Jonathan Chance: So What is the Official List of Things You Want Me to Remain Silent About

[Thudlow_Boink]

@mhendo

But those posts were tame, tame, tame. Had i seen them from any poster, about any issue (right or left, conservative or liberal), i would not even have raised an eyebrow, let alone thought they needed an official warning. They were no more problematic than dozens of posts found in GD on a regular basis; they were not insults, they were not even particularly controversial, especially the one about Republicans.

The warning for the first linked comment was bullshit, pure and simple; an awful, awful call. If calling Republicans intransigent is unacceptable in GD now, you might as well shut down the forum altogether.

Having read that first linked thread, I’m inclined to agree. I didn’t see anything moddable in that particular comment by Der Trihs.

On the other hand, Jonathan Chance in one of the other threads gave a pretty good summary of what’s wrong with Der Trihs:

@Jonathan_Chance

Der Trihs, you should know better than this.

In effect, your need to cast those with whom you disagree in the worst possible light can be extremely detrimental to any form of discussion and distracts from reasonable debate.

In the above post, you characterize a group of people with beliefs differing from yours as bullies (by your repeated use of the word ‘aggression’) and bigots. Instead of dealing with people as individuals you seem to prefer to treat them as classes of beings.

When Der Trihs makes these sorts of comments, I’ve learned to just sort of shrug them off, but I can’t help wondering what happened to him psychologically that caused his hostility to overcome his common sense. Because he is smart enough to know better.

Sometimes I think the solution would be to force Der Trihs to share a house with a person who represents all that he abominates (Republican, religious, pro-life, patriotic American): Every week, twenty minutes of wacky sitcom hijinks would ensue, followed by a heartwarming reconciliation and a lesson that “maybe, deep down, we’re not so different after all.”