Group A Person 1: But of course we did, since we all know that Group B Person 1 is a liberal!
Group B Person 1: How dare you? I demand an apology!
Group B Person 2: Well, technically, you are more or less functionally a liberal.
Group B Person 1: Don’t you get it? They meant that as an insult…
Group B Person 2: ???
Group A Person 1: LOL
Group A Person 2: LOL
Status: Group B Internalized values of the adversary. Co-opted!
Welcome to the futile dance of “the pejorative”, letting only the regressive faction frame the narrative. As contrasted against, for instance:
Group B Person 1: Damn straight, baby. More liberal than you can handle. And WTF are you going to do about it?
I have known a few non-apologist, including my ex-wife. Of the people I have known, this behavior has been life long as best as I could tell. The commonality I noticed between them all was a strong sense of being better and separate than everyone else. That the offended are just too ________ to understand that the offender is always right and they are always wrong. Once, when some people were very correctly pissed at my ex, her father’s response was “Fucking peasants!”.
It’s that old Us vs. Them mindset that makes it too easy to treat others as less than human and it seeps into every aspect of their lives.
It’s just hanging out! It offers some context to my remark that:
Most sex-negative and woman-shaming propaganda I encounter tends to have its roots (or at least rationalization) in Abrahamic religion. But there is no reason to assume that the rest of us are in any way compelled to live according to that same morality. I thought that the Seal of Babalon would be a nice reminder that there are those for whom chastity, modesty, patriarchy, and prudishness are not to be assumed as normal or desirable.
When I was teaching adult ed and had to stop more than one student from using the computer lab to edit amateur porn during class time (sigh), I always got, “Oh, well if YOU feel offended I’ll stop editing it at the school.”
Fuck what I found offensive. Not surprisingly, it was totally against school and school board policy, and the students knew it, because we went over allowed computer use in the first day of class. They had to read and sign an agreement saying they understood the policy.
But no, they always thought shaming the teacher and insinuating she was a prude would let them get away with it.
