What’s more, there are any number of choices that had to be made the way they were in order for me to exist. … That doesn’t prove, in itself, that the debate isn’t justified, but it does go some way towards demonstrating that “What if your mother was pro-choice?” is a red herring as far as the debate is concerned.

No joke.

My mother’s parents met because of World War II; granddad was in the Air Force and grandma was a military nurse. They were from completely different parts of the country and wouldn’t have met if it weren’t for the war. So it turns out that Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, among a number of other factors, was necessary for my personal existence.

This does not, however, seem like a good reason for me to become a neo-Nazi.

Alex, I consider insults that use women’s genitals as a marker for anger or contempt worse than the equivalent insults using men’s genitals (because we live in a patriarchy and so the context of each is different), but I don’t think either is a great feature of the language that needs to be preserved, so if getting people to treat “cunt”-as-insult as the slur that it is involves getting them to treat “dick,” “dickhead,” etc. the same way, I don’t consider that much of a loss.

It seems to me that “reclaiming” the word “cunt”, if it is going to be reclaimed, would involve making it non-insulting, rather than making it as commonplace an insult as insults based on male genitals. Because there’s nothing wrong with having one of them and there’s nothing unpleasant about them, so why use it as an insult?

DK, I’m familiar with the patterns of usage.

Could you explain to me what you take “the point” to be that’s being missed? Because I don’t understand what “the point” of referring to authoritarians in New Labour as “cunts” is supposed to be, if not insulting them by comparing them to women’s genitals.

In the United States, at least, it’s still common in certain quarters to use the words “faggot” and “gay” to deride men you’re contemptuous of, or things that you think are stupid (“That’s so gay,” etc.). Just out of curiosity, if I were objecting to a post about the “authoritarian faggots in New Labour,” and how “gay” their policy proposals were, would you be reacting the same way?

If you’re afraid I’m personally wasting time that I could be spending “challenging the patriarchal status quo” elsewhere, you needn’t worry; I’ve plenty of other things that I’m doing towards that end besides spending a couple minutes of my time asking you to think harder about the language that you’re using on your weblog. However, I will say that whether or not complaining about something “completely fails to challenge the patriarchal status quo,” that’s not an excuse for reinforcing it, even in ways that you personally consider small or trivial.

Sunny: As for these comments, they are a lot of Nazi twaddle.

… because the Nazis were, of course, well known for their relentless criticism of public celebrations of military prowess.

Sabotta: As for the notion that Boyington was just paid by the “federal government” to “kill people” — while this is true in one sense, it is idiotically reductionist in another.

Please instruct me in the subtleties, then. What’s the purpose of “shooting down enemy planes,” if not to destroy the plane and kill the person? What was Boyington’s job in the south Pacific, if not to take commands from the federal government as to where and when to do just that? War, whatever you think of the cause that the war is supposed to serve, does involve killing people at another’s command. Sometimes killing is just and sometimes it’s unjust, but it is deliberate blood-letting from beginning to end.

I really have no patience with this kind of thing – I suppose I could suggest (in connection, for example, with his service with the Flying Tigers) looking up “the rape of Nanking” – but since all that happened to non-Caucausian people, I suppose it doesn’t matter.

This is disingenuous. Boyington’s military career didn’t end with the Flying Tigers and he went on to play an active and important role at the command of the United States federal government in their air war in the Pacific, after his tenure in the Flying Tigers — quite a different cause, with quite different ends and quite different means, which also happened to adversely affect the lives of a few “non-Caucasian” people along the way.

That said, it’s also rather beside the point, at least as I see it. Even if Boyington had only fought in unambiguously just wars, it’s not a University’s job to drum up military parades or put together memorials for successful killers. Why would it be?

As for Spencer, his comments on High Church revivalism in the CoE are steadfastly silly (and a reflection of his growing statism in old age), but the bulk of his remarks are quite right. The regimentation of every aspect of society, from recreation to politics to charity, into forms that unconsciously or consciously ape military subordination, at the direct expense of individualistic and industrial patterns of life, is a sign of decadence. The prominent celebration of martial and physical prowess, at the expense of art, intellect, industry, etc., is a sign of growing barbarism. Belligerent squadrons of ruddy-faced order-takers on the march may swell the Movement for or against whatever, but they don’t augur well for a free and humane society. In the very best of circumstances they may even be necessary evils to save or to make it possible to later achieve better things, but the incessant celebration of this kind of life from the commanding heights of a society is as sure a sign as any of long-standing rot.

And, to come back to the point, when did it become the job of Universities to give dead government warriors a parting rah-rah?

Medium: ‘“Moral facts” sound like something of an oxymoron.’

It’s only an oxymoron if you presuppose that the fact-value distinction to both real and unbridgeable. But a lof of philosophers don’t presuppose this anymore (and very few did, up until at least the mid-18th century). Note that appealing to the is-ought problem won’t help you out here: moral realists can accept the problem while denying that it’s equivalent to the fact-value distinction; the philosopher would just have to hold that modal statements using “ought” assert facts, but the facts they assert have at least some irreducible normative or teleological content. One such philosopher was Aristotle, who believed all of ethics to be founded in natural facts and also wrote the first known expression of the “is-ought” problem in the Nicomachean Ethics 1144a.

That said, I agree with you that David Irving shouldn’t be imprisoned just for being a dishonest sack of vomit. That’s a bad thing to be, but it’s not a crime.

Patrick, I’m inclined to agree with you about moral and non-moral facts of equal complexity when the facts are complex (I’m more confident in my knowledge of various facts about the Krebs cycle than I am in my knowledge of any number of thorny casuistical questions, for example.) But I’m not so sure about “simple” facts. “It’s wrong to burn a cat alive just for the fun of it” seems at least as certain to me — I am at least as confident of it — as I am “there’s a book on this table.” Of course, I’m completely confident in both beliefs, but I can at least imagine error-possibilities for the book-belief (possibilities which are outlandish, or simply idle, but at least coherent), whereas I cannot even imagine anything that would convince me that I’m wrong about sadistic cat-burning. The book-belief is certain beyond any reasonable doubt, but the cat-burning-belief is apodictically certain; I couldn’t give it up without simply giving up on morality as such.

aketus, I’m not the cops and I don’t have either the power or the desire to make Andy post different things on his weblog. I’m replying to what he said in a forum for replies that he made available. Your appeals to his rights to post anything he likes are therefore out of place.

aketus: “What’s important to remember is that words on paper are just lines. Words out loud are just sounds. It is humans that define whether they are offensive or not.”

Look, let’s say that Andy were talking about some male white supremacist twit, and he’d posted the same image, reading “Jesus loves you! But I think you’re a faggot.” Would you be responding the same way?

aketus: “But you’re not questioning why the word is offensive. It’s just 4 letters. Where is the Board of Profanities that label certain words with more or less connotations than others? And who gives them the right to make it universally accepted this way?”

aketus, I don’t care about whether the word “cunt” is by itself “offensive,” “vulgar,” “profane,” “dirty,” “obscene,” etc.; thus I don’t care about how we’re supposed to determine this. As I explained above, what I’m concerned with is not the word at all, but rather the way it’s being used in the “funny” image at the end of the post.

Andy, thanks for the reply.

I’m not claiming that the image couldn’t be funny without an appeal to sexism. In fact I think it would be funnier if it weren’t using the word “cunt” to contemptuously describe a woman (if it were, say, “But I think you’re an asshole,” just to take an example off the top of my head).

The problem with using “cunt” that way is that (1) it takes out your contempt in the form of explicitly sexualized aggression toward her (by reducing her to her genitals, making her a mere “cunt” instead of a human being) and (2) it presupposes that a “cunt” is a bad thing to be (otherwise it could hardly work as an insult). I hope you can imagine why this might be insulting to people who happen to have one.

“Certainly, we can be more confident about natural facts than moral ones.”

I don’t agree that this is “certain,” at least not categorically. For example, it is a moral fact that it’s wrong to pour gasoline over a cat and light it on fire, just for the fun of watching it burn. It seems to be a natural fact, as far as we know, that the Universe is expanding, and that the further away a galaxy is from us, the faster it is moving away from us. I’m pretty confident of both facts, but I’m far more confident of the fact that it’s wrong to burn cats alive just for the fun of it than I am of the fact that the Universe is expanding. (In fact, I think that if anyone reposes less cofidence in certain moral facts, such as the fact that burning cats alive for the fun of it is wrong, than they do in empirical discoveries, then that itself may be a form of moral vice…)

“In case anybody had any illusions on this matter, last week beyond all reasonable doubt that New Labour are a bunch of authoritarian cunts.”

Why are you comparing authoritarians in New Labour to women’s genitals?

Is that supposed to be some kind of an insult?

“Steps are afoot to begin a campaign led by bloggers to try and stop the bastards in their tracks.”

Why are you commenting on their parentage, for that matter? It ain’t their mamas fault that they act like a bunch of twits.

I think I actually remember seeing something in a simlar vein — a combination laundromat / coffee shop / Internet cafe, specifically — somewhere in Santa Cruz when I went back to visit a couple of years ago.

Seems like a great idea, to me at least! Also, instead of having one of those ridiculous vending machines, if there’s a cafe with a register built in, you could just sell people measured portions out of a huge vat of 7th Generation or some other eco-friendly detergant.

Well, I know why “cunt” is considered a dirtier word than “vagina” or “vulva” (as you mention, it’s because it’s was a vulgar word, in the literal sense), and I’m familiar with feminist efforts to “reclaim” the word. My concern isn’t with profanity; it’s with “humor” that reduces a woman — even one who is, in fact, a really rotten person — to her genitals in order to express your anger or contempt for her.

English affords a lot of ways of insulting people that don’t have anything in particular to do with sex or gender; there’s no need to do it this way.

Alexandra, you may think that the following comment is a “slam dunk.” I think it’s the height of political immorality. Viz: “You see, Glenn, al Qaeda really is a threat to the United States. As such, we must do everything in our power to thwart their designs to foment mayhem and promulgate murder. You may not understand this, but most Americans are more than willing to sacrifice our civil liberties and much more so than we have done so far in this effort.”

I have no problem with an individual American who is “more than willing” to sacrifice her or his own civil liberties and much more so than she has done so far in “this effort.” That’s your bag; if you want to trade off living your life at the permission of others in order to gain more in the way of bodily safety, I won’t get in the way. The problem is that that’s not all they’re proposing when they talk about “sacrificing our civil liberties.” What they mean, and what I object to, is that they are “more than willing” to sacrifice other people’s civil liberties, and more specifically my civil liberties, and much more so than they have done so far in “this effort,” whether I like it or not. That you have no right to “sacrifice.” It’s not yours to give.