Olovetto's image depicting a Swastika transforming into a Star of David

THE FOLLOWING CONTENT HAS BEEN MOVED HERE FROM ANOTHER THREAD E.R. Ollovetto wrote: "I can't believe that mods deleted that image as well as all the posts after. Great job guys. I'd like an explanation."

E.R. Ollovetto wrote: Here is the verbal description of this so called "offensive image": a 4 stage morphing of the swastika into the Star of David along with the slogan "History takes shape". What the moderators fail to realize is context. The image wasn't used alongside me saying "Jews are bad." or something. It is within the context of this recent episode of Israeli murders. This is analogous to me discussing the word "nigger" without saying "I hate black people", and instead saying, "How can you argue against me using the word "nigger", when you are advocating slavery?" (For the record, I am a "guido"/"honky" who is married outside of my race/skin color.) Also, you deleted several posts of mine having nothing to do with the "offensive image". The fact remains that bloom is a hedonist hypocrite for condemning Hitler's actions "against his people". His "legal reasoning" is lock-step with Hitler's.

DONDOLEE: For what it's worth: I personally thought the image was just trying to be goading and overly provacative, perhaps you didn't intend it to be that way, but that's how it appeared to me. It also looked to be something that was going to be inherently counter productive to any dialogue had it been acknowledged by your opponent. The rest of the conversation seemed a bit too spurrious, personal, and inflammatory (especially considering the intended topic of this thread) to be of much merit. I think the mods made the right call if there goal was to try to keep this topic alive and healthy. my two cents

BLOOMJ: "I'd like an explanation." I personally don't think you deserve one. Thank you moderators.

lol, good use of promoting the "member issues". 

I don't know why you think that all moderating a forum is about is responding to "inflammatory comments".

The quote button has been broken for over a month. I've personally written out a guide to the workaround a few times, let alone other people who made the effort. This is something that could have been stickied in every forum.

Then there is the greater issue of if this forum is supposed to be at all directed toward scholarship or its just a place for every clueless statist, legal positivist or moral relativist to spout their views and blatantly ignore rational arguments. How many threads on nukes are going to be made week after week before a mod starts saying, "We've had a thread on this every week, thread closed, refer to this sticky."?

Your feedback has been noted.

How civil of you.

There were a whole bunch of posts deleted in that thread related to bloom seemingly saying that there was nothing wrong with what Hitler did than "his people" being on the wrong side of the battle. I'm wondering if he realized how foolish and hypocritical this was and deleted his own post, plus the option to "delete children", or if the mods did it.

What is the point of this group if you aren't actually going to address the forum issues? I still don't think there is anything wrong with using that image in this context of a Jew saying there is nothing wrong with the flotilla murders because "it's what the law says".

The posts were deleted as "children" and as a budding flame ware between you and Bloom. While it is fine to ask for moderator attention to issues in this forum, that is not its express purpose. The reporting function is still the place for that. The purpose of this forum is to give members a place to discuss member issues where it won't distract from discussions about economics, political theory, philosophy, and history on the front page.

I found that Swastika image to be quite repulsive; Was it supposed to be ironic? I think not.

Even though I haven't seen the thread of which this was posted in, I have seen the image before and thought it was pretty fitting to the current state of Israel.

The posts were deleted as "children" and as a budding flame ware between you and Bloom. While it is fine to ask for moderator attention to issues in this forum, that is not its express purpose. The reporting function is still the place for that. The purpose of this forum is to give members a place to discuss member issues where it won't distract from discussions about economics, political theory, philosophy, and history on the front page.

I didn't flame him. Unless it is also forbidden now to say things like, "Your cherished Marxism is a joke." (Replace Marxism with [naive] legal positivism, and that is what I said.)

In my very first post about forum issues, I suggested rules from another forum and both the ban on "broad brush attacks on political ideologies" and "baseless assertions" were rejected. So, it looks like I did nothing IIRC to cause a flame fest to "bud", unless there is a necessary change in rules you ought to make.

See, if I knew that this rule existed and could count on you guys to enforce is symmetrically, bloom would have been long gone and this whole thing would have never happened. In fact, didn't someone say once that bloom had already been banned and returned? So, when Lilburne feels like he has an axe to grind with me, the rules are enforced. Otherwise, people like Rettopper making 6 (!!!!) posts in a row, including (in short) saying that libertarians are "faith based" and "jihadists" get nothing done about them. Oh, then we have this post where mods are posting in the thread and just gloss over comments people make to me.

This one is up there with the most ridiculous responses I've ever gotten here. First I was told:

What do you have against buying books?

 This is some evening, 1-2 hours after this dude cited some work related to the topic of (his) legal positivism, which is utterly off-topic. I did't go out to buy his $45 suggested read and digest it in an appropriate timeframe apparently. This is the same chap who claims to read a book a day, yet is perhaps one of the worst cases of "educated person reading comprehension deficit". This post is so amazingly off-topic and ridiculous. Really? Really?

So basically, you are technically not proficient in any of the literature in logic, economics, or history, and not interested in reading it... However, this is my fault, obviously...

 

Read the books you have. Why did you buy them as you said if you haven't yet read them? Then:

Make an expanded reading list! Otherwise, you'll end up like mainstream people who are such because they don't read anything but journal articles from the last few months. I have met economics professors from U. of Chicago who haven't read Frank Knight...

 

Your posts are massively full of errors if you don't read.

Post all of my innocuous posts, the reducio leading to bloom's apparent position in support of Hitleresque policies as long as he is on the winning team, and you will see that I did not flame him, even when he said things like, "I know you'll morally condemn me, but I don't really care.  You're absolutely irrelevant to me, I need nothing from you."

I completely ignored this crap. I stayed civil, besides maybe posting some image entirely appropriate to a Jew himself advocating Nazism, which some thin-skinned folk who seem to ignore all context deemed racist.

apparently copying HTML source from the "real forum"'s editor doesn't work and we end up with these fucked up links oh well, who cares right, fucking quote has not been fixed in two months

I want my MVP tag back. Nobody has yet been able to make a case that this image was not appropriate in the context of a Jew advocating Hitleresque policies.

I think the recent news about Castro comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is ironic.

"The hatred felt by the state of Israel against the Palestinians is such that they would not hesitate to send the one and a half million men, women and children of that country to the crematoria where millions of Jews of all ages were exterminated by the Nazis," he said.

"It would seem that the Fuehrer's (Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's) swastika is today Israel's banner,"

I think his first statement is true. They would non hesitate if not for the internet age making it harder to hide their atrocities, and the international climate, especially their biggest supporter, the US, not condoning outright Nazism. Both countries prefer the sleek new model of soft fascism.

Suicide bombings in Israel have decreased over the past few years to almost nothing and Hamas has just recently publicly said it has stopped sponsoring the practice because it only serves to feed Israel's propaganda machine. Across the country almost every farmer is tied to miri land serfdom. The people of occupied territories are forced to pay Israeli taxes, but do not receive welfare benefits and are not considered citizens.

Is Israeli terror as swift and severe as the Nazi's was? No, but it nonetheless exists. Read here for the history of the process of developing Palestinian ghettos by Israel.  << http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-hassan100706.htm >>

Consistent with Israel’s “annexation plan” or “convergence plan” – as is called today – to isolate the Palestinian into Nazi’s-like ghettos, the rest of the occupied West Bank will be divided into three big ghettos. The three big ghettos then divided into nine smaller ghettos separated from each other by walls, and Jewish-only highways. In addition to total restrictions on freedom of movement, the ghettos are manned by countless military checkpoints and razor wires making life unbearable for the Palestinian population. The aim is to prevent any possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian state and subject the Palestinians to servitude, thus the final dispossession of the Palestinian people from their land.

Jews who lived in and experienced the Nazi’s ghettos have often made the comparison between Israel’s brutal treatments of the Palestinian people and the Nazis’ brutal treatments of Jews. In a letter to the Israeli press more than twenty years ago, Jewish holocaust survivor Shlomo Shmelzman wrote: “In my childhood I have suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I passed from the Warsaw Ghetto, through labour camps, to Buchenwald. I hear too many familiar sounds today, sounds which are being amplified by the war. I hear about ‘closed areas’ and I remember ghettos and camps. I hear ‘two-legged beasts’ and I remember ‘Untermenschen’ [subhumans]. I hear about tightening the siege, clearing the area, pounding the city into submission, and I remember suffering, destruction, death, blood and murder…Too many things in Israel remind me of too many things from my childhood”. (Ha’aretz, 11 August 1982). Israel’s terror and crimes have since increased by many folds.

Unlike the German ghettos, which were provisional, Israel regards the Palestinian ghettos as permanent measure to control Palestinian lives. Further, Israel uses the ghettos as investment for the benefit of the Israeli economy. Israel is moving highly polluting industry and sweatshops to industrial zones around the ghettos where Palestinians will be used (forced) as slaves to provide cheap and abundant labour. In addition, Palestinian ghettos are open-air prisons completely controlled by Israel.

For anyone to assume that the use of that image was a racially motivated attack on Jews is the height of ignorance, an insult to Holocaust survivors as well as the Palestinian victims of today.

The answer is still no.

Yeah, stick to Rettopper. Debating me is apparently out of your league.

I will explain and defend my administrative decisions to a certain extent, but I will not "debate" them with you. I will, however, debate scholarly issues. And I will point out that you have still yet to answer my refutation of argumentation ethics from a long time ago, even though I wrote the refutation in response to your challenge to critique it.

Why does anyone care that it is offensive? 

I understand the staff are probably trying to maintain a "presentable" image of the forums, living up to the conservative culture that LVMI seems to embrace, but these forums contain quite a  few young and more open minded people. Shouldn't the forums rules reflect that?

I want to see more about why the image was removed, and I want to see the rules listed.

Also, not all rules are enforced, so why was this one? Is it because one of the administrative staff was particularly offended by the image? Does it matter whether a minority or a majority were offended? 

What if it had been a swastika morphing with a cross in the same context? 

Furthermore, haven't there been a lot of comparisons with Israeli foreign policy and the Nazi's? Isn't the image simply a  reflection of that? 

The forum has aspirations to be a forum for more enlightened discussion than for flame-wars

The forums reflect the presence of the more irreverant elements by giving them guidance on what is acceptable and attempting to moderate them.

If you see rules not being enforced and this bothers you make a report. The image itself is deifnitely more provocative and offensive than the vast majority of
images posted here. I don't know what sense of the word 'matters' you are using, but ultimately as the mods make these decisions it will be them making
the decisions and not others.

I say no; I would however consider a swastika morphing into a hammer and sickle as being acceptable.

Yes, there should probably be less of that? not a good reflection.

I will explain and defend my administrative decisions to a certain extent, but I will not "debate" them with you. I will, however, debate scholarly issues

So far, you have done neither. I could give you numerous examples of actual offensive imagery or racist talk, i.e. the types of things I DID NOT post in this thread, but then you would probably, once again, fail to recognize the context of the discussion and punish me further. It seems like you are ignorant of the atrocities by the Israeli government and therefore have no problem feeling offended if anyone questions Israel's "right" to herd Palestinians into ghettos.

It's apparent that you are incapable of admitting to your mistakes. Balance an image that some people may find offensive, who probably also ignore the Jew praising Hitler's "necessary technical application of law", which was up for maybe an hour, against all of my other contributions to the forums. Bloom seems so embarrased that I brought his position to its logical conclusion that he totally stopped responding to me in that thread. Still, what is horrifying to you is my image and not what he advocates.

And I will point out that you have still yet to answer my refutation of argumentation ethics from a long time ago, even though I wrote the refutation in response to your challenge to critique it.

Refutation? I would really like to see this and am sad that I must have missed it. I forget what thread it was but I remember you vacuously asserting that flaws existed with Hoppe's theory then telling me several times that you didn't have time to justify your statements. I remember telling you that if your theory is so solid that you ought to post a Mises Daily on it, seeing as you have the keys to the kingdom and all.

You remember incorrectly. What I didn't have time for was to look into Argumentation Ethics to write the refutation in the first place without some thing provided for me to respond to.

Remember this?

Again, if you want something from me, give me something concrete to respond to that you think undermines my position, even if it's only a single paragraph, and I'll respond.

But I don't write monographs on cue.

After insisting on a response without providing me something to respond to you finally quoted Hoppe. I responded with a fully Misesian point that Hoppe's entire enterprise of trying to "refute" a value judgment is non-sensical to begin with. Instead of grappling with my point, you just wrote "hurt-piece" and told me to go write a Mises Daily, to which I replied:

Are you saying my argument is somehow "drunken" or "ugly"? If so, how so?

ERO,

You repeatedly ask me to respond to Hoppe's ArgEthics. You finally give me something to chew on, so I do so with a fully Misesian analysis of Hoppe's vain attempt to refute a value judgment, and all you have in response is childish teh-internetz-speak? And you have the nerve to say you're embarrassed by me?

and

First you insist that I formulate a position of argumentation ethics. Then very soon after I comply with your insistence, you are already asking me to write a Mises Daily on it? Seems kind of demanding...

What a joke. You can find Hoppe's own writings and all of the responses to criticisms on his website. I'm not going to recount them for you and anyhow I've written plenty on them. Where is the "refutation"? I sure as hell don't see it.

In lieu of a substantive arguement you've, once again, tried to distract things by focusing on my "incivility". I don't know where you get the idea that "hurt piece" means drunken or ugly, maybe some internet slang directory. Well, I'll assure you that that is not how I meant it. I meant, "Wow! These forums are a hurt piece. The quote button still doesn't work and for some reason everything I write is in italics. Wow! These people are concentrating on 'personal, subjective valuations' and don't seem to realize that law can be analyzed praxeologically."

I am typing this line since I accidentally posted this in the real forums and am getting a duplicate post warning. edit: I just now clicked your last link. If you think that is a refutation, you are sorely mistaken. You haven't even read Kinsella on estoppel still I take it. If you really think:

"AE comes in to convince non-sadists and non-ascetics what social arrangement will best suit their ends: namely the contractual society. That post of mine you quoted wasn't in response to your post which you linked to. It was in response to the "dodge" image you posted."

You are seriously confused.

ERO: "Where is the "refutation"? I sure as hell don't see it."

Here. (I tried to link to this particular post in in my last post, but missed a ">" in my "a" tag. It's there now.)

Regarding your edit: you fail to provide an argument. Notice how when I debate Rettoper, I do not vaguely gesture at literature. When I utilize Austrian authors, I explain in my own words how his positions are disproved by the arguments of those Austrian authors, or at least directly quote the relevant passages. You would be much more convincing in general (to your readers, if not your opponents) if you did the same.

I'll make a debate thread later today. I don't want to hear another word about this except that you accept or decline. Do you not understand the rule of staying on topic? While I work this up, you can get back on the topic of Israel.

I accept. Same rules as the Retopper debate.

While I work this up, you can get back on the topic of Israel.

I am not discussing the topic of Israel in the context of the OP of this thread (again I will not engage in "debates" over administrative decisions).

You claimed to be able to justify the decision, but in light of the issue of context, you are unable to do so. GGUL

E. R. Olovetto:

I don't want to hear another word about this except that you accept or decline.

Is this how you speak to people offline?

I'm asking because you seem to think that being insulting, cruel, making personal attacks, and demanding is going to get you any closer to your goals. And yet, it is obvious to almost anyone that you have zero power in the very relationships you behave with such belligerence.

You were much cooler headed and much more civil last year. But now, instead of behaving like a leader, which would reflect your tenure and understanding, you act like a big spoiled kid here in the community. While that is certainly your prerogative, I can't help but ask what end it is you think you are going to achieve by being so wound up and anti-social to the very people whose cooperation you require in order to move forward your agenda (any agenda).

Do you really think Lilburne doesn't have other things he would rather work on, including spending time offline with his family, than to humor you and put up with your insults and attacks? Do you really think that the Mises Institute, and the Mises Community in particular owes you something? Do you have any idea how many volunteer man hours people have dedicated to provide you with the opportunity to be so disrespectful? Do you really think that making people feel bad is the best contribution you have to offer, or that treating people with such disdain is somehow righteous and reflects your higher morality and intelligence?

Please, check yourself. Your behavior has become beyond embarrassing.

Why did you quit as forum admin?

E. R. Olovetto:

Why did you quit as forum admin?

There were several reasons, many of them personal, but I will say that the way some *cough* libertarians *cough* treated me, other members of the staff and LvMI explicitly and implicitly really bothered me quite a bit.