Savage Love Sep 4, 2018 at 4:00 am

Shooting Stars

Joe Newton

Comments

103

Ditto Grizelda. Congratultaions.. sorry I haven’t got back to you. The file wouldn’t open. Can it you re send it please. Sorry you’re not having luck yet with your music. It’ll happen.

105

Congrats, Griz!

106

@102 BiDanFan, @103 LavaGirl, and @105 DonnyKlicious: Thank you and bless you all.
I am fortunate to be able to pursue my passion. I so hope to make a sustainable living out of it (I'm not expecting multi-million dollar contracts overnight-----$25-$30k annually to start would be great). Did I tell you that my latest and largest orchestral work ever, Sea Symphony (total time in three movements = 20:05) is complete? I have also finished my third of four short pieces for flute choir and piano to depict the four seasons in the order of fall, winter, spring, and summer. Once I have completed IV my slate is clear for the next wave of writing projects.
@103 LavaGirl: Oh no--the mp3 files I sent you wouldn't open? I'll resend them. I hope you will be able to give them a listen and tell me what you think.

107

@102 BiDabFan, @104 LavaGirl, and @105 DonnyKlicioius: Thank you and bless you all.
@103 LavaGirl: Oh, no---the mp3 files I sent you wouldn't open? I'll try again.

108

Uh-uh.....my comments don't seem to be posting. I'll try again later.

109

Hunter @104: Deception? Making things up again, I see. It's humiliation which you deny is a key ingredient in cuckolding (versus hotwifing), and none of us had to mention it because Dan already did:
"1. Cuckolding isn't that hard to understand: A cuckold gets off on their partner fucking other people AND being humiliated or degraded by their partner and/or their partner's playmates."

110

@83 / BiDanFan: "Virtue signaling" is a politically neutral term that could be applied to the far right just as easily to the far left. The pastor who sees rentboys on the down low is "virtue signaling" when he pounds the pulpit and shouts about gays being an abomination. Matthew 6, which talks about making public demonstrations of piety and charity versus private generosity and devotion, essentially decrying "virtue signaling."

"Virtue signaling" generally refers to a person who cares more about their appearance than the purported value of which they are making a public demonstration. It's related to--but distinct from--hypocrisy, as one's value might be sincere. The issue is really that reputation for holding the value carries greater weight than the value itself.

There are a great many on the far left who "virtue signal" as well, but I think it's easier for someone who tends toward the left to see it more clearly with right-wing examples.

A far-left example of virtue signaling that comes to mind is the "white knight" who espouses feminist attitudes with the rather transparent intent of increasing his odds of getting laid.

111

Ms Lava - Mr Savage is on the record as allowing there to be no legitimate reason for gays with trans partners not to perform the C word. In a world where people take The Opposite of Sex for an instruction manual (for the benefit of Mizz Liz, that's the film in which a pregnant Ms Ricci goes from Louisiana to visit her gay half-brother in the Midwest and tries to get hold of a chunk of the legacy he'd been left by his true love by playing the Homosexuality-is-Discrimination card to seduce and steal his current boyfriend, pass the baby off as his, and claim her brother owes the boyfriend alimony), it should only be a matter of time before that expands to women, especially if such concepts as male and female get undermined further.

112

M?? Harriet - No, the point is that the individual letters don't belong together at all now that we are not in a time of political extremity. The Urquharts' marriage is the perfect case, as Mr U wrote about a year or two ago. If he passed, that undermined her L presentation. If she remained an open lesbian, that outed him as T. The trans goal of assimilation to the point of erasure might suit 1%ers like Mr Savage and other top Vs, but would be death to real gays.

If the individual letters of LVBTQetc. want to remain glued together, then I respect their right to agency while thinking it a less than optimal decision.

113

I don't know XiaoGui17, at least in New Zealand the term "virtue-signalling" has only just started being heard regularly, and it's exclusively used to deride left-leaning people.

The most notable example so far has been a loudmouth conservative ex-politician saying that radio broadcasters who introduce themselves and offers greetings in Te Reo Maori (NZ's indigeneous language) are virtue-signalling "at its worst'. Personally I love hearing it, and I use it in email correspondence for greetings and signoffs, which is (of course) also derided as virtue signalling.

114

Busy @113: Agree. I've never heard left-wingers deride an anti-gay pastor for "virtue signalling." They'd call that example "homophobia," which isn't a virtue. The context in which I generally see the term used is to bash vegans and other environmentalists, with the user of the term implying that they are only trying to appear better than others rather than expressing genuine concern for animals or the environment. It's dismissive; it's basically a way for people who've been reminded that they should be doing better to dispel their guilt at eating meat/not recycling/whatever the "virtue" in question is. Or indeed, as you say, to shut down a male feminist by questioning his motives.

115

NZ seems such a paradise with your PM, busy.

116

Mss Quilting/Fan - The notorious Dr Winters and her circle do call some things from the other side Virtue Signaling, but most of their examples are things I call Vice Signals. A prime example is how an MRA who never had anti-gay policy positions began greatly increasing his use of the F word because he "liked seeing the way it triggered a lot of snowflakes". Anti-gay pastors are presumably sincere in their positions (although I could see some of them feeling pushed into exaggerated stances); the Signal requires an inflation or even contradiction of one's actual stance presented for a gain in reputation.

117

@114 BiDanFan
"Agree. I've never heard left-wingers deride an anti-gay pastor for "virtue signalling."

Yes, to deserve being bashed with that, right-wingers would first need to HAVE virtue.

"They'd call that example "homophobia," which isn't a virtue."

My pet peeve is I wish the term "homophobia" were substituted with the more accurate "anti-gay bigotry" since the behavior they display is HATE, not fear (aka phobia)(unless you count, and I MOST DEFINITELY DO, their fear of being discovered to be secretly gay themselves because they're too weak to face the bigotry they perpetrate).

118

@177 vennominon "Anti-gay pastors are presumably sincere in their positions"

Except for the, say, half of them that are secretly gay themselves.

119

@118 of course not. I'm sure they sincerely hate their own gayness.

120

@119 Registered European
Ooops course you're correct. Plus they probably hate themselves too.

@117
p.s. on the term "homophobia".
The best thing about the term is I'm sure rightwingers hate it (since their whole toxic pathology is about distracting from that they are primarily/fundamentally driven by fear, because they have not developed beyond that).

But as I was saying, it bugs me that the term 'praises them with faint damning' (in that 'fear' of homosexuals is not as bad or accurate as the truth that they hate homosexuals and virulently discriminate against them).

121

Curious @117: You're Venn's new best friend!
Sorry but the word "homophobia," whether completely accurate to its Greek root suffix, has become the established term in English for "anti-gay bigotry."
And I'm not convinced it isn't a phobia. The best definition of homophobia I've seen is "the fear that gay men will treat you the way you treat women." Transphobia? The fear that the beautiful woman you've just met has a penis, or that she'll rape your child if the two are alone together in a women's bathroom. There's an irrational fear amongst the opponents of same-sex marriage that granting gay people this right will render hetero marriages meaningless, and men who hate lesbians fear becoming irrelevant. There IS fear behind the hate; it IS cowardly to revile people who are different instead of trying to understand them.

Venn @116: While we're on neologisms, I do prefer Curious2's term "asshole signalling" to your more direct parallel of "vice signalling." There are lots of vices, some of which are harmless and fun. What right-wing trolls are signalling is that they are assholes.

122

Harriet, if you're still around, here's a piece by one of the trans masculine people whose issues you dismissed upthread:
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/07/17/trans-masculine-people-are-being-excluded-from-the-conversation
"Because of the lazy assumption that being trans masculine is somehow “easy”, because of the belief that trans men can pass by unnoticed, as men, our trans masculine stories are erased."

123

@121 BiDanFan "There IS fear behind the hate"

I'm sure you're right! And when the term "homophobia" was born, perhaps pointing that out was more powerful (and more acceptable to the masses of a culture disgustingly accepting of it) than my preferred but much longer and more unwieldly phrase.

But it still bugs me that they're being called on the lesser evil. But perhaps (I hope) doing so remains more effective even now.

124

A classic example of Virtue Signaling arises at the beginning of this week's podcast, when Mr Savage's first comment in its entirety is, "I'm on Team Serena." He manifests no understanding whatsoever of tennis, doesn't clarify what actions he thought were right or wrong, and offers nothing constructive for going forward, but just shows what a Good Person he is.

I am on Team Institute-a-Workable-Coaching-Policy, but shall manifest knowledge of tennis and clarify my views on particular actions. (In a reverse of the French Open catsuit ban, I could take a brief arguing Saturday's incidents were racist, but would decline to argue that they were sexist. The most sexist thing that occurred at this tournament was that a woman [Alize Cornet] was given a Code of Conduct violation for changing her shirt on court.)

At least this time the umpire had a known track record as being on the strict side. (I believe in this tournament he was one of the few umpires to dock a player a first serve for not serving within 25 seconds. the "serve clock" being a new innovation this year, and just in time, as Novak Djokovic has had to reduce his ball-bouncing before serving to about seventeen times when in the past he's gone over thirty.) Personally, I'd rank this between the 2009 and 2011 brouhahas.

To go incident by incident - Given how this umpire has construed a call of, "Vamos!" from Toni Nadal as constituting coaching Rafa and that M Mouratoglou's hand gesture was one of the more blatant instances I've seen, I am not surprised at all by the call, although other umpires would have looked the other way. In my own time as an umpire (In my day, I umpired for and ran junior tournaments, and called a number of adult matches), though I called foot faults, I only encountered illicit coaching once or twice. At the time it was simply a case of removing the coach (parent) from the match, which probably helped the player more than otherwise. Ms Williams' response was out of the ordinary. I am entirely prepared to accept that she only saw M Mouratoglou's thumbs, and readily acknowledge that, at WTA tour events that permit one on-court coaching visit per set (plus occasions when the opponent leaves the court), she never calls him onto the court. Her explanation that, while the umpire wouldn't know it, she and her coach didn't have a code, and that she would rather lose than cheat, was composed but irrelevant. Players have protested violation calls for coaching, but without choosing to interpret them as personal attacks on their characters.

2 - A woman posting in the threads attached to the Slate article by Josh Levin wrote many times that NO MAN was ever penalized a point for breaking a racquet. Even if true, her claim was classic misdirection. Equipment abuse is a Code of Conduct violation, just as coaching is. The first CoC violation calls for a warning, the second calls for a point penalty, then a game penalty for subsequent violations. (At one time, the fourth incident constituted grounds for being defaulted.) Which violation occurs is irrelevant. Most players who have already received a warning will be careful not to break a racquet, or will accept the point penalty if they do. It has been suggested that Ms W thought that the warning had been rescinded. (For the sake of thoroughness, as many players will throw or drop a racquet without intending to break it, the general standard is to play at least one more point with that racquet before changing it. Ms Williams' racquet was clearly smashed. Her Slate defender claimed that women who smash racquets are always castigated while men receive sympathy, but that just called to mind the Charleston tournament on green clay in the spring a few years ago, when Pam Shriver, calling a match between Samantha Stosur and Vera Zvonareva, gave Ms Z's smashing her racquet to smithereens a thorough and highly entertaining endorsement.)

3 - The broken racquet had occurred when Ms W, after going ahead in the second set, lost her serve to give Ms Osaka the serve at 2-3, 15-0. Others have weathered such a penalty and Ms W has overcome similar adversity in the past, but this time, she was ruffled enough to drop serve again to go down 3-4 with Ms O to serve. Ms W began to harangue the umpire as she walked to her chair for the change of ends, demanding from him the apology he "owed" her, then telling him when he would not apologize not to speak to her, and calling him a thief, for "stealing" a point from her. Personally I'm closest to the position of Mary Jo Fernandez, that the umpire could have told Ms W she'd reached the limit and any continuation of the harangue would result in another violation. The penalty was loss of a game, the first such penalty I'd seen at the US Open since Jimmy Connors was penalized a game for a similar exchange with the umpire in a match against Stefan Edberg. Now here I think one MIGHT be able to make the case that Ms Sharapova might have gotten away with calling the umpire a thief and a liar.

During the visit of the referee, I did have sympathy for Ms W when she complained that she understood that the referee couldn't reverse the game penalty, but that these things kept happening to her. Her playing the gender and especially the Working Mother card were understandable but not really applicable.

Verdict - More deft umpiring could have resulted in there being no game penalty. The original warning was at least defensible; the point penalty was automatic. Ms W would have come out of this sympathetically had it been left at her not seeing more than what appeared to be thumbs up. Once she went into Superhero mode, the chance of its ending well was poor.

To go forward, the simple answer might be to allow coaching at Grand Slams. The against such a course was most clear in the 2017 men's semifinals. Sr Nadal lost the first set to Sr del Potro because he was avoiding his opponent's forehand side and letting Sr dP get grooved on the backhand side and be able to run around it to hit inside-out forehands. Without benefit of coaching, Sr N solved the problem, began hitting judiciously to the forehand to open up the court, and won the next three sets rather handily. Both Williams sisters have shown similar problem-solving capacity, as has Hr Federer (though often not against Sr N). There may be an answer that would result in less than a Code of Conduct violation being issued against the player. I hope for a productive conversation along such a line.

If anyone is going to disagree, please do more than merely claim membership on the non-existing "Team Serena".

126

Venn - I have to know - what's your handle on Slate? I have a few guesses...

127

@124. Venn. It gives me great pleasure to say you have convinced me on every point.

128

@122. Bi. Back from a long weekend--hiking again, then a crazy workday yesterday. To discover that my contributions prompt a mild college professor to thoughts of homicide!

Incidentally the writer in the Economist has the same (sort of) experience of bodily gender dysphoria I do. The assumption that trans men pass unproblematically, while trans women 'have it hard' can be lazy, yes. I thoroughly agree with the writer's insistence on the variety of trans/GQ identities, most notably where the urge to queer gender binaries can often be at odds with, while at other times feeling continuous with, a desire to 'pass'. My original point was that the person jibbing at 'I'm a cis woman etc.' wasn't checking his privilege. I still think this. Yes--he may have trouble being accepted in his reassigned gender. But he wasn't picking up on men partitioning themselves unnecessarily and prejudicially wrt his claim on his gender, but on the usage of an enlightened or feminist woman.

129

@112. Venn. In one sense, I do think the Q subsumes every other letter in a way you don't. To my mind, Evan Urquhart is not a straight man (he's a man or trans man; it's fine if he wants to call himself a 'straight man' but I'd prefer it if he says something like 'I've become a straight man', 'come to be a straight man'; 'now that I'm a straight man'. And as far as I can see, he isn't claiming an undifferentiatedly normative status as a straight man). His wife is still a lesbian and still queer. Their marriage queers a heterosexual marriage, while being a heterosexual marriage.

I fear we live in times of escalating political extremity.

130

To wrap this up:

Virtue-signalling, in colloquial use, is almost always used in a negative sense, ie, casting aspersions on someone's sincerity. I never made the argument that this isn't the normal meaning. My annoyance was that I explicitly spelled out that I was using it in a non-standard manner in the post, and ? actively chose to disregard that in order to insult me (for no particular reason other than they seemed to enjoy it). While I generally find these fights actively unpleasant, I'm not going to sit here and pretend I'm not bothered.


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