Categories
People Political

Is this what we’ve become?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Imagine my delight when I woke up this morning and found the following comment attached to one of my old postings, Blast them all and let God sort them out.:

I don’t expect Arabs to be humiliated. . .I expect them to be dead, deader than dead. God doesn’t need to sort them out, he already has. He had the evils all in one place at one point. Now he’s got them spread out all over the world. But I’m not going to sit around and wait for them to do something. . .if I see evils happening in my own backyard, the perps are going to die. If I’m marching into Hebron, and see a sand nigger with a gun, I’m going to kill them. Plain and simple, I’m not going to “bomb them and let God sort them out.” I’m going to shoot them and give God something to do.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust. The order has been given. Arabs are the 21st century’s Nazi’s. And they are going to die a painful death.

Staff Sgt Thomas Nichols
USMC

(Note that the IP address attached to comment belongs to the Marriott hotel chain, and the comment was most likely written by someone staying at a Marriott — not necessarily by a person with this name. The writer found my weblog posting by doing a Yahoo search with the words “ARABS MUST DIE”.)

Is this what we’ve become? Three thousand people were killed September 11th, so let’s kill millions of Arabs. Can someone please explain the humanity, the justice, and the morality of this?

The last time this world saw a determination to eliminate all people of a specific religion was in the middle of the last century, and was conducted by a man named Adolph Hitler. I found it somewhat ironic then that the use of ‘nazi’ is given the victims in this instance.

I will say this, though: at least this person was honest in their belief and in their expression of that belief. Too many people in my country, and in other countries, hide this same belief behind polite phrases such as “liberation of the native people” and “war on terror”.

And, at the least, this person wanted to kill all Arabs because he’s afraid, and because he’s pissed that someone would actually dare hurt Americans. Too many people in my country, and in other countries, want to kill Arabs because of oil. However, one difference between them and the writer, Staff Sargeant Nichols, is that these people don’t want to kill all the Arabs.

After all, we have to leave enough Arabs to run the pumps, staff the hotels, and clean the streets.

That I would live long enough to see this become the new “moral way”, the latest Christian Crusade, saddens me, and sickens me.

Categories
RDF

Selective Hearing

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Debate is not a game one plays when one is bored or has little else to do. Debate is a way of people trying to understand each other’s point of view. At the least, it is a way of discussing points of view for an audience in order to convince members of that audience to follow one course or another. Debate, when practiced at its best, is a celebration of differences.

In this previous post I responded, many times, to questions and concerns about RDF and RDF/XML raised by people such as Mark Pilgrim and Joe Gregorio. Was I patient? I hope I was. I tried to be. Was I accurate? As accurate as I could be. Did I convince anyone? Unknown. At the very least, though, I had hoped that I had argued well and that my rather extensive efforts were met with respect.

Imagine how disappointing then when I visit Joe’s weblog and find that he’s posted a new note about this discussion and quotes everyone in the debate but myself, though most of the quotes he uses were a result of my own discussion.

By ignoring me I have effectively been removed from the debate, my efforts dismissed. I have been reduced.

It is too easy in weblogging to reduce each other. Too easy to dismiss each other. To easy to ignore that which we just don’t want to hear, and manipulate that which we don’t want to ignore.