In this Great Debates thread, Dogface gets right to the point in his first post:
Don’t tell us why you think the show mentioned in the OP is wrong. Just throw out that tired old line about liberal anti-Americanism. Hey, I can understand. It can be difficult to consider views of history that differ from your own. But you could at least try.
If Dog had stopped there, I wouldn’t be making this post. Unfortunately, he (you are a he, right?) must not have spewed enough ignorance and horseshit to satisfy his liberal-bashing urges, and lets loose with another gem:
Asking Lissa to specifically quote where you said sympathy for the victims is anti-American? Ridiculous! Here’s the relevant quote:
“Some people”. Hey, it must apply to you. You’re some person. When this interesting > > ACTUAL QUOTATION! < < is shown to him, Dogface responds:
No, dipshit! Your handle was put in there because the first part of the post was directed towards you and your your crazy-ass allegations against liberals! It was NOT there to say you called sympathy anti-American! Fucking idiot. More political masturbation:
Whoa, Doggy! Slow down! Don’t want to blow your load yet, there’s more liberals to condemn! I must admit I enjoy your attempt at being fair and balanced. Hoping that your steaming pile of shit would be overlooked if you threw in an itty bitty diamond, eh? I guess you didn’t think you had spread enough crap for the day, which would be the only explanation for this:
Gasp! You, sir, have uncovered the Vast Liberal Conspiracy to “CONVENIENTLY” sweep 60-year old opinions under the rug. As you certainly know, opinions do not change over the years. Ever. Also, all of us modern liberals are in fact re-animated World War 2-era conservatives, brought back to life to spread vicious anti-American lies. Mwahaahaaaa!
As you can see from my snarky comments, Dogface is… what?! There’s more? Say it ain’t so! I’d like to spare you (and myself) Doggy’s raging hard-on for ignorance and general asshattery, but my rant would just not be complete without it.
Responding to to a strawman accusation (referring to his “knee-jerk liberal attitude” comment):
Certainly not a strawman.
Wait, what was it we were debating? :smack:
begin bonus rant
After reading these posts, it’s interesting to note that Dogface said to reject a political ideology which demonizes its opponents. But then, it’s probably not fair to bring this up. After all, this is the thread where he accuses Chomsky of claiming that the Khmer Rouge never committed a single atrocity. Interestingly, Mr. Dogface did not return after he was shown to be incorrect.
In addition, it’s instructive to note that the Manhattan Project was authorized by that notorious ultraconservative, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and that orders to use the two Japan bombs were given by rock-ribbed Republican Harry Truman.
My understanding is that American citizens were told at the time that bombing Japan was the only way to end the war and would result in more lives being saved. I don’t think they had any way of knowing how horrendous those bombs were.
Now when historians examine unclassified documents, many believe that the Japanese were on the brink of surrendering anyway. That’s not revisionist history in any bad sense – not when you finally have access to historical documents that you didn’t have before.
I don’t defend Harry Truman’s decision, but I have always thought that he had the support of most of the American citizens when the bombings brought the war to a close. If Conservatives or the right-wing did not support the decision, I would like to know more about their thoughts.
V-J Day was my first memory.
I didn’t have a clue about how awful it really was until I was a freshman in college and saw a book of photographs. I looked a every picture and could feel my heart sinking. Like it or not, we do have blood on our hands.
And as ill as it makes me to think of the bombings, I cannot put myself in the frame of mind that the GI Generation was in after four years of war and death and sacrifice. I can’t know how I would have reacted then.
Who was the “left” was that wanted to use the bomb?
First of all, if you knew about the bomb you were in an elite circle, under investigation, or dead. Certainly two, possibly all three. The “leftist” scientists were of mixed mind, but mostly against. Some of their objections were based on the theory of a runaway nuclear reaction destroying the world. Hard to spin that politically. The generals and admirals were split. The politicians that knew were split.
I don’t recall, ever, hearing a political spin put on the decison to drop the bomb. There were dozens of considerations that went into it. For example, they considered a demonstration of the bomb. It was ruled out as too risky because the Japanese would have been notified where to look. Hence, expect every fighter in the Japanese air force. Worst of all, a dud is dropped and recovered by the Japanese…
OTOH,
this part was some pretty good hyperbole. Not all true, but good for effect. The problem with area-of-effect postings is that they get you pitted. Enjoy.
The answer to the latter question shows the simplistic dishonesty of the previous statement.
There were opponents to the use of the bomb (nearly all post facto since (as Beagle notes) the bombs’ construction and use were secret) on both sides of the political spectrum.
However, among those who expressed reservations about, or even opposition to, the use of the bombs were:
(on the Right)
Former President Herbert Hoover
General Dwight Eisenhower
Admiral William Leahy
Editor (U.S. News) David Lawrence
(on the Left)
Socialist leader Norman Thomas
Economist Stuart Chase
Columnist (Christian Science Monitor) Richard Stout Commonweal (a liberal Catholic magazine) Christian Century (a liberal Protestant magazine) Common Sense (a liberal secular New York magazine) Progressive (a liberal secular Wisconsin magazine)
Among those on the Left who cheered the use of the bombs were:
Daily Worker (official publication of the CPUSA) The New Masses (another publication by the CPUSA) Nation (a liberal weekly) New Republic (a liberal weekly) PM (a liberal daily published in New York)
The majority of the country–Left and Right-- felt, at the time, that the use of the bombs was simply an end to the war. The later analyses regarding the extent to which the decision to use the bombs was driven by other factors than simply military expedience have been driven by continuing access to earlier documents and the historians (as opposed to the pundits) who have waded into the discussion have not, generally, been driven by politics.
…as if just saying “liberal” is enough to refute any argument! I’ve learned that I can safely ignore any posts that average one use of the word “liberal” per sentence.
You can add I.F. Stone and Owen Lattimore to that list of Leftists who supported the bomb. I just made a very similar point to yours in the original GD thread, but i don’t expect Dogface to actually address the issue, either there or here.
You know, what really pissed me off about what happened in the other thread between **Dogface ** and myself is that he refused to answer my question. (I asked him for examples of books which tout “America is wrong, not matter what.”)
Had I wanted to fight, I’m sure he and I would happily be trading snarky remarks, but because I asked politely to see examples of what he was referring to, I get the silent-treatment.
I’ll admit I’m an odd person, but when someone asks me for proof of an assertion, and I find I cannot provide any, I find myself questioning my opinion.
Well, Lissa, you’ll be happy to know that, in principle at least, Dogface claims to be as concerned about fighting ignorance and providing evidence as you are. In this thread, he takes someone on another message board to task for a close-minded, ignorant attitude to the debate over second-hand smoke. Dogface’s OP is quite reasonable, and the woman that he’s pitting seems to be something of a moron. But Dogface can’t resist blowing his own trumpet, asking:
Why indeed? We might ask the same question after examining Dogface’s attitude in a few other threads. Let’s examine the evidence, shall we?
My first encounter with our friend was in the In frightens me that people don’t know these things thread. Now, the thread was in IMHO and was going along fine, until Evil Captor made a realtively harmless, but still somewaht gratuitous reference to Bush and the Republican voters:
There was really no reason to insert this comment into the thread, but most people chose just to ignore it. But not our friend Dogface, the crusader for truth. He chimed in:
The political jab here didn’t worry me in the slightest; after all, he was responding to someone else’s snarky comment. What concerned me, especially in a thread about what people do and don’t know, was Dogface’s apparent belief that more people voted for Bush than for Gore in the 2000 election. I decided to offer a corrective, in which i was careful to note that i wasn’t trying to be combative:
Well, Dogface was having none of it.
We’ll leave aside the matter of my “bringing it up in the first place,” which i had not. Now, i admit that this post did give me pause for a moment. I thought that maybe, despite all my reading on the 2000 election, i may have missed something and that Bush might, in fact, have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college. So i went looking for statistics.
The first place i looked was Republican and other conservative websites, because i figured that if Bush had in fact won the popular vote, those websites would be trumpeting the fact. But i found nothing. So i searched more widely, and posted the results for Dogface to read and, if he wanted, debate:
I concede that a few of my comments were a little too snarky for IMHO (and i apologized and said that a Mod could remove the offending portions), but i think i made my point about the popular vote. If Dogface could have presented me with some alternative statistics or websites that disputed the ones i had found, i would have been happy to look at them.
So, what was Dogface’s reaction to this? Nothing. Nada. At first i just assumed that he hadn’t been reading the Boards for a while–i mean, we’re allowed a life away from SDMB, right? But the thread was still going six days later, and Dogface returned, only he apparently had no interest in continuing the debate, and had moved on to other issues. So i decided to prick his memory:
The response was rather predictable:
About then, other people were telling us to take it elsewhere, so after a final recitation of the argument, i left the thread. All i was hoping for, in making my point, was that Dogface might simply concede that he had erred. Plenty of people confuse the electoral college with the popular vote–it’s a common and perfectly understandable mistake, and i wasn’t looking to crucify anyone for it. But Dogface’s reaction makes his whole “The more i learn the more happy i am” schtick seem a little disingenuous.
Interestingly enough, Dogface made a comment on the electoral college system only half an hour ago that tedns to confim that his attitude to the whole thing is little more than anti-liberal ranting:
Then there was this thread. Someone made a comment about reading Noam Chomsky who is, i admit, a rather controversial character in American politics, but also one who is often misrepresented by his opponents. Dogface had only this remarkable piece of insight to offer:
I concede anyone the right to disagree with Chomsky’s political views, and i know that many of his positions offend a lot of people, but i happen to believe that Dogface’s assertion here was wrong, and my belief is based on considerable reading of Chomsky’s own works on the subject of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. So i offered the following:
The response from Dogface to a fairly reasonable argument backed up by citations? Another resounding silence.
He has been similarly unresponsive to arguments offered by me and others in the Hiroshima thread that prompted this Pit thread, as you have already noted. This despite the fact that he was happy to wade in with virulent anti-liberal vomit, but was unwilling to back it up with even a scintilla of evidence.
Even in the thread about second-hand smoke, he made an ass of himself, titling the thread “I weep for America.” A few people noted that this represented a ridiculous generalization, for example:
and
and
and
Of course, by now you can guess what happened next. That’s right. Absolutely nothing. Dogface abandoned his own thread more quickly than he started it.
His own most recent attempt to start a Debate is this gem, Wacky-nutso Politics: The Price of Prosperity?. Well, if his premise also applies to Wacky-nutso debating tactics, then he must be about the most prosperous person around.
I don’t think I’ve ever participated in a pile-on here yet, but in this case it seems warranted, and I feel strengthened by mhendo’s rather lengthy post.
Lately I have considered tentatively pitting Dogface myself because of his habit of posting drive-bys in which ignorance and wilful misreading vie for pride of place. It irritates me no end and hinders proper debate. I’ve seen him do it whenever he feels his cherised Republican America is under attack. He peeks in the thread, throws in a prickly post, and goes his merry way without every looking back. He’s like a debating guerilla.
I don’t mind a good debate, but someone who only posts drive-bys is actually detracting from a debate. You have to work hard to put in a proper reply, and are left without an opponent. The next time this happens, you’ll think twice whether to reply to such a poster. In this way someone can seriously diminish the wonderful debating culture here at SDMB. If you don’t want to debate, don’t post, or at the very least post in a less abrasive and uninformed manner.
Actually I’ve never noticed him exhibit this kind of behaviour until a few weeks ago. Coincidentally around that time Dogface achieved immortal fame by his inadvertent triple-post that spawned the current fad of interbellum life-negating beams. Did that snap something in his mind? Let’s hope for his and our sakes that he grows out of it.
