No, it’s the most important facet of the argument. Hoping your own team loses because you disagree with the principals motivating the game is understandable if stupidly charitable; but wishing unnecessary harm upon own team is the very definition of self-destructive bloodlust. Der Trihs’ political stance is just a manifestation of his own relentless self-hatred and mental instability. In many ways, he isn’t even agreeing with the anti-American crowd abroad: he’s just fucking crazy and needs something outside of himself to despise.
I had no idea also. My visual of Der Trihs was some 18 year old mom’s basement know it all. Now I’m going to have to update that to a 40 year old mom’s basement know it all.
Well, this is the funny thing - Der can hold forth at some length and in agreeable fashion on the doings of some alien race from Nebulon VIII, and step on no toes in so doing. It’s only when he ventures onto Planet Reality that the frothing at the mouth starts.
I think the real point is that **DT **would disagree that you Iraq occupation force is “his own team”. He’d be right, too. Nothing “fucking crazy” about that stance at all.
(I shall now count down the seconds to a “If he doesn’t like it, he can leave” argument from some ignorant fuck.)
There is something else to keep in mind, here. Our regard for our soldiers is entirely sentimental, they are ours, we want them safe. If someone must suffer, let it be the other, regardless of how justifiable may be the other’s enmity. I share this sentiment entirely, but also recognize that it is a sentiment, it is a function of my nationality, not my humanity.
Were we not Americans, we might well be inclined to see the insurgents as freedom fighters, resisting an occupying army. How many of us wept for Russian moms whose sons died fighting in Afghanistan, often slain by weapons we provided?
Der Trihs is not moved by this sentiment, and the harsh truth is that he has a point. I blame him less for his view than for the coarse manner of its expression, it seems designed to injure.
But we are forced to a really nasty paradox when our soldiers are misled and misused. And there is ample blame to be assigned, but it doesn’t fall on Der Trihs.
Funny thing about **DT **is that he is so much like Bush and Rove-- he grossly exaggerates the views of his political opponents, and then proceeds to demonize them based on those distorted views. He and a few other whackos (on both sides of the political spectrum) spread so much ignorance in GD that they might as well be trolling.
The point was that it is irrelevant if I am included in a group. By not actually addressing me he skirts the issue of wishing death on people. “I wish you were dead” is not the same thing as “I wish everybody in the group you are a member of were dead”. Implicit in the second statement is the intent of the first statement, and yes, it is a distinction without a difference, but that’s the long and short of it.
I suppose that if you want that precedent re-evaluated you could ask one of the people in charge, but as for me, I couldn’t care less about Der Trihs or his opinions. He has the right to them, and he has the right to express them in any manner he sees fit to express them so long as it doesn’t violate the policies of the forum he espouses them in.
Ok, I should have put it more carefully. There is nothing special about the Catholic church or Priests. I do not believe in sacerdotalism. How you choose to feel about the issue is up to you.
Have we ever had the right-wing equivalent of DT? I know we have as far as religion goes.
Hey-maybe he’s really a fundy fanatic Republican, trying to act exactly as their idea of a left-wing atheist would act. Because he does exactly that. Malacandra, yeah, but maybe that’s what he needs…
BTW, have ever gone all over pagans, or Jews, or Muslims, Buddhists, etc, the way he does on Christians?
Right, because the Dope is a hotbed of religious fundamentalism and American militarism.
Still, possibly it’s just that topics like science fiction simply don’t arouse his ire the way real-world issues do. He plays nice in CS because he doesn’t greatly care either way. Except that, to take a for-instance, it’s possible to hold strong views on a topic like abortion, and express them forcefully, without coming across as assholish. But on this one, you’d have to define “groupthink” as “that mindset that doesn’t actually think that all prolifers are actuated by hatred for women, want to chain them to hospital beds and force them to give birth, and hope plenty of them die in order to be gloated over”. Perhaps you can. After all, most people would fall into the category of “mindset that doesn’t actually think &c.”. But the term groupthink normally implies a certain sense of being excessively restrictive, whereas in this case I don’t think that’s so - rather, that the so-called “groupthinkers” can be defined as “at least sane enough not to believe they are a softboiled egg.”
It doesn’t fall on American soldiers either. Those guys don’t have a choice. Blame the fuckers who sent them there. If Trihs wished death on George Bush, he’d still be a dickhead, but I doubt anyone here outside of the Secret Service would really mind that much. Al Franken said it best when he said that if Vietnam should have taught us anything, it was that you can’t blame soldiers for bad policy. Most people have figured this one out. Trihs is too locked in his fucked-up headspace to care.
Yeahhhh. Not unless he has access to better virtual reality technology than the rest of us. Or in other words, people in penthouse apartments surrounded by beautiful women really wouldn’t give a fuck about getting wedgied as a teenager. Face it: Trihs is a loser. I don’t have to be psychic to see that. He exudes a sense of failure the way other guys exude BO. Every comment he makes about troops and theists reflects the anger of the inadequate man.
He’s a 40-year-old who complains about his Asperger’s syndrome and high school experience, rhapsodizes about sci-fi trivia, and can’t even work up the nerve to defend himself against a bunch of anonymous strangers in the Pit. What part of any of this suggests “fuck machine” to you?
His argument has been that if they were moral, they’d refuse. While I understand the difficulty of doing so (I was in the military), his stance really isn’t that indefensible. I also don’t believe he wishes death on the servicemen simply because they are servicemen. He just figures that if they all died, the Iraqis that we would have killed in the future would potentially be saved. Again, not indefensible. In peacetime, or in a non-preemptive war, I’m pretty sure he’d have a completely different take on our military. He’s right that the current situation is neither of those, and that our military are killing innocent civilians in large numbers. Were our soldiers to have all magically died on the first day, there’d be a shit load of innocent Iraqis that might be less dead. While I don’t take his stance, I personally put less worth on the life of a soldier (and this was true when I was one) of any nationality than I do on the life of a civilian of any nationality. The one chooses to be involved, while the other doesn’t.
As 'luci noted, it’s not necessarily the root of his arguments that presents problems for many, it’s the manner and degree in which he espouses them that many of us don’t agree with.
Which brings us full circle to what I said before:
A soldier that refuses to go into combat faces quite a lot. He is likely to be charged, court-martialed, and subject to imprisonment and severe consequences down the road. In all likelihood, life as he knows it is over. He will not be able to get a decent job, he will be shunned by society and probably his own family, especially if it has a tradition of military service, which is true of quite a few soldiers’ families today. Add to that the psychological ramifications of sending his unit into danger understrength, because they decided to honor their oath.
And Trihs says he should just refuse? What gives him the right to say that? Am I to believe that an adult who posts these claims but–again–will not defend them in the Pit has the moral fortitude and courage to hold himself up to the same standard? Fuck that, Trihs would cop out. I must repeat my advice to read between the lines of what he posts regularly. Trihs has copped out his entire fucking life. His whining about how awful he had it as a kid (and I would lay my next three paychecks on my having seen worse than he ever did at that age), his mental instability, his general manner. These are the traits of a man who has never had to step up to the plate. He has never had to make any decision even approaching the difficulty of that he would force upon a US service member caught up in this fucked-up war. It’s obvious.
So fine, call him courageous for insisting that men desert their units for moral reasons. Just don’t ever fool yourself into thinking he could practice what he preaches. Trihs is the worst kind of hypocrite. He’s the hypocrite who will never have to deal with the results of his hypocrisy. Isolated as he is, I doubt he will have to deal with the results of much at all.