In going back over Nathanael Blake’s comments over the April 2007 VT shootings as referenced below, I found a couple of things: a) “And Yet I am Unmoved” -- a follow-up article to Blake’s column “Where Were The Men?” which immediately criticized male students after the shootings for not attacking Cho as he sprayed Norris Hall with gunfire, and; b) the following reply by an author named “Spatula” who offers Blake a rebuttal that is 100 times better than any I could have provided last year.
You already are a coward. First, with your insults of the dead and the survivors, then with your intellectually dishonest self-justification.
You called the dead cowards. You called men and women who risked their lives to hold doors shut cowards.
"True, I've never had someone come into my classroom and start shooting. But I've never been married, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't disqualify me from saying that adultery and wife-beating are wrong, and criticizing those who commit adultery and beat their wives."
This is a false equivalency. There's a damn big difference between saying domestic violence is wrong and making up stuff about what you think people are capable of doing under fire based on nothing but a fanciful sense of machismo. You had little knowledge of this event and clearly did no research into the history or science of how people react to such situations and why. Yet this didn't stop you from preaching about manliness by heaping contempt on the dead.
"I am sorry if I have caused pain. I meant to have a discussion on a social and political commentary website of something I find interesting in this: why so few resisted, even after they expected to be killed. Social and political commentary sites are, by their very nature, going to discuss uncomfortable and painful issues....It wasn't I who started e-mailing social and political commentary to everyone I could find at VT."
So this is the conservative idea of responsibility - "it wasn't me." What part of the World Wide Web do you not understand? How dishonest - you know your potential audience includes Virginia Tech - that group has conservatives who read online journals like anyone else. Your words show up on Google, on Technorati. If you really didn't want a public reaction or the VT students to see, you would have had this discussion in a more private place.
You wanted a public reaction and now that you're getting it, you are trying to blame someone else.
Also you didn't just discuss "something I find interesting" in a dispassionate abstract observation on policy or manliness. You went on a rant specifically targeting the victims, [and] mocking their specific actions.
Face it, you were heartless and assumed you wouldn't get called on it. If you feel unhappy because now you held responsible by those victims, then it's on you.
Don't try to pretend you didn't say this:
"College classrooms have scads of young men who are at their physical peak, and none of them seems to have done anything beyond ducking, running, and holding doors shut...Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that."
Except these students - including women - held those doors shut at risk of their own lives.
By this point many people, some of them real men with real courage, have pointed out that manliness is not suicidal unarmed attacks on an armed opponent when there is possibility of escape. That's the sort of stupid sacrifice which adds to the death toll while doing nothing to end the danger.
It takes a true coward to sit in high judgment from a position of safety without all the facts, then to pretend it isn't their fault if the victims are offended.
Your idea of manliness seems cribbed from pop culture and your own insecurities, not reality. Well let me tell ya something, pilgrim - John Wayne and Clint Eastwood didn't call dead civilian victims cowards. Ronald Reagan wouldn't spout off on what wimps the dead were shortly after a slaughter. George Bush didn't say anything like that.
That was you.
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