It’s easy to take individual lines from a few paragraphs of a comment and structure your own arguments based upon a line by line interpretation without reading the complete statement (where you get the time is another question). You structure your counter points based upon an extremely narrow interpretation of what you just read searching for just the right place to cut the comment off so you can score your point and reinforce your own brand of intellectual arrogance.

Kranky….pejorative, I always thought i was droll.

TerenceC’s comments here about 10 times more than you do so it’s not really much of a surprise that you don’t have a good gauge of his comments. Can he be a bit on the caustic side sometimes? Yes, but then so can you. Or do you honestly think that “explaining yellow to a bat” and characterizing liberals as eternal children are kind things to say? Your condescension is just as opposed to the spirit of the site as him making fat jokes.

However, Terence, you know to leave the insults out of it. There’s no reason to make this personal. Thanks for understanding.

Conservatives are the guardians in charge of making us all be careful about cultural changes that can bring negative side affects. Younger folks will always chafe at that.

Exactly. It’s small wonder that the young don’t identify with the GOP. Youth, in the mine run of cases, brings with it a blithe intellectual arrogance, a belief that they can fashion in the brilliant foundry of their own minds and thence prescribe for the entirety of society “the answer.” An inability (or, worse yet, refusal, or, worst of all, indifference) to recognize the imperfection of human foresight and the inevitability of unforeseen consequences. They mistake their own prejudices and preconceptions for judgment and timeless truths, and, given their druthers, would gleefully sweep society’s real timeless truths of tradition onto the ashpile of history.

To borrow Oakeshott’s memorable evisceration of the so-called rationalist mindset, youth is eager to hale “the social, political, legal and institutional inheritance of [their] society before the tribunal of [their] intellect….” Fortunately, about 50% of them grow up.

Justin, you ought to be aware that your tolerance for pejorative varies on a partisan basis. My tolerance for pejorative is high, so Terence doesn’t bother me much. But even so I do note that his insult to insight ratio is well above optimum.

Conservatives are the guardians in charge of making us all be careful about cultural changes that can bring negative side affects. Younger folks will always chafe at that. This pretty easily explains things. As a culture, new things bring questioning and controversy. Sometimes we get used them, see that they are fine, and dismiss earlier concerns as off the mark. Liberals LOVE to notice this.

Far less well-noticed is that sometimes we DON’T get used to new things and adopt them, we continue to reject them. We see that they aren’t fine, and we hold the line against change. This is why we don’t all walk around naked smoking crack, F#$^king in the street, driving on the sidewalk, taking other folks stuff, and so on.

I happen to think we’ll be A-OK allowing gays to marry, or else circumscribing gov’t involvement in the legalities of unions to civil contracts for all. In another 10 or 15 years, almost no one will give a sh!t. But that doesn’t mean I want to join in the progressive triumphalism or generational triumphalism.

It may well be the case that speaking generationally, there will always be things that the next generation “gets” better than the last one. Indeed, it’s probably true with gay marriage that many older folks just CAN’T get it. But I counsel everyone to do such folks the favor of granting them the respect of understanding that just maybe it’s because their heads are full of all the stuff that they have already learned and understood.

I can promise all the younger folks out there that by the time you reach 40 or 50, the song that goes “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger” will suddenly begin to resonate. If it doesn’t, then you just haven’t been paying attention.

TerenceC writes:

The comment is a paraphrase of Seth MacFarlane from “The Family Guy”.

Who, on evidence tendered, is a funny but profoundly bigoted, obnoxious man. If there’s such a thing as a liberal reactionary – to the extent that “reactionary” can be thought of as a mindset and a pattern of behavior rather than the substantive political views of the person – he’s it.

The full comment is “The two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a big fat white guy who is threatened by change.” I didn’t realize I was insulting anyone Simon, sorry (I think I’m getting a vision of what you may look like however:)

The inartful foldback into an insult at the end reveals the rhetorical nature of the apology. FTR, I’m not particulary fat, I’m only aging in the sense that this week I’m a week closer to thirty than last week, and I work in an industry whose only constant is an accelerating rate of change. Stick those in your vision.

However, political change in the USA only comes about when the dominant political culture is toppled

The dominant political culture in the United States, despite your insinuation to the contrary, is a kind of snide, smug, watery strain of liberalism, and has been for a while now. Although the actual instruments of state power were in Republican custody between 2003 and 2007, if one focusses on the culture – as your comment purports to – it is by-and-large liberal. There’s a reason why the afore-mentioned Family Guy is, much to its chagrin I’m sure, very much mainstream.

This is a horrible trend for organizations reliant on wedge political issues for their subsistence.

Such as the Democratic party, that routinely invests massively in abortion, gay marriage, radical secularism, class warfare, and other devisive wedge issues. You don’t seriously mean to reveal that you didn’t realize that there are two sides fighting the so-called “culture wars,” did you?

The government has absolutely no business telling anyone who they can love – it’s none of their business.

Strawman. No one contends otherwise.

Anyone who has ever been married will tell you that marriage is nothing more than the joining of property, assets, and well being into one legal entity. If you don’t believe me…

I don’t believe you, no. I’m married, have been for five years, and there mere fact that I’m someone who has ever been married telling you that marriage is much more than those things falsifies your claim. (Or at least, it falsifies it to the extent that “anyone who has ever been married” is anything but a synonym for “I”.) Few people who are married would agree with your definition; indeed, one suspects that a man who tells his wife that their marriage means nothing more to him than the legal unification of assets and property will receive the divorce papers in short order.

To say that 2 men, or 2 women, or a man and a women should have different legal rights in this instance is not only wrong it’s illegal in my opinion.

(1) Gay marriage isn’t about having the same rights – everyone already has the same rights vis-a-vis marriage unless you start manipulating the generality at which the issue is evaluated. What is being asked for is not equal rights, but new rights: a change in the nature of marriage to allow something that marriage has not consisted of before. I tend to think that the difference in how people think about this comes down to whether one thinks marriage is a verb or a noun; only if one believes that marriage is something that you do could you believe that each person gets to do it in whatever way they like. If, by contrast, one understands marriage as a preexisting institution, the idea of “have it your way” comes over as the crazy guy insisting that the clerk accept his hand-scrawled note rather than filling out the standardized form.

(2) It isn’t illegal, and whether it is or is not is not a matter of opinion – it’s a matter of law. Your comment implies a conceptual inability to differentiate between what you would like the content of the law to be (what legislatures do) and what it actually is (the realm of the courts).

The USA is a republic based on the rule of law

Quite so, which is why what Vermont did is legitimate, what Iowa did probably isn’t, and what the Supreme Court of the United States is going to do certainly isn’t.

it’s good to see that the lawmakers are finally starting to take their responsibility seriously enough to put emotional, non-legal, wedge issues aside as they settle issues of human rights and individual dignity.

This approaches a parody of unselfawareness.

Sheesh, that was an unrewarding comment to write. It’s like trying to explain yellow to a bat.

Everyone wants to make comments about Gen X, Gen Y, I guess Gen Z is next (What do we start calling it after we run out of letters?). However, political change in the USA only comes about when the dominant political culture is toppled – and it typically doesn’t disappear quietly. It isn’t generational it’s demographics.

The white male was the dominant political figure in the USA since The Declaration of Independence was signed. The white male is on the wane politically as a dominant force for many reasons. Immigration, inter-marriage, equal rights are few of the reasons. In the next 10 to 20 years this trend will accelerate for those same reasons with a growing exodus of people from the small towns, sprawling suburbs, and low population states into larger and larger cities due to economic changes.

The increase in population densities of cities always leads to greater levels of tolerance for individual differences. This is a great trend for our republic since it focuses attention on real problems without the added burden of emotional wedge issues. This is a horrible trend for organizations reliant on wedge political issues for their subsistence. Fill in your own names for these organizations but they are typically centered around the issues of Gays, Guns and God.

I have been married for a long time (to a woman:). I’m not an expert by any means but I can say that you have your good years, you have your bad years, and if you have children you’ll have quite a few years that you don’t even remember. One day just sort of runs into the next and if you’re lucky the good years will outweigh the bad as you get older.

The government has absolutely no business telling anyone who they can love – it’s none of their business. Anyone who has ever been married will tell you that marriage is nothing more than the joining of property, assets, and well being into one legal entity. If you don’t believe me, look at what a divorce settlement consists of – it’s all focused on a disolution of joint assets. To say that 2 men, or 2 women, or a man and a women should have different legal rights in this instance is not only wrong it’s illegal in my opinion.

The USA is a republic based on the rule of law – it’s good to see that the lawmakers are finally starting to take their responsibility seriously enough to put emotional, non-legal, wedge issues aside as they settle issues of human rights and individual dignity.

But if you want to compare something let’s compare the notion that instead of emailing me or tweeting me that you found an inappropriate comment, you used this thin gruel to try and question the credibility of the site. Do you really think that’s appropriate?

@TerenceC, I know you were just making a joke in response to Exiled, but you need to leave the insults out of it. You know the rules. Help me out here and abide by them.

And now for something completely different: compare Donklephant, “Debatewise has landed” (4/6/2009) (claiming that the aim of Donklephant “is to provide people with a place where they can read opinions on issues without having to wade through the profanities, vitriol and shameless flaming that often abound in forums”) with the comment immediately above by TerenceC (“Show me a fat aging white guy who’s afraid of change and I’ll show you a republican”). Is that the kind of comment you think has a place here, Justin? which of these antithetical writings do you reject as befitting Donklephant?

The tide is turning and I think once you get 10 states that allow gay marriage then I think most states will go head and approve it.

“You might be a Republican if you think that the institution of marriage needs protection from gays, despite the fact that you are in the middle of your third divorce.”

As DCM points out, there are generational shifts in attitudes towards different subsets, and Generation Y will still be Generation Y in 20 years. Of course their politics will evolve. However, this is where they’re starting so they’re much more likely to be socially liberal in a couple decades.

But you know what isn’t evolving? The Republican party. And this inflexibility will end up marginalizing them if they don’t wise up.