Comments Elsewhere

I’m not sure why Mike Schneider places such a high premium on brevity in replies; perhaps because longer analytic replies interfere with the sort of drive-by rhetorical sniping that he likes to claim as representative of “elementary logic.” I don’t want to tax his patience here; but then, I don’t care very much, either. So perhaps this reply will strike a sort of middle ground.

I’ve responded at length to why Mike’s literally false claim about Hitler in 1932 does not actually very strongly support the claims that he wants it to support about majoritarian democracy, if what he actually said (which was false) is replaced by some different claims about related people and related events (which are true). Here again Mike changes his claim; this time falsely claiming that “The Nazi Party, run by Hitler, *won* an election.” It did not; Parliamentary representation is not determined by winner-take-all votes, so there was nothing for the Nazi Party to “win.” What it did gain was about the same proportion of the vote that Hitler received when he did stand, personally, in a winner-take-all Presidential race in 1932—and lost badly. That said, most of the issue is best explored through the PageUp key. The main thing that worries me here is that Mike made a simple claim which was simply refuted by the historical record—Hitler did stand for election in 1932, but he lost by a very large margin, even in a three-way race. This has been pointed out several times and yet Mike is still unable to simply admit that he misspoke and move on. Why?

Mike also claims not only that I am mistaken, but that I am lying when I claim he diagnosed me as “a die-hard anti-Semite.” One wonders, then, what the hell he did mean when he dismissed my criticism of his uncritical reliance on the self-interested reports of Israeli intelligence by saying this:

“Perhaps if you weren’t in such fucking hell-ass rush to slam Da Jooz, you’d have backed up a couple paragraphs to King Abdullah (hint: not an Israeli).”

And then, when I responded to the charge and remarked that rather than replying to my substantive points “Instead, he decides to accuse someone he has never met of anti-Semitism”, Mike completely ignored the substantive comments and replied simply:

“If the shoe fits…”

If Mike did not intend to accuse me of being motivated by anti-Semitism, then he’s done a pretty poor job at whatever it was he was trying to convey. Which was…what?

(N.B.: for those who are interested, a “failure” of representative democracy would be a case where it produced an unacceptable political order, or where it failed to live up to the goals for which it was intended, or both. For example, Communist strongmen have been democratically elected, as in the case of Allende’s Chile; elected legislatures routinely feed at the trough of looted wealth all around the world. The Constitutional representative democracy of the United States was allegedly established to ensure that government would remain federalized, humble, and strictly limited in scope; but if those were the goals then it has clearly failed—although not so dramatically as it has failed in some other parts of the world today.)