Insults and Politics

My mother once said "If I'm going to insult someone, I'm going to get very personal." That's been food for thought about a lot of things and I'm very aware that people routinely get personal when making attacks on someone.

If you have a political agenda, such as promoting LGBTQ rights or women's rights, you should maybe think about what you are doing when you publicly insult someone. I generally try hard to not use insults about things like age, weight, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.

I usually attack people on behavior and ethics. Because I MEAN those things. I'm not just trying to get their goat because I can't stand them.

When I was active on Hacker News -- an overwhelmingly male forum -- as a fairly prominent (in terms of visibility on the forum) female member, I tried hard to not make ugly generalizations about men. It always bothered me when other women did so and I tried to distance myself from it if I felt like I was being used to promote misandry.

People like to make snarky remarks about Donald Trump. They call him Cheeto and all kinds of crap and I generally don't agree with doing that.

I probably rarely, if ever, use anything like Cheeto. I'm not five years old and I just don't think that kind of juvenile stuff has a place in politics.

Something I've seen more than once is cracks about things he says sounding gay in a way clearly intended to be insulting. I probably hate him more than you do and that's not an angle of attack I ever use.

If he's a closeted GAY guy, I don't REALLY care one way or another, but I ALSO don't REALLY WANT to associate him with the LGBTQ community. 

He gets compared to Hitler. If you are not rampantly and intentionally homophobic and trying to hurt the LGBTQ community, WHY would you say "Sounds GAY!" as one of your snarky jabs at him?

I don't say he "sounds gay" because it implicitly agrees that calling someone gay is an insult. We all know you aren't saying that to suggest "See! You, too, can steal an election and become President, regardless of sexual orientation!"

What I care about and criticize about him is the crap like:

1. He's probably having an incestuous relationship with Ivanka and the entire PLANET knows it.

2. He's the STAR of The Epstein Files and everyone knows it.

3. He stole the election and admitted it on tape, yet SOMEHOW remains in office.

4. He apparently starts wars to enrich his awful children, though none of his so-called children look like him, so I wonder if they are actually his biological offspring -- and I NEVER hear people ragging on him about THAT while seemingly eager to remind planet Earth that calling someone GAY is obviously an insult and then frequently saying immediately afterwards "not that there's anything wrong with that!"

Yes, I'm aware some people will read that bullet point list and object to me characterizing his relationship to Ivanka as probably incestuous in the first bullet point and maybe not biologically his in the fourth bullet point and scream in my face "PICK ONE."

I don't have to, no. He's the only father she's ever known, similar to my opinions about Soon-Yi Previn and Woody Allen. That's not a criticism of Soon-Yi Previn, but they should have never been issued a marriage license.