Any one who's read this blog for any length of time will have noticed that I've often complained about having some of my cyber-remarks deleted or censored. By some divine irony, it's almost always been by persons who take the political position of liberals, which may say something about the intellectual wherewithall of current liberals, at least in the comics community. This last week, however, brought in a bumper crop of three, though I was only tangentially involved in one of them.
The tangential one appeared on this BEAT post. The substance of the original post was to record how some conservative pushback had appeared against using comic books in schoolrooms due to a perceived "liberal agenda." Most of the posters assumed a fairly liberal stance in response to the topic, but one fellow, whose longlong name I'll abbreviate to "Eor," made two posts of a more or less conservative tone. The second post contained two very short remarks, arguing (as I recall) that the liberal notion of "sexuality is a social construct" was no more objective than many conservative notions. I agree with the latter topic, and just wrote, "Good one." Then Heidi deleted the second post and it looked like I was agreeing with Eor's sole remaining post.
I also decided to test the depth of the intellectual waters at the Superhero Hype Board by reprinting THE CONFEDERACY AND THE DUNCES there, sans the title. I flatter myself that it should be clear that it was not an overarching defense of the Southern cause-- yet the dozen or so responses to the thread were concerned only with condemning the Confederacy as the Ultimate Evil. On top of that, someone asked for the thread to be closed, and so it was. So much for enlightened debate there.
Much less surprising was the deletion of two posts on a "pro-LGBT" thread on CBR Community. While I had never posted on said thread before, I'd been something of a gadfly against the knee-jerk ultraliberals for some time, so I imagine that some moderator was simply over-reacting against an innocuous post. On the LGBT thread, someone used the phrase "straight privilege" as if it were a self-evident thing. My two posts requested a definition or citation of what the poster thought it meant. No one responded, except the moderator, who after deleting my posts penned a self-righteous screed in which he thought it was dumb for anyone to question the existence of straight privilege. I didn't say it didn't exist, and I wasn't necessarily planning to debate anyone on the subject, but the moderator just didn't want to deal with heavy matters like definition of terms.
So I guess I'll be looking for new forums in future for debate potential. I suspect the ones with "comics" in the title have all been played out.
Jack H. Harris Presents Dark Star!
4 hours ago
2 comments:
Hi Gene,
You know, of course, that these self-righteous fascists of the left are not in the least interested in debating ideas. In fact, their whole worldview rests in so shaky a ground that they sense, deep inside, that their whole world will crumble at the slightest reality-shock.
And as their 'politics' have no firmer ground to stand on than the same quagmire of biases and preconcepts of their worldview, they cannot halp but to be radicaly fundamentalist in the implementation of said politics.
In truth, I find them to be akin to islamic radicals or any other kind of religious fundamentalist. How can they be otherwise? Their ideas have no substance, no other goal than to force their particular view of paradise upon the heathens (these being, not surprisingly, the large majority of the people). And a simple confirmation of this fact is that they were never able to convince anyone of their idea's inherent goodness - they always have to be forced by means of legislation. What better proof can we hope for in terms of their intrinsic shortsightdeness?
As to their attempt to condition comics contents and their painful distortion of past content we can not think of it but as: 1) another attempt to condition the poloitical formation of younger readers's minds; 2) the confession that they have not the mental apparatus to face more complex challenges than comic books. Kid's stuff, as they would say a couple years ago.
By the way, if you haven't read it yet, I strongly recommend that you read Martin Barker's A HAUNT OF FEARS (1984), about the British Comunist Party's comics campaign, that is as stupid as Wertham and as insidious as McCarthy.
Cheers,
Sherman
Definitely agree that the majority of the people I'm talking about-- primarily the ones who couldn't recognize any grey areas in the Confederacy ethos I brought up-- have drunk the Kool-Aid of political narrative and are never coming back. It's odious to me because in the past I think major liberal figures of the past have been noteworthy for being able to sustain enlightened debate over such issues. Now most major liberals resort to the level of "if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem" and let it go at that. I wondered if the recent spate I encountered had anything to do with liberals realizing that Trump is really not going to be conveniently impeached in the next month. But no, it's been going on for some time, and I'd theorize that it's partly a response to the extreme intransigence of the Far Right as represented by the political blockades of Mitch McConnell.
I have a copy of HAUNT OF FEARS but never got round to reading it, so I'll put it on my list for a near-future read. I'm curious as to whether the Far Left in those days really persecuted the popular medium because of actual persecutions like the witch-hunts of the 1950s, or if they simply disliked the free-flowing fantasies of comics on general principles.
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