If you have a legitimate problem with CoffeeCatholic being on the feed (like that she doesn’t post much about fat or has gruesome pictures, and not that you just don’t agree with her or think she’s mean while everyone on the Fatosphere is fair), please email me at big dot liberty at gmail dot com.

I know quite well what logical fallacies are, and what an ad hom is (and it doesn’t apply to just groups, btw). My non-leftie brain isn’t incapable of absorbing the knowledge. Booga booga!

And yes, I am making fun of you, because you resorted to such a drippingly condescending comment which I DO perceive as both a personal and group attack (something I perceive akin wielding of the privilege knapsacks). If you don’t like it, please don’t read my blog OR the Fat Liberation feed.

If you can’t see the difference between a reader feeling uncomfortable by a writer suggesting they have privilege and a reader feeling uncomfortable because the writer’s calling them a manly-looking killer… see any rhetoric text.

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/adhomine.html

CC isn’t as descriptive-orientated as blogs on the other side of the aisle who categorize people, but I don’t think that she has any less of a right to talk about what she sees as a problem in certain groups which categorize themselves in a certain way.

If you’re bothered by what you see as ad hom on CC’s, I’d have to say that it has mostly to do with your perspective. I’ve seen (in a post, not the comments, not that that really matters in my opinion) Libertarians so ad-hommed in a post on SP on “personal responsibility.” There really isn’t as much difference as you think, if you step out of your political category and try to look at the rhetoric from each side objectively.

There’s plenty in the comments at Shapely Prose which is as group-targeting as what you read on CoffeeCatholic:

From here:

“Great googly moogly. I knew the Republicans had it out for the American people, but I had no idea it was that bad.”

“… I had the misfortune to watch a video of Sarah Palin’s interview with Charles Gibson this morning. What a hateful, angry person! I don’t think I’d want her as vice president even if she was a liberal.

I’m pissed off that polling numbers for McCain are improving after appointing this horrid woman…”

CC’s blog doesn’t allow comments, but you have to know that I consider what is allowed through moderation to be just as susceptible to criticism as the blog post itself. Allowing other people to make the ad hominem attacks for you doesn’t absolve you from the responsibility for public posting those attacks.

There’s more like this, but I really don’t want to wade through 100+ posts with 50+ comments per post. I went through 20 comments on ONE post, and found ad hominem attacks.

There’s also plenty on Fatshionista about what people on the Fatosphere think about self-professed “color-blind” individuals.

I think this:

When discussions of privilege pop up – whether white privilege, thin privilege, class privilege – that’s the objection I most commonly see/hear. It’s hard to talk about and it is divisive and it makes them feel bad and why do we have to talk about these things at all?

If discussions about privilege make you uncomfortable, that is a good thing.

If discussions about racism make you uncomfortable, that is a good thing.

If discussions about politics, fat hate, sexism, homophobia, etc., etc., etc., make you uncomfortable? That is a good thing.

Discomfort is USEFUL.

from this post on the Rotund is pretty insulting, yet another attempt to justify the utility of citing privilege. This later quote:

“Why does acknowledging privilege make you feel (as it does a couple of people I know) backed into a corner?”

Is a personal attack on all people who think privilege lists are worthless tools of haughty elitists who are more interested in showing off how “anti-racist” by fingering others who are less “anti-racist” than they are (which is a function of how enlightened you are to your own privilege, apparently). This post made me feel furious and personally attacked. Yet another misleading diatribe on the assumptions some left-leaning individuals make about people unwilling to swallow their racist tripe.

I don’t agree with CC’s personal attacks, certainly. But why do you think she thinks that way? She’s grouping people, and maybe unfairly, but why do you think other blogs and bloggers on the Fatosphere aren’t doing this? Because I see something very different.

“These Feminist-Liberals loooove it when their fellow human beings are killed… they kill babies, they kill the elderly, they kill the infirm and the ill and the disabled… yes, oh yes, killing human beings is the answer to all of their problems. ”

and

“…you creepy man-looking Feminist/Liberals cannot even begin to imagine what it means to love beyond your selfish self-serving selves”

These are an ad hominem attacks of an entire (and diverse) group with whom she disagrees. How is this speech defensible or in any way conducive to reasonable discussion?

Your response to “Dancing” is to argue that what seems “mainstream” to liberals is “extreme” to conservatives, but you don’t address “Dancing”‘s main point, which is that CoffeeCatholic engages in outright, unapologetic name-calling, insulting those with whom she doesn’t agree and always making blanket generalizations from specific examples as if those specific examples speak for *all* feminists and/or liberals.

The problem isn’t with her conservatism but with her rhetorical attacks on readers of the fatosphere. And I’d honestly like to see where, in, say, Shapely Prose or The Rotund, you see similarly hateful language from Kate or The Rotund herself.

That being said, I’m going to look into disincluding pictures on the feed. Sorry about that.

It’s pictures that bug me. There are things you can’t un-see. I’m pyrophobic like whoa, and seeing a charred dead child? That image is going to be there for months, if not longer. That doesn’t mean anyone has to have a policy about pictures on their blogs/feeds, that just means that i’ve learned to be careful when i read certain feeds.

Even so: your blog, your rules, your decision. I have the option of not reading.

Thanks for your understanding. I’m not trying to ram politics down anyone’s throat — there’s politics all over all the feeds right now, because of the US election. I just think that it wouldn’t be fair to take CC off the feed for simply having different politics (and religion) than the average Fatosphere blogger.

HOWEVER, if I do see anything on there that I consider trollish and hateful (like saying people in a certain group don’t deserve equal rights or treatment due to their membership in that group), I will consider taking her off the feed. I haven’t seen anything like that yet, and I don’t think there will be anything like that, but no one is exempt from being taken off the FL feed if it’s deemed necessary.