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Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Ilion's Minions

'BigFurHat,' the fluffy-headed Big Cheese at the 'iOwnTheWorld' blog, says (in the comments) that 'Ilioncentrism' is "a blog that gets 43 hits a day."

This, O My Minions, is great news, is it not? And, yet, I must confess to you, with heavy heart, that the news contains for me a dram of sadness. For, you are not commenting (if I may coin the word) 'miniously.'

As I told my esteemed college, the Big Fluffy-Headed Cheese, "without some feedback, there is only so much I can do to offer [My Minions] interesting essays and links to others’ thoughts."

21 comments:

Ilíon said...

In breaking news, the Big Fuzzy Head has indicated his unilateral surrender

Joan of Argghh! said...

Ah, I'm a pushover for comment fodder. Like another blog says, "blogging is easy, commenting is hard."

Ilíon said...

Hello, Joan; welcome to my blog. I know I've seen you somewhere, but we've never spoken.

Ilíon said...

And, I've always thought that your name is witty; don't know why, it just makes me smile when I see it.

Ilíon said...

In a late breaking update to the above news item: the Big Furry Brain *still* does not grasp the fact that when I used the word 'conflate,' I meant exactly, and properly, that.

Sheesh! I guess you can lead (or direct, as the case may be) a Honkin' Big Brain to the dictionary, but you still can't make him update his vocabulary.

Joan of Argghh! said...

Hmmm. . . you linked me with the math doodling video. I thought I said hello then! If not, allow me to thank you again. And, well, hello.

Ilíon said...

There are a good half-dozen guys and two gals who comment here from time to time. I'll be right disappointed if they don't at least say hello to you -- *I'm* the introvert, after all.

Drew said...

I think comments are overrrated. I kinda figure that if you are brilliant enough in your initial post, there should be no need for comments to add anything or post any corrections. Basically, comments mainly serve the purpose of proving that people actually read a blog, and thus of boosting the author's self-esteem.

JSA said...

Yeah, I might qualify as a "denzien" of your blog, since I've read it for about a year and agree with much of what you write. But I certainly wouldn't qualify as a "minion", since I don't mind saying you were dead wrong with your slut-shaming accusation that a teen mom is a "scheming little vamp". I mean, it's not even a matter of agreeing to disagree, it's a simple matter of fact, and it's a relief that people with attitudes like you expressed in that comment are dying faster than they are being born.

Ilíon said...

Indeed, you cannot be a Minion ... for a proper Minion would understand the tongue-in-cheek intent, without having to be told it.

As for the other, I am confident that you will be unpleasantly surprised at who dies out and who does not.

JSA said...

@Ilion - Yeah, my statement about birth rate of misogynists is already refuted by the entire Islamic world. I was hoping you wouldn't notice that.

Foxfier said...

Also not a minion, since I'm a loyal lt to someone else and raising my own minion.

That said... Doesn't everyone realize blog-hits are a poor measure of popularity? There's also RSS subscriptions-- I don't usually come over unless I have something to say, and I'd bet the 14 others on google reader alone are similar.

Ilíon said...

Mr Allen,
It's too bad, really, that you likely will never grasp the fact that I am the exact opposite of a misogynist. That said, while I doubt that you are a misogynist, intentionally at any rate, you've given me enough information to recognize you as an enabler of both standard-issue misogyny and the misogyny which calls itself feminisn.

Ilíon said...

Foxfier,
Being one of my Minions is not an exclusive thing; and while -- obviously -- there is some degree of mutual loyalty between my Minions and myself, it is not a loyalty which demands the lessening or betrayal of any other. Now, it must be recognized that there are two levels of Minion, the Inner Circle being those who talk back to me.

JSA said...

Ilion,

Was that latest comment tongue in cheek? Or are you saying that you really were placing the primary culpability on the 15 year-old girl?

I'm allergic to sweeping generalizations, and I definitely don't respect people who channel Humbert Humbert in their pronouncements. Saying, "I was just joking", after calling a 15 year-old girl a seductress, doesn't really make it OK.

Obviously, the girl may bear some culpability. But the girl's parents bear a great deal of culpability, as does the boy, and also the adults of the community who establish the local norms and values.

There's an interesting new paper surveying 90,000 kids from 80 communities across the U.S. It shows an interesting disconnect from 9th to 12th grade, which might be relevant to your point.

The overall finding of the paper is that girls feel that there is too much sex in the relationships, and boys feel there is too little. Both sides are making a "sacrifice", but the ones scheming to get sex are generally not the females. Now, at 9th grade, the female preference for sex aligns with how much they actually get, but of course that isn't necessarily proof that the females are instigators or (to use your words) "scheming vamps".

Drew said...

Just because they feel there's too much sex doesn't mean that they have no desire to engage in it. Probably a lot of them engage in it, for example, in order to entrap the boys as a twisted alternative to marriage. And then there's also the desire to act similar to their peers. So even if they aren't nymphomaniacs themselves, they can still be culpable.

My main disagreement with Ilíon's initial post, though, is that I think it's fine to praise people for not doing something immoral -- i.e., for not murdering their children.

JSA said...

Drew, I don't think that's quite right. The boys desire the sex; the girls desire the relationship. You can't confuse the thing desired with the thing used to obtain the desire. The point of the study wasn't to talk about the transaction, in any case, but to measure the extent to which both parties were disappointed. The level of relative disappointment suggests that it is the boys (more often than not) who are initiating and soliciting the transaction, versus the girls saying "Free sex available to the first guy who will enter my snares!".

Ilion's original comment (which I hope was just a joke, albeit tasteless) is a lot like saying "The scheming altar boy tempted the priest in order to get attention and video games". Or, "The nubile nymphet seduced the hapless old pedophile so that she could get showered with candy". It's disgusting.

Foxfier said...

Some girls do desire the sex, unless we're going the "no, they just think they do, and boys who look for a relationship just think they want one" type stuff.

There are smaller numbers of physical users in females, but they exist. (We can make theories on the damage that causes such psychotic using tendencies-- treating humans as objects-- and why it's more frequently observed in males, but that's another topic. My pet theory is "power.")

Ilíon said...

Mr Allen,
My point in *this* thread is to mock BigFurHat; specifically, his behavior.

Drew said...

If it were true that girls did not desire sex, then I think that truth would only make the girls MORE culpable, not less, for engaging in the illicit sex. They would be more culpable specifically because they folded even without experiencing strong temptation.

And comparing ordinary males to pedophiles doesn't make much sense. Pretty much the whole point of punishing either pedophilia or statutory rape is that the victim supposedly doesn't have the capability to consent. If the victim consents to extramarital sex, then yeah I would condemn him even if he's an altar boy.

JSA said...

Drew; that's correct -- the girls in question are typically considered by the law to be incompetent to consent to sexual relations. Given that the law doesn't consider these children competent to consent, it's hard to see how someone can confidently place full blame on a fifteen year-old girl for having sex, let alone for accidentally getting pregnant in the process. At the very least, the person making such a claim will need to defend his lowering of the age of consent, in contradiction to well-established social and legal norms.

Additionally, if one asserts that a pregnant 15 year-old is a "scheming little vamp", one takes on a much greater burden of proof. Who do we believe? The 15 year-old who claims that the pregnancy was unexpected, or the random Internet person who has never met her but says she is lying? Does this man have mind-reading powers, or some other way to know that the little girl is probably lying? Of all accidental pregnancies, what percent are actually deliberate? And are young teens more or less likely to match the pattern?