In likening the social stigma against bringing iPads into movie theaters to the defenders of slavery, Dash was, he explained on Twitter, "providing a wide range of examples of cultural conservatism, I showed a continuum from trivial to profane." Which, indeed, there is a continuum from trivial to profane in his post — he mentions slavery and people who turn up their noses at rap music in the same sentence. But the broader problem here is that he's painting people who want, or even expect, a little courtesy from their fellow moviegoers as conservative oppressors. Isn't that a nifty trick? If you don't like me talking and using my bright, glowing phone in a movie theater it's you who have the problem, and if you complain I will, however facetiously, compare you to freaking slave owners in a blog post.

Dash also casts those of us who would like to watch a movie we've paid $13 to see relatively unbothered as wanting a "hermetically sealed, human-free, psychopathic isolation chamber of cinematic perfection." It's a bit of hyperbole that completely (and deliberately, because a more measured argument would be harder) ignores and blows past any legitimate, reasonable desire to be quiet and unintrusive during a movie and hope that others do the same. Ratcheting things up another notch, Dash talks about what cinema-going is like in India, with people talking and answering calls and milling about. So, you see, these shushers are thus rife with "privilege or entitlement," operating with a colonialist mindset that fustily, and whitely, calls for creaky old decorum. Which, I'm sorry, is bullshit — and what's worse, insincere bullshit. Whether he set out with this intention or not, by this point in Dash's post he's gone full troll, piling on a few layers of achingly pretentious sociopolitical critique to get people's heads spinning. All while arguing, remember, that people shouldn't be shunned for tweeting during movies.

So, stylistically Dash's post is ridiculous. And perhaps the most insidious (see, I can be hyperbolic too!) thing about all those silly flourishes is that they do distract from what he, in some gnarled way, is actually arguing: That people should do whatever they want in movie theaters and that anyone who wants them to be quiet or turn their phones off is, at best, a cinema snob who refuses to acknowledge the realities of the world, and, at worst, a conservative nutjob hellbent on prescribing their rigid and antiquated morals on the rest of the world like old-timey, privileged bigots. It's the ultimate way to shut down what had been a reasonably amiable disagreement about everyday public manners. He knows he's being this way — specious, smarmy, contrarian — but he doesn't seem to care. If he was trying to say that this is a silly argument to be having at all, it was an oddly brilliant way to make his point. Trouble is, I think he means at least some of what he says. And so now we're here, arguing about how a guy said something instead of, really, what he said.