Category Archives: rhetoric

On “Perverts” and the Brony/Pegasister Community

entertainment, glbt, internet, politics, rhetoric, sex, stompity, television, transgender, videogames 2012.07.03 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Michael J. Nelson: “BronyCon 2012 drew a crowd of 4000 chubby little pervs.” (twitter.com) When I first started writing here about getting into Dance Dance Revolution in late 2003, I got a lot of negative e-mails. Most of them were along the lines of, “You can’t go play video games where kids are present because you’re one of them queers and everyone will be right to assume that you’re just going there to try to ‘pick up’ or kidnap kids for whatever perverted things people like…

So It’s More Acceptable to Bully Kids?

arts, cyberbullying, glbt, politics, rhetoric, teaching, television 2012.06.23 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Donations for bullied bus monitor soar past $500,000 (MSNBC.com) It’s difficult to figure out just how to phrase what this story has compelled me to say without sounding like I’m trying to play down what Karen Klein went through, and continues to go through as the video of her being bullied on the school bus she was monitoring gets played over and over again, on news broadcasts and millions of computer screens all over the world. Let me say at the start, then, that what…

The V Word

freespeech, politics, rhetoric, sex 2012.06.17 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Michigan lawmaker to help perform “Vagina Monologues” (AP via Google) Lost amid the understandable silliness surrounding the reaction to Michigan Republicans forbidding Democratic Michigan State Representative Lisa Brown to speak on the Michigan House floor, due to her use of the word “vagina” in a floor speech against an anti-abortion bill, is a larger and much more serious problem that has been going on in Michigan for over a year now. Bear with me talking about that for a while, and I promise I’ll talk…

With American Power Comes Irresponsibility

politics, rhetoric 2012.03.02 Sean Shannon 2 Comments

I wasn’t going to say anything about the most recent Rush Limbaugh controversy, mostly because I haven’t cursed on here in over five years and I’m not sure that there is a way to properly respond to Limbaugh’s slurs without resorting to profanity to prove the point. If Limbaugh wants to argue that Sandra Fluke, because she posits that health plans should pay for birth control, is a “slut,” the temptation to use other nasty words to describe Limbaugh, mostly amalgamations of body parts with…

The Myth of Schadenfreude

internet, politics, rhetoric 2012.02.26 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Sometimes you just latch onto something you hear somewhere like you don’t latch onto anything else. It’s like your intuition, instead of giving you a friendly nudge to let you know, “Hey, this might be useful,” screams at you, “You must remember this for the rest of your life.” One of those moments for me came when Dennis Miller had his HBO show during the Clinton years (you know, back when he was still funny), and he devoted one of his rants to the topic…