M
mattiasNYC
Guest
ruffrecords said:
Look, people aren't made up of one trait or whatever, they're the sum of many different "parts". However, not all parts should be valued equally, because they don't have equal implications. Not particularly caring for infants for example might not result in more than a person not having children. Big deal. Liking dogs is nice. Loving to help other people is nicer (because we're not dogs so we benefit from "altruism").
However, anti-semitic sentiments rank pretty darn high on the importance-scale, far higher than what people think about dogs or ice cream or if they are willing to buy a round at the pub. To me, a person being an anti-semite outweighs pretty much all other good traits that person has.
So if we're going to call someone "nice" or "bad" or whatever the terms are, then we can use what we know about a person and weigh all that and come to a conclusion.
Or, conversely: Feel free to tell me what positive traits are so important and great that they turn an anti-semite into a very nice person.
Now, obviously, you could then argue that "well how do you know what they thought?". Well here's the thing: If you go marching with people yelling things like these people yelled, then unless you're a complete idiot, or possibly deaf, you understand full well what their sentiments are. Thus;
- Either you agree with those sentiments, and keep marching with the group
- Or you disagree with those sentiments, and leave the group - which was very easy to do
- Or you disagree with those sentiments, but stay with the group, in which case in my opinion you're not much better.
Again, what kind of person decides to keep marching with a group of anti-semites despite not being one themself? In this specific case we could postulate that a person was there to march against taking down these statues and wasn't an anti-semite, and we'd be left with this:
- Here's someone who marches for the right to keep monuments of slave-owners, and that's more important than not being associated with and thereby support anti-semitism.
Think about that and how that sounds. It really doesn't sound all that great to me. It sounds so bad to me that I have an extremely hard time thinking that person was "very nice". Actually, come to think of it, isn't there a more probable scenario here? It walks and quacks like a duck. In this case the quacking says let me keep my monuments of racist slave-owners, and btw, Jews don't get to replace us white people. That's a "duck".
For reference in case the symbolism is somehow unclear:
Then:
Now:
Tell me someone is walking in that crowd and is a very nice person. I just don't see how that's possible.
PS: Yeah, I'm an atheist and I love science, so I acknowledge that anything is possible when considering quantum field theory.... but we don't live on such a small scale so for the purpose of using language in a reasonable way; no, not possible.......
LSo
