Since I wanted to stop hijacking this thread re: Bush’s reaction on 9/11, as there’s still dialog ongoing that is germane to the OP. I don’t pit other Dopers as a rule, but I had to put this out there.
In this thread, Normal Phase offered up a great post:
[bolding mine]
I agree with absolutely everything Normal Phase said. I’m no apologist, and I’ll say it again, very clearly - the entire Bush foreign policy team (maybe save Powell) deserves to be brought up on charges at The Hague. That’s not my issue with Der Trihs.
But Normal Phase made a point to stop short of endorsing Der Trihs’ perennial dead horse, that Bush is some kind of murderous madman, dancing on the graves of American citizens and Iraqi children alike.
My whole point is that one must truly and honestly comprehend and represent the nature of their opponents to hope for any kind of constructive discourse. We don’t need to make out Bush et al as any worse than they actually were to convey the depth of corruption and hubris that they embodied. But as bad as they were, I can pretty much guarantee that these guys didn’t sit in war rooms with their fingers tented, smiling over Iraqi and Afghani body counts every day - and they damn sure didn’t jump for joy on 9/11, with 3000 US citizens dead.
I’m not saying the reality is much better - that they simply didn’t care how many were killed in pursuit of their agenda, and that they didn’t let jurisprudence, the civil rights of our own citizens, or preservation of basic human dignity get in their way; and that after the fact, they used 9/11 as an excuse to execute their plans.
But by making out the bad guys as so much worse, rather than actually presenting facts to try to sway folks to his cause, Der Trihs only serves to alienate those who need to hear the real truth of the matter - especially when he invokes victims of 9/11 in such tasteless fashion. If I - a damn proud progressive liberal - have such a visceral negative reaction to such rhetoric, what would the average person on the street think? And as I said in the other thread, the average person is who needs to be swayed before any kind of positive change will happen in this country, on any front. Do anyone really think an honest dialog can occur when many people would see Der Trihs’ entire argument as only a couple degrees from blood libel? (and not in the Sarah Palin “you hurt my feelings” sort of way, but in the old-school “Jews drink the blood of babies” context).
I get that Der Trihs is simply trolling - and I doubt he’ll have anything truly constructive to say here, so I guess this will be a short thread. But I had to put this out there, to underscore the well thought-out post from Normal Phase (and maybe also to rebut the impression that I’m any kind of Bush apologist).
Maybe one more thing to add - a polite request for Der Trihs: every time you post a diatribe against Bush (or against religion or anything else for that matter), maybe along with it, you could include an actual link to a factual article even vaguely supporting your position - maybe as an exercise in moderating your tone, or if nothing else, to give others the ammunition to reach their own conclusions.
I’m not at all saying that such factual evidence doesn’t exist - I’ve read much of it myself, and as I said, I don’t need convincing. But there may be folks out there who do need to see for themselves, and maybe you should focus your outrage toward swaying folks to your cause instead of pushing them away with hate. Otherwise, it’s all just so much rhetorical masturbation.
Early in my posting career in some thread where he was going off on chrsitians claiming all kinds of things I asked for a cite three times in the same thread and he ignored me each time. So I doubt he is going to change and actually try to back up why he thinks the way he does.
Excellent OP and quite respectful for the Pit. Not to come down hard on any one particular poster, but the general habit of making the opponent out to be worse than he is does absolutely nothing productive for political discourse. I appreciate you putting that out there.
What’s ironic is that in the referenced thread, he did say this:
This is the most sensible, rational post I’ve ever seen from Der Trihs. And it might have laid decent groundwork for an argument that Bush would have invaded Iraq regardless. Had DT included a link, that is, instead of “go look it up”. And had he actually followed this up with further reasoned debate, instead of his next post, which was:
What you are overlooking is the record of the Bush II administration. As events turned out the way to predict and comprehend its actions was to assume the most dishonourable and debased motives were solely in play. Then, turn it up to 11. Only then could an accurate picture appear.
So Der Trihs’s method has good and reliable form. At least in the present context.
I find it helps if you keep in mind the image of a fully grown man who, quite early on, solidified a worldview based on the comic books he used as a substitute for social interaction, in which the “bad guys” are 100% evil merely for the sake of being evil. Who may well be physically repulsive, who likely has never been laid, and whose prospects for future sexual release (outside the company of his own fist and a partition full of Hentai) can charitably be termed grim. Who is very, very bitter about that fact, and attempts to sublimate his unfulfilled adolescent longing with crudely drawn fantasies of an unjust world overrun by cackling sadists and black-hearted succubi who desire nothing more than to oppress his sad, delicate, and unattended manhood.
I hear he’s a lot of fun in Cafe Society threads, though.
D_T is a prime practitioner of something that ordinarily drives me batty: incessant drive-bys that seem to mainly post the contents of his head as fact. Every once in a while I’ll think about why he doesn’t (drive me nuts, that is). It certainly isn’t his politics; while I definitely skew to the liberal end of the spectrum, and I won’t be sending the Bush family a Christmas card any time soon, calling up images of GWB dancing on the graves of dead Iraqis in all apparent seriousness seems, quite simply, deranged.
But for some reason it doesn’t bother me as much as some other monomaniacal posters I could name. For one thing, it’s a relatively eloquent sort of madness; the grammar is arranged pretty well, and he clearly understands the concept of brevity. In, make what most folks would consider a fairly outrageous statement, in three lines or less, out, badda bing badda boom.
And that’s maybe the heart of it. He doesn’t seem to really engage other posters all that much; he’ll make a brief, flat statement about how blackheartedly evil the Republicans, or the the US military, or Christians are, but that’s pretty much as far as it goes. He might respond to one or two posters who try to rebut his, er, unnuanced opinions, but like the panda in the bar, he pretty much shoots and leaves. So I guess his posts don’t interrupt the flow of a thread all that much, and so he’s managed to stick around for years, despite frequent expressions of opinion about as outlandish as those of Commissar, who managed to get himself booted in far less time.
Well, there I am posting the contents of my head as fact. :dubious:
Well put. The unilateral condemnation this guy is always spouting just adds an extra layer of condescension to an already very obnoxious rhetorical style. And as far as debating techniques go, it’s basically the equivalent of trying to shove your dick through eye of a needle.
I think the thing that bothers me so much is the dogmatism. When he’s posting in a political or religious thread, I find I don’t need to read the post to know what it says. Frankly, his black-and-white, us-and-them worldview is a mirror image of the religious fundamentalism and extreme economic conservatism he despises.
As someone who makes a cameo appearance in the very first post–THANK YOU ALL!
A special thanks to Crown Prince of Irony, Hamster King, and a special thanks to Der Trihs. There are others [music starts cuing up] You all made this possible! Without you, this flame could never have happened. And I just want to say…we’re are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And, whenever you’ve got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up.