–Adam

First, you were accusing the whole of the Daily Kos community of using childish and foul language without citing any particular sources that you'd encountered. You painted the entirety of the site with a broad brush, and that was uncalled for. Plenty of people had just spent a good deal of time laying out why they disagreed with you. When you finally came back to respond, you only wanted to talk about how a bunch of people had said mean things to you a few months ago, so you didn't care to talk to any of us.

You're not required to 'buy the ultra-liberal partyline', but it is most certainly not knee-jerk to tell you why you are wrong. If you don't want to talk to liberals and insist on labeling anything they say to you as “knee-jerk”, you're likely to get rated as a troll.

Second, you were telling everyone that you make a habit of posting potentially inflammatory material (you can call yourself reasonable and blame the entire community for getting pissed, or you can read through some of the comments and consider other people's point of view) and running before anyone can discuss that material with you. People consider that to be troll-like behavior, and it is not welcome on the site.

Throughout the comments, I made a number of attempts to defend you when people made cruel attacks against you personally, and I got plenty of crap for it. But I did not defend you when you posted that comment, because you made it completely clear that you couldn't care less about the four hours of back and forth that had gone on in the comments.

A few hours later it was removed. Censored.

Now try and explain to me how that, combined with the explosive and unsavory nature of most commenters, is not full-on trolling.

Got an opinion they don't like? Fine! The mods will just delete it.

I had a long day, and I'll get to responding to your longer comment midday tomorrow.

–Kyle

I think it is absolutely necessary to get into the minutiae. Just because the Op-Eds that you appear to be modeling your essay on generally ignore the need for sources and careful wording doesn't mean you'll have an easy time going to a site like Daily Kos and doing the same.

If everything is arguable just because a large group of people think it, then why even write about it? Even Stalin, who is one of your examples of an obvious bad guy, does well in Russian polls. Isn't our work as writers to pull together *facts* and specifics for a wider audience? Otherwise, we're just telling everyone what they already know. You state in your own editorial policy that “Sources will be given to claims, facts, and figures, referencing valid and legitimate data, rather than expecting readers to take all non-opinion content as truth by default.” Saying that many Americans think something (without even citing a poll) does not count as a reference to valid and legitimate data. For a long time, many Americans thought Iraq was connected to 9/11 – does that make it arguable or worthy of citation? Many Americans also favored slavery and the disenfranchisement of women. Are those now also 'arguable' viewpoints? Seems extreme, but if that's our only metric for what's arguable, then where exactly is the end-point?

You do realize that a long time ago, the United States prosecuted Japanese war criminals who waterboarded American soldiers during WWII, right? If you really believe that we shouldn't prosecute the Bush Administration for authorizing waterboarding, then supposedly you think those Japanese war criminals should have gone scot-free.

I can also name a number of journalists and pundits who underwent voluntary, controlled waterboarding, and immediately described it as torture, the most well-known in my opinion being Christopher Hitchens and the conservative shock jock Mancow, both of whom didn't believe it was torture and then changed their minds very quickly when it was over. Even Jesse Ventura underwent waterboarding when he was a NAVY Seal as part of his training, and he called it torture too. And again, that was under controlled circumstances — nothing like what the prisoners at Guantanamo and Bagram experienced.

As for you claim that waterboarding is “not at all the same as removing fingers, toes, or limbs, using electrification, scarification, or other massively inhumane techniques,” well….I'm not exactly sure what experience you have on any of those techniques to back up that claim, and you don't seem to provide any evidence that it doesn't cause extreme pain or mental stress like other torture techniques, which — by the way — is exactly what the Red Cross determined that waterboarding does when they released a report on the practice about five or six months ago.

But the bottom line, for me, is this: If you don't support prosecution of government officials in this country who authorized waterboarding, then you don't have the right to complain if an enemy military captures an American soldier and does the same thing to him, because doing so would be hypocritical. If American soldiers were captured by, say, the Taliban, and tortured in the same way that we did to several prisoners in the war on terror, then you have no right to demand that Taliban officials who authorized torture face any punishment or justice, because we should just “move on” and it's “destructive” to prosecute them.

If you can respond to any of these points, and do so without referring to them as “reactionary,” “kneejerk,” or “inflammatory” with an “asshole attitude,” I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

Will that pacify you?

–Kyle