Ow, a bee stung me!

I cannot imagine ever being too tired out to cause trouble, much less the local commentariat. I suspect that we will all lurk silently to lull you in complacency. Then, once you present your musings (I’m thinking something at the level of typical of Douthat or Brooks), we will come out swinging and take you down. There may be some regrettable but unavoidable collateral damage along the way.

The story of the pizza parlor summarizes everything that is stupid and wrong about America.

First, the pizza parlor co-owner says that she would refuse to cater pizzas for a gay wedding, if a gay couple ever asked her to deliver shoddy pizza parlor pizzas to a wedding which obviously none of them have ever done. So her denial of service was a fantasy. Some people read _50 Shades of Grey_ and fantasize about something like that, some fantasize about God looking on approvingly as they don’t deliver crappy pizzas to a gay wedding.

Next, some coach gets investigated for supposedly tweeting that the place should be burned down. You know, I don’t even care that the tweet was probably of the “heads on pikes” variety. Anything that remotely sounds like let’s burn the pizza place down _Do The Right Thing_ Spike Lee style because of someone’s unapproved fantasy is stupid and vicious enough. Left activism, people!

Next, the right wing outrage machine raises $800K + for the pizza place. Will they ever even have to sell pizzas again? Like, should they even bother to ever reopen?

Maybe outrage storms can be the basis of our new economy. We’ll all work for disposable income that we can send off to some recipient chosen essentially at random, and the recipient will get Two Minutes Hate plus $800 K, plus someone else will get Two Minutes Hate and lose their job. It all balances out.

You just compared my husband to both David Brooks and Ross “I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won’t” Douthat, marcel. You say you don’t want me to be full of venom what I will direct towards your own beloved eye like unto a spitting cobra, but on the internet (so, maybe less like a cobra, and more like 8chan). But how was that not a vicious slam against me, personally, right there? Like, a strong, strong implication that I would sex David Brooks up? I can put up with a lot in the name of free discussion, but a woman has to draw the line somewhere. Any further suggestions that I would–in all likelihood–engage in oral congress with tepid “what the New York Times thinks Republicans sound like” pundits will be met with napalm. Additionally I will use some sort of igniting substance, so that the napalm is burning and not just, you know, hanging around as a flammable gel. It’s still very dangerous, of course, but less frightening in the very short term. Nope, on fire. Because look at Ross “I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won’t” Douthat’s visage, which is slowly enlarging at all edges towards clayish podgy quadrilatery, so the brow’s lofty aspirations have become brick-like, and the face part is left ever-lonelier in the middle. Do you want to allow him near your…I’m at a loss…area? You do not. Well, marcel, in this respect you and I are just alike.

Wow!!! A wedding without pizza!!! Oh! The Horror!!! Someone please help out an old phart who is disconnected from current culture, and let me know if pizza is the new new thing in weddings.

Blaze TV fans and forward-the-email-friends raised more than $800K for the pizza place to not work. Or is it people intend the money to compensate for the loss of revenue resulting from the owners choosing to not operate during these stressful times? Either way, perhaps it’s important to hold onto the logic at work in the reasoning of these supporters of the Memories Pizza: when people are dispossessed of their means to financial participation, we support them by providing them aid and monetary support. Thus, when endemic poverty afflicts someone so that they cannot easily develop their own means of entry into exchange and markets, these tens of thousands of supporters of Memories Pizza demonstrate they already believe we should pool our resources together and help them out, too. Rather than call them homophobes or bigots or whatever insult will make one feel morally righteous, call them subsidizers, socialists, or communists. While consent to give remains important, as it should, the logic of corporate assistance—we show solidarity and values as one body by how we share and distribute resources—remains the same. Framing the issue this way might help either or all of the sides involved to think more about what these “shows of support” mean not only within the group but outside the groups, and how we might grow our groups to include one another if that were what we want…

It is true, though, that self-righteousness motivates a lot of people to threaten or harass complete strangers across the planet for expressing their opinions, and these crowds of people now shut down businesses, organizations, individuals who otherwise would have only harmed—if we understand expressing opinions and views as harm at all—a comparatively much smaller number of people. They produce actual harm for saying something found ‘offensive’ or ‘socially backward’, rather than for demonstrated behaviors of hatred or antipathy.

Is this the progress of reason? Is this what we can expect from the moral democracy of our time? At this time when the greatest number of people now have an outlet for their voices to be heard, there’s an awful lot of ease with which people seek to not only demand conformity in what we say publicly but enforce it through economic disruption and social ostracism.

But even then, why not allow space to those people who want to remain aloof or separate from the social bodies people more easily assemble into these days? Swarms, hives, mobs, crowds: moral panics afflict reasonable and righteous people regardless of how they view gods or laws or justices; there isn’t really any sign that people who are “liberal” or “progressive” swarm any less than people who are “traditional” or “conservative.” But they will not allow someone to have their freedom away from either side, both sides, those sides—everyone has to be included in the misanthropy flood, because the social life demands a demonstration of how far we’re willing to go to side with one and not the other. These demonstrations have to outdo the previous ones; they have to be hurtful; they have to teach a lesson; they have to humiliate; they have to shame; they have to mock—because respecting another person for wearing different colors as the human they are is just not right any more.

Liberal folk enjoy blood in the water just as much as suburban evangelicals, as when people enjoy watching this or that Internet friend take down, burn, or rip into whatever scapegoat is theirs for the day.

And if the scapegoat violates social norms, all the justification is already there to lynch. We just have to provoke the scapegoat, poke its shoulders, call it names, antagonize it into striking back. We cannot let it alone.

The beast we feed will never be satisfied with whatever goats we slaughter. Once we cannot let it alone, it will never leave us alone, neither.

Nice turn of phrase. I hope my own governator, Walker: Taxes Ranger, soon complains of many stings.

My fav quote from the parlor owner: “That lifestyle is something they choose. I choose to be heterosexual. They choose to be homosexual. Why should I be beat over the head to go along with something they choose?”

I always want to ask what morning it was that these people woke up, yawned and stretched, and said to themselves “Know what? I think I’m going to be hetero for the rest of my life!”

Was you ever stung by a dead bee?

You will NEVER get to 1,000 comments on this bullshit.

However much I might look down on this small-minded pizza purveyor, I can’t help thinking this is a storm in a stuffed crust. Does it make me a concern troll to suggest that it’s poor manners to criticise wedding choices? 21 years ago, we got a local vegetarian workers’ co-operative to cater at our wedding, and the food included some excellent pizza.

[silently lurking]

C’mon, marcel. Get off your ass and give Belle her comeuppance.

We need the eggs entertainment.

Belle @7:

Nice!

But just one tiny infinitesimal point: I’ve suddenly realized I have a burning desire to see the birth of ‘quadrilaterality’, not so much as a realization of the derivational process, but on the grounds of pure euphonia.

(I’m not that excited about the imminent realization of Douthat’s facial quadrilaterality, as it would be just the final manifestation of his inner essence.)

I’m outraged by the trivialization of bee stings. Bees, bless their little hearts, we couldn’t live without them, kill more Americans than rattlesnakes, sharks, bears or spiders. So, for that matter, do dogs.

I was allergic, got a two-year series of shots, so maybe I’m immune. I’ve learned to be comfortable around them. My flagpole is nestled up against a native lilac bush which is thronged by bees through the months it’s in bloom, so on the days I want to fly something I have to nudge my way to the cleat warily, gently, respectfully.

To me, “quadrilateral” evokes Milan’s fashion district.

The pizza place other co-owner later specified that they don’t discriminate in normal deliveries (which I’m willing to believe, given that I don’t think too many people call them and say “I’d like a large pizza with pepperoni delivered and by the way I am gay”) and if you were poor enough to have to have their pizza at your wedding I don’t think you’d ask them to cater, I think you’d just order 5 pizzas or something like that. But once again: by their own claim, and not contradicted by anyone, they have never catered a wedding of any kind. All of the stuff about how poor people get married, and about how businesses shouldn’t turn down money etc. is beside the point, because this was simply a fantasy on the co-owner’s part.

“You say it if you have just utterly failed to foresee a wildly foreseeable but minor injury.”

Indiana’s RFRA is not a “minor injury” sadly. It is codifying discrimination into law. Kind of unAmerican, in that invidious way the GOP has decided to be unpatriotic and unAmerican.

PatrickinIowa @15 – I love that movie! (It’s better than the original book, actually.)

It comes to something when the best thing one has ever done to bring joy into the world is adopting a slightly silly pseudonym for the purposes of commenting on a blog, but there you go.

Is the reason that this thread doesn’t have hundreds of comments that it’s basically a happy-ish story? It looks like the reactionaries have backed down, at least to the reasonable position of accepting a balance between freedom of opinion for religious people and, um, consumer choice (is that the principle?) for gay people? If so, at least one cheer for non-idiocy.

Not being an American, a lot of the “they say it’s about X, but really it’s about Y” (where X is some high-minded thing like ‘freedom’ and Y is ‘I hates them faggets’) stuff is something I have to take on trust from people who know the situation better. I can imagine a principled argument in that says that nobody should have to serve someone else without explicit individual consent, and that we have no right to ask questions about why they choose to give or withhold that consent. I’m unable to square this with my personal preference that absolutely anyone should be able to buy pizza from absolutely any pizza shop. I’m a tiny bit concerned that this argument ends up getting resolved on the basis of the character of the people arguing for the former position (viz. that they are knuckle-dragging homophobes), because I instinctively feel that this isn’t a great way of deciding political arguments in general. But, since I can’t do any better myself, and the outcome is one I agree with, I suppose this is one of those times when the culture war seems to have ended with the right side winning and it’s not really worth asking any more questions.

I mean, I appreciate it as a fantasy. There’s all these gay people mysteriously wanting pizza for their wedding, maybe spreading out in the right of the frame if you imagine this scene as a rectangular picture or video still. And there’s the pizza co-owner, center stage with a big pile of pizzas stacked up to the left, virtuously but sadly refusing to sell them pizza, and in a little circular inset in the upper left corner of the frame there’s the face of God, white-bearded, looking down with approval as someone follows his commands. Someone just shared a bit of their fantasy life, and it’s a BDSM kind of fantasy (they are sadistically denying the wedding party the pizza that the wedding party inexplicably wants to buy, yet they are in a masochistic part of the frame, suffering criticism and having to be mean to someone because of God, so they get to combine both). But no actual gay people were harmed in the creation of this fantasy.

Rich@35,

Not-serving-pizza-at-gay-weddings porn is a small niche, but underserved.

I object to the misleading rearrangement of these panels from Hit Comics #1 (July 1940, Quality). By omitting the establishing shot of the first panel of the second tier (dialogue: “What the’-?? The RED BEE!!!”) and realigning the panels, Mr. Holbo has fraudulently introduced an element of incoherence into a story that was doing very well at being incoherent on its own, thank you very much. Thug #1 (brownish suit, not the guy in red or the one in green plaid) is standing in front of the desk of Boss Storm (blue suit, professorial) when the Red Bee enters (fabulous striped tights there, RB, but I’d consider something less BROWN brown for the sleeves, and perhaps black boots to match the belt) just prior to the commencement of the stinging/punching. This textual mistreatment suppresses the REAL question: how does Thug #1 transform from being blonde in tier 1, panel 3 to a brunette in the being-punched sequence? (He stays airborne for another full punching panel, by the way.) The story’s author, B.H. Apiary, must be rolling over in his grave.

Rich @36:

Maybe the wedding party are the masochists so both sides are getting off in a “the masochict begged the sadist to hit him and the sadist wouldn’t do it” kind of way.

To Parse @ 41 “I note that Miami has a law forbidding dry cleaners to charge more for women’s clothes than for men’s”

Actually, charging more for women’s clothes was discrimination… now prevented by the Miami law.

Indiana’s new law codifies the right of a person to discriminate against another person. Feel free to celebrate…

Re; Belle at 28: Did Douthat really no kidding claim ( in print of course) (not that it matters really) that knowledge of a potential partner’s use of birth control effectively de-bonered him?

De-bone Douthat. Has a nice ring.

Parse.. “And I note that you haven’t challenged my belief that there are some instances of discrimination which are actually not injuries at all, but instead positive development in the law.”

I am not speaking of all sorts of different discriminatory laws. I’m speaking of this particular new law in Indiana, which is not at all a positive development in the law. You may feel legal discrimination is a “minor” issue. I do not.

@ 50

It’s not a bee. It’s a nano-drone. The proof is out there.

Philo Vahinger: it is supposed to be “wildly foreseeable.” Did you actually read a post by such a finicky person and think he hadn’t intended it? You didn’t get the joke about how getting stung by a bee while facing down the Red Bee is a “wildly foreseeable” injury? Didn’t slow you down for a moment?

Stephenson-quoter-kun: this is unquestionably but one among the many activities you engage in that make people super-happy.

#4: A “Lost Cause”, as it were…

I was going to say likewise, it’s the Lost Cause That Keeps On Losing. I don’t know why people universally assume that the South, as a social movement, lost the Civil War, aka the War of Northern Aggression. I think it’s really really sad that the history of local control vs. federalism has got caught up with the issue of slavery*. I mean, locally Seattle can have a $15 wage and Massachusetts can do something towards universal health care. From here it looks tough on the people of Kansas, but important to recall that most folks there like it that way and those that don’t might fit in here in Oregon, maybe. Federalism might be a nifty idea on paper, but apparently it has no defense against creeping reactionism, which de natura has no brief at all for progress.

Maybe a more proper role for the federality (vs. enforcing uniform good manners everywhere) would be to enable Voting By Feet, on the assumption that people who like it where they are will do the best and most creative job of taking care of the place. Even in re coal, there’s something to it that it’s outside agitators (the money folks from NYC and Chi) who are causing the problems. Note that the new world order, which is federalized reactionism on the largest scale, has a strong vested interest in keeping people contained within arbitrary “states”.

* … pointing out that the Dutch managed to dismantle their slave empire without wrecking the country.