Pit thread for Martin_Hyde {He has been BANNED}

You’re a delusional imbecile–I don’t have anything to do with these shootings, you’re confusing your own emotional reaction with being “mad” that I got in the way of the typical SDMB useless, whingeing, “crybaby train” on mass shootings. You guys wanted to post a bunch of feel-good nonsense about how terrible it all is, how America sucks, gun owners suck, Republicans suck, etc etc. And I simply pointed out that it’s not effective. That it’s a loser for Democrats politically. That you’re just rolling into a cycle that, so far, has ultimately always worked to Republican advantage.

The thread that kicked this off is about the politics of gun control, I see little reason to get into a gun rights dispute–but there is an intrinsic tradeoff to liberty and security, across the board. Being honest about the fact that I am willing to accept a higher risk to society for a certain liberty, is simply being truthful. There are a number of issues that we allow in our society that create dead children. It is actually deranged to believe you can, through fiat, create a society where no children die.

I’ve also clarified many times I am fine with any number of gun controls, I am just not in favor of regimes of mass-banning. Considering the Democrats haven’t been able to summon political support for even moderate gun control, I find it shocking they don’t at least consider more moderate proposals–and actually push them throughout the year, not just when a bunch of kids are dead. Frankly I think Democrats misunderstand the political opportunity that opens when these shootings occur–namely, this isn’t a time you’re going to make much political hay on gun control. It just isn’t. Gun control battles, as much as they can be advanced, happen when passions are cooler on the issue.

You mean the thread kicked off by you and Lance Turbo being unaware that “cultural genocide” as it is commonly described doesn’t perfectly meet the 1948 UN legal definition of genocide? A conversation started by this post:

No one ever said the underlying acts weren’t some form of genocide, the dispute was whether they would meet specific legal standards for that under UN 1948 definitions, which is a simple matter of law, not of morality or broader definitions. The fact that you simply didn’t understand that reflects your proclivity to emotional histrionics.

I don’t think that at all. But I do think that this board is a nest of a lot of people who think their incredibly dishonest and incredibly manipulative styles of argument make them morally superior to other people, and I enjoy jousting with that from time to time, which is fine. There’s a big contingent of people on this forum (like the OP of this thread, for example), and some of the common histrionic types, that seek to argue by falsely defining what another person says for the purpose of generating posts on off-board forums where they can then all slap themselves on the back about it.