With Claire*, you don't get a magnum opus, you get a lupine opus. This is one of those, not so much because of the size of the response, but because it just seems like it's all in there. Nothing is perfect, but it's good enough that it becomes very difficult to quote it merely in part.
So, RTWT.
One feels a bit sorry for the original "first-time" commenter, who at least implicitly gets fairly savaged by the force of the article, and then by the Commentariat. Claire does a perfectly fine job of declaring that she's speaking to attitudes rather than singling out ad hominem (she's better than most at this), but still...whoosh. (I admit, full disclosure, that I am familiar with such criticism myself, and perhaps I make more of it than I should.) Truth is, unless he speaks up again (and as of this writing he doesn't appear to have done so), we may never know what his actual intention was. In one way that's a bit of a shame, but on the other hand, if someone really does need to learn this particular lesson, it's probably gonna leave a mark anyway.
Anyway, that aside, it's a truly excellent summary statement on the question, and what the question usually implies in society-as-it-is-now. Duly bookmarked here, because I have a feeling I'll want to refer back to it.
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* Claire Wolfe. Get it?
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