The RSHD, again: Felicity Savage and the Miss Manners defense

[the_archfiend]

To Felicity Savage:

October 1st, 2013:

Ms. Savage:

The overall point of your article at Amazing Stories (found, I must admit, through this particular LiveJournal page) seems to be that it's perfectly acceptable for someone like V*x D*y (i.e., the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipstick*) to engage in some incredibly repugnant public behavior as long as he doesn't use those naughty, naughty scatological words you dislike in doing so. Such is not the case with anyone choosing to take issue with him, however. They're far worse people for calling him some unpleasant names in response.

Too bad they seem to be fully deserved, questions of profanity aside.

To wit:

For examples of racism, there's his post attacking N.K. Jemisin (which is the same one that got him in trouble with the SFWA when he used one of their Twitter accounts to propagate it) or his post discussing - and I kid you not - "the merits on anti-semitism". Or his
post on WND defending massive deportations of illegal aliens by stating that - wait for it - "If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society". Granted, that's either one seriously poor analogy he's choosing to employ or he's merely doubling down on what a great guy Hitler was. Your choice.

Sexism? Well, there's his singularly odd defense of men mutilating women because - in the RSHD's own words - "a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability". 

Homophobia? Say no more. Too bad for him that employing it really seems to have backfired badly, though.

Dipstick*? There's any number of beliefs he has that fall into this catch-all category, including his loving embrace of the anti-vaccine movement, his creationist tics and his complete inability to understand astrophysics.But, as a member of MENSA no such thing as the Dunning-Kruger effect really applies to his pet theories, correct?

But I digress. Obviously, the biggest crime in all of this is that people took issue with him and chose to employ actual obscenities to do so. For shame! Nothing he wrote could possibly compare to that!

In conclusion, I'd like to say that although I was greatly disturbed by what you wrote and what you strangely chose to focus on in your essay, I will not employ any actual profanity in doing so. I will merely use words like "obtuse", "insipid" and - unfortunately - "inane" instead. However, no obscenity. And those are proper words of usage in the English language, after all, so no harm, no foul.

(*The actual word Dips*** was not used in deference to Ms. Savage's high-borne standards of decorum)

Comments

[unhipster.livejournal.com]

I don't get how some people can still be so disgustingly racist and sexist. It's 2013, wake the fuck up! That shit is not ok!

[the-archfiend.livejournal.com]

Truth be told, I don't think Felicity Savage is the vile f***stump that V*x D*y is - but she _is_ woefully ignorant of how ethically challenged he comes off as.

aking issue with some of the language on _MW,DH_ (among other places) and not bothering to take any issue with what the RSHD has written in the past (and thus misunderstanding a large chunk of what got him booted from the SFWA to begin with) is either being willfully ignorant, lazy or - even worse - tacitly taking his side.

Her post was completely ridiculous, regardless.