Rafael wrote:
Two examples that spring to mind are:
He linked picture search results that he found on google by simply typing "iraq blood streets" as definitive proof of the volume of bloodshed and wanton death that was occurring in Baghdad.
To be more specific, he showed close-up pictures of small pools of blood that appeared to be on cement. There was no visual reference in the picture to show whose blood was there, how much blood was there at the entire event, what had caused the blood to be there, or even that it was in Baghdad or anywhere else in Iraq. It could easily have been blood from a moderately severe traffic accident anywhere in the world.
Even if it was in Baghdad and did result from violence, there was no evidence that it was anything like what the phrase "Streets running with blood" implies.
That was what the whole incident stemmed from. He used that phrase to
imply that inhabitants of Baghdad were being massacred on a daily basis by us, the insurgents, or both. This was the problem. He wanted to be able to use hyperbolic language to discuss things like violence in Baghdad at levels that didn't even
resemble the actual level of violence (which was certainly anything but pleasent as it actually was). This made discussion impossible, because essentially his position amounted to the idea that
any violence at all was the same as brutal daily massacres and therefore intelligent discussion of whether the violence was getting better, getting worse, or staying the same was utterly lost. Bear in mind, this was all surrounding the national debate on whether the Surge was working in 2007 or so, and so the topic of exactly what the level of violence was, was a lot more than just a semantic debate on exactly how many people dying daily in Baghdad counted as a massacre, but rather a discussion of where the Iraq war was eventually going to go.
Any sort of international political topic involved the same sort of nonsense, often worse. He outright invented international treaties that do not exist, claimed we were violating them, then when asked to cite them simply refused to provide the name of the relevant treaty. This was invariably after already having cited some treaty that simply did not say what he claimed it said.
When it came to Israel or anything to do with Israel, it was the same thing. There was the Great White Phosphorous Debate, which I know I've discussed before. During one of the vrious Israeli attempts to deal with the endless rocket attacks from Gaza, Monty loudly insisted that the Israelis were using White Phosphorous incendiary artillery ammunition on civilians. In reality they were using smoke rounds to create smoke screens. While these rounds do have White Phosphorous in them, they are not incendiary ammunition any more than toothpaste that includes white phosphrous is incendiary. They are useless for starting fires except when in contact with highly flammable substances such as gasoline. Not only did I provide pictures clearly deliniating the difference between the ammunition; pictures from the Field Artillery School at Ft. Sill, OK, but I also pointed out that Monty's own pictures of civilians being "horribly burned" showed nothing of the sort. He provided one picture that showed a fire about the size of a backyard BBQ pit, with civilians running, totally unscathed, through the smoke-producing felt wedges that the round actually dispenses.
The discussion was a lot more lengthy than this, and also involved Monty citing two "Experts" one of whom admitted he wasn't an expert on artillery, and the other of who admitted he hadn't seen any actual pictures of what the Israelis were using, but both of whom stated that
if incendiary rounds were used in an urban area, that would be a war crime. Monty, naturally, took this as absolute proof that such rounds
had been used, and no amount of direct photographic evidence or technical information to the contrary could make a dent.
It isn't just a matter of these incidents either; these incidents were just the most blatant and obvious examples. Another favorite bugaboo of his was people being "carpet bombed". He had no idea what carpet bombing is, when or why it's used, or the incredible amount of heavy bombers and ammunition it takes to do it. When asked to tell us exactly who it was that
was presently being carpet bombed, he singularly failed. Yet this did not stop him from ranting on as if it were actually happening. As fr as I could tell, he simply assumed that because the U.S.
can carpet bomb people, it therefore must be doing so because the U.S. is big and mean and evil, because the immorality of indiscriminate purposeless bombing could not possibly impact our national policy at all, and any suggestion that it might was implying that we are perfect and never do anything wrong. The suggestion that even if we really ARE that evil, that we still might not be carpet-bombing people for the sheer hell of it because its expensive, manpower and ammunition and fuel intensive, ties up limited numbers of heavy bombers and puts additional hours on their airframes, and above all,
serves no useful purpose whatsoever was brushed off as simply apologizing for the brutality that we all just know must be going on somewhere because that's just what we do - we brutalize brown people and chortle about it while scoffing potato chips.
Or there was the "China can invade the U.S." thing - he claimed the Chinese army was scary because of its size and could invade the U.S. - despite being opposed to practically any military spending at all; this I found particularly hilarious because he constantly asserted our technological superiority over any opponent as a reason to cut spending, evidently feeling that the rest of the world was making no effort whatsoever to advance, and that therefore we would always have an insurmountable edge.
Then, he turns around and makes this assertion about China, and when its pointed out that there's this huge ocean between us and them and that our Navy controls it, and they don't have anything like the ships or aircraft to either fight our Navy outside their home waters nor move their enormous army to the U.S., we're simply told they're smart and because they're supposedly kicking our *** in "Green technology" that this means they can produce aircraft carriers and destroyers just as good as we can. When it's pointed out that an aircraft carrier is a large, expensive, complex piece of gear and that designing, building, and then training on how to operate the carrier itself as well as the associated ships plus all the logistical lift that would be needed to even think about invading the U.S. would probably take upwards of fifty years, he takes this as some sort of assertion that the Chinese are racially inferior to Americans!
These are far from the only instances, just the most memorable. That might not even seem that bad, but this was compounded by the fact that the same people saying "if you don't like him, just ignore him" were the first ones to say "Well, he has a point" which he
did in the sense that being opposed to senseless, pointless brutality is a point, or that people were dying in Baghdad during the worst parts of the war were a point, or that it's not acceptable to wantonly employ inendiary artillery rounds on civilians is a point, or that if a million Chinese soldiers somehow get to California we might need to do something about that is a point. His points were all obvious, "duh" points that had validity only in terms that they appealed to our better natures, mixed in with a nonstop lecture on how anything less than 100% agreement with him made you a racist, mysogenist, capitalist, free-market ******* that got their jollies slaughtering <insert minority here>.
Again, he probably could have been simply ignored out of existence, but even if everyone who disagreed with him did so, that left people still saying "Well, I actually agree with Monty here." Not that they shouldn't have agreed with him, but if the consensus was supposed to be "ignore Monty" that makes it impossible to have a discussion with anyone else who is not ignoring Monty and is referring to what he says.
Monty was definitely worse than anyone else here. He made the entire forum entirely intolerable. In fact, most of the bad habits people indulge in now are leftover bad habits from dealing with Monty since 2005 or earlier.
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