lolgaxe wrote:
It's what he thinks is a distraction. He believes that if he focuses on the etymology of the word we'll somehow forget that the person that used it meant to be insulting with it.
The entire thing is a distraction. I've stated multiple times that he clearly meant it to be insulting. I've never denied that. My argument has been that the fact that he leveled an insult about her based on her appearance does not in any way make her position magically "correct". Nor does it make his statement that her position and opinion is moonbattery "false".
The idea that we should all just ignore the positions being argued and focus instead on who called whom what is silly.
And yes, on the issue of what he specifically called her, I got it more in the classic sense of dismissing someone as a skinhead, not because of the connotation between the term and it's association with racist groups who opted for that style, but because of the earlier connotation that skinheads were often people who were angry about injustice in the world, but weren't often very good at articulating it, and often had very bad ideas about what to do about it, were otherwise ignorant of the facts surrounding the issues, and otherwise were a group of people best described as a hot mess. The skinhead movement was driven by a sense of "wrongness" in the world, which they somehow magically could perceive, and to which the answer was to step outside the mainstream and show just how different you could be, rejecting the norms, calling for "action", etc. But in a very non-hippy way, of course. It was all about counter culture.
And yeah, once you understand that motivation, it's pretty clear why racist groups gravitated to the same mindset and style. The difference is that what they saw as "problems" in the world were not things like world hunger, lack of jobs, lack of opportunity, lack of respect, etc, but focused on racial groups they did not like and whom they blamed for those things. It's not like it's hard to see the pattern here. The racist movements often feed on those other movements, grabbing up disaffected people and pointing them in a direction and giving them a target to focus their anger on. But the actual overlap between racist and skinheads, even today, is pretty freaking small. It's just that most people who fit the classic "skinhead" model, no longer call themselves that, specifically to distance themselves from the racial connotation.
Honestly though, "working class person with anger at unfairness in the world, adopting a radicalized wardrobe to indicate disaffection with the norm, and show how much they are in opposition to that norm, including short hairstyles, piercings, tats, and other ways to stand out" is a heck of a mouthful to say. Maybe we should come up with a new, short, term then?
