Quote:
Originally Posted by Rococo
Oh well. I don't know why your spidey sense is tingling, but there isn't much I can do about it.
To be clear, I'm not equating Fly to racists. I just think of him as a polemicist whose main audience is those who already agree with him. But when someone is trying to defend a billboard that shows Obama bowing to a Saudi as "not racist", yeah, Fly is the best in the business at exposing them.
Perhaps I am overreacting to the "get a sense of humor" argument. I have a negative reaction generally to that response because the right has used it so frequently as a defense to charges of racism.
I can appreciate Fly is an acquired taste. I am not insisting people appreciate what he does (e.g., it's not "get a sense of humor") -- but the reaction is extremely telling.
The argument is basically that Fly is insulting and abrasive, that he doesn't distinguish between people who are awful and people who are well-intentioned but wrong, that his attacks are simply misdirected. OK, you got him. But that's like a generic description of talking politics on the internet in general. Here and everywhere. Many on this forum are just as insulting, abrasive, flat out wrongly commonly. It's pervasive. There are very few exceptions.
That Fly inspires an army of angry people following him around is because Fly's criticisms are very specific and directed at people who are not used to being treated like that. It's not even that he's really good at identifying racism; tons of people on this forum are fine at that. And yes, I think the kind of specific people who aren't used to being treated like that are special flower white bros who are not accustomed to criticism and react very poorly. That's my point. The more accurate description of Fly is that he knows how to trigger Aspie white dudes with little social grace, he knows just how to identify them and is relentless with them. THAT'S what makes FlyWf unique. It's not that he's a uniquely great social critic (he's smart, he's witty, I like his substantive points -- but that doesn't make him exceptional). It's that he quickly finds the dudes (you can probably quickly name 5 or so of the notorious examples) who are temperamentally oblivious, a specific kind of clueless white guy with low self-awareness. That's Fly's unique trait is finding specifically those guys. He spots them quick and goes hard to the rim with them.
So it's not that you have to laugh along; merely that some of you need to learn to deal with what is a very common human experience.
Last edited by DVaut1; 07-08-2017 at 04:53 PM.