Re: In today's news...
Why did this suddenly become about who can feel more pain, and what's more painful? Seriously, I bring up an actual fact about how women are being mistreated, and the go to response is to suddenly start throwing in jokes about how men have it harder, and complaining about women saying they feel a lot of pain during child birth?
Heh, that reminds me of this one forum I go to – they go off topic so often that they lampshade it when it happens, and it’s happened so much that two threads were entirely renamed when completely tangential discussions about sparkly vampires and a user’s breasts overtook them. Gosh, if only I could remember the name of the forum that all that happened on.
…Oh, right.
But aside from the fact that going off-topic is what ULMF is contractually obliged to do, the reason we’re not longer discussing a terrible law is because there was never anything there to discuss: the law is, objectively,
Fucking Terrible. I doubt that there is a single person on this forum who would even slightly defend the dumb shit Arizona is doing, so all that there was ever going to be is a few people saying “Indeed, that is a pile of putrid pus.” There’s no point in saying something that’s already been said, so discussion moved on from a thing there was no reason to discuss, to things that were more in-doubt. (Namely, whether women should be treated better for being pregnant… which then turned into discussion on exactly how much pregnancy hurt, in order to determine exactly how excessive the pain of birth is.)
So, that said, what exactly did you expect the thread to do? Would it have made you feel better if we all degenerated into a pack of screaming monkeys out for blood, filling eighty pages of the thread with “ZOMG HORRIBLE KILL THEM KILL THEM KILL THEM!!!”? Or would you not be satisfied until someone actually went to Arizona to hunt some most-dangerous game? You’ve made us aware of the travesty, and that’s great; now everyone here can decide the degree of action they wish to take about it, whether they want to write a letter, sign or create a petition, or perform any other sort of activistic activity.
This is part of the fucking problem. People refusing to see that there is a fucking problem, and treating it like one big joke.
Nobody here is blind to the fact that there is a fucking problem. There isn’t a single fucking person on the forum, who, when asked if women are still being discriminated against, would fucking reply, “No, women are not fucking discriminated against anymore”. I ask again; what the fucking fuck do you fucking want us to fucking do about it? Should we spend our every waking moment hunting for some injustice to fight, throwing ourselves bodily into conflict and sacrificing our happiness for the sake of people we will never meet? It’s a grand principle, but the reason you didn’t see me next to you while you were serving in the military is because I don’t go for that kind of thing.
We’re talking about removing discrimination that has already achieved a degree of Total. Global. Saturation. Truly removing all trace of prejudice is going to take generations – and I do my small part towards that, but no more. If I see bigotry and discrimination around me, I frown on it, maybe even debate it. I hope that, through the efforts of its constituent parts, society will continue to osmose towards a more tolerant whole. You can certainly ask more than that of me, just don't expect me to concede to the request.
To this: I challenge you to find me one member of this forum whose mind has been significantly changed on an issue of importance after a heated debate on this same forum.
You would be hard pressed finding someone who changed their mind, sure, even though I count myself among those who changed their mind during a heated debate, in fact, one in which I was even a participant. What is far easier to find is people who made their mind up, after seeing a heated discussion about something that they never really thought about before. What you can easily find are the people whose discussion never got heated, because only one or two posts into it, one of the parties realized they had an actual, objective flaw in their logic. What you can find easily are people who, despite not giving up the core of their argument, found themselves with a much more complete understanding of both sides of an issue, people who changed their minds on small things tangentially related to the actual discussion. I can personally vouch for having experienced all of these things while on ULMF; some I can even remember well enough to give examples.
I take most of these debates seriously, but to many people here it's Comedy Central -- that's not a pleasant fact but unfortunately it's just the way things are here.
No. Just… No. In the interest of not subjecting the forum to excessive heated discussion, I’m just going to stop at that.
with a dull multi-tool.
