Thursday, March 27, 2008

Gentlemen, start your thesauruses...

Monday March 31 is Civility in Progressive Blogging Day.


Progressive bloggers are often scolded (there's just no other word) by our conservative counterparts for playing fast and loose with language, specifically the *liberal* use of profanity. We do it because sometimes all the words in Webster's are insufficient to express our response to the ongoing stupidity that oozes out of Wingnuttia on a daily basis. A judiciously-employed curse here and there helps to get the point across with feeling, but ultimately leads to pants-pissingly shrill accusations that progressives are potty-mouths who swear because they lack the syntactic finesse to express themselves any other way.

That's fucking ridiculous: our use of profanity is no reflection on our deft semantic skills. We can be civil, we just don't want to. And we'll prove it: CC throws down the gauntlet:
"Canada's Retard-o-sphere (aka The Blogging Tories) are constantly pissing and moaning about how we leftists ... well, we progressives ... well, OK, me and my two co-bloggers ... are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people because we use the kind of language normally reserved for late-night porn or private sessions between Father Murphy and little Billy in the confession booth long after the parishioners have fled the building.

Conversely, we on
this side of the sanity line constantly accuse the BTs of being pig-ignorant hypocrites or just flat-out lying douchebags. Hence, this challenge, in which I want the members of Canada's progressive blogging commmunity to be calm, cool and collected for a whole 24-hour stretch, while everyone over there in the Wank-o-sphere tries to be honest for the same period."
CC's challenge is kind of a double-edged sword. For our part, all we have to do is cut out the swearing and gratuitous insults for a day. It might be the first day in over a year that I don't type the word "nitwit" at some point -- unless, of course, I'm pointing out that it would be incivil to call so-and-so a "nitwit". But never mind that -- Wingnuttia faces a far more rigorous task: be honest. That means:

No posts claiming that fetuses are slaves, and feminists are today's white supremacists;

No posts claiming snow is proof that Global Warming is a hoax;

No posts about how Hitler was a "leftist";

No posts deriding lie-beral libtard leftard moonbats.

Etc.

ACR is in, so is TGB. We can do this -- can they? Speaking of Global Warming, the expression "a snowball's chance in hell" comes to mind.