It’s probably the uniform. 
Now why couldn’t people have just waited for that to happen instead of wasting board space trying to debate with him?
He was obviously just on a drive-by, not interested in a debate and out to jerk some chains. And here’s all these people, who you’d hope would know better, willing to rise to the bait. :rolleyes:
53 posts before being banned, so if anyone took the under (somebody set the line at 57), congrats. Talking to him helped bring the banning about, so it served a purpose that way. Also, reading that crap makes me mad, so I might as well take the frustration out by arguing and knowing I can beat that stuff, even though in the battle of wits, he was unarmed.
I think Jews and others who are afraid of bigots like that should see those posts, if that guy was ‘one of the best’ on Stormfront, it’ll probably be very comforting.
I agree that talking to these people is necessary. If you don’t talk to them, you can’t understand them, and if you can’t understand them, you will never be able to cure them.
It would be nice to keep these people isolated in the backwoods of the Deep South, but you can’t. There are just as many of them in poor neighborhoods in major cities, where they ARE in a position to do harm. Letting them go about their business and ignoring them is wrong.
Sure you can. I just use epoxy resin. Those slack jaws make perfect ashtrays.
[/Bizarro Martha]
Revtim makes very good points in the ‘I think there is value …’ post.
I would add that I need to reminded that ‘those people’ exist; I tend to forget, and living in a rose-colored bubble just isn’t safe.
That being said, I won’t enter those posts. Nope. I get upset enough at statements that pop up in the normal posts.
[ol][li]I agree that such people are incapable of reason, by definition. Debating them is a waste of time and annoys the pig.[/li][li]Nonetheless, limiting discussion enmartyrs them (new word!) and gives them a power they have not earned. Also, stupidity is best brought out into the light.[/li]Man, Airman Doors must be one hot emeffer, the way gobear is always kissing his ass in these threads. Got a pic, Airman?[/ol]
I, for one, welcome our new Jewish overlords.
/oy gevalt!
(shrug)
I’d think somebody with your name would understand the value of a futile gesture.
Anyway, it may be safe to ignore someone who is unreasonable when debating Kirk vs Picard but it is UNsafe to ignore hatemongers. Most may never see the error of their ways but there have been some who have been turned to the path of righteousness when they finally got it through their thick skulls that there was no validity in what they believed. We cannot assume that a person is a moron just because he sounds like one to our ears; not all thick skulls protect small brains.
I think that you must owe me a cocktail or something for putting that image in my head.
I agree 99.9% with that. The only caveat is that I’ve never debated with Millen88, and don’t know what his views are.
I find it very easy to distinguish the hate-mongers from the simply confused. The hate-mongers never ask any questions to understand someone else’s views. They come here to have a one-way conversation. Debating with them only lets them air their views.
I have to say I’m shocked at how long it took for our latest guest to get banned. He openned at least one thread containing obvious hate speech **in ** the OP. I"d say zero tolerance for that sort of stuff. Banned people can always come back if they contact the mods and convince them they now understand the rules.
Damn, Airman– do you hate always being right?
Fuck that! The Deep South is a beautiful place, buddy, full of wilds and full of wonderful, friendly, earthy people. Not only that – there’s also a lot of black people who live in the Deep South who sure don’t want your fuckin’ trash down here.
Don’t go thinking we’re a dumping ground, because the South, even the Deep South, is nothing of the sort. We don’t need or want lying bigots.
Daniel
Are we allowed to name suspected sock puppets in the Pit? If so, then I’ve got another member whose over-under we can bet on.
Crap!
Never mind. I see he got banned while I was writing this.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/member.php?u=44787
14!
Check the rules, but I believe you are supposed to e-mail a mod directly, not out them in a post, regardless of the forum.
Yeah and I had a really nice reply to his stupidity too. Where the hell did BrainGlutton go anyway? He invited the damn things in.
I agree wholeheartedly. Aren’t there at least a few posters here who have changed their views of gays or evolution based on reading the boards? Also, this being the Internet, there are quite a few young people here, and the SDMB is a lot more cosmopolitan and a lot more intelligent than many of their communities. For example, I haven’t yet personally met any transsexuals/transgendered people in the surface world. There were none in my high school, or at least, none who had come out, and I can understand why – high school is cruel enough as it is. So it’s no surprise that much of my education on a subject that I knew very little about came from the SDMB, where we have some delightfully witty and intelligent trans posters and a lot of knowledgeable allies. A similar type of education happened with my view of religion. After abandoning my native Lutheranism in my early teenage years (I’m 19 now), I found myself quite skeptical of Christianity and organized religion as a whole, even to the point of contempt. However, upon coming here, I found that, surprise surprise, there are indeed many intelligent religious people who can debate like pros and aren’t above occasional self-deprecation. I still don’t understand why people are religious, but I’ve learned to accept the fact that religious belief can be a powerful tool for good.
So although debating complete asshats might not change their personal points of view, I don’t think we can deny the Internet’s power in swaying the minds of young people. Reading in all its forms, whether we’re talking books or message boards, can really show kids that their immediate surroundings, and the mindset that can result from those surroundings, are more insular than they think. Sometimes it can even do it to adults.
That said, I do think the thread in question was closed for good reason, as the OP obviously didn’t care enough to make even a pathetic effort at a debate. I just don’t agree with the general principle of not debating idiots. Debating them does not give them any semblance of legitimacy. Rather, it merely acknowledges that there are a shitload of idiots in the world, and they’re more powerful than we’d like to think. It’s indeed taking longer than we thought.
I’m with Monstro as usual. There is more racism below the surface than most of us know of, especially those of us who are white. There are people who would be appalled that I live in one of my city’s few mixed race neighborhoods. While I was living in Hawaii, I used to get a lift from a co-worker who believed that the mixing of the races was “against God”. (She was there because her husband was stationed there with the military, not someone who’d moved to Hawaii of her own choice.) A few days after the World Trade Center bombings, I heard a co-worker say that anyone not born in the United States should get out. I looked up from what I was doing and said, if that was the case, it’d take a bit longer for me to fix her database. I wasn’t as sanguine as I sounded.
These people, like cockroaches, exist. We may not like it, but the fact remains. I’ve been fighting attitudes like theirs for most of my life, and I see no reason to change. Yes, as I said in the thread in GD which invited this mess, they scare the hell out of me, and they do so on a rather deep, visceral level. The more light we can expose their arguments to. The more we can show that their so-called facts and truths are anything but factual and true, the less credible we make them and the more damage we do to their cause. Besides, frankly, after couple dozen years of doing this, they’re easy targets!
I have never yielded to bullies in my life; I see no reason to do so now.
CJ
Well, yes, but you have to admit that the Deep South produces more of these thinkers, on balance, than the north or west. That said, the emergence of groups like the Michigan Militia suggests that a definite shift is taking place in the power base of racism.
Look, guys, there’s a very good reason why we have to bring these people out into the open and argue with them. A hundred years ago, there were more individuals in the United States who were openly racist than you’d ever see today.
The rule of law began to prevail, people stopped believing that, say, murdering a black child was ‘acceptable’, and all of a sudden white supremacists weren’t in the driver’s seat anymore. In their minds, they became victims- oppressed by the evil multiculturalists and the Jews and the minorities themselves.
These people are now isolated, weak, and no longer the majority (nor a plurality, which is as strong as they ever got). Now that they see themselves as victims, they’re too scared to employ violence.
We’ve redefined their goals for them. Every time their goals are stymied, they alter them to be more palatable to moderates. First they realized that the proposed genocide of all minorities in the US wasn’t going to wash. Then it became “send them home”… that didn’t work either. Then it became “make them use different water fountains”- no luck there. Now the vanguard of racism is “White Nationalism”- they’re actually proposing that they leave, rather than the other way around. They’ve become, dare I say it, politically correct. Eventually this too will dwindle to a muttered, “I’m not sure about those black people.”
Evil in humanity is self-replicating. The process can be stopped, though- and constantly reminding those in the middle why those on the far right are wrong is a good way to do it.
bolding mine
This is really not all that bright of a comment when referring to racists or bigots.
BTW RNATB I don’t think you are either. However, the above quote is a bit insulting to those of us who live in the south, in the woods, or are not wealthy.
I hope you didn’t mean it the way it sounded. If not, that’s cool. I understand the “stereotype” but promoting it doesn’t help. Thanks 