I already did. Those links I provided say exactly what I just told you they do. They challenge and refute your arguments one by one. If you're too stupid to understand that then that's not my problem. Sorry if you can't follow simple directions. If I'm wrong about this, prove it or shut up.
I think if you look at these links, it's fairly obvious your argument doesn't hold water. Specifically, I take exception to the numerous times you've stated (and I won't bother to provide specific examples of this, because I'm not your link boy) that sex with children is a normal and natural part of society.
As anybody with an IQ above 20 can plainly see, you believe that child porn is acceptable in society and should not be outlawed. It's OBVIOUS. I've PROVEN it. In actual fact, you are a disgusting pervert for thinking that raping children is not a big deal. Go ahead and try to demonstrate my argument wrong. You can't--the evidence I've cited is plainly irrefutable. I'm not going to do any more of your research for you. Read the pages I've pointed you to. If you can't see what I'm talking about, then you're not doing it right because you're a moron.
Yeah, somehow I didn't really expect that apology to be forthcoming.
Where do these comments, except in your insane little imagination, even mention kiddie porn? Where do they even say anything like "all censorship is completely wrong"? The ONLY mention of censorship I was able to find in your quotes was a reference to "certain kinds of political censorship", which seems to me to state exactly the opposite of what I am, due to your own inability to form a coherent sentence, taking a best guess at what you're saying: That people on Slashdot do not distinguish between political censorship and outlawing child porn.
Your quotes do not in any way, shape, or form say what you are claiming they do. You could have just as effectively quoted random passages from "War and Peace" and it wouldn't have gone any further towards proving your point. In other words, you are either a liar, a troll, or completely batshit insane. Please do continue, though. I actually find it quite amusing.
Actually, as a disinterested reader of this thread, it's pretty clear to me that you've lost. Your linked posts have absolutely nothing to do with your point--which, as far as I am able to discern, is that people believe that censoring child pornography is as bad as censoring anything. You haven't shown that. You haven't even linked to a specific post (let alone two specific posts) that state that censoring anything at all is completely objectionable under any circumstances. If you're not technically capable of linking to individual posts, then at least provide post numbers. Don't expect us to sift through any web page you happen to feel like linking to in search of vague evidence that you believe proves you're right when, in fact, you appear to have no idea what you're talking about. Or to describe your fallacy more formally, "argumentum ad just making shit up".
You've spewed a lot of verbiage and said absolutely nothing. Your whole argument seems to be based on the premise that people--on Slashdot, at least--believe that censoring child pornography is wrong as a general matter. This is a straw man argument unless you can provide concrete evidence that this is the generally held opinion on Slashdot. But you can't. All you can seem to do is hurl invectives when challenged. And, to be brutally honest, your writing style is slovenly and tiresome to read. Kindly do us a favor and learn to use the shift key.
So are you a Holodomor denier, then? It either never happened, or ten million very real deaths are directly attributable to Soviet corruption and apathy in the best case. In the worst case, it is outright genocide. Either way, I don't see how you can excuse Stalin of these deaths and yet attribute the sum total of WWII casualties to Hitler. It's a double standard.
I have can read your words just fine. I merely reject your point of view that any other kind of mass murder is "better" than genocide.
Casualties of war aren't mass premeditated murder based on ethnicity. Plain and simple. You can try to redefine language to suit your agenda, but I'm not going to let your Newspeak go unchallenged.
I don't see how Hitler can be accused of deaths in Holocaust but absolved of WWII deaths -- both were held under his orders, to implement his party's policy.
Nobody is excusing German aggression and the deaths it caused. But again, it is one thing to kill on the battlefield against armed combatants, and quite another to inflict mass homicide on an unarmed and mostly unaware populace. Neither may be "good", but one of them is a war crime and one is not. Can you at least acknowledge this, whether or not you believe it should be the case?
(as I mentioned, a sick fuck that you are)
If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the facts are against you, argue the law. And if the law and the facts are against you, call the other side names.
Last time I checked, Geneva Convention is about treatment of prisoners of war, not about what is or isn't a despicable act of mass murder.
Read up. The Fourth Geneva Convention sets guidelines for treatment of civilians during wartime. In other words, it defines a distinction between soldiers and civilians, and makes the intentional killing of civilians a crime, but not--and this is my point--the intentional killing of combatants, or even the inadvertent death of civilians due to collateral damage. Thankfully, the particular beliefs of Alex Belits neither reflect nor influence international law. While you're reading, you may also be interested in the Genocide Convention, which explicitly defines the crime of genocide (and again, distinguishes it from deaths caused by military action).
How so? Do you mean, the truth does not matter as long as "evil" people are involved?
So you admit that you believe in a massive conspiracy to attach deaths to Stalin's name unfairly. That's all anyone needs to know about you. There's no argument that can be presented to you to challenge your religious beliefs in this matter.
I have already demonstrated that none of Stalin's mass murders were ethnically motivated, and that claims about Ukrainian famine being a result of genocide are baseless.
"Insisted in the face of all presented evidence" would be more correct than "demonstrated".
You, however not only are trying to mix up the facts to make Stalin worse than Hitler at any cost, you are clinging to your "Only genocide matters -- all other kinds of mass murder is OK!" system of values.
I'm not the one excusing tens of millions of deaths that Stalin could have directly prevented had he the slightest inclination to do so because they don't fit into my very narrow and self-serving definition of genocide. And please do work on your reading comprehension skills. Twice now I've said that Stalin wasn't necessarily worse than Hitler, only that he killed more people. It's a subtle distinction, I know, but do try to comprehend it.
Fortunately no one outside US borders (or Americans with any capacity for independent thinking) shares this point of view, so all I have to do is to point this out.
You are the only person in the world who believes the Holocaust was anywhere near the scale of 70 million deaths. You also may well be the only person in the world who does not understand the difference between the deaths of soldiers and the intentional killing of noncombatants. Thankfully for all of us, you were not present at the signing of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
You and other people in this very thread claimed that Stalin was worse.
I said he killed more people, not necessarily that he was worse. You can't argue with the numbers (well, I suppose you can, but you'd be wrong).
Americans "know" that Stalin was the worst person's ever -- the details are irrelevant. Did Hitler kill 6 millions? Then Stalin killed tens of millions! Oh, Hitler killed tens of millions? Then Stalin might have killed hundreds of millions! Or billions! And that's just Jews! Hitler had syphilis? Then Stalin must have had AIDS! And fucked babies! And Pravda published an editorial that explained how it is AWWWWRIGHT!
This is the level of "knowledge" Americans have about him.
I'm not going to dispute this with you anymore. If you seriously believe there is a massive concerted effort to pin crimes on Stalin that he didn't commit, when you freely admit that there are a tremendous number of crimes he did commit under any definition of the word, then I don't really know how to convince you that this is your own delusion. You really should consider educating yourself. Go take a class in world history at the local community college. Until you've done that, you're just making things up because you want to believe them.
Of course, in special American kind of ethics, mass murder is perfectly justified it it is "casualties of war" -- never mind, it's a war started by Nazi with the goal of clearing up the "living space" for themselves from all "less deserving" people -- Jewish or otherwise. War is OK. Attacking formerly friendly countries is OK. Bombing and shooting at civilians is OK. But targeting a specific ethnicity while sparing others is a big no-no. Mass murder is fine as long as it's equal opportunity mass murder. This is why US government can attack countries all over the globe, killing tens of thousands of people in each of those wars -- it's all perfectly fine because it is not motivated by racism.
Ah, of course. It all comes back to America. No idea how that entered the discussion, but hey.
I think I'm starting to see the problem here. I'm using the term "genocide" as defined under international law, such as the Genocide Convention. You are using the Alex Belits definition, where it only counts as genocide if you disagree with the ideology of the people committing it. So the Nazis and the United States have committed genocide, but the Soviets get a pass because communism is totally cool.
This is the whole point -- making him look worse than Hitler.
If you seriously believe that the majority of people in the United States believe Stalin was more evil than Hitler, then you are delusional. Ask ten people on the street in the United States whether Hitler or Stalin was worse, and I guarantee you that all of them will say Hitler. As I said, most people barely know who Stalin is. Everybody knows Hitler was a bad guy. You're contradicting yourself by stating that U.S. propaganda has been focused on painting Stalin as the most evil monster in history, then saying it proves your point when nobody knows or particularly is interested in what Stalin did. Your logic is truly dizzying.
I have never ever heard anyone in US teaching it in this manner.
Then open up a history book. Go on, go down to your local high school and ask to see one of their world history books. Open it and read about World War II. I'll wait. You'll see I'm right, whether or not you have "heard" of it or not. Is it not the truth? As far as we were concerned in WWII, Stalin was one of our staunchest allies. Some of the most famous photos from the era depict Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin meeting.
Look at the message in this thread by pipingguy -- he asked how much Stalin participated in Holocaust.
First, he's a fool who can't use Google. Second, if you check out his website, it's registered to someone in Canada. Hardly a great example to use if you're decrying the state of the American educational system. Besides, doesn't that just prove my point that most people don't really even have much of an idea what he did? There is not, despite your fervent belief, a systematic attempt to paint communism as evil on the basis of Stalin's atrocities. Or rather, if there is, they're doing a piss poor job of it, when people are asking if he was a Nazi or something.
Maybe, just maybe, people are rejecting communism on the merits? No, it can't be that--there must be a focused effort to unfairly deride one of the most famous proponents of communism as a mass murderer. So the answer is... to prove he wasn't a mass murderer, even though he was? Or maybe prove he wasn't quite as bad a mass murderer as most people have no idea that he actually was? I don't get it.
"Casualties of war"? Who, do you think, killed all those people? Except for seven millions Germans, they were all killed by Nazi. Indiscriminate mass murder of people, soldiers and civilians alike, in the process of aggressive war covering a whole continent is somehow BETTER than mass murder, 1/10 of the former in scale, targeting a particular ethnicity? What kind of sick fuck are you? I am Jewish myself, and I find this disgusting -- Nazi rule in Germany and WWII was an unprecedented tragedy, and Holocaust is merely a part of it.
So let me get this straight. Casualties resulting from war are equivalent to mass premeditated murder targeted against a specific ethnicity? But massive casualties suffered by a particular ethnic population due to the indifference or incompetence of Ol' Joe are somehow excused from being genocide? Wow.
If considering genocide, on any scale, to be worse than killing soldiers on the battlefield makes me a "sick fuck", then that is what I am proud to be. And both Hitler and Stalin are guilty of genocide.
And yet you still haven't told me what law you'd be violating by doing any of that. It's not a crime to be obnoxious, as you have so deftly demonstrated. Perhaps some of it would violate some sort of local malicious mischief statute in some jurisdictions, but it's far from clear that it would even rise to that level.
The issue at hand, once again, is not whether I would mind. Please try to understand that the world doesn't revolve around what it is you like or don't like. There is a threshold over which you are not allowed to cross, and the law says that, in general, that threshold is causing damage to property. If the prospect of people doing things you don't approve of is so disturbing to you, pass a law. In the meantime, you're entitled to be as obnoxious as you would like, within the bounds of the law. And I will stand up for your right to do so, even if you will not stand up for mine.
As much as you would enjoy sitting here discussing your opinion on what people should or shouldn't be allowed to say or do based on what you find offensive, I honestly don't care what your opinion is on the matter. I'm only really interested in talking about the law as it stands.
Evidently not, according to the judge in the matter. I'm not sure what legal theory you're operating under. Can you cite case law supporting your position?
Besides, trespassing is generally not a criminal matter unless it involves real property, and even then it may not be. I'm not sure that evidence obtained in violation of a civil statute is necessarily inadmissible, unless it was obtained in violation of the defendant's constitutional rights. Do you really have a constitutional right not to have things attached to your car in a public place? Clearly, officers can place parking tickets on your car without fear of reprisal or the need to obtain a warrant. In this case, instead of a parking ticket it's a GPS tracker, and instead of putting it on the windshield they attached it to the underside of the car. Is there a distinction? Sure. But does that distinction turn it into a constitutional matter? I don't see that it does.
The issue is not whether I would mind. The issue is whether it is illegal. I'm sure the guy was not thrilled about having the cops attache a GPS tracking unit to his car. But was it illegal? Not that I can see. I don't know what your political beliefs are, but I don't believe that anything that pisses people off should be illegal.
A line certainly should be drawn somewhere. Is merely touching somebody's property (that is in a public space) where you would draw it? Even at the price of potentially stifling speech? Personally, I tend to think that unless you can demonstrate actual harm caused by the act in itself (and not the speech related to the act) then I'm inclined to err on the side of freedom.
I consider myself a libertarian, and I sympathize with Objectivists, but I don't see that merely touching somebody else's property in public without permission crosses a line. If that were the case, nobody would be able to enter buildings that didn't have signs out front inviting people in.
What is the crime that occurs when somebody merely touches your property? How are you harmed by that? Do you really believe there should be criminal sanctions for merely touching somebody's property in a public place, with no intent to take or vandalize the property, and especially if permission to touch said property has not been explicitly denied? But that's getting into the theoretical. As the law currently stands, I know of no law prohibiting people from merely touching property that's in a public space.
Your link just goes to prove my point. Whether it is illegal to place things on somebody's car is up to the local jurisdiction. I would have no problem with them passing a law outlawing this. But in the absence of such a law, I don't see that you have a natural right to have your property completely undisturbed so long as it is in a public space. As to whether it SHOULD be illegal or not to merely touch somebody's vehicle, well, I don't know what kind of libertarian/Objectivist you consider yourself, but I'm not the kind that's interested in making victimless acts illegal in and of themselves.
So what is it that makes me think it's legal? Well, pretty much the fact that it isn't illegal.
Can I show up at your house and toss a handful of magnets on the bottom of your car? I know it's a pretty silly thing to be doing, but, well - at least I'm not hurting anything, right?
If you have to enter my property to do it, then no. If it's in public--parked on the street, say--then I don't see why not. It's only vandalism if it causes damage to the vehicle (or perhaps if there was intent to cause damage, regardless of whether actual damage was caused). And barring that, what sort of crime are we talking about here? Illegal use of magnetism?
A warrant is simply a document stating that a person performing an otherwise illegal action will be protected from prosecution for performing that action. So the question is whether it is illegal for anyone, police officer or private citizen, to attach a GPS tracker to your car. I'm not aware of any law that prevents people from temporarily placing things on other people's cars as long as they don't cause any damage to the vehicle. I'm also not aware of any law that prohibits using GPS technology to follow somebody. Conceivably, it might be an invasion of privacy, and grounds for a civil suit, but in this case the court is ruling that it's not, at least when the police do it. I don't think this is an unreasonable interpretation of the law as it stands. In fact, I think ruling this practice illegal under the current body of jurisprudence would be overextending the court's authority.
While I'm not a fan of the practice, and the privacy implications trouble me, it's not up to the court to hold something that is otherwise legal to be illegal simply because it's creepy. That's the job of the legislature, and in this case I hope they will step up to the plate.
Is it? What law is it illegal under? You can legally put fliers and such under people's windshield wipers. I don't see how this is any different. It's one thing if they permanently attach something to your car in a manner that defaces it. But simply attaching something temporarily to your car in a way that doesn't diminish your car's value in any way? I'm not aware of any law generally preventing that.
So you're saying that the American propaganda that I've been fed all my life is so terrified of the notion that somebody might find communism attractive that they have been ascribing the deaths en masse in the Soviet Union to Stalin in particular rather than the shortcomings of communism itself? Seems sort of counterproductive to me.
Anyway, you're completely wrong. Most people in the United States have only have a very vague idea, if they have heard at all, of the atrocities Stalin committed. Vastly more are aware of what Hitler did. In fact, when WWII is discussed in schools, Stalin is generally portrayed as a hero who helped us liberate Europe from the grasp of an evil dictator. His own genocides are usually swept by the wayside, because A) they're much more difficult to discuss without an in depth knowledge of Soviet politics in the early 20th century, B) he committed them by and large upon his own people, so it just doesn't produce the same degree of revulsion in the public, and C) he was much more subtle about it than Hitler, so it's just a much drier subject than the Holocaust, especially since it doesn't particularly involve the United States.
The reason why people usually talk about the 11-17 million (although some people are under the misapprehension that the number was as small as 6 million) killed in the Holocaust rather than including the war deaths in WWII is because these are two separate things. Casualties of war, even those resulting from collateral damage, are QUITE different from the targeted extermination of a group of people based on ethnicity. Hitler was evil enough without embellishing what he did. In fact, mentioning that Hitler was actually responsible for the deaths of 70 million people rather than focusing on just the ones he exterminated would lessen the impact of the Holocaust in people's minds because the exterminations would simply be folded into "casualties of war". It is important to keep these two concepts separate. The murder of one human being in cold blood is a far worse crime than causing the death of ten thousand soldiers on the battlefield.
Hitler may have been more evil than Stalin, but he couldn't match him in terms of sheer numbers.
"...of 1,500 prisoners, only 40 are known to have survived the [Treblinka] revolt. These survivors are almost all of the known survivors of Treblinka camp."
Or do these not count because they weren't technically in Germany (and also aren't convenient for you)?
Actually, when it comes to the question of whether the Holodomor constitutes genocide, I give more credence to the Ukrainian government, which has officially recognized it as such, than Soviet apologists.
Stalin withheld food from the Ukrainians until they could meet production quotas they didn't have a prayer of filling. The reasons for doing this may be disputable, but the government knew the effect would be disastrous on the Ukrainian population and proceeded to do it anyway. Not all genocide involves rounding people up and putting them in ovens. Taking food from people with the intent of letting them die is just as much murder. And mass murder that is targeted against a specific population is genocide.
I don't think you understand the history of tensions between the Soviet government and Ukrainian nationalists. And your attempts to absolve Stalin of blame because the policies were supposedly implemented by Ukrainians--as if Stalin didn't know about them and couldn't have done anything about them--are laughable.
Are you serious? Stalin killed more people than Hitler in terms of outright genocide. He let 10 million Ukrainians starve to death in the 30s over a policy dispute, and that's barely scratching the surface for him. The only person who possibly killed even more than Stalin was Mao.
I don't really understand what you mean by "war by proxy", or more relevantly, what that has to do with the discussion. It doesn't really matter how these civilians--and in the examples you conveniently provide, the combatants were by and large civilians--obtained their guns. The point is that they had them, and when it came time to use them, they did. And it may not have been armed populaces alone that managed to defeat their oppressors in these cases, but so what? They certainly played a critical role in these victories, in that if the general populace had been completely disarmed there would hardly have been any opposition at all.
Is it so great between a government and an armed populace that outnumbers the army by several orders of magnitude?
Yes. And has been for a century, at least.
Sorry, but the numbers just don't agree with you. In the Warsaw Ghetto, it took 2000 German soldiers equipped with rifles and tanks nearly a month to suppress a few hundred Jewish rebels. If it had been a few million rebels instead of a few hundred, it would have taken far more manpower than the German army was able to commit to quash that resistance, even assuming the Warsaw uprising was particularly successful. Consider that at least 11 million people were ultimately executed by the Nazis. Do you seriously believe that had these 11 million people been armed and prepared to fight, the death toll would not have been less?
While I disagree with your arguments, I can see you have considered them and are capable of articulating them lucidly--hence my willingness to meet in person (although I will admit that my enthusiasm for long distance travel to do so is marginal). However, your statement "I wouldn't fight a battle I believed hopeless unless all other methods of fighting it were exhausted" does strike me as exactly the sort of sentiment that collaborationist use to justify their cowardice to themselves, right before "I can do more good alive than dead". Nobody goes into a battle believing it to be hopeless. And those who truly believe it to be hopeless don't go into battle--especially not when collaboration is still an option.
I'm not necessarily saying you believe that. It's possible I may be misinterpreting what you're saying. But that is my objection to your attitude when it comes to whether or not to bother resisting tyranny at the individual level.
It only remains worthwhile if the tactics you use to stand up against them have a hope of success.
You're more likely to be successful with a gun than without one. If not, why would anyone want to have a gun in a fight?
You likened my response to the collaborators in WWII. If you "stand by that", then you are scum. Nothing more.
Yes, I did. And yes, I do. If you were given the choice between fighting a corrupt power in a battle you believed to be hopeless and collaborating, you have made it very clear what you would choose. And how you would justify it to yourself.
The tactics best used for fighting tyranny do not involved hoarding guns in your basement. That might have worked a century ago, but not today. The disparity of firepower between a civilian, however well armed, and a soldier, is too great.
Is it so great between a government and an armed populace that outnumbers the army by several orders of magnitude?
Look at every uprising that actually drove an occupying force away, or at least weakened them to the point where an external opponent could defeat them. The people, like yourself, who sat upon hoards of guns and fought in their homes, died early and did little. The people who would stick to guerrilla warfare, who'd bomb and sabotage the enemy, and who'd feed intelligence to external allies concerning the disposition of the tyrants armies, those are the resistance fighters who made a difference.
You're making the mistake of assuming the people "hoarding guns" and the people securing victories against tyranny through other means weren't one and the same. Look at the American Revolution, for example. At any rate, the people who evaluated whether to fight or surrender on the basis of whether they were certain they'd win the battle won very few battles.
I'll take you up on that. Or I would if I thought for a moment that some anonymous person on the net actually meant it.
You can send me email at guidodelconfuso@gmail.com if you're genuinely interested in continuing this discussion offline. I assure you that I am. If you're in New York by any chance, I'll meet you this weekend.
Slashdot Mirror
So you can't challenge me on the merits of what I say. I guess you lose. Buh bye.
I already did. Those links I provided say exactly what I just told you they do. They challenge and refute your arguments one by one. If you're too stupid to understand that then that's not my problem. Sorry if you can't follow simple directions. If I'm wrong about this, prove it or shut up.
I think if you look at these links, it's fairly obvious your argument doesn't hold water. Specifically, I take exception to the numerous times you've stated (and I won't bother to provide specific examples of this, because I'm not your link boy) that sex with children is a normal and natural part of society.
A perspective on the benefits government mandated censorship in Ireland.
Would this qualify as child porn for purposes of internet filters?
Demonstrates that censoring child pornography is worth the potential collateral damage.
Artistic freedom is not unreasonably suppressed by the outlawing of child pornography.
As anybody with an IQ above 20 can plainly see, you believe that child porn is acceptable in society and should not be outlawed. It's OBVIOUS. I've PROVEN it. In actual fact, you are a disgusting pervert for thinking that raping children is not a big deal. Go ahead and try to demonstrate my argument wrong. You can't--the evidence I've cited is plainly irrefutable. I'm not going to do any more of your research for you. Read the pages I've pointed you to. If you can't see what I'm talking about, then you're not doing it right because you're a moron.
Yeah, somehow I didn't really expect that apology to be forthcoming.
Where do these comments, except in your insane little imagination, even mention kiddie porn? Where do they even say anything like "all censorship is completely wrong"? The ONLY mention of censorship I was able to find in your quotes was a reference to "certain kinds of political censorship", which seems to me to state exactly the opposite of what I am, due to your own inability to form a coherent sentence, taking a best guess at what you're saying: That people on Slashdot do not distinguish between political censorship and outlawing child porn.
Your quotes do not in any way, shape, or form say what you are claiming they do. You could have just as effectively quoted random passages from "War and Peace" and it wouldn't have gone any further towards proving your point. In other words, you are either a liar, a troll, or completely batshit insane. Please do continue, though. I actually find it quite amusing.
Well done, sir. I think circletimessquare is due to provide "a correction and an apology".
Actually, as a disinterested reader of this thread, it's pretty clear to me that you've lost. Your linked posts have absolutely nothing to do with your point--which, as far as I am able to discern, is that people believe that censoring child pornography is as bad as censoring anything. You haven't shown that. You haven't even linked to a specific post (let alone two specific posts) that state that censoring anything at all is completely objectionable under any circumstances. If you're not technically capable of linking to individual posts, then at least provide post numbers. Don't expect us to sift through any web page you happen to feel like linking to in search of vague evidence that you believe proves you're right when, in fact, you appear to have no idea what you're talking about. Or to describe your fallacy more formally, "argumentum ad just making shit up".
You've spewed a lot of verbiage and said absolutely nothing. Your whole argument seems to be based on the premise that people--on Slashdot, at least--believe that censoring child pornography is wrong as a general matter. This is a straw man argument unless you can provide concrete evidence that this is the generally held opinion on Slashdot. But you can't. All you can seem to do is hurl invectives when challenged. And, to be brutally honest, your writing style is slovenly and tiresome to read. Kindly do us a favor and learn to use the shift key.
So are you a Holodomor denier, then? It either never happened, or ten million very real deaths are directly attributable to Soviet corruption and apathy in the best case. In the worst case, it is outright genocide. Either way, I don't see how you can excuse Stalin of these deaths and yet attribute the sum total of WWII casualties to Hitler. It's a double standard.
I have can read your words just fine. I merely reject your point of view that any other kind of mass murder is "better" than genocide.
Casualties of war aren't mass premeditated murder based on ethnicity. Plain and simple. You can try to redefine language to suit your agenda, but I'm not going to let your Newspeak go unchallenged.
I don't see how Hitler can be accused of deaths in Holocaust but absolved of WWII deaths -- both were held under his orders, to implement his party's policy.
Nobody is excusing German aggression and the deaths it caused. But again, it is one thing to kill on the battlefield against armed combatants, and quite another to inflict mass homicide on an unarmed and mostly unaware populace. Neither may be "good", but one of them is a war crime and one is not. Can you at least acknowledge this, whether or not you believe it should be the case?
(as I mentioned, a sick fuck that you are)
If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the facts are against you, argue the law. And if the law and the facts are against you, call the other side names.
Last time I checked, Geneva Convention is about treatment of prisoners of war, not about what is or isn't a despicable act of mass murder.
Read up. The Fourth Geneva Convention sets guidelines for treatment of civilians during wartime. In other words, it defines a distinction between soldiers and civilians, and makes the intentional killing of civilians a crime, but not--and this is my point--the intentional killing of combatants, or even the inadvertent death of civilians due to collateral damage. Thankfully, the particular beliefs of Alex Belits neither reflect nor influence international law. While you're reading, you may also be interested in the Genocide Convention, which explicitly defines the crime of genocide (and again, distinguishes it from deaths caused by military action).
I have a good idea! Let's rehash the entire thread piece by piece! I'll start:
Or do these not count because they weren't technically in Germany (and also aren't convenient for you)?
Besides, at the time, these camps WERE part of Germany.
How so? Do you mean, the truth does not matter as long as "evil" people are involved?
So you admit that you believe in a massive conspiracy to attach deaths to Stalin's name unfairly. That's all anyone needs to know about you. There's no argument that can be presented to you to challenge your religious beliefs in this matter.
I have already demonstrated that none of Stalin's mass murders were ethnically motivated, and that claims about Ukrainian famine being a result of genocide are baseless.
"Insisted in the face of all presented evidence" would be more correct than "demonstrated".
You, however not only are trying to mix up the facts to make Stalin worse than Hitler at any cost, you are clinging to your "Only genocide matters -- all other kinds of mass murder is OK!" system of values.
I'm not the one excusing tens of millions of deaths that Stalin could have directly prevented had he the slightest inclination to do so because they don't fit into my very narrow and self-serving definition of genocide. And please do work on your reading comprehension skills. Twice now I've said that Stalin wasn't necessarily worse than Hitler, only that he killed more people. It's a subtle distinction, I know, but do try to comprehend it.
Fortunately no one outside US borders (or Americans with any capacity for independent thinking) shares this point of view, so all I have to do is to point this out.
You are the only person in the world who believes the Holocaust was anywhere near the scale of 70 million deaths. You also may well be the only person in the world who does not understand the difference between the deaths of soldiers and the intentional killing of noncombatants. Thankfully for all of us, you were not present at the signing of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
You said no Jews survived by fighting back, presumably to make a point. I provided two counterexamples to refute your point. That's how debate works.
You and other people in this very thread claimed that Stalin was worse.
I said he killed more people, not necessarily that he was worse. You can't argue with the numbers (well, I suppose you can, but you'd be wrong).
Americans "know" that Stalin was the worst person's ever -- the details are irrelevant. Did Hitler kill 6 millions? Then Stalin killed tens of millions! Oh, Hitler killed tens of millions? Then Stalin might have killed hundreds of millions! Or billions! And that's just Jews! Hitler had syphilis? Then Stalin must have had AIDS! And fucked babies! And Pravda published an editorial that explained how it is AWWWWRIGHT!
This is the level of "knowledge" Americans have about him.
I'm not going to dispute this with you anymore. If you seriously believe there is a massive concerted effort to pin crimes on Stalin that he didn't commit, when you freely admit that there are a tremendous number of crimes he did commit under any definition of the word, then I don't really know how to convince you that this is your own delusion. You really should consider educating yourself. Go take a class in world history at the local community college. Until you've done that, you're just making things up because you want to believe them.
Of course, in special American kind of ethics, mass murder is perfectly justified it it is "casualties of war" -- never mind, it's a war started by Nazi with the goal of clearing up the "living space" for themselves from all "less deserving" people -- Jewish or otherwise. War is OK. Attacking formerly friendly countries is OK. Bombing and shooting at civilians is OK. But targeting a specific ethnicity while sparing others is a big no-no. Mass murder is fine as long as it's equal opportunity mass murder. This is why US government can attack countries all over the globe, killing tens of thousands of people in each of those wars -- it's all perfectly fine because it is not motivated by racism.
Ah, of course. It all comes back to America. No idea how that entered the discussion, but hey.
I think I'm starting to see the problem here. I'm using the term "genocide" as defined under international law, such as the Genocide Convention. You are using the Alex Belits definition, where it only counts as genocide if you disagree with the ideology of the people committing it. So the Nazis and the United States have committed genocide, but the Soviets get a pass because communism is totally cool.
This is the whole point -- making him look worse than Hitler.
If you seriously believe that the majority of people in the United States believe Stalin was more evil than Hitler, then you are delusional. Ask ten people on the street in the United States whether Hitler or Stalin was worse, and I guarantee you that all of them will say Hitler. As I said, most people barely know who Stalin is. Everybody knows Hitler was a bad guy. You're contradicting yourself by stating that U.S. propaganda has been focused on painting Stalin as the most evil monster in history, then saying it proves your point when nobody knows or particularly is interested in what Stalin did. Your logic is truly dizzying.
I have never ever heard anyone in US teaching it in this manner.
Then open up a history book. Go on, go down to your local high school and ask to see one of their world history books. Open it and read about World War II. I'll wait. You'll see I'm right, whether or not you have "heard" of it or not. Is it not the truth? As far as we were concerned in WWII, Stalin was one of our staunchest allies. Some of the most famous photos from the era depict Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin meeting.
Look at the message in this thread by pipingguy -- he asked how much Stalin participated in Holocaust.
First, he's a fool who can't use Google. Second, if you check out his website, it's registered to someone in Canada. Hardly a great example to use if you're decrying the state of the American educational system. Besides, doesn't that just prove my point that most people don't really even have much of an idea what he did? There is not, despite your fervent belief, a systematic attempt to paint communism as evil on the basis of Stalin's atrocities. Or rather, if there is, they're doing a piss poor job of it, when people are asking if he was a Nazi or something.
Maybe, just maybe, people are rejecting communism on the merits? No, it can't be that--there must be a focused effort to unfairly deride one of the most famous proponents of communism as a mass murderer. So the answer is... to prove he wasn't a mass murderer, even though he was? Or maybe prove he wasn't quite as bad a mass murderer as most people have no idea that he actually was? I don't get it.
"Casualties of war"? Who, do you think, killed all those people? Except for seven millions Germans, they were all killed by Nazi. Indiscriminate mass murder of people, soldiers and civilians alike, in the process of aggressive war covering a whole continent is somehow BETTER than mass murder, 1/10 of the former in scale, targeting a particular ethnicity? What kind of sick fuck are you? I am Jewish myself, and I find this disgusting -- Nazi rule in Germany and WWII was an unprecedented tragedy, and Holocaust is merely a part of it.
So let me get this straight. Casualties resulting from war are equivalent to mass premeditated murder targeted against a specific ethnicity? But massive casualties suffered by a particular ethnic population due to the indifference or incompetence of Ol' Joe are somehow excused from being genocide? Wow.
If considering genocide, on any scale, to be worse than killing soldiers on the battlefield makes me a "sick fuck", then that is what I am proud to be. And both Hitler and Stalin are guilty of genocide.
And yet you still haven't told me what law you'd be violating by doing any of that. It's not a crime to be obnoxious, as you have so deftly demonstrated. Perhaps some of it would violate some sort of local malicious mischief statute in some jurisdictions, but it's far from clear that it would even rise to that level.
The issue at hand, once again, is not whether I would mind. Please try to understand that the world doesn't revolve around what it is you like or don't like. There is a threshold over which you are not allowed to cross, and the law says that, in general, that threshold is causing damage to property. If the prospect of people doing things you don't approve of is so disturbing to you, pass a law. In the meantime, you're entitled to be as obnoxious as you would like, within the bounds of the law. And I will stand up for your right to do so, even if you will not stand up for mine.
As much as you would enjoy sitting here discussing your opinion on what people should or shouldn't be allowed to say or do based on what you find offensive, I honestly don't care what your opinion is on the matter. I'm only really interested in talking about the law as it stands.
Evidently not, according to the judge in the matter. I'm not sure what legal theory you're operating under. Can you cite case law supporting your position?
Besides, trespassing is generally not a criminal matter unless it involves real property, and even then it may not be. I'm not sure that evidence obtained in violation of a civil statute is necessarily inadmissible, unless it was obtained in violation of the defendant's constitutional rights. Do you really have a constitutional right not to have things attached to your car in a public place? Clearly, officers can place parking tickets on your car without fear of reprisal or the need to obtain a warrant. In this case, instead of a parking ticket it's a GPS tracker, and instead of putting it on the windshield they attached it to the underside of the car. Is there a distinction? Sure. But does that distinction turn it into a constitutional matter? I don't see that it does.
The issue is not whether I would mind. The issue is whether it is illegal. I'm sure the guy was not thrilled about having the cops attache a GPS tracking unit to his car. But was it illegal? Not that I can see. I don't know what your political beliefs are, but I don't believe that anything that pisses people off should be illegal.
A line certainly should be drawn somewhere. Is merely touching somebody's property (that is in a public space) where you would draw it? Even at the price of potentially stifling speech? Personally, I tend to think that unless you can demonstrate actual harm caused by the act in itself (and not the speech related to the act) then I'm inclined to err on the side of freedom.
I consider myself a libertarian, and I sympathize with Objectivists, but I don't see that merely touching somebody else's property in public without permission crosses a line. If that were the case, nobody would be able to enter buildings that didn't have signs out front inviting people in.
What is the crime that occurs when somebody merely touches your property? How are you harmed by that? Do you really believe there should be criminal sanctions for merely touching somebody's property in a public place, with no intent to take or vandalize the property, and especially if permission to touch said property has not been explicitly denied? But that's getting into the theoretical. As the law currently stands, I know of no law prohibiting people from merely touching property that's in a public space.
Your link just goes to prove my point. Whether it is illegal to place things on somebody's car is up to the local jurisdiction. I would have no problem with them passing a law outlawing this. But in the absence of such a law, I don't see that you have a natural right to have your property completely undisturbed so long as it is in a public space. As to whether it SHOULD be illegal or not to merely touch somebody's vehicle, well, I don't know what kind of libertarian/Objectivist you consider yourself, but I'm not the kind that's interested in making victimless acts illegal in and of themselves.
So what is it that makes me think it's legal? Well, pretty much the fact that it isn't illegal.
Can I show up at your house and toss a handful of magnets on the bottom of your car? I know it's a pretty silly thing to be doing, but, well - at least I'm not hurting anything, right?
If you have to enter my property to do it, then no. If it's in public--parked on the street, say--then I don't see why not. It's only vandalism if it causes damage to the vehicle (or perhaps if there was intent to cause damage, regardless of whether actual damage was caused). And barring that, what sort of crime are we talking about here? Illegal use of magnetism?
A warrant is simply a document stating that a person performing an otherwise illegal action will be protected from prosecution for performing that action. So the question is whether it is illegal for anyone, police officer or private citizen, to attach a GPS tracker to your car. I'm not aware of any law that prevents people from temporarily placing things on other people's cars as long as they don't cause any damage to the vehicle. I'm also not aware of any law that prohibits using GPS technology to follow somebody. Conceivably, it might be an invasion of privacy, and grounds for a civil suit, but in this case the court is ruling that it's not, at least when the police do it. I don't think this is an unreasonable interpretation of the law as it stands. In fact, I think ruling this practice illegal under the current body of jurisprudence would be overextending the court's authority.
While I'm not a fan of the practice, and the privacy implications trouble me, it's not up to the court to hold something that is otherwise legal to be illegal simply because it's creepy. That's the job of the legislature, and in this case I hope they will step up to the plate.
Is it? What law is it illegal under? You can legally put fliers and such under people's windshield wipers. I don't see how this is any different. It's one thing if they permanently attach something to your car in a manner that defaces it. But simply attaching something temporarily to your car in a way that doesn't diminish your car's value in any way? I'm not aware of any law generally preventing that.
So you're saying that the American propaganda that I've been fed all my life is so terrified of the notion that somebody might find communism attractive that they have been ascribing the deaths en masse in the Soviet Union to Stalin in particular rather than the shortcomings of communism itself? Seems sort of counterproductive to me.
Anyway, you're completely wrong. Most people in the United States have only have a very vague idea, if they have heard at all, of the atrocities Stalin committed. Vastly more are aware of what Hitler did. In fact, when WWII is discussed in schools, Stalin is generally portrayed as a hero who helped us liberate Europe from the grasp of an evil dictator. His own genocides are usually swept by the wayside, because A) they're much more difficult to discuss without an in depth knowledge of Soviet politics in the early 20th century, B) he committed them by and large upon his own people, so it just doesn't produce the same degree of revulsion in the public, and C) he was much more subtle about it than Hitler, so it's just a much drier subject than the Holocaust, especially since it doesn't particularly involve the United States.
The reason why people usually talk about the 11-17 million (although some people are under the misapprehension that the number was as small as 6 million) killed in the Holocaust rather than including the war deaths in WWII is because these are two separate things. Casualties of war, even those resulting from collateral damage, are QUITE different from the targeted extermination of a group of people based on ethnicity. Hitler was evil enough without embellishing what he did. In fact, mentioning that Hitler was actually responsible for the deaths of 70 million people rather than focusing on just the ones he exterminated would lessen the impact of the Holocaust in people's minds because the exterminations would simply be folded into "casualties of war". It is important to keep these two concepts separate. The murder of one human being in cold blood is a far worse crime than causing the death of ten thousand soldiers on the battlefield.
Hitler may have been more evil than Stalin, but he couldn't match him in terms of sheer numbers.
Finally: thousands of Jews survived the Holocaust in Germany by hiding - none by fighting back.
Two words for you: Sobibor. Treblinka.
"...of 1,500 prisoners, only 40 are known to have survived the [Treblinka] revolt. These survivors are almost all of the known survivors of Treblinka camp."
Or do these not count because they weren't technically in Germany (and also aren't convenient for you)?
Actually, when it comes to the question of whether the Holodomor constitutes genocide, I give more credence to the Ukrainian government, which has officially recognized it as such, than Soviet apologists.
Stalin withheld food from the Ukrainians until they could meet production quotas they didn't have a prayer of filling. The reasons for doing this may be disputable, but the government knew the effect would be disastrous on the Ukrainian population and proceeded to do it anyway. Not all genocide involves rounding people up and putting them in ovens. Taking food from people with the intent of letting them die is just as much murder. And mass murder that is targeted against a specific population is genocide.
I don't think you understand the history of tensions between the Soviet government and Ukrainian nationalists. And your attempts to absolve Stalin of blame because the policies were supposedly implemented by Ukrainians--as if Stalin didn't know about them and couldn't have done anything about them--are laughable.
Are you serious? Stalin killed more people than Hitler in terms of outright genocide. He let 10 million Ukrainians starve to death in the 30s over a policy dispute, and that's barely scratching the surface for him. The only person who possibly killed even more than Stalin was Mao.
I don't really understand what you mean by "war by proxy", or more relevantly, what that has to do with the discussion. It doesn't really matter how these civilians--and in the examples you conveniently provide, the combatants were by and large civilians--obtained their guns. The point is that they had them, and when it came time to use them, they did. And it may not have been armed populaces alone that managed to defeat their oppressors in these cases, but so what? They certainly played a critical role in these victories, in that if the general populace had been completely disarmed there would hardly have been any opposition at all.
Is it so great between a government and an armed populace that outnumbers the army by several orders of magnitude?
Yes. And has been for a century, at least.
Sorry, but the numbers just don't agree with you. In the Warsaw Ghetto, it took 2000 German soldiers equipped with rifles and tanks nearly a month to suppress a few hundred Jewish rebels. If it had been a few million rebels instead of a few hundred, it would have taken far more manpower than the German army was able to commit to quash that resistance, even assuming the Warsaw uprising was particularly successful. Consider that at least 11 million people were ultimately executed by the Nazis. Do you seriously believe that had these 11 million people been armed and prepared to fight, the death toll would not have been less?
While I disagree with your arguments, I can see you have considered them and are capable of articulating them lucidly--hence my willingness to meet in person (although I will admit that my enthusiasm for long distance travel to do so is marginal). However, your statement "I wouldn't fight a battle I believed hopeless unless all other methods of fighting it were exhausted" does strike me as exactly the sort of sentiment that collaborationist use to justify their cowardice to themselves, right before "I can do more good alive than dead". Nobody goes into a battle believing it to be hopeless. And those who truly believe it to be hopeless don't go into battle--especially not when collaboration is still an option.
I'm not necessarily saying you believe that. It's possible I may be misinterpreting what you're saying. But that is my objection to your attitude when it comes to whether or not to bother resisting tyranny at the individual level.
It only remains worthwhile if the tactics you use to stand up against them have a hope of success.
You're more likely to be successful with a gun than without one. If not, why would anyone want to have a gun in a fight?
You likened my response to the collaborators in WWII. If you "stand by that", then you are scum. Nothing more.
Yes, I did. And yes, I do. If you were given the choice between fighting a corrupt power in a battle you believed to be hopeless and collaborating, you have made it very clear what you would choose. And how you would justify it to yourself.
The tactics best used for fighting tyranny do not involved hoarding guns in your basement. That might have worked a century ago, but not today. The disparity of firepower between a civilian, however well armed, and a soldier, is too great.
Is it so great between a government and an armed populace that outnumbers the army by several orders of magnitude?
Look at every uprising that actually drove an occupying force away, or at least weakened them to the point where an external opponent could defeat them. The people, like yourself, who sat upon hoards of guns and fought in their homes, died early and did little. The people who would stick to guerrilla warfare, who'd bomb and sabotage the enemy, and who'd feed intelligence to external allies concerning the disposition of the tyrants armies, those are the resistance fighters who made a difference.
You're making the mistake of assuming the people "hoarding guns" and the people securing victories against tyranny through other means weren't one and the same. Look at the American Revolution, for example. At any rate, the people who evaluated whether to fight or surrender on the basis of whether they were certain they'd win the battle won very few battles.
I'll take you up on that. Or I would if I thought for a moment that some anonymous person on the net actually meant it.
You can send me email at guidodelconfuso@gmail.com if you're genuinely interested in continuing this discussion offline. I assure you that I am. If you're in New York by any chance, I'll meet you this weekend.