And here is what I mean–I never said it was worth minimizing. Explaining is not minimizing. Stating fact is not minimizing.
But this shows this person’s strategy–lie and then obfuscate. Note that he didn’t just allege I minimized he called me a genocide denier and has still yet to provide even one piece of evidence of that. Of course now in this other thread he’s obfuscating it by suggesting he only took umbrage to me “minimizing” it, without even providing evidence for that, either.
I mean, if you really wanted to disagree with him about the family separation stuff you could educate him with regards to the Sixties Scoop instead of insisting that he’s “minimizing” instead of just nitpicking for historical accuracy as he asserts.
Stating a fact for the purpose of minimizing is minimizing and minimizing is a form of denial.
You are a a genocide denier.
That’s a hell of a tautology you got there.
The point is that whether his statement is true or false is irrelevant to whether or not it is minimizing.
Contextualizing is just justification.
And who has done this?
Since this is the second time you have made the claim that this is what is happening here, I’m much more tempted to demand that you cite your claim or admit that you are a liar as @Martin_Hyde likes to do. But, I am willing to see that you misunderstood, rather than claim that you are being disingenuous and heap insult upon you as he does.
If instead you would like to acknowledge that the entire point here is that in order to prevent actions like this, we have to acknowledge that people did truly evil things even while telling themselves they were doing the right thing then we could proceed into a point of mutual understanding.
What you have just said is that there can be no meaningful discussion of genocides, period. For all discussion must inevitably “justify” genocide. The ludicrous nature of this Orwellian nightmare kind of uncovers how fucking stupid and wrong your position is.
But you are minimizing it. That’s the whole thing. When you say, “Well, actually, some of them eventually got to see their families again.” What exactly is it that you think you are doing?
And your strategy is to be passive aggressive and ambiguous, then play the victim when you can claim that someone misunderstood you.
You are obviously not here for productive debate. You admitted yourself that you are here to “slap sheep”.
It is a lie of your own making that anyone conflated family seperation of slaves with residential schools, that’s really what started that tangent, your own disingenuous lie. That I misunderstood that you were lying, and took your statement as a misunderstanding rather than an intentional “obfuscation” was on me, I’ll admit. I took your bait.
No, it means that when you try to “contextualize” something, you are making justifications for it. You are opening up yourself for your own moral ambiguity as you contextualize the wrongs that you yourself may do.
I find it tedious where you’re just repeating the same thing. I find you to be a fundamentally useless person devoid of value. Unless you post something to actually change my mind, I can’t really see a scenario where it is worthwhile whatsoever for me to exercise any sort of mental energy in reading, let alone responding to, your posts.
For the record–there is nowhere, ever, that I said I was solely here to “slap sheep”, once it was obvious that you and your coterie had fully derailed the other thread into a pile on, I made the comment that I was happy to slap sheep when it came to it. I would have preferred an actual honest discussion. I see little evidence you are capable of that.
Also for the record, I never minimized genocide. Speaking factually about something is not minimizing it. I also repeatedly had actually called the operation of the Indian residential schools genocide. You simply couldn’t fathom that someone could think that, but also post things that in any way go against your personal opinions on the matter.
My original comment on slave separations, in response to something MandaJo said, was not ever intended nor proffered as an excuse, minimization or etc, and not only did I clarify that it was obvious in my mind from the original text. So with that I bid to you farewell, and consign you to the trash bin of posters I cease interaction with.
Is it possible to make any factual statements about the extent of a genocide without “minimizing” it?
And then proceeded to post reason after reason why it wasn’t so bad really.
It isn’t the factual part of the sentence that minimizes genocide, it’s the first part, the “it’s worth noting” part. Why is it worth noting? For what purpose would we carefully note the exact circumstances of these family separations, and compare them to other separations? The statement isn’t worth noting except to declare that this genocide wasn’t really all that bad, look how much worse it could have been.
Of course.
But cherry picking facts, while ignoring others, in support of a minimizing argument is definitely minimizing.
This statement is minimizing…
Stating a fact in support of that argument while ignoring other facts that explode that argument is also minimizing.
What facts has he ignored?
Would it still be minimizing if it were true?
So as the person who actually said it, that is not the motivation in using the phrase “it’s worth noting.” I actually, as Delayed_Reaction posted, found MandaJo’s bringing up slave family separations to be useful and an interesting comparison. But I also felt it should be properly understood the context in which they are compared.
I’ll be frank, if I thought the Indian boarding schools and how they were operated was not a genocide, I have little fear of saying it. I have a long history of posting things here that lots of people disagree with. The idea that I’m sitting here trying to backdoor deny a genocide is hilarious to me. If I didn’t agree with the general point that both much of the actions in these schools, and the broader treatment of native Americans generally by white men from the 1500s thru to relatively modern times, constitutes genocide I would not be afraid to say it. I promise you being afraid of a bunch of people on the SDMB disagreeing with me isn’t in my DNA. In many sense I relish a fight, I’d probably be happy to share such an opinion if I held it, because it would guarantee a vigorous discussion.
I just simply don’t, I have said so repeatedly. I don’t believe there is any real evidence that I ever said otherwise because I haven’t. Unlike Lance, kb, Euphonious and others I don’t take your comment in bad faith at all, but I do think it misses the mark because I was not the one to bring up slave family separations and I never disagreed with them being compared, in fact I agreed with the comparison. But I think you can agree even with that comparison but also feel it important to baseline the factual nature of the comparison, which could include pointing out areas where they are not 1:1 identical.
The point was that you made the comment about slave separations in response to something that I said, which is why there was confusion. I still don’t actually understand why you thought what you said was relevant to what I did, unless you thought that I was the one who made that comment.
Depends on what “facts” you choose to share. As in my original analogy, it is “factual” that the Nazis didn’t kill all the Jews, but if you chose to share that fact in a conversation about the Holocaust, there isn’t a single person who wouldn’t think that the reason that you chose to share it was to minimize what did happen.
The same with your choosing to share the fact that some of the kids got to see their families again. It serves to minimize the fact that they were forcibly taken from them in the first place. That you chose to use this as a response to the point made about family separation in the first place shows that you fundamentally misunderstood the reason for that to be brought up, not as a comparison about which one is “more bad”, but as a demonstration that white people do not value the families connections of non-whites.
So, did you actually misunderstand the reason that @MandaJo spoke of this, or were you just lying and obfuscating, as you accuse anyone else who misunderstands what point you are trying to get at?
Wait. No. Please don’t go.
But seriously, your immediate jump to hostility in a potential misunderstanding indicates that you are here looking for a fight, not for a discussion, and that really makes you entirely useless for productive discourse.
It’s interesting that most of the respondents here outraged at Martin pointing out that the family separations under discussion weren’t permanent have not one single time pointed to the forcible family separations that were permanent. I mean, if you want to correct him, correct him for being wrong rather than being outraged at his tone. Perhaps when he learns that some family separations were most definitely permanent he’ll admit that he has learned something new, and agree that those actions were indeed akin to slave family separations.
Anyone going into a Holocaust thread and saying, “They didn’t kill all the Jews” is being obviously disingenuous, because everyone knows that there are still Jewish people alive in the world. The nature of the Canadian boarding school system and the specific ways they victimized native children are much less well known. Personally, I was not aware that some children were still allowed to have contact with their parents until I read Martin’s post. Understanding that doesn’t make me think what happened was “okay,” or excusable, or cause me to categorize this as something other than genocide.
Yep–I wasn’t familiar with any of the details of that and would have taken no issue with that being shared back in the other thread.
I was aware that some native American children were given to whites in America for foster/adoption but not much specific about it and 0 about Canada, but for most of the period of the boarding schools in the US my understanding is they did not commonly adopt out the children to whites.