE'S MY PITCHFORK?" and feel that it's terribly, terribly unfair to lump them in with the nekulturny and/or Puritans who just *happen* to be voting Republican too...

Nooo, I am not terribly sympathetic any more. I was stupid. I supported evil because I was gulled and unwilling to examine my own beliefs until the consequences of what I was voting for in my blind "prolifism" were shoved in my face. I have accepted that - and all those people who made me SO VERY ANGRY by saying that we were hurting the poor, that we were a movement of racists and sexists and corporate lackeys all those years? were dead right to say so. And if they hadn't made me angry and indignant to disprove them - well, that and the fact that "our" side kept on saying explicitly racist/sexist/pro-plutocrat things in front of me - I wouldn't have been spurred to start taking the blinkers off and the fingers out of my ears.

Re: Or...

[violaswamp]

I have no sympathy or respect for the ones who actually do pull the R lever. I was referring to those who don't, who either left the party or never joined and now vote against Republicans.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at in the next post,

[bellatrys]

where if you realize that you don't actually *have* one or more of those slats, the Xenophobia/Mammon/SexSquick sides, to your psyche, you realize that there's no way you can fit in, that you've just been fooling yourself that there's a place for you in the movement.

But that takes a certain humility (I say in all arrogance) because it *is* horribly painful and agonizing to realize and admit that I Wuz Had and used as a *tool* by a bunch of people who embody all kinds of things you abominate, and that the people who were ticked off at you for being a tool were *right* - you need a reverse gear, you need to be able and willing to look at exactly how and why you were led astray so you "don't get fooled again" by yet another con artist who knows all the right buttons to push...

I remember when it was like a voice in my head, only the voice was mine, saying very clearly "If Rush Limbaugh is a conservative then I cannot be" - it was really a formal logic puzzle, but if I hadn't been compelled to listen to AM radio at two workplaces, I could have gone on deluding myself that the tent really *was* big enough, that I could go on being in favor of women's rights and the environment and multiculturalism and so forth, and it was just random irrelevancies that all the conservatives I happened to know were sexist xenophobic corporatist toosl...

And once you *know* that, you gotta make a choice, you know?