Babale, may I humbly suggest that your life would be less stressful if you learned to accept the fact that laypeople in casual conversation often use words in ways that don’t fit the precise technical definitions of those words as used by experts? And that this is OK, part of how language works, and not within your power to change?
Legal terms don’t use legal definitions when used outside of a legal context. Come on, you know that.
I personally use the term as defined here unless I’m discussing international law on the subject:
the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group
That doesn’t necessarily conform to the legal definition.
I fully agree with you about that on 99.999% of topics.
If there is even one realm where it is important to be precise, though, it is when it comes to the single gravest accusation that can be made against someone. As the UN website itself notes, the specificity of the special intent, aka dolus specialis, is precisely what lends the charge of genocide its immense gravity.
In the vast majority of contexts, exact words don’t matter all that much. In a few very specific contexts, though - like whether trans women are women, or what is a genocide - words carry immense weight and it becomes a lot more important to be precise.
In the context of sharing an opinion in the Pit, I see no need, nor do I have any interest, in providing any more information.
Let me ask a more relevant question.
Do you think that if someone else looks at that evidence and decides it falls short of genocide, does it follow that this person supports Reagan’s actions?
Or is it possible to oppose, even strongly opposed, something without thinking it is specifically a genocide?
Especially while you’re trying to eat breakfast. 
Well, here are a couple paragraphs from Wikipedia which seem to support the contention that Reagan’s AIDS policies were at least significantly influenced by extreme homophobes.
Reagan was dissatisfied with his meeting with the task force, and in August of that year scheduled another meeting on the AIDS epidemic, this time without any representatives of the LGBT community, instead choosing to meet with conservative activists.[25] Attendees of this meeting included Director of the Office of Public Liaison Faith Whittlesey, National Director of the Conservative Caucus Howard Phillips and Moral Majority representative Ron Goodwin.[25] Goodwin advocated for closing gay bathhouses and requiring blood donors to provide sexual histories, while Phillips encouraged Reagan to put out a statement condemning homosexuality as a moral wrong and “link[ing] this statement to the AIDS outbreak”, and pushed for a position of only discussing the AIDS pandemic in the context of homosexuality as a moral failing of AIDS victims.[25][24] Many conservatives of the era echoed similar sentiments.[27] Pat Buchanan, who would become the White House Communications Director for Reagan in 1985, wrote acerbically in a column on June 23, 1983: “The poor homosexuals. They have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”[27][28]
According to historian Jennifer Brier, these meetings and the attitudes prevailing in them deeply complicated epidemiologists’ efforts. While public health leaders and epidemiologists from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and National Institute of Health (NIH) attempted to gain control of the epidemic, they also had to contend with Reagan’s conservative advisors and aides, who wanted AIDS education to “fit the model of social and religious conservatism that posited gay men as sick and dangerous”.[29] Brier further writes that, “Staff members were flooded with material with vitriolic attacks on homosexuality.”[29] Following these 1983 meetings, there are no records of internal White House conversations on AIDS for two years.[24] In a 2006 interview, Margaret Heckler, who was Reagan’s Secretary of Health and Human Services from 1983 to 1985, stated that she had never gotten the chance to speak with Reagan about the AIDS crisis, as the Reagan administration’s cabinet meetings were highly structured and AIDS had never been put on the agenda.[30]
I note also that when Congress first voted money specifically for AIDS research in 1983, the Reagan administration opposed the bill. The President never uttered the word “AIDS” in public until 1985, and didn’t make a speech about it until 1987.
Taken together, it seems clear that, particularly during his first term, the Reagan administration failed to treat AIDS as a legitimate health crisis, largely due to bigotry against the groups primarily affected by it, which led to massive numbers of deaths among those groups. So, probably not “genocide” according to the strict definition, since the government didn’t actively attempt to spread AIDS, but merely acted with reckless disregard for the lives of (an unpopular subgroup of) its citizens. Still, it was extremely common for AIDS activists in the 80s to use that word, and I for one am not going to scold them for it.
There’s also this, from that same wiki page:
Don Regan, who served as Reagan’s Treasury Secretary and Chief of Staff, said that “Reagan was not inclined to be too sympathetic,” to AIDS victims, because he did not want to “make the world safe for immoral practices.”[101]
For the record, that is precisely my claim. Can I prove it? Not to the level required by a court of law, but then, I’m not a lawyer, you’re not a judge, and this isn’t the Hague.
But given the overall hostility of the Reagan administration towards gay people in general, it seems more likely than not that a significant portion of their inaction on the AIDS crisis was because they were happy to see gay people die, and thought that letting a bunch of us die would be good for the country.
No (or not necessarily), and yes.
I’m sure this was debated elsewhere in depth, but most of Reagan’s cruelty and depravity was accomplished simply by doing nothing and ignoring what was going on. Others in his circle made speeches about immorality and God’s justice while people were dying. But they didn’t deliberately or otherwise cause AIDS. So I suppose it wasn’t genocide, legally speaking. The attitude, however, toward the dying, was so similar to that of perpetrators of genocide (they deserve death, they aren’t really human, we’re well rid of them) that one might be forgiven for conflating what happened and genocide. In any case it had a very similar effect.
Lest we forget, many people approvingly called AIDS the “gay plague”.
They didn’t start panicking until they learned it did not just affect gay men. And even then, at first they went through denial and accused heterosexual men of being closeted.
High profile folks like Magic Johnson (who by no means could be mistaken for a closeted gay man) helped fight that stigma that it was primarily a gay issue. And even he felt stymied by the White House response that he felt did nothing. And that wasn’t even under Reagan by then - it was the early '90s under Bush.
They might not have actively killed gay men, but they certainly did little to nothing about AIDS - even to the small extent of actively supporting medical research or public awareness programs - when they thought it was limited to them.
Thank you for noticing my post! How about this for a topic of discussion: Would you all agree with my idea that a good metanoia is the best road to redemption? Is it possible that Demon Tree is approaching that point? It matters to me.
Babale and the rest of yous, please give us all a fucking break already.
DemonTree seems to be showing some signs of evolution, and I applaud your efforts to engage constructively with her.
I don’t think I’ll be posting much more in this thread, as I don’t feel right about participating in a Pit thread that the Pittee has just said made her suicidal.
Redemption is always worth pursuing. As for the particular poster in question, I have no idea what will work. But I will opine that some people need to see a crack of light before they can open the door themselves.
I’ll say I feel much better about @DemonTree from what I’m reading in this thread. It doesn’t invalidate past criticism, but if someone wants to change and be better that should be encouraged.
I’ve certainly changed my opinion on a lot of matters over the years, and very much changed my opinion on LGBTQ+ issues. I was lucky to grow in a very diverse environment when it came to race, but not so much when it comes to other aspects of identity, and had to grow to be more accepting and understanding.
Absolutely. I’m not completely convinced that that’s what we’re seeing.
In her posts that soften her original position, there’s not really an acknowledgment that there’s been a change of position. Nor is there an acknowledgment of the harm that her previous position supported. Instead, there was a heavy emphasis on the harm that she suffered from people angry at her for her previous position.
Now, I don’t want to yell at her for changing her mind. Any move away from a harmful position is great. But I also don’t want to treat this as a full change of heart if it’s something else.
You said everything I was thinking about it. There’s a multi-stage process to go through, and at this point, we’re looking at possibly of entering the process.
I can see posts I made on Usenet in the 1990s that make me cringe now. I need to keep that in mind more when posting here.
If you look at her latest post in ATMB (from after your post), she feels she hasn’t changed at all and hasn’t ever caused harm to trans people. So color me doubtful that there has been any growth on her part.