This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Bein Sane: muddled with the talking heads entry, because it implies that members of the Cabinet and so on aren't qualified to discuss politics because they're appointed, not elected. Also took Ben Stein out because he has legitimate political experience...well, as legitimate as working in the Nixon White House is, anyway.
Ademska: added Bush to the example list, because really.
Dalantia: Changed it to any sitting president. It needed it. :p
Unknown Troper: However, Bush is no longer the sitting president, and he still falls under this category. Surely he merits his own entry?
Astyanax: Quite honestly, though I know it would never happen because it would simply be too controversial and flame-baiting, the hatred of Bush deserves a trope all its own. Never have I seen such an utterly ridiculous outpouring of loathing, and the part that annoyed me: far too much in places where IT HAD NO BUSINESS BEING. I want to read a review of Grand Theft Auto, I don't want to hear how you think Bush is Satan Incarnate for the sixty rewillionth time!
Soap: Heh, if it ever happens, it will be called Bush Derangement Syndrome.
- Neoconservatives, who, despite being mostly Jewish and formerly of the Left, are compared to the Nazis more than any other group on the blogoshpere.
Praetyre: Why does the entry on the Nazis mention the Holocaust, yet the entry on communists doesn't mention the 100,000,000+ people they killed?
- Because only one book ever made that claim about communists. Or because the Nazis were all members of a single political organization, whereas talking about something "communists" did is like talking about something that "conservatives" did, and asking present-day American Republicans to take the blame for, say, colonial wars waged by British Conservatives in the 19th century.
- Gattsuru: Since it was deleted, I'll ask here before putting it in again; what about pointing out things that the vast majority of historians, including notoriously useful idiot apologists like Chomsky (motto: the Khmer Rouge were the best things to happen to Cambodia since sliced bread!), agree did happen and were reasonably assessed as either intentional or 'best' the inevitable result of policies anyone with a functioning brainstem could guess would lead to industrialized mass death? Holodomor and similar targeted starvation efforts, where states with millions of starving men and women and children were made to export over 1.8 million tonnes of grain and the USSR prohibited people from leaving the country to search for food? The fifth of a million-strong non-Slavic populace of the Crimean peninsula, who were deported en masse, most into forced labor, where somewhere between one in five (according to the NKVD) and just under one in two (according to Tatar activists, one of the groups actually deported) died from starvation or disease? The Great Purge, where the official data lists 680,000 executions? Dekulakization, which the Soviet media list as 'only' killing 700,000? North Caucasus? Stalin's USSR (and a number of later big-C Communist governments like the aforementioned Khmer Rouge, 1970s China, a dozen smaller examples) 'only' aimed for a number of smaller groups, groups that Westerners don't really associate with an ethnic group, and 'only' starved or worked to death people through an explicitly genocidal system of industrialized mass executions rather than horrifically poisoning them or working them to death.
. It doesn't use similar metrics, timescales, levels of responsibility, or even levels of "proof" (and given that the BBoCommunism uses Conquest's numbers, that the french counterpart is worse-researched is a bad sign).
I'm sorry if that seems like natter, but right now the page reads like the United States view on big-C Communists in general and the USSR in specific are mistaken and somehow removed from reality. We're not.
- You can see the problem with blaming those things on "communism" (instead of, say, the specific governments of specific countries at specific times) once you notice that many of the victims of things like the Great Purge were communists themselves. I don't think anyone denies that Stalin or Mao were nasty people. The issue is with blaming a person's actions entirely on his ideology. You never see people doing that with liberals or conservatives or anyone other than communists...
Jojabar: I deleted it because it just plain isn't relevant. Look around the various Acceptable Targets pages and see how many have fat paragraphs justifying their status as a target.
Gattsuru: On this page, 145 words are spent on explaining why comics find Mc Carthy an acceptable target. 135 are spent on Nixon, excluding the actual explanation of who he was and the Futurama jokes. 375 are spent explaining the evils of celebrities with political interests. 143 are spent explaining how psycho PETA is. 133 are spent on Brian Mulroney's monstrosity. On the Acceptable Sexual Targets page, the vast majority have descriptions explaining why they are targets. You want it snipped down, I can certainly do that, you can certainly do that. But it's not out of line, and I'd dare say that a casual sentence calling the Americans who do remember the USSR's many genocidal campaigns "mistaken" is.
Jojabar That's a reasonable point about the other stuff, and I'm going to do some chopping. This whole section is way too bloated.
