Personally I prefer people to be straight-forward about what they think. In my (not very humble) opinion SA is just hiding his fascist ideas behind “polite society” idioms.
I’ve met some sandwich board people who were quite polite, and very, very crazy. However, I feel like I am playing into his hands by even posting to this thread. I wish people would just not engage him because that makes it seem like he’s a person you could actually have a meaningful conversation with. He’s been Pitted fairly recently for like 10 pages but no change or reflection transpired as a result. So… yeah. I think this will be more of the same.
To be polite I alerted him/her to this thread, but yeah (s)he’s probably not interested in my opinion. Anyway I don’t really expect people as fucked up as that to change for the better. It just makes me feel better that I’m not the only one that thinks this person is fucking crazy.
He. He’s a bitter old man who pines for the olden days and blames liberals for every bad thing that’s ever happened in the past several decades. He doesn’t just want liberals to get off his lawn, he’d like them to please get off his planet. It’s not his planet, but he’s doddering, so I’ll let that slide. Yes, he would be right at home in a fascist society. It would be the ultimate Viagra for his mind, body and soul (such as it is).
He never will. Ever ever ever. Rubystreak is right.
I take it you’re new? I haven’t seen you around before. Read some of the other pit threads. They’re very entertaining, in a bashing-your-head-against-the-keyboard-while-watching-intelligent-people-with-good-points-be-completely-blown-off kind of way. No, you’re not the only one.
I’m not that new - I’ve been lurking here for at least 6 years. And reading pit threads make me angry for no reason. I scan them and reply to as few of them as I can.
I stayed out of that thread, specifically because I avoid Starving Artist these days, but the post Equipoise quoted above can basically be paraphrased: “Unless a few individuals behave in a way that I, Starving Artist, personally find acceptable, I won’t give a shit if a millions of other individuals who share one arbitrary, and irrelevant, trait with them lose their civil rights.”
Nice impulse but it won’t help. Starving Artist isn’t crazy or stupid. He’s willfully blind and likes it that way because it makes him feel good about himself. His world view extends as far as his navel lint. History consists of how he felt about things. There is no reality beyond Starving Artist’s own selective memory.
He really, really liked the world 50 years ago, the heyday of Republican white men, Joe McCarthy and segregation. As a Republican white man, the world is no longer to his liking so someone must be at fault. Liberals ruined his tidy, never-was world, you see. Therefore liberals are the opposite of everything fine, civil, principled and good. Liberals are, fatally, not Starving Artist.
Note that none of his asinine blather makes a lick of sense. It’s not about facts, or principles, or even conservatism. It’s one bitter, blinkered old man’s decision to deny any worth or virtue in anyone who isn’t exactly like himself.