Bob-

Thanks for being the smartest man anywhere, the best down-boiler ever, and for forming the finest little circle of thinkers to be found.

– Pain

“Thanks for being the smartest man anywhere”

Perfectly correct and a stunningly intellectual observation.

“the finest little circle of thinkers to be found.”

Let’s not go overboard.

A question for Bob, who has Excessive affective concern for others and so may know what I am trying to get at here:

How do you know how far to push in a debate? Playing the mad dog Pit Bull can scare away potential allies. Also, one doesn’t want to hurt the feelings of another who is on his side.

For example, you are the first pro-Southerner who is also openly sympathetic to inter-war Germany. But most of them will write one off as a Lover of Big Government and Hater of Freedom and Evil Yankee-like Tyrant if one speaks too uncritically of them.

Pain

The most important thing this makes me think of is that WE NEED MORE REPORTS FROM THE FRONT.

Lord Nelson, Prometheus, Simmons and the others of you PRACTITIONERS should have been all over this in the period when I was unable to reach General Comments. Get IN here, troops!

The second observation is that Pain makes the sort of point I appreciate: concern for others is essential to a real Moot. “How do you know how far to push in a debate?” Playing the mad dog Pit Bull can scare away potential allies.”

How far you push any point depends entirely on what you want to leave the other participants WITH. Repeat, you are not trying to WIN an argument.

What is the POINT of bringing up interwar Germany with unReconstructed Southerners? It is that here we have a case of ANOTHER proud people who were defeated and HUMILIATED. Like the South, they had to agree that the whole thing had been their fault.

In the heat of debate, as in the heat of any kind of battle, you must not lose sight of what YOU are saying. For this, you must constantly be thinking of the people you are talking TO. The point here is that the Germans were treated the way WE were after our respective wars.

I do not speak uncritically of interwar Germans. I am the one who keeps emphasizing that all the Hitler-worshipers ignore the fact that a huge segment of that German population became fanatical STALINISTS. In 1933 the combined Communist and Nazi representation in the Reichstag constitute a majority. No government could be formed without Communists or Nazis.

Ergo Hitler. This is not a case for Hitler. What IS it a case for?

After the Civil War, the South was driven to be permanent enemies of a name: Republicanism.

I came up when liberals ruled because of this. All conservative Republicans voted against General Lee. All conservatives were still voting against Reconstruction. Instead of these Middle Americans deciding elections, elections were decided by people who had no deep-rooted American identity.

We all saw the problem then. Every Southerner was a Democrat. No Midwestern conservative Republicans would vote Democratic. The swing vote was liberal. Thurmond Democrats agreed on everything with McCarthy Republicans, but they could not unite.

Hence the election of Rockefeller and Javits. Hence the nomination of liberals and moderate Republicans for president.

Your point is that vindictive victory destroys the victors.

We get very interesting citations from input to sites like Chronicles of Culture, but we get no url to refer to or, more often, a general url that takes us to a debate with forty or fifty entries. I don’t know about others, but I cannot tell which of this huge number of entries is being referred to, so it is of no use to me.

One person referred to a Helsinki Convention as a reason for denying an immigrant visa to a white South African, but no explanation of what that citation from some Helsinki Convention IS. If you want something more than sympathy, you have to tell us what it SAYS.

I just thought that I would let you know that since you are censored at work (it must be all the girly pictures), the first thing I do when I come home is to read this blog. This is what I am doing right now – even before I renew my SCV membership!

— Pain