Jim,

I appreciate your retraction and I unreservedly and humbly accept your apology.

Furthermore, I share your instinctive repulson of terms like "do gooder" and "liberal fascist", both being terms that have been applied to me.

Thanks for taking the time to reconsider your position.



Spleen.


"Have you essentially said that intolerance towards racism (and vehemently disagreeing with the views of those who set themselves up as apologists for racist "comedians") is the same impulse that leads to racist mass murder on an unprecedented scale?"


This line of argument only works if you take the liberty of substituting "racism" for "views contrary to one's own".

In doing this you create a straw man and as such are arguing with a fignmet of your own imagnation and saying nothing about smokeys point.

If smokey had had a problem with people being intolerant of Racism he would have said so.

Instead he said that lashing out at viewpoints contrary to ones own is an approach that he finds comparable to Nazi attitudes.

For example, If Jim will forgive me for torturing a dead horse, My view on TT is different to Jims, but as has been well and truly established by now (I hope) it does not follow that my view is racist or that I am an apologist for a racist comedian.

To make a snap judgement about another persons viewpoint because they disagree with you and to condemn them without hearing what they have to say equally is not interchangeable with "intolerance to racism".

To stand up to racism you need first to be able to identify it.

Sometimes this is easy.

Sometimes it isn't so clear.

I think that in my case it was obvious that my posts contain none.

So lashing out at my posts is not the same as being intolerant to racism.

In the case of TT there is clearly debate about whether he is racist or not.

I believe not, as I believe that he was illustrating a seperate point and not expressing a racist view.

I think he is anti racist and his words were meant in a satirical vein.

The context of the debate around him is therefore not about whether to be tolerant or intolerant of him, but whether or not he s a racist comedian.

So to start suggesting that Somkey thinks we should tolerate racists is misleading, defamatory and has no bearing on anything he has posted so far.