re: #1348 LudwigVanQuixote

Gee, do you think that you were busy launching into masisvely hyperbolic invective and defining yourself as the true American who could decide the moral worth of others might have had anything to do with people misunderstanding you?

Saying things like “I say it firmly. You are all pathetic.” is never going to work.

I saw nobody, nobody at all calling for indefinite detention before you entered the thread. Nobody approving of it. I did see some of the usual ignorant ‘they don’t deserve rights because they’re not American citizens’, which I really do feel is ignorance in civics rather than sycophantic evil.

You directed your comment to “the right”, on a blog where most of the members feel they are on “the right”.

I am really tired of the phony whining of the right, that we might actually live up to the ideals we are supposed to.

That you ever after only spoke against torture and indefinite retention is true, from a brief summary, but the manner in which you did it gained you nothing, and lost you much. By entering with a broad brush, it wasn’t clear to me, or to anyone else, apparently, that that was the constraint of your criticism.

I do think you’re responsible for the way you deliver your message, as well as the content of that message.

Compare Lister and Semmelweis. They were both perfectly right. Semmelweis failed. It didn’t matter that he was right.