Friday, June 17, 2005
Shrinking my social circle
If I come across you on the street, and you are wearing one one of these shirts, YOU WILL NEVER BE MY FRIEND. You will in fact be the most unfathomably pompous jerkwad ever to wear a poltically oriented t-shirt.
How did I find out about this? Oh, the famous Powerline hacks!
Actually for full disclosure I got the link to Powerline from liberal blogger Daily Kos.
But the post speaks for itself.
If you could defend Guatanamo Bay from some kind of distant intellectual foreign policy perspective, would you where a shirt like that to profess your support for it? Kind of a tacky form of activism, the free speech equivalent of a guy on a bus I saw wearing a t-shirt that says "Fuck Bush". Only while that guy was bluntly and crudely saying on a t-shirt what so many of us think one time or another, the loving Gitmo t-shirts profess a depth of moral depravity on the part of the wearer of the shirts that is incredibly sad. I doubt they'll only be worn in heavily Republican parts of heavy Republican states where Bush is never questioned and cars with Democrat-themed bumper stickers get keyed.
Weekend time!
How did I find out about this? Oh, the famous Powerline hacks!
Actually for full disclosure I got the link to Powerline from liberal blogger Daily Kos.
But the post speaks for itself.
If you could defend Guatanamo Bay from some kind of distant intellectual foreign policy perspective, would you where a shirt like that to profess your support for it? Kind of a tacky form of activism, the free speech equivalent of a guy on a bus I saw wearing a t-shirt that says "Fuck Bush". Only while that guy was bluntly and crudely saying on a t-shirt what so many of us think one time or another, the loving Gitmo t-shirts profess a depth of moral depravity on the part of the wearer of the shirts that is incredibly sad. I doubt they'll only be worn in heavily Republican parts of heavy Republican states where Bush is never questioned and cars with Democrat-themed bumper stickers get keyed.
Weekend time!
Comments:
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I think the "I heart Gitmo" t-shirt bluntly and crudely says "fuck terrorists", something many of us think one time or another. What it also says, on the link you offer, is that they are designed to support the troops, not moral depravity.
What the manufacturers are saying is that the two can be separated, what you're saying is that they cannot. The answer, of course, depends wholly on your point of view, but your assumption "...the loving Gitmo t-shirts profess a depth of moral depravity on the part of the wearer of the shirts that is incredibly sad.", is incorrect. A simple omission caused this, and the error can be rectified, rather simply, by putting the following two words: "I think", directly prior to the above quotation.
That would be a sentence I would agree with. Without those two words, I'd have to disagree, for this reason: There are some who would call you morally depraved for your opinions on Gitmo. They would suggest that you support terrorists by framing our soldiers in controversy (and this scandal has obviously hurt the war on terror, whether it was right or wrong to investigate it).
I'm sure you would reply by saying that the two can be separated, that no, you do not support terrorists, just the Geneva Convention, and that you don't appreciate someone putting words in your mouth.
Ditto.
Let the fools wear their t-shirts. I wouldn't wear this one, but there are definitely some hilarious ones on the Powerline site that I might, indeed wear. The "celebrate diversity" t-shirt, depicting some 16 various guns springs to mind, or the picture of Che Guevara with a no-smoking circle/slash over his face (the idea of a T-shirt not celebrating Che Guevara is indeed revolutionary.)
In closing, I would say the pharse "tacky form of activism", is redundant because, activism, by definition, involves attention getting, stunt-making, goading, and generally making a public ass of one's self for the primary purpose of self-aggrandizing (a political or social cause being a distant second, but then I put words in mouths). Whether you’re an "I heart Gitmo" redneck or a nude-bicycle-riding exhibitionist, the goal is to offend someone with differing sensibilities, by flying in the face of those sensibilities.
Tacky, indeed.
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What the manufacturers are saying is that the two can be separated, what you're saying is that they cannot. The answer, of course, depends wholly on your point of view, but your assumption "...the loving Gitmo t-shirts profess a depth of moral depravity on the part of the wearer of the shirts that is incredibly sad.", is incorrect. A simple omission caused this, and the error can be rectified, rather simply, by putting the following two words: "I think", directly prior to the above quotation.
That would be a sentence I would agree with. Without those two words, I'd have to disagree, for this reason: There are some who would call you morally depraved for your opinions on Gitmo. They would suggest that you support terrorists by framing our soldiers in controversy (and this scandal has obviously hurt the war on terror, whether it was right or wrong to investigate it).
I'm sure you would reply by saying that the two can be separated, that no, you do not support terrorists, just the Geneva Convention, and that you don't appreciate someone putting words in your mouth.
Ditto.
Let the fools wear their t-shirts. I wouldn't wear this one, but there are definitely some hilarious ones on the Powerline site that I might, indeed wear. The "celebrate diversity" t-shirt, depicting some 16 various guns springs to mind, or the picture of Che Guevara with a no-smoking circle/slash over his face (the idea of a T-shirt not celebrating Che Guevara is indeed revolutionary.)
In closing, I would say the pharse "tacky form of activism", is redundant because, activism, by definition, involves attention getting, stunt-making, goading, and generally making a public ass of one's self for the primary purpose of self-aggrandizing (a political or social cause being a distant second, but then I put words in mouths). Whether you’re an "I heart Gitmo" redneck or a nude-bicycle-riding exhibitionist, the goal is to offend someone with differing sensibilities, by flying in the face of those sensibilities.
Tacky, indeed.
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