I read Digby's samples. I was amazed. Dobson hit his dog with a belt? His hand wasn't enough to discipline a 12-pound dog, an animal he himself describes as "tiny"?
This was an animal he'd been giving orders to every day for six years, and it was an anomalous instance of non-obedience, but Dobson and the dog got into a "vicious fight" wherein "I fought him up one wall and down the other"?
I don't believe it. A dog that was going to challenge Dobson's authority that thoroughly would have shown signs of it before. My strong suspicion is that the dog was terrified.
We're never told how it was that "Siggie had become boss of the house while I was gone." We're talking here about a tiny and normally well-disciplined dog who, by Dobson's own account, didn't do anything to warrant correction until late at night. I literally can't imagine what the dog was supposed to have been doing in the meantime that constituted being "boss of the house." I can only think that Dobson has a hypervigilant sense of Who's Boss, and somehow felt that his authority had been questioned by his little pet dog.
Little pet dogs generally know who's in charge. Dogs are good at that.
By the way, one of Dobson's details can't be true. He describes the incident as "both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt." That's not possible. Dogs can't swing belts.
I think Dobson has to be displacing his own behavior onto the dog. I further think he does this in order to depict the incident as his dog and himself having a fight. The dog was trapped in an enclosure; and Dobson, who weighed sixteen times as much as the dog, as well as being much stronger and having much more reach, was beating the dog with a leather belt.
One of the things abusers do is to recast beatings as fights. If they other person hit back or struggled at all, then it was a fight, and the rules are different.
An instance of this that stuck in my mind was an explanation I once heard about how an eight-year-old girl had forced a fight on her father -- this was a fight in which she struck no blows, but nevertheless wound up on the floor getting kicked -- by verbally challenging his interpretation of events.
That's not a fight. Neither is James Dobson taking a strap to a small lapdog.
Nice to clear up what Disney does and doesn't feel is acceptable behavior.
Chris Quinones, I hereby award you a gold star for Unrecognized Inside Baseball.
Alex, that wicked Thing, will have to settle for the glory of a couple of sharp (albeit unpaid-for) posts, and the pleasure of dancing en pointe.
That's funny; I found you neither loud nor aggressive nor a bore. Can't vouch for your casseroles, of course, but I'll take them on faith.
Perhaps he's exhausted his inventive talent.
A further observation: I spent a lot of time on Usenet. One of the things I learned was that when someone shows up who (1.) claims not to be the person under discussion, just someone who's very very familiar with their work; and (2.) feels obliged to doggedly respond to each and every thing said about the p.u.d., unto the last weary trailing-off comment; then (3.) the probability that that participant is in fact the p.u.d. approaches 1.
Xopher: Thanks. Can't see how I managed to leave him standing, unless it was the overwhelming boredom that struck me when I read his comments.
Wes has been less obviously deranged, but he's even more boring than Bane. I have a great dislike of loud, aggressive bores with an obvious sense of entitlement. They tell jokes badly, and never volunteer to bring a casserole.
Dan, it's hard to imagine a statement which couldn't have been made by some SFWAn somewhere.
BTW: "not subject to the logrolling which infested the Hugoes" = "my own work might stand a better chance."
Funny thing is, the Hugos are the cleanest major award in American SF. The Nebs are dreadful.
p.s.: Xopher gets a gold star for "y dt."
I believe that's a new record for number of comments disemvowelled in one go.
Exercise of arbitrary authority, yum.
Has VD/Nick B. made a single argument in this thread that can stand up to scrutiny? I can't find one.
As far as I can tell, the most significant consequence of this discussion has been to tip off the SF community, years earlier than might otherwise have been the case, that Vox Day/Theodore Beale is a third-rate intellect (especially when it comes to science), a tad unbalanced, and a generally unpleasant fellow. He had some play value, mostly as a novelty, but I wouldn't put him on programming.
The second most significant consequence of this discussion was that it provided the occasion for Sharyn November to say "I think we all need to drop this and move on," and for John Scalzi to reply, "But... there's still more candy inside him!"
Carlos said:No disemvowelments?None yet. Patrick and I spent the weekend helping Jim Macdonald transport his ancestral roll-top desk (which proved to have a secret drawer full of 19th C. physicians' drug samples, and how cool is that?) from Bedford NY to Colebrook NH. We're back now.
Going through Vox Day/Nick B.'s comments here is like reading erotica written by someone who -- well, in the immortal words of Xander Harris, "You've never had any tiny bit of sex, have you?" It's really, really obvious that VD is not acquainted with actual women. I don't just mean sexual relations. I mean he's had little or no social interaction of any sort.
That's not the only gap in his knowledge. In spite of his fetishization of the hard sciences, VD doesn't have a scientific turn of mind. There are plenty of scientists, male and female, participating in this discussion. VD doesn't talk like them, and he doesn't reason like them. His "opinions" about women, gender relations, the hard sciences, and SF are a jumble of low-resolution cliches. It's like he's reinvented the Girl Cooties Theory of Genre Literature on his own, only he thinks it's true.
It's pretty clear that VD fears and dislikes women, and that his gender theories are a back-formation. It seems perfectly appropriate that he's a fan of that patently misogynistic suspected female impersonator, Ann Coulter.
Igor not get to play "Jacob's Ladder" with power feed and barbarian's legs?
I want a time machine and various other unspecified magical devices that will allow me to arrange a free-for-all debate between Pierre Trudeau and George W. Bush.
Isn't it magical how an emoticon can so swiftly and economically make a dumb post look much, much dumber?
Jonathan Vos Post, I'm suspending your Electrolite and Making Light posting privileges for the next two weeks, which means you're out of here until New Year's Day.
You are not mindful of the company in which you find yourself.
You've posted far too many messages that had little or nothing to do with the discussions in which they occurred.
You've been a burden on the conversation.
Furthermore, you've failed to take cognizance of the longest-running and most heavy-handed series of hints and suggestions I've ever given anyone in all my years as a moderator.
See you in 2005.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden
Moderator, Enforcer, and
Wielder of Arbitrary Power
Since this is an open thread, let me just say that that sidelight link about Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher makes me want to wash out my mind with soap: ICK! ICK! ICK! ICK! ICK!
I don't know about Bellatrys' dog, but I liked the categories.
Tina: "If all you do is harsh on people, they're going to stop listening."I find I rather resent that "all."
But speaking of listening: have you listened to the rhetoric of the far right? It's deliberately brutal, and intermittently vile. Obviously, there are people out there who don't mind hearing it. One of the functions of such speech is to sort out the participants in the national political discourse, driving out people who get the flutters over a little harsh language, and giving encouragement to those who like "callous and offensive" just fine.
When you stop listening, you cede the discourse to those who haven't. You can't win if you don't stay in.
Wishing electoral politics weren't about sides has an equally simple answer: if some people understand it to be about sides, while others refuse to accept that idea, the people who understand it to be about sides will win.
Sorry. As Patrick has quoted me as saying, if there's no willingness to use force to defend civil society, it's civil society that goes away, not force.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 13 |
| 2004 | 91 |
| 2003 | 221 |
| 2002 | 38 |
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