If You Squint, The Foot Kinda Looks Like A Swastika

The idea of commitment is not for sale, the worth of a person’s word is not malleable.

That sounds pretty high-minded. However, it’s not true. Worth is the most malleable thing in the world. Commitment in the case of a contract, is for sale by definition. You seem to be trying to say, “a person’s word ought to mean something.” That, I agree with. However, when I leave my car with the valet, they give me a little ticket which says, on the back, “if we wreck your car you can’t hold us accountable.” And if they do wreck my car, and I do sue them, it will turn out that accepting that bit of paper from them is meaningless. and everyone knows it’s meaningless.

When you take a prescription medication, you sign a thing saying you have been advised by the pharmacist etc. and they give you a piece of paper that warns you that the drug may harm you in any of several catastrophic ways. If you take the medicine, you are agreeing to assume the risk, according to the drug manufacturer whose product you must take anyway. As with the contract with the valet, I have given (according to you) my word not to hold Pfizer (et al) accountable if their product kills me or harms me. And yet: har de har har.

These are not binding agreements. In fact, the drug company does have an obligation not to kill me, and the valet does have an obligation not to wreck my car. They are covering their asses.

Another example: a long time ago, I worked at a biiiiig corporation and after several months there I read the manual which spelled out all the rules. One fire-able offense was “having a personal relationship with a person who works for a rival company without having disclosed that relationship in writing.” In this particular industry, it’s not an exaggeration to say that virtually everyone is having a relationship with someone who is or soon will be working for a rival company. I went to human resources to declare my relationship and they laughed. They thought I was making the rule up. No one in the company had ever read the manual. No one had ever declared their spouses or mistresses. I’m pretty sure I am the only one who ever did.

To compare that kind of extreme to running into offensive content “walking around in the world” attempts to trivialize that which cannot be trivialized.

No, it doesn’t. What I said was that I was ambivalent about the “people might get offended”/misunderstand/etc. argument because that’s not a workable standard. Since you would basically have to shut down, well, everything everywhere.

When Rudy states, “nobody made fun of holocaust victims” I feel it is fair to explain, in crayon if necessary, that the site did just that.

Yet, you didn’t actually do that. Explain, I mean.

3. Pointless. Rebutting a point not made.

I wasn’t rebutting a point. I was making a point.

A rating system for being offended? Why? Is this some way of implying an over reaction? Would that not be projecting your personal threshold? Or do you imply some constructive function

I truly cannot tell what you’re talking about half the time. I think you were offended by a comment that was not made by the writers who run the blog, and then somehow equated that with the point of view of the blog — and cast yourself as the defender of the victims of the holocaust, in opposition to the blog, which apparently is anti-Semitic. But why not assume that the blog is anti-racist and pro-Semite? Your assumption seems to be that simply invoking the holocaust at all, in the context of a joke (satire, whatever), is by definition offensive. I don’t believe that. (woody allen, sarah silverman, sasha cohen, etc.). If I thought BoC was anti-Semitic, I would not read them.

12. You say you don’t like polite all that much. Seems odd to me, personally, since you once objected to something I said as being snide, which you said had therefore made me disrespectful, and “rubbed you the wrong way.”

Allow me to clarify. I don’t like “polite” comedy or humor. That’s my personal preference. I do value manners, and generally, treating people with respect, in personal interactions.

You took your own interpretation of one sentence, one of many interpretations available (mythical means undefined, not just "of mythic proportions),

Mythical does not mean undefined.

You seem to have this belief that you can know what people’s thoughts and feelings are beyond the subject matter involved. You freely posit a psychoanalytic profile of peoples’ motivations and feelings, here in this post, about what others did, despite the obvious intent that they self-described.

I didn’t. Seriously. I think most of the trouble you get into here and elsewhere is due to the fact that you can’t read.

What I objected to was making fun of victims of GENOCIDE. Must that be explained? Seriously?

This reminds of a joke. A guy goes to a baseball game. He’s sitting in the stands, and twenty rows back, some guy yells out, “HEY DAVE!” He turns around, scans the crowd. Can’t see who said it. Goes back to the game. A moment later, he hears again, “HEY DAVE!” He turns around. Again, he can’t see who said it. Again, his attention returns to the game. Again, after a moment, “HEY DAVE!” The guy wheels around, and shout back, “MY NAME’S NOT DAVE!”

Why do you think I was talking to you?

Ultimately, you are defending, as are others, someone’s right to speech. My point is this: that right to speech is covered and limited by SB Nation, making some things inappropriate here, and what I objected to is by definition not only callous and juvenile, but against the rules.

No, I’m not. There is no right to free speech here. The laws protecting free speech protect it from the government. This is private property. This blog is here because SBN allows it to be here. You are here because the blog allows you to be here. That’s why, at JftC, the agreement says, “think of it as a party; we are the hosts, you are the guests.”

I think it is probably inappropriate just about everywhere, and I also think I would be of the majority opinion among all people.

If you’re talking about an unrelated commenter saying something about “ovens,” I would agree. But if you’re using that to make a blanket condemnation of other people who did not make that comment, just because they made a joke at the expense of racists… to me, that “doesn’t track.”

I also mentioned it was personally offensive to me. I was not so naïve as to think anyone would care about that, but it was a useful device that prompted people reveal their true selves.

Saying you’re offended is a device?

Look. Racism, bigotry, insensitivity and anti-Semitism are wrong. Jokes that mock holocaust victims are offensive. I just don’t trust you to be the arbiter of what’s offensive and what isn’t. And I reject your recasting my comments as “attempting to trivialize that which cannot be trivialized.” That characterization conveniently casts you as the defender of “that which cannot be trivialized” and everyone else as holocaust minimizers. When in reality it’s a case of “stay off my side.” It’s not that I think you’re over-reacting (as you said in your comment), it’s that I think you’re reacting indiscriminately.

You did the same thing a few weeks ago when you leaped to the defense of several moronic comments I quoted from Rich Hammond’s blog, casting yourself of the defender of a population (Hammond commenters) that I have been a vocal member of since the beginning. And — why wasn’t just yesterday that you leaped to the defense of Jarret Stoll as though I had said all these horrible things about him when in fact my criticism was that he’s not really a great second line center, but more of a third line center?

I would find your gigantic chunks of commentary easier to handle if you would not assign opinions to people that they don’t actually have.