But does it make you think that it wasn’t as bad as your originally thought it was?
They also didn’t kill all the Jews in Germany. Does everyone know that there are still Jewish people living in Germany?
I still think it was genocide and an atrocity. Isn’t that bad enough? I don’t see any point in saying, “This was the worst genocide, and this was the second worst genocide, and this was the third worst…” but it’s still useful to understand the actual contours of what happened.
The distinction between “All the Jews in the world,” and “All the Jews in Germany,” is entirely meaningless to the point I was making.
He’s felt that way for a looonnngg time!
Seems the only reason he is here is that he hates everyone on the SDMB, and so enters threads to pick fights, spew insults and then play the martyr.
Seems like a shitty way to spend your free time but whatever.
But that’s not what is happening here. What happened was that it was claimed that some of the children got to occasionally see their families, and that was meant as a counter to the point that white people don’t value the family structure of non-whites.
Sure, and in some contexts that is true. But when it is offered as a rebuttal as to the callousness with which the white people treated the indigenous, it’s not being offered simply as a means of describing the contours.
The distinction between children forcibly taken from their homes, and that some of the children were allowed to see their families occasionally was entirely meaningless to the point that @MandaJo was making.
As quickly as he turned to hostility and insults over a misunderstanding, it does seem as though his motive was to pick a fight, not have a productive conversation.
All I can think of is this XKCD…
That’s exactly where I was going to go from just reading the OP of this thread. Why in the world would @Martin_Hyde think that a post like this would help?
If you think you’re being misunderstood, then the usual action is to try and make yourself understood better. It’s not to call everyone who disagrees with you sheep, or—far worse in my not so humble opinion—saying that anyone who disagrees with you has a mental illness. (Fuck acting like an illness is an insult!)
I get needing to vent because it feels like people are willfully misunderstanding you. I feel that happens to me, too. I get that the topic at hand is a rather contentious topic where things get heated.
But this type of response? I can’t say I read everything you wrote in that thread, @Martin_Hyde, as people were making me angry and so I left. But the posts I did read from you didn’t come across as badly as all this. I thought they were a bit naive, but not horrible.
However, this response completely changed my mind about all of that. It seems we saw what you were really thinking the whole time. You were just posting to attack the leftists who dared considered this admitted genocide to be a horrible thing. You weren’t just trying to discuss the topic. You were trying to “slap sheep.”
The problem with an argument of ignorance is that the information about the subject was already available in the thread before the post, and was made clear after said post.
Yet the response was not “Oh, I didn’t know that. It wasn’t to try and be more informed.” It was to get mad that anyone would dare get offended, and attack everyone who disagreed as sheep and mentally ill, while admitting their actual goal was to slap people rather than to actually discuss the topic.
It’s one thing to be ignorant and willing to learn. It’s another to be defiantly ignorant on a topic that involves such a huge moral horror.
Ignorance is only an excuse before the information has been spoonfed to you. And it’s definitely not an excuse to say the shit they are being pitted for.
How many times do you someone should be accused of genocide denial before it’s acceptable to get angry about it?
Since when is being angry an excuse to say that the only reason why you ever post here is to attack everyone on the left, calling us sheep and mentally ill?
It feels like you’re ignoring the actual reason the poster was pitted. It’s not about being angry. It’s about admitting he was only here to troll.
Your defense make no sense, as they clearly were not what he was thinking. He was thinking “I need to slap some leftist sheep.” He admitted that.
If someone tells you their true motivations, you believe them. It’s bizarre to try and find excuses for them. @Martin_Hyde told us who he is, and why he’s here.
I found the quoted blurb in the OP to be quite disgusting, but this is in no way a reasonable restatement of what Martin said. He did not say that he’s only here (in that thread) to slap sheep, nor did he say that was his principal reason for beginning engagement with that thread.
You’ve been an advocate of the principle of charity in the past - use it. The charitable, and IMHO reasonable, interpretation is, “I showed in in that thread to have a legitimate argument. Unfortunately, excessive group-think from the left made that impossible, so once that was clear, I was happy to slap the sheep around a bit.” Yeah, there are some problems with that, but not what you’re saying.
And ?
Why bother participating in such a thread in “a den of groupthink lefties” if the goal wasn’t “sheep slapping” from the beginning?
Look, I’m not Martin Hyde. I can only guess. Maybe it’s this part?
In his own words, the majority are bleating sheep so finding such a discussion – especially in the Pit – would be rather difficult for him.
One time more than whatever the arbitrary threshold is for Banquet_Bear to not get angry, and not a post less…
Maybe he likes a challenge? Look, I don’t know. Ask him. But don’t pretend that the very words he wrote here prove that his only intent is sheep slapping. That’s just not what he wrote.
No, he’s also here for the bear fucking hunting…