WW said:
David said:
[...]
Because of my loyalty to the newsgroup fuhrer. Heil
Fehrer! Death to noobs! Ok, just kidding.
Feher. And having a grandmother who was Jewish (well,
she was catholic on paper but then again she said Oh
Yisrael and not Oh Jesus, which is a strong hint) I take this
bullshit of yours as a serious offense. And not a joke.
So in order to be offended, you have to rely on speculative
ancestry? In that case, one of my ancestors might have
been a Jew also, and so I should be equally offended! Isn't
it time for Jews to stop complaining about something that
didn't even happen to them personally? Isn't it enough that
you got a special word out of it, and a state? I mean, the
millions of Poles, Slavs, Serbs, and other people killed by
the Nazis, Stalinists, Leninists, and every other brute in
history don't have a special term for their meaningless
deaths, but I've never once heard one of their ancestors
complain about it.
So I think it is time for you to apologize!
You mean it's time for you to censor me.
Calling someone a nazi is *not* a joke, in any way.
It is when "Nazi" is a placeholder for "authoritarian dictator",
and not "Jew burner". I could have used Castro, Stalin, or
even Mao, but people have a broader knowledge about
the Nazi infrastructure, so references to them are more
easily recognizable. Who knows what Castro's secret
police are called? And I thought "Feher" was a funny
play on "fuhrer", which is a generic term perfectly
describing my opinion of your behaviour sometimes.
From dictionary.com:
füh·rer also fueh·rer
n.
A leader, especially one exercising the powers of a tyrant.
I never said: "Fuhrer of the Third Reich," (though that
would not be an unreasonable inference, granted).
So far I was amuzed by your silly ways, but this is over the
line. If you want to stay here ever again as someone with a
light chance to be respected, you will publicly apologize!
This is merely fodder for my point. If you can't handle some
satirical criticism, I'm not going to placate your censoring
impulse with a contrived and insincere apology. That would
be insulting to you (since I don't regret saying it at all), and
would betray the very issue I was trying to highlight: that you
are an authoritarian tyrant.
And this is not a joke either.
Yes, that's what disturbs me the most. I never justified
genocide or any other atrocity, and yet you are unable
to separate the concept of a dictator from an event in
history. That is dangerous, because banning speech
about dictators merely creates the type of environment
in which said dictators prefer to operate in the first place.
Besides burning people, Hitler loved to burn books. And
refusing to allow people to condemn that behaviour
through satire is a sad indictment on "progressive"
humanity. Satire is the act of making a point through
analogy, exaggeration, and humor, all at once. It surely
runs the risk of offending some; but often, the point being
made is worth that risk.
Dave