--- In [email protected], "whynotnow7" <whynotnow7@...> wrote: > > Could be, though that again raises the point -- Are we reacting > to Ravi's behavior, regardless, or trying to set this up as "a > teachable moment" in which we align Ravi's behavior with an > assumption about his consciousness, or his mental health?
What's interesting to me is that most of Ravi's posts are loving, playful, funny, often even wise, but we freak out when he has a negative outburst and start discussing his mental health, even asking whether he should have freedom of speech or be ejected from the forum. Yet there are others here whose posts are *routinely* negative, whose tone typically is "demeaning harshness," to use Curtis's phrase, frequently coldly, calculatingly cruel and hateful, and we seem to have learned to take them in stride, without wondering about the writers' mental health. We had one of those posts this morning, in which the writer not only went to considerable lengths to harshly demean those he calls "crazies" (i.e., his critics), but actually recommended his own twisted form of censorship by counseling others not to interact with the "crazies" in order to freeze them out and make them shut up. And there wasn't a peep of objection. Indeed, Curtis emerges from lurkdom to pompously pronounce judgment on Ravi while arrogantly declining to concern himself with the possibility that there may be worse transgressors of the social compact holding forth here. He chastises Ravi for what he perceives to be homophobia, apparently having entirely forgotten the remarks of the negative poster described above intended to insult Robin by suggesting he was gay (not to mention his betrayal of Curtis's confidence by citing something Curtis had said to him in private email that, taken out of context, made Curtis appear to be impugning Robin's sexuality as well). Curtis further fulminates over Ravi's insults to a woman when he has never been upset by the "demeaning harshness" with which the negative poster treats women he doesn't like. It's fine with Curtis to call a woman a "dumb cunt too stupid to live" as long as there's no mention of blow jobs. (BTW, Curtis, the word is "aplomb," not "aplaumb," and it's never used in the plural.) Bob and Obbajeeba are right, the hypocrisy around here is so thick you could cut it with a knife. It makes me physically ill. Thank goodness I have only one more post left this week.
