The term 'teabagger' - acceptable or not?

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James , Almost banned Me aye . I don't plagiarize in the real sense. Did you ever notice the song "Super Freak" was the same music as "Can't touch this" Sorry off point . Tea baggers are collage students that dangle there testicles in other peoples faces . Tea party members are constitutionalists. Progressives call them Tea Baggers . I hope this clears things up for you bro

 

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james, why should everything that is a "political insult" be banned. You going to ban me next for calling Abbott "Mr Negitive"? Or if someone questioned "the real julia"?

Your not talking about indervidual people on sciforums but rather political debate which yes gets insulting but as long as its only aimmed at the parties\groups or the leaders and members rather than people here let it be

 

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Brazilian Fart Porn

You can either strike the second, or amend it to read, "It is used to refer to by those who are against the Tea Party movement."

I would make a few specific points about the propriety of the term teabagger:

(1) Yes, the term is pejorative.

(2) That's nobody's fault but the folks who decided to call themselves teabaggers, and invited people to protests by saying, "Come teabag with us!"

(3) The term is pervasive in offstream American media.​

The thing about (1) and (2) is that nobody can help the fact that the teabaggers named themselves teabaggers. It's not my fault they didn't check first to make sure the word wasn't already taken. It's not yours, either. It's nobody's fault but theirs.

That's why I have a hard time forbidding the word. This is not a name that opponents made up to denigrate tea partiers. True, it's a name that opponents keep in circulation to ridicule the tea partiers, but that also has a demonstrative value. Throughout, the two things we've known about this movement are (A) they have no idea what they're doing and (B) they don't really care about (A).

How did an allegedly libertarian movement not know the slang value of teabagging? I'm sorry, but I would damn well think there ought to be at least one freakin' queer in that big tent who would cough and say, "Um ... no. We don't want to call ourselves that."

I mean, come on. What the hell happened, there?

Of point (3) listed above, how are we going to deal with the word in otherwise acceptable media sources? What, do people have to go through the articles they quote and s**r out the offensive words, or maybe if they just strike through the teabaggy parts? Shall we try to set the filters and endorse tea balls in order to forestall any debates about whether or not you can really taste the paper or maybe that's just shitty tea leaves?

 

Give Me liberty or give Me death ! who said that ? Was that Patrick Henry ? They killed him James . Yeah I think they did . The Mob .

Tea bagger was used in the media and when it reached uber right wingers of America it was not well received because of the act of tea bagging ( Testicle dragging across the face of another person) . The Uber left still refers to the uber right as Tea Baggers publicly . It is the battle that rages in America and world events are being shaped by the rhetoric. It revolves around different Ideologies in economics . Keynesian economics of spending your way out of depressions verses making government small and letting natural market forces make corrections by new losers and winners based on economic demands . There is much debate as the world tumbles into the new depression era . We call it the great recession of 2008 if I am not mistaken., American Politics is fun for everyone

 

Tea Party People are Tea Baggers . That is the short answer James . God ! There are no others except the nut drag . Progressives call them Tea Baggers

 

They call Progressives " Demacommies " so all is fair fun and games of American Politics

 

It depends on your circle of influence . My Grandma Conservative would say it is unacceptable , but she would also profile every one she meets too, so go figure is Grannies advice the one to go by . Most rational people get a chuckle out of the term , even Tea Baggers

NO, O.K. clear

I got a failure to communicate here . The term is acceptable because of the Boston Tea Party that happened at the beginning of the American Revolution . A bunch of Colonist dumped Tea in the Bay instead of paying taxes to England. 1776 0r there about was the date . It was in protest to the Tax on tea from the Americas when England still owned the Colonies. The Phrase " No Taxation with out Representation " was the catch phrase of the day .

 

As Tiassa said, it is a term that was used by the Tea Party movement to identify their followers until they discovered what the term meant. It has never been used in a political sense to describe those who are not Tea Party devotees.

 

good points
for instance the term "whig"

The term Whig was originally short for 'whiggamor', a term meaning "cattle driver" used to describe western Scots who came to Leith for corn. In the reign of Charles II (1660–85) the term was used during Wars of the Three Kingdoms to refer derisively to a radical faction of the Scottish Covenanters who called themselves the "Kirk Party" (see the Whiggamore Raid). It was then applied to Scottish presbyterian rebels who were against the King's episcopalian order in Scotland. The term 'Whig' entered English political discourse during the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1678–1681 when there was controversy about whether or not Charles's brother, James, should be allowed to succeed to the throne on Charles's death. 'Whig' was a term of abuse applied to those who wanted to exclude James on the grounds that he was a Roman Catholic. The fervent Tory Samuel Johnson often cracked that "the first Whig was the Devil." (wikishit)


so the question becomes, do we at sciforums attempt to be a place where objective and rational discourse occurs or a place where populist sentiments run amok, captive to every whim and fancy of the faddish rhetoric that rises and falls?

i find this excessive moralizing utterly pathological and cannot help but wonder if it merely serves as an elaborate ruse to cover and conceal something far more insidious and reprehensible

 

i object to this caricature of my president
cartoons have no place in sciforums insofar they only serve to mock and denigrate

 

1. Yes it's insulting to Tea Party members
2. They deserve it.
3. Sciforums should not censor insults to political parties or non-users.

 

kindly use filters instead of bullets and batons
you guys are overworked and underpaid, right?

 

Whatever the Sciforums mods decide, they should be consistent. Either it is an acceptable term or not. It should not be selectively enforced as it is today.

 

The Patchwork Principle

In 2008, "Palintology" offended some of Sarah Palin's supporters. In 2009, we semi-officially struck "teabagger". We've also rejected abuse of anti-Obama terms such as "Obamassiah" and "The One".

What we're into, along those lines, is a clumsy arrangement of patchwork solutions.

Over the years, we've considered whether or not it's appropriate for an evangelical Christian to attribute the opposition to ultimate evil: Are we of the Devil's brood?

And we've let religous rivalries carry on to the point that atheists and theists are often slinging massive, inappropriate generalizations at one another.

One puzzle facing the staff at present is how to keep track of all the quirks and ad hoc rules we've applied over the years. At some point, we have to acknowledge that we've been going about this wrongly.

The way I see it—and this is strictly the way I see it, and should not be construed as an official site perspective—is that we've been operating at the most simple valence of rhetoric and offense. For instance, is a term designed to be offensive and derogatory, or is that just the effect it has on some people?

I have an ongoing dispute, for instance, with one of my fellows on staff, about whether or not it is appropriate to identify and explain genuinely perceived bigotry. In this, the simple valence is that it is offensive to be called a racist or sexist or homophobe. A slightly more complex consideration would be to examine whether or not the label is reasonably applied. That is, A asserts bigotry of B, and B is offended, so we should strike A's assertion and explanation of perceived bigotry. But, to the other, what if A is reasonably correct? Now, maybe B doesn't intend to be a bigot, but that's also a long staple of bigotry, too.

I frequently offend my conservative neighbors, but at some point, in my opinion, a hard, perhaps even shocking question such as, "What is it with conservatives and rape advocacy?" might seem appropriate to me. To wit, Republicans almost elected to the U.S. Senate a Colorado prosecutor who refused to prosecute an open-and-shut rape case (he had a confession) because he felt it was somehow the victim's fault. Congressional Republicans this year attempted to redefine rape in order to exclude statutory rape. That is, they didn't want to explicitly exclude statutory rape, so instead wrote bill content that would hae that effect. It was a fairly naked attempt. A Massachusetts Republican recently expressed that an immigrant's status rightly should discourage an illegal from reporting a rape, explaining, "If you weren't here, the crime wouldn't happen." And when a group, ideology, or identity consistently lands on the wrong side of an issue, at what point do we start to wonder if it's more than simple coincidence?

But the idea of Republicans as rape advocates is offensive, is it not? At least, to Republicans? What it comes down to is that there is a range of behaviors that qualify as rape, and it turns out a good number of Republicans either would like to, or simply wouldn't mind if, that range of qualifying behaviors was narrowed some. What is the threshold, here? At what point does one say, "I'm sorry if you're offended, but ..."?

I mean, at this point, I'm not even reaching to the couple of east-coast state legislators who each, in their own turn, argued that pregnancy by rape is impossible; one attempted to use his medical credentials to explain to the people that, "The juices just aren't flowin'." Those were over a decade ago; we have plenty of examples from more recent years.

One might look at the American sex wars in political culture and wonder a few things that conservatives find offensive. We can point to Pam Stenzel, a Bush-administration abstinence advocate who is perfectly willing to admit, in a roomful of fellow evangelicals, that she doesn't care whether or not her program works. We can point to Utah, where the question isn't whether the state can force a school to teach sex ed, but whether the schools should be allowed to teach sex ed. And the answer is no. And a teenager in Utah is statistically more likely to contract a sexually transmitted disease, such as chlamydia, than a common illness like the flu. We might look at Ted Haggard, who ended up snorting meth out of his gay hooker's ass, and then, after his public disgrace, fell in with a con-artist charity run by a registered sex offender. Or Dr. George Rekers, a founder of NARTH who ended up in a scandal not so long ago having his "luggage lifted" by a twenty-something gay prostitute he took on a vacation to Europe.

And it's actually worth noting the famous Democratic Party example, former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. He, too, fought a lost cause, prosecuting prostitutes. And yet he ended up banging prostitutes.

To the one, we see in these sexually constricting attitudes a string of policy failures. To another, we see in these sexually constricting attitudes a necessary increase in the thought and energy allotted to considering other people having sex. And to yet a third, we see a creepy trend emerging whereby these puritan sexual warriors are, in fact, caught up in the very sins they obsess themselves with.

So it doesn't really work. Yet people are determined to keep dwelling on other people's sex lives. After how many years do we get to ask about the psychological depravity of social-conservative attitudes toward sex?

But that's probably offensive, isn't it?

And yet, in all of this, teabaggers make confounding examples. Obviously, the context is pejorative at this point. To the other, they gave themselves the name.

Only a couple years before the rise of the teabaggers, President Bush, I think it was, caused some controversy by using the phrase "Democrat Party". The phrase is in vernacular circulation, now, and some of our hardline conservatives have even used it here at Sciforums. Teabaggers have found a place in vernacular circulation, as well. But no matter how obnoxious we think it is coming out of Ed Schultz's mouth, or in the pages of The Stranger, or at Huffington Post, or The New Republic, or ... or ... or ... or .... No matter how obnoxious one finds the word, we must remember that an allegedly libertarian political movement gave itself that identity label.

I still find it very strange that in this "libertarian" (i.e., "not conservative") movement, there was not one libertine who could have stood up and said, "You know, the thing about asking people to 'teabag' with us ...."

Part of me wonders about a guy I saw on MSNBC once upon a time, taking part in the debate about who the real teabaggers were, and he was asking people to come teabag with his group. And he reminded me of a particular Southern queen I met at a famous tchotchke store in New Orleans crossed with longtime WWE "manager" Paul Bearer. So it occurs to me that it's possible that some of them did know. One could even extemporize, based on that single, vague, example, that "real" teabaggers were happy to spread the term since it would annoy the people who were trying to annex their movement.

But in the end, this is all just chatter; when we attempted to suppress the teabag conjugates, it was because teabaggers were offended that we were all having a homoerotic chuckle at their expense. And that's as complicated as the question got, back then.

Now that we have it before us again, I think it would serve well as an example of how we establish our standards.

 

Did you stop to think that the Tea Bagger could see them selves as the ball dipper instead of the face that gets the bags ?

This is pretty ridiculous to not allow " Tea Bagger "
It is an acceptable term in American Politics

My Progressive Council Woman was a tea bagger long before Tea Parties of the extreme right took it up . Yeah that was her thing to get elected years ago and when elections come back around she always does the same thing . She Has Tea Parties at her House . Yeah kind of like house warming Parties with Coffee and Tea and a Croissant to boot. She called them Tea Parties so in retro-spec the righties stole the movement from her

 

I prefer the term Teavangelist Nutbagging Conservacon.