camille paglia, you fucking %&*#

[piranha]

among other things, she yaps about matthew shepard:

Although I am a supporter of the death penalty in extreme cases, I think there were ambiguities here: The aimless hooligans who beat Shepard and tied him to a fence perhaps didn't necessarily mean to kill him. Despite my abhorrence of the crime, I was a dissenter about the sanctification of Shepard, a charming young man with a troubled family background who had faced many difficulties in life because of his frailty and lack of conventional masculinity.

Only a week before, Shepard had expressed fears about being killed. Given that apprehension, it is still inexplicable -- if the case is examined only through a political lens -- why Shepard would leave a public place in the company of such blatant thugs.

what the fucking fuck? nevermind her complete lack of understanding of hate crime legislation. what has me really upset here is how she is blaming the victim. sanctification? sanctification is not required! all it takes is the recognition that regular folks do not deserve to be brutally killed ('regular' as in, they didn't physically threaten or attack you). perhaps the attackers didn't MEAN it? they PLOTTED it. they PISTOL-WHIPPED him. when your actions kill somebody, and not accidentally because they ran out into the street in front of you, but because you're robbed them and beat the shit out of them, i don't give a fuck whether you MEANT it. why the victim came with you doesn't matter. even if the victim did something stupid. acting carelessly does NOT excuse or justify being robbed and beaten and left to die.

it's especially poignant, because in her little diatribe against hate crime legislation she's showing us right here WHY we need that legislation, because she thinks it's even remotely justified, this inquisition into WHY this gay man did anything "suspicious". i don't often read her column because she's such a pretentious, kettle-calls-pot-black twit, but this one takes the cake. i am writing to salon after i come down from mt fury.

dear salon. i am not going to threaten you with letting my subscription lapse, because you generally offer me good value. but can you not find somebody less patronizingly offensive and more intellectually rigourous in her place? look, the NYT let bill kristol go! surely it's time to cut her loose, because listening to too much talk radio has rotted her brain.

Comments

[supergee]

That makes even less sense than she usually does.

Re: camille paglia, you fucking %&*#

[piranha]

it actually makes perfect sense -- she is deeply in love with her chosen role of The Dissenter, so much so that dissent has become more important than reasoned analysis. that's pretty obvious with her opinion of palin (she seems to think a little studying will bring palin up to obama's level), but it becomes crystal clear in her blaming the victim.

if one just assumes she'll decide to swim against the stream, even if the stream for once is going in the right direction, one can pretty much predict where she'll stand on any given issue.

[princessofgeeks]

oh yes, blame the victim. that always makes SUCH GOOD SENSE. and makes the rest of us feel SO SAFE.

*head desk*

thank you for following this because I don't think I could. I think I would howl with rage and break something. Even secondhand it's infuriating.

Re: camille paglia, you fucking %&*#

[piranha]

yea, i am actually angrier today than i was yesterday, which doesn't happen often.

[forthwritten]

Oh, and of course, people who intend to hurt you always have big labels saying such on their heads, and they never chat to you in bars or act friendly towards you or offer you a lift home in their car.

Gah. Victim-blaming is so ugly.

Re: camille paglia, you fucking %&*#

[piranha]

no, because you can tell obvious thugs by just looking at them -- it's their head shape, and the way their eyes are so close together.

GOOD GRIEF. i am even more angry today than i was yesterday.

[matthewdaly]

You might not think that's a reason to avoid Salon.com, but I do, and I will.

A jury (of Wyomingites of all people) concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that there were no "ambiguities" here. Henderson and McKinney lured Matthew Shepard out of the bar as a part of a premeditated act of murder. Henderson avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty, and McKinney by the grace of Mr. Shepard's parents. It's not heretical to second-guess a jury verdict. But casually dismissing the very conclusions that they were specifically forced to consider does not impress one as a bold act of freethinking, but rather as cherry-picking your data to support your personal agenda.

[piranha]

the longer i wait with writing this letter, the angrier i get. almost all the comments concentrate on her opinion of palin (*rolls eyes*), but this, this shows her to be so very much in love with her own role is The Dissenter that she puts the lie to her own statement of finding the crime abhorrent.

[crantz]

That is foul.

[flarenut]

Paglia has, I think, long since gone from Dissenter to Troll. There are indeed people who make a career of dissenting from the popular wisdom, but the ones who do it honestly dissent from popular beliefs they find wanting regardless of the position of those beliefs (and/or their most ardent supporters) on some political spectrum or other. For Paglia to be a Dissenter (crappy as that role would have to be) she would have to be distinguishable from, say, George Will.