I get the impression that Phillip Jones is not a fan.
Pz Myers how dare you trivialize the inhuman and insidious horrors of Nazi concentration camps by comparing them to ICE facilities! Yes the conditions in those places are unsanitary and unacceptable, but they are nothing like concentration camps which were specifically intended for genocide. Stop pretending you oppose concentration camps PZ! Communists and Socialists like you always lock people who don’t agree with collectivist ideology up when you get into power! You always torture and murder them too, because you know that people won’t abandon their individual rights, freedoms, concerns, sovereignty, and independence for your pipe-dream, hammer-and sickle utopia! The discovery Institute has written about you too, asshat! They remarked, completely and accurately, that you are a crusader/bully determined to silence and Malign anyone who disputes your talking points, even if they agree with you on most everything else. Even if the person is a leftist and evolutionist like you, if they don’t agree with you in every minute point, you attack them like a rabid dog!! Dawkins and Harris aren’t perfect, but they are better men than you!! And they continually publish scientific research; you haven’t published research in more than four years! You’ve spent nearly all your time trolling and trash talking on twitter!!! You should have been disowned by Atheist Ireland and it’s allies a long time ago!! If Dawkins, Harris, or any other new Atheist dies as a result of your defamation, like Pim Fortuyn was, I will make sure you and all the other hate-mongering, Islamic appeasing, Ameriphobic , uber-left wing pricks who’ve been lying about and bashing them are held accountable. Dawkins is in danger of being killed like Taslima Nasrin. Because of bin ladenist, brown-shirt lefties like you!! By the way, the Federal Government, while refusing to charge you with treason and sedition like they should, informed me that they have you under surveillance, and are waiting to catch you committing some act of insurrection or violence against the government so they can arrest and charge you. And don’t tell me you’d never do that, you said you hoped for a revolution to erase the stain of America. And you support Antifa violence against right-wingers like Andy Ngo. I wouldn’t be suprised if you’re plotting to bomb a bridge, like those Occupy Cleveland nuts!! If this country is so terrible get out!! I’m going to boycott any appearance or association with you asshole!!
Twenty three exclamation points. Not a high score, but respectable. I appreciate how it gradually escalates from “how dare you trivialize…” to “new Atheists will die as a result of your words” to “you’re plotting to bomb a bridge”.
Extra points for going to the Federal Government, and gloating that they said I was under surveillance and are awaiting any excuse to arrest me, while at the same time claiming that I’m the one who wants to take away individual rights, freedoms, concerns, sovereignty, and independence
. Always nice to be reported to a police state for daring to suggest that they’re a police state!
I love the aside where he revels that the Federal Government has informed him that you are under surveillance. They aren’t typically inclined to reveal information about on-going cases to just anyone but, given that the trump crime family leaks like a submarine with screen windows, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise.
I rather doubt that I’m under surveillance, which would require money and manpower. I’m not worth it. More likely a few people have reported me for various things (snitches!) and some agency somewhere has a file on me that they’d fish out after I bomb that bridge.
You know, the Feds informed me they told him that to keep HIM under surveillance. Just between you and me, I’m sworn to keep it secret. Believe me
/s 😎
Pz Myers how dare you trivialize the inhuman and insidious horrors of Nazi concentration camps by comparing them to ICE facilities!
That’s easy: it’s a matter of degree. And being on the same spectrum as the nazi concentration camps is not a scale that anyone should want to be measured against.
Pro-tip for loony fascists: if you are going to rant about leftists supposedly wanting to lock up their ideological enemies, don’t end your rant hoping and rooting for the imprisonment (or worse, treason is historically a capital offense) of your ideological enemies.
Confused troll is confused.
How dare PZ exercise his right to free speech. I find myself singing “Know Your Rights”, damn Strummer died too young.
It’s “almost” like this idiot doesn’t realize that there are other concentration camps in history besides the ones the Nazi regime ran.
Jazzlet @7: But the right to free speech only applies if you’re not dumb enough to actually use it.
Why is it that people who don’t know the difference between a concentration camp and an extermination camp feel the need to lecture others about disrespecting the memory of the Holocaust?
ICE detention camps are very much concentration camps, and the failure to recognize that is simply ignorance of history and actual disrespect for the memory of the Holocaust. “Never again” doesn’t just refer to gas chambers and ovens; it also refers to any element of an ethnic cleansing program, including forced confinement of civilians under conditions designed to produce desperation, poverty, a complete lack of privacy, psychological breakdown, illness, non-systematic death, and more.
The Holocaust was a program of dehumanizing the other, an escalation over time of ethnic cleansing methodology. The Final Solution does not stand on it’s own but rather was in fact the final solution of a long term ethnic cleansing program in which concentration camps were an intermediate step, a step that enabled extermination camps by making it clear that the victims were not people in the eyes of the state.
What does this mean?
How come I don’t get emails like that ? I am green with envy .
microraptor @#9 that’s why it brought the song to mind, looking in from outside the American ‘right’ to free speech does seem to apply to some viewpoints rather more than to others.
Plenty of exclamation marks, but it lacks commas, doesn’t it?
Dawkins and Harris … continually publish scientific research…
Citations needed, Phillip.
As previously mentioned, not all nazi camps were outright extermination camps. And there was a gradient of brutality, from the first ones operated by SA to the later ones by SS and by Quisling regimes.
All concentration camps through history has had higher than normal mortality, and that includes the British ones in South Africa and (later) Kenya.
All camps that operate outside normal legal practices have inadeqiate health care; this inclides the border camps and the Australian camp on Manus Island.
I’m a bit disappointed, not that many random capitalizations before jumping into denunciation for treason and sedition.
So, PZ, when did you make war against the United States of America, or at least give aid and comfort to spiders, or something?
Phillip, if you’re reading, do learn what the charges actually mean and well, read the Constitution, which actually does define treason.
And no, the federal government doesn’t give a tinkerer’s damn about PZ, but you’re likely being looked askance at. Such rants actually do acquire attention and further screeds will be automatically reviewed.
But then, what do I know? It’s highly probable that I’ve worked for the government for longer than you’ve been alive.
Folks, this is why you don’t poke baby in the soft spot. If one does, one ends up with a Phillip.
@11: For a start, it means that the writer is an ungrammatical nitwit. Taslima Nasrin is alive (AFAIK, I just checked wikipedia in case), so presumably the intent is to say that Dawkins is in as much danger as she is. Which is a bit odd in itself, since as far as I know the Myers Gang has no plans to assassinate Dawkins. Or at least no published plans — does the nitwit know something we don’t? [Voiceover: No.]
The idiot doesn’t understand most things.
This is someone with a clearly disordered and incoherent mind, or what passes for a mind on the lunatic fringes.
As a descendant of folks who suffered and died in KZs: fuck that guy and the horse he rode in on. Also, see Jews against ICE. Funny how these people never bother to ask actual descendants of Nazi victims how they’re feeling about this.
“or any other new Atheist dies as a result of your defamation, like Pim Fortuyn was”
Interesting example – Fortuyn saw himself as a catholic and defended the right to discriminate (especially muslims).
“not all nazi camps were outright extermination camps”
From 1944 on the difference between extermination camps and other ones disappeared as prisoners were both worked and starved to death.
@larpar, #14:
ISWYDT
Perhaps the letter writer is confusing Nasrim with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She of course is also alive, but apparently has faced death threats.
Taslima has also been subject to credible death threats, and lives in a part of the world where atheists have been hacked apart by machetes.
You know she has a blog right here on FtB, right?
@Crip Dyke, #22
I did, didn’t I. : )
Am I a horrible person? All I can think of is what you’d plug into the Markov Chain to get that output. Random capitalization is nice. Reference to names he is so sure you should care about he doesn’t bother to otherwise identify them. And of course the double and triple exclamation marks. It is so nearly without substance, though, it would be too trivial to generate.
23 exclamation points and no paragraphs. This is someone who wasn’t paying attention in school. And as others have remarked above, such camps are on a gradient or spectrum – “Concentration Camp” isn’t a trademark. One thing they all have in common though is that they punish people for who they are, not for what they have done.
Jazzlet @7: I’m particularly fond of the live version I heard where he mixes up the lines. You have the right to free money!
(er… hi. First post. Clearly this would be the all-important comment that would finally prompt me to make an account.)
@28: Yes, indeed. Clearly you belong in this particular zoo.
ephemerides @28 I saw them around then, honestly can’t remember what they played, but I do remember it as a brilliant gig.
Man they need to make an app that forces wingnuts to use paragraphs.
I’m at a loss as to why he didn’t accuse you of being a known Arachnophile.
I get the impression that Phillip Jones is a Fox-watching low-grade moron.
Why would an American atheist care about being disowned by Atheist Ireland? It must be more than four years since Professor Dawkins retired; has he published any research recently?
Concentration camps (another great British invention that makes me wonder how the hell so many of my fellow Brits can believe the Empire was a Good Idea) are vile; but they are not extermination camps even if many of the prisoners die of neglect, overwork, or disease.
@32 wcaryk “Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Arachnid Party?”
Sigh, another average American conservative voter. Someone should take his crayons away before he eats them all.
Yikes! And I thought my online missives could get rambly. HEY PHIL!!! Find a point and stick to it!
Yeeeeeeeah… For some reason, I seriously doubt that. Reminds of an email I got from a fundy cousin after I was outed as an atheist. ”The local authorities should be alerted to your activities!” he wrote. For what? Not believing in a magical cosmic tyrant makes me more liable to commit crimes?
Also, this cracks me up:
Says the guy who wants the federal government to charge us with ”sedition and treason” for not agreeing with the fascistic ideology because he knows that people won’t abandon civil rights, compassion, safety, science, and interdependence for his red-white-and-blue, star-spangled police state.
Does he even know which side he’s on? It’s truly rare to see a rant favorably cite both prominent atheists and the Discovery Institute.
I have to suspect that this letter was edited though. I see no mention of Peterson in it anywhere, and that’s just not credible.
“By the way, the Federal Government, while refusing to charge you with treason and sedition like they should, informed me ” — I think it’s a safe bet that at most the only exchange of information between Phillip Jones and the federal government involves a W-2 form.
lucifersbike @#34
I thought concentration camps were a British invention too, but I was corrected recently on this site, though I don’t now recall by whom, so no we pinched the idea.
Ah, yes. The old “you’re just like the Nazis ’cause you wanna, like, tell people what to do and stuff, like, man…” attack. Is there actually a coherent response to this? My old stand-by of “fuck off you sad wanker” doesn’t seem all that persuasive.
Why are right wingers such nut jobs? This guy needs mental health help.
Jazzlet @13: I know, I was referencing that part of the song.
Geez, if liberals wanted to blow up a bridge… ONE bridge?… we could just vote in some Republicans instead, and all the infrastructure bills would get killed, and EVERY bridge will fall down without us lifting a finger!
@jazzlet #40
Nazi oficials mentioned in memoirs that they have taken inspiration both from British concentration camps in Africa and american treatment of Native Americans.
Concentration camp is basically any form of gathering people without trial or indictment but based on political/national/ethnical/religious description in one place under guard. It is as old as warfare probably (as is genocide)
The 3 oldest examples using term concentration camp I could find in a quick search are
1896 Spanish organized camps during rebellion in Cuba
1900 US organized camps in Philippines
1900 British organized camps during Boer War in South Africa
As with everything in life, there is a spectrum – British camps in South Africa started more as an interment/refugee camp but with lack of funds, resources, medical supplies and manpower turned into concentration camps. Some concentrations camps turned into death camps in time (only a handful of nazi camps were designed as death camps, most started as concentration camps and were repurposed).
It is unfortunate that people tend to lump death and concentration camps together – in case of ICE detention centers I do not know how exactly they operate but it seems to me that comparison with concentration camp may be warranted (nice prison is still a prison, nice concentration camp is still a concentration camp) as a wake up call, to stop yourselves from following that road – however I feel that some people are using it to tap (very slightly) to the emotional reservoir of horror of death camps.
In the same way how many people compare some actions of politicians to Hitler’s road to power in early ’30s which is justified, but would not hold the emotional power if not the atrocities of World War II.
I, for one, welcome our new Arachnid Overlords.