Christ.
Bricker, I appreciate your thoughts and your kind words.
I just don’t know where to go with this.
You suggested that I might wish to “counter” some perception of some subset of the board.
My problem:
Why should I?
How can I?
Those are both pretty fundamental. If people want to believe X, they will damn well believe X. The Internet’s about the worst place to try to convince them of not-X.
And, why should I?
This board (or at least the denizens of it who find themselves citeless and angry) is/are no less Godwin-prone than any other. Every word spent talking about this nonsensical and distractionary “issue” (I’m not bashing you, Bricker, as I know you are simply making an observation on, but not endorsing, the phenomenon) further reinforces and rewards Godwinizing, and encourages those who have backed a losing horse to triumphantly (or, for the sneaky cowards, insinuatingly) start musing about what old Huerta did during the War, feeling as though they’ve scored a very clever point indeed.
Bricker, you tell me ('cause I really wonder): am I getting through to ANY of these people when I mention my recent hobby horse the Genetic Fallacy? Has there been ANY rhetorical dawning of awareness from my recent lacing of my posts with stipulations that the reader should, arguendo, assume that I am the most dyed-in-the-wool fire-eating fascist murderer – but then challenging them to repudiate my arguments or statistics or citations on grounds other than the fact that they are held by a (let us assume) Bad Person?
If I could make the Genetic Fallacy point here, would it not, maybe, help their debating skills in other threads? Or am I a wild-eyed optimist?
Is it getting through any heads that, when they still can’t gainsay my cites, it should make them understand that Godwin is not an argument but an ad hominem epithet?
Is nobody else performing the thought experiment that I am performing or positing: Imagine Huerta is a cunning evil Nazi. So cunning is he that he does not actually espouse or practice actual Nazi beliefs. He does not use fascist terminology, sources, or theory. In other posts on the board his interests appear superficially to be much like those of any average non-Nazi, and his politics would appear to be some mixture of populism, conservatism, libertarianism, with a dash of Liberalism. Remember, this guy is a super-cunning fascist. His handle is an ethnic minority name. He’s hidden his fascism SO WELL that he’ll go to his grave with no overt “act in furtherance” of it. Hmmm. How is such a crypto-crypto-crypto-fascist really different from a . . . total non-fascist, and which scenario would Occam have us opt for being the more likely?
Am I the only one thinking that when all my opponents have to go on is dark mutterings about my username, that’s a pretty good sign the argument’s going okay for me?
Bricker, as someone whose views (from what I read) sometimes fall (like mine sometimes do) on the rightish side of the spectrum, you (and I) have more to lose from Godwinizing than do the smug citation free “progressives.” Don’t you worry that dignifying weird-ass conspiracy theory “fascist” allegations with a moment’s attention is a bad idea?
And finally:
I’ve addressed this once before, and I will not address it again: My handle (the numeric portion at least) was chosen for me by Hotmail when my chosen handle (Huerta87) was taken. (Go ahead, spam away – I’m also orinoco87@yahoo.com). Apparently dozens of other Huertas were computer literate before I. The numerological symbology that has been adverted to here was news to me when it was first noted on this board, as I am not a member of or sympathizer with any of those groups or their views (and for Christ’s sake, give me a little credit – if I wanted to go fascist, I’d take the intellectualoid Wagner/Nietzsche route, not some obvioius skinhead motorcycle gang approach. That would be worse than fascist. That would be tacky).
