This is really a quite interesting post. Especially interesting for me, because I'm surprised, I have not expected such a reaction from you. My impression was that you fight against hate speech directed against various groups like blacks, Jews, LGBT*, women and so on. Now, we have a clear case of such hate speech against Russian people, a guy who likes to describe Russians in such phrases like
"the pants-pissing drunks littering Moscow". Ok, Russians are obviously not among those who you would like to protect against such hate speech. But now it looks like you even support such hate speech. Against me, you apply
The thing is, Schmelzer, I can read. If I attend the colloquial description of "pants-pissing drunks littering Moscow", it is
you, not our neighbor, extending that to all Russians:
Next thing Bolivia or perhaps Morocco will start a nuclear weapons program and begin making threats and demands just like Putin, maybe Photoshop some stealth planes and missiles to spread around on Facebook like your friends always do, demand that they be treated like their ancestors accomplished something worth celebrating at some point in forgotten history. With functional economies backing them up, they would constitute far greater threats than the pants-pissing drunks littering Moscow, it's a truly scary thought.
Yes, the people who wring their hands and wail about because they bought into some cheap propaganda are the sort of people that statement regards unkindly. We have our own versions of besotted barflies who are willing to believe birth announcements are part of a decades-long conspiracy to steal the United States from white Christians, or that it will culminate in the U.S. Army rounding those folks up to steal their guns on behalf of Walmart and McDonald's.
And it's true, when it comes to policy, we expect better of American Presidents than delusional conspiracism.
The drunken potsherds at the pub? Well, their accuracy isn't so important, but after a while it's certainly fair to call them out on their bullshit. And if they're too far out of it to know what freaking day it is, maybe the barkeep should nix that next round. That is its own question.
Still, we ought to be able to expect better of Senators and Members of Congress.
Your complaint requires that all Russians be so easily duped as the pants-pissing drunks our neighbor describes as littering Moscow, but it is also true that we don't actually know how much the trollfarmers drink.
And while it is true there are at least
some language and cultural barriers in effect, it is also true you're doing a bit we Americans have known for a long time. It's an occasional ejaculation of fallacy that used to catch others off-guard; the way it goes is that some celebrity says something reprehensible, and some person out in the masses happens to denounce that statement as some sort of
-ist, at which point somene else near that person erupts, complaining that when a someone denounces all [____] as supremacist, that someone force others to oppose them. It comes up a lot, actually, in our civil rights discussions.
Presently, we Americans hear it about white supremacism: Apparently, calling white supremacism racist forces white people to become white supremacists. Well, at least, to take the white supremacists' word for it.
Trying to depict the whole of Russian people as being so creulous and delicate and dysfunctional as yourself doesn't actually help them.
Your bawl just doesn't meet any useful standard.
Nor does that surprise anyone.
