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Okay, my apologies. I acknowledge my comment was over the top. However, in my defense, I think there is a point where blatant dishonesty is more corrosive to this forum’s norms of charitable good-faith discourse than any number of nasty words. Take LiberalRetvrn downthread spewing stuff like this:
This is such a flagrant and deliberate mischaracterization of video that all of us can see that it degrades the norms of discussion here and is exactly what the Mein Kampf quote was directed at. I will clean up my act but for the sake of discussion I implore you to moderate blatant dishonesty.
... Jews?
We do not make value judgments about whether someone is making good arguments or being honest when it comes to moderation. We'd be banning people right and left if we responded every time someone accuses someone else of being dishonest.
FWIW, I first saw that quote a few weeks ago and my immediate thought was "Holy shit, I know exactly what he's talking about! I've had that exact same experience a thousand times! I'd just call the person responsible a leftist instead of a Jew."
Given historical realities, it's quite possible that the specific people he's referring to (presuming such exist) happened to be both.
But that pattern... it's like God of the Gaps on steroids, run by a person with absolutely no concern for internal consistency or intellectual honor/shame. It's the purest essence of Arguments as Soldiers, the final form of "There's no such thing as objective truth, just competing power narratives". Maybe it shows up on the right too, and I don't argue with them enough these days to see it. But in all my years of internet atheisting and libertarding I don't think I ever encountered a fundie or neocon who went full... whatever that is.
And it is basically a particularly vicious form of nerd sniping against the kind of systematizing autists who frequent this place. But it's not actually against the rules. And it's effective, to an extent, because there's no real defense against it except to go full @gattsuru "He's an exhaustive list of every time this was explained to you and you failed to rebut the fact claims in any way."
I don't have any useful suggestions for wrangling this as a moderator (except to unchain The Gattsuru). Good luck, I guess.
Well, yes, that is definitely a pattern that exists. We've all encountered it (and I have encountered it with rightists). Hitler might have been describing a real phenomenon, but "This is specifically Jewish behavior" was obviously Hitler's hangup, and quoting Hitler to say "You're acting like a Jew" breaks a few Motte rules (none of which is, contra @SecureSignals, "don't say negative things about Jews").
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