Okay, if you’re going to take that tack and refuse to grace us with some more racist comments, please explain why some many racists like yourself are so afraid of being called racists? We just had a hilarious racist named Mister Obvious who posted some very funny stuff in Great Debates, and he maintained that he had nothing against Jews, it was just the ‘fake’ Jews who were descended from Satan that he had a problem with.
Why do you think that racists like you and him lie about your racism rather than wearing it proudly? Is it due to the social stigma that’s attached to being a racist these days? If, say, you were in the ‘right’ kind of company, would you let fly with some more jokes about how Jews love money so very much or how pissed off you are that Jews are always actin’ so Supremacist and such? You know, dark little pub somewhere, nice pint of warm Guinness in your paw… could you be persuaded to talk at length about how very money grubby Jews are and how many crimes we should lay at their feet due to the actions of the Mossad? Maybe about how it’s not that you hate them, you just wish they’d all shut up and stop going on and on about how awesome Jews are so you wouldn’t be forced, against your will, to be so angry at them?
I guess what I’m asking is: is it the negative reaction to your racism from Dopers that’s caused you to dial back expressing your racist ideology and you’re not such a coward when you’re among like-minded folks, or is your racism something that just sort of bubbles out of you from time to time, like a fart in an elevator, leaving you to deny that you had anything to do with it when there’s only one other guy in the elevator with you?
Finn Again, you’re not a Tolstoy or a Tolkein, so try and cut the wordage down. It’s barely tolerable when you don’t know what is coming, so imagine what it’s like coming from your predictable mind.
Yes yes, literary criticism, very clever, and meaningful (especially coming from a mind such as yours), and, dare I say it, shockingly, boldly original!
Now, please elaborate on why, exactly, you keep saying clearly racist things but then want to pretend you’re not a racist. Possessed by demons? Shaman’s curse? A strange version of torette syndrome that only happens when you type and instead of cursing you just blurt out anti-semitic spew?
Come on, don’t leave us hanging. Either provide more quality racism, explain why you feel the need to lie about being a racist, or at least try to craft an amusing justification for “I’m not a racist, it’s just the things I say about Jews that are!”
is snarky willful ignorance? Because “you express yourself with such belligerance and venemous hostility that you overwhelm any reasonable point you make.” sure isn’t. I have no idea if you’re “craaaaaaaazy”, I’m just saying you come off like a nutjob. It’s really plain for all to see. Well, I guess not for Fenris but then he seems to think an attack dog like you is useful for some reason.
I don’t know. I’m not an opponent of his so I’m not going to guess their hopes and concerns. If they are all just a bunch of Jew haters, it probably doesn’t matter what he says. :dubious:
Finn Again, you’re nowhere near the nutbag league of some of the folks who criticize Israel on the SDMB. If you’re finding that there are fewer and fewer sane people willing to engage in the criticism-of-Israel side of threads, however, I think you bear some responsibility for that. Your argument style, while rife with facts, also contains a high degree of victory-through-attrition tactics, in which you appear to try to overwhelm your opponents with sheer verbiage.
If I were an Israeli citizen, I’d undoubtedly belong to one of the left-wing peace parties; in US news accounts I find myself most often agreeing with their positions and initiatives. I am not anti-Israel, but I find many criticisms of Israel’s approach to Palestinians to be valid. But I gave up debating such issues on this forum years ago, in large part because of the way you’d argue it. Your arguments weren’t persuasive, but they were exhausting.
If you’d like to have civil, intelligent, reasonable opponents, you might look for ways to change your debating style to make it more attractive to such opponents and less attractive to nutjobs.
I can appreciate that sort of sentiment LHoD, but by the same token, it’s not my attempt to overwhelm anybody with verbiage. The issue is tremendously complex, with a lot of history (and counterclaims) built up around it. And seemingly simple comments, especially seemingly simple analogies or nested claims (or what have you) can be very, very time-consuming to deconstruct.
It’s the reason why, for instance, glib denunciations of evolution tend to devolve into gigantic mutli-page threads where people spend hundreds of words describing their terms and thousands explaining evolutionary mechanics. Or threads where someone claims “everything is best with the least government regulation” turn into monsters. A comment as simple as “Palestinian land” covers about 500 years of history and four different sovereign powers.
I’d love to get a debate on the issues, how to get a viable and fair two state solution, how best to put diplomatic pressure on Israel to stop settlement expansion and such, how to ensure that the PNA doesn’t just go Arafat’s route and sponsor terrorism again… but even there, talkiing about the issues involved, let alone the solutions, tends to necessitate a massive bit of text. And I do generally err on the side of providing more factual information and context than less, which makes it worse, I know.
I do grok that I help contribute to the tone, and responding to certain people who voice fictions, and responding as I do, creates quite an adversarial tone. I’m not blind to that. I am stubborn and I tend not to let fictions go, but perhaps I should. I’ll at least ponder the situation a bit and see what I can’t come up with. Thanks.
On a total tangent, one of the ads for this thread is currently:
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First of all, that site is fucking hilarious. it has everything from Nazis to ninjas, no joke.
Second, it’s got some weird sort of evil bastard popup that says in a Dolph Lundgrenesque voice “wait!” if you try to move your mouse cursor away from the main page and navigate away.
I can’t actually advise anybody to click on the link, but it’s hilariously awful at the same time.
Ok, Finnagain, now that we’ve settled the whole issue of you being a one-trick-pony of walls of text vis a vis the Middle East, why don’t you explain how that applies to your douchebaggery in the pit?
Because, for all your claims that people are stupid liars, you sure aren’t a paragon. Care to provide a cite or some facts that I’m an anarchist? Or better yet, that I’m in the nutrasweet is bad camp? You can’t, because I’m not, and even if I was, you’ve never made an actual argument against those positions other than “Duuuurrr, Smashy was a bad person because he was smarter than me.” Maybe it’s you that is a stupid liar. Who is stylistically rigid.
Your status as an annoying twink is because you can’t get over your rages at people who question any of your precious worldviews – any dissent is a direct attack on your ego. But you don’t even have the saving grace of being interesting.
There are no facts or cites here, other than “FinnAgain is a trollish dipshit” and “his posts”. It’s not even your failure to write with wit or vigor that offends. It’s your pompous, smarmy, smugness, which is so clearly unwarranted. I might be an insensitive asshole, but I don’t hold grudges or ignore what someone posts, or commit the intellectual dishonesty of trying to wield the whole “SDMB consensus” bullshit like you do, which is made even more absurd when you’re in a thread where you have all of 2 allies.
So while you’re in this spirit of conciliation and self-examination, why don’t you apply that to more than your single issue?
Especially one that I’ve already explicitly said I don’t agree with, in this thread. I do understand that when the racists like Ivan go unremarked it tends to suggest some form of tacit support from their cohort, but I think that’s most often not the case.
I do, however, think it’s quite important for both ‘sides’ to do their best to police their own. Sam Stone has some of the same views I do, but I’ve also endeavored to correct him on factual grounds. I think debates would be a lot better if when a creature like Sevastopol voices support for the ethnic cleansing of all West Bank settlements, or Ivan starts cracking (hillarious!) anti-semitic jokes, or others talk about how Jews control US foreign policy, that folks on their own ‘side’ would take the time to say “Hey, we don’t need that kind of shit here.”
If I was in a thread discussing immigration policy and I found that someone who was nominally “on my side” was also an overt racist and David Duke admirer, I would
view any factual statement made by such a person with profound skepticism and make sure I triple-checked it with reliable sources,
would call out said individual whenever they began peddling outright racist tripe, and
would, when any of my opponents called out this person for making racist statements, would avoid commenting “Gee, you can’t say anything against illegal immigration without being called a racist.”
It shouldn’t be so hard to follow similar guidelines in discussions of Mideast policy.
That wasn’t a straw man. I did not ascribe that opinion to FinnAgain and I had just the sentence before said that I had no idea what his opponents are thinking. It’s ironic that all those web pages carefully explaining logical fallacies generally lead to people bleating out stuff like you just did, don’t you think?
Thinking about it though, it’s not far off from what Fenris said in his defence of Finn:
I am *generally *pro-Palestinian (in the sense that I want them to have a functioning country, and feel they’ve been treated unfairly, although I don’t approve of their use of violence) and somewhat anti-Israeli policy (in the sense that I find it more confrontational than helpful, a little too easily violent and just a little reminiscent of my own country’s Apartheid past, although I totally support Israel’s Right to Exist)
BUT
Israel threads, especially lately, generally leave me sympathising with the pro-Israelis and shaking my head at the anti-Israelis. Some of whom do come across like racist troglodytes of the worst sort.
