Baiting Tom Sylvester
November 25, 2003
by Bernard Chapin
I
verbally met Tom Sylvester Sunday night on Glenn
Sacks’ excellent LA radio show. I had seen his name before
on Men's News Daily but didn’t know anything about him before
last week. When the debate was over, I got into my Central time zone
bed and managed less than five hours of sleep before getting into
my car at 5:45 am and driving to work. I briefly checked my emails
before I left and saw an message from Mr. Sylvester.
It seems that he had the late night desire (4:30 am) to bait me some more on the issues Glenn put forth. This email may not have irritated me as much had I got more sleep or it been a Thursday instead of Monday.
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Tom condescendingly expressed a desire for us to have more discussion. He’s got it. In fact, I’m glad he decided to add me to his enemies list. To Tom, I say, “I’m your man, Huckleberry.” I kept this response as short as I could, but don’t fear, I’ve got a few more missiles in the silos ready to be launched should I have the need.
Here's what he said:
“My basic disagreement with your writing boils down to tactics. After all, I don't like Maureen Dowd's columns either, but I think that calling her a bitch isn't the best way to voice such disagreement. At one point you write that people like yourself ‘are rarely present to offer logic and reality as an antidote.’ Maybe that's because you also regularly offer up insults like bitch, reptile, and so on.”
He has brought up an integral issue in debate by mentioning name-calling. We can all agree that pointless insults do not enrich debate in any way. Furthermore, the words he mentions are not fabrications. I’ve wrote them. I have used these words in articles and will repeat one of them in this piece. Yet, even though I used denigrating language in the past, I often excoriate the politically correct for their relentless name-calling. Is there a contradiction in my tactics? Is Tom right? Absolutely not.
You see, what people like Sylvester do not realize is that labeling someone with an accurate word of description may or may not be an insult, but it's certainly the truth. The truth can be beautiful, mundane, revolting, or obscene, but, for this reason, if you limit yourself to only pursuing the truth with sterile language then you will never find it.
I do not call my enemies what they are not. If I use inflammatory words because it often helps to describe someone in a meaningful way. Let’s take the example he sited, Maureen Dowd. Quite frankly, Maureen Dowd is a shallow b-tch. This is a logical conclusion based on the reality of her writing.
In fact, I know no one who would dispute such a statement. My mother actually likes some of her columns but she’d never say that she wasn’t b-tchy and shallow. It’s just my mother, unlike me, thinks that she’s funny.
There are numerous justifications why Maureen Dowd is a b-tch. First, she tries to blame the Bush administration for everything that has ever gone wrong within a five thousand mile radius of The New York Times building. Second, she called Arnold Schwarzenegger a metrosexual. Third, her chronic attacks on men are both shallow and b-tchy. She despises men as they do not have all the interests and emotions that she has, which is a very shallow and far from tolerant. She’s venomous over the fact that her career girl choice was foolish [at least in her case judging from the rhetoric] and, like the grasshopper in its tale with the ant, Dowd knows a cold winter lies ahead, and she hasn’t done a darn thing to prepare for it. She also gloated about the male sex’s impending extermination [which she got wrong by the way] in a column from last July.
Was I right to use polemical language in my response to her chortling about man’s impending doom? You bet. Calling her a shallow b-tch is best practice. However, it was also used in the title as an attention getter, and other than that, I would rarely use such an everyday word for the purposes of description.
On the show Sylvester made reference to my calling politically correct individuals, “Stalinists.” He’s right about that. I have and will continue to do so. “Political correctness” can be traced directly back to the communists. Some attribute it to the Frankfort School, some to Mao, and others relate it back directly to the former editor of Pravda, (Nikolai Bukharin, whom Stalin eventually had killed). Regardless of when or where it exactly began, it came from the communists and the methods of Stalinism are alive and well in the universities—which Sylvester believes hold no barriers for men:
“In the heyday of Stalinism, the accusation of ‘class bias’ was used by communists to undermine and attack individuals and institutions with whom they were at war. This accusation magically turned well-meaning citizens into ‘enemies of the people,’ a phrase handed down through radical generations from the Jacobin Terror through the Stalinist purges and the blood-soaked cultural revolutions of Chairman Mao. The identical strategy is alive and well today in the left’s self-righteous imputation of sexism, racism, and homophobes to anyone who dissents from its party line. Always weak in intellectual argument, the left habitually relies on intimidation and smear to enforce its increasingly incoherent point of view.” Horowitz, Hating Whitey, pp.11-12
Sylvester’s objection to this stems undoubtedly from his own lack of education. He probably wouldn’t know Stalin from Samsonov, but we should not be surprised that recent college graduates know so little about history.
What do we call a person who has no knowledge of the roots of the political correctness but parrots it anyway? Shallow. That’s a perfect description. What do we call someone who tries to bait you at 4 o’clock in the morning because he needs more attention? B-tchy,…and a whole lot of other things too. Q.E.D.
Anyway, like many others with worthless pieces of paper as a means to depict their achievement, Tom does not possess the basic knowledge necessary to realize how little he knows. Indeed, he has been so thoroughly indoctrinated that he appeared to not even be aware of the how ideologically skewed our universities are (which many a study has documented). In summation, my use of the word “Stalinism” was erudite and important. Two words that will never apply to Sylvester or Dowd.
The politically correct person uses a conveyer belt method in which to attack others. Unlike me, they care nothing for truth. In contrast, they attempt to cram their foes into their limited understanding of the world. They see enemies and look left to scream: “Homophobe!” Then they look right and yell: “Racist!” “Sexist” might be what they keep in reserve and “oppressor” is what they say to those before them.
They can say it with as much emotion as they want, but none of it means anything. I’ve been called a fascist a million times by these automatons. Yet, no name could be less descriptive of my views. If I were asked to redo the budget of the United States, when I was finished it would come back to Congress 70% smaller than it was the day before they submitted it. I am dedicated to small, defense-oriented government. Those who have called me a fascist are too ignorant to fathom that omnipotent central government is the lynchpin of fascism. [By the way, in case Tom’s wondering, my use of the word ‘automaton’ is astute. The PC masses have never thought for themselves.]
Lastly, the most shallow and b-tchy thing I can say about Tom Sylvester is to cite the reason why he has chosen to attack us. It seems that the situation which caused him to become upset with Men's News Daily was due to some of our members insulting him online. To this, I say “waaaahhhhh.”
Forgive me, but what a p-ssy. Anyway, I can defend using the p word as well because only a neutered housecat would write articles on the internet and then be mad when he gets negative responses. [Indeed, has he met any radical feminists before?] Nasty emails are part of the game. One has to accept that when you begin writing. If you expect only positive regard from your readers, then you, without a doubt, are a p-ssy.
More disturbingly, Sylvester never denied that this was the reason for going after us. He said in an article that men’s righters have flooded people with angry emails and mentioned that he had been called lots of names by us last night. So what! This guy’s a prima donna. I think our readers should contact Jennifer Lopez because she just got a new soul mate.
It’s like Sylvester expects everyone to form a prayer group and chant his name a few minutes after he writes something. I just cannot relate to any of this. After my piece on Rush Limbaugh six weeks ago I was battling angry leftists online for ten days in a row. Had I been Tom Sylvester I would have contracted for the exclusive services of the nearest sensitivity counselor just so I could make it out of bed in the morning. “But, boss, I can’t go to work today–somebody said something bad about me. Can you send home my cat nip?”
Just like many other receivers of progressive education, Tom Sylvester is someone with a tremendous amount of confidence, but there’s no reason for it whatsoever.
Bernard Chapin is a writer in Chicago.
