[Jiro]

You're being sarcastic, but I can think of a number of cases where someone could have expressed that opinion seriously and been pretty much correct, including Jews under the Nazis, and the Ukrainians now.

You can't reduce politics to a game of pattern-matching where every time someone says something which pattern-matches to "you called someone bad people!" you should react just like the last time someone said it. Sometimes people are bad, sometimes they're not, and there's no shortcut to figuring it out other than by taking the time and effort to actually figure it out, (Which isn't really a shortcut at all.)

[teddyh]

You seem to be arguing in favor of the ability to declare one side entirely bad, while I (using sarcasm) argued against it. I am still not entirely convinced that the ability to completely denounce one side as entirely evil is somehow an important freedom which must be preserved, even if it is sometimes true.

Regarding your examples, I couldn’t possibly comment, for obvious reasons.

[cortesoft]

Of course, no one is arguing that all sides are equally bad or that when one side says that that the other side is evil they are always wrong… the problem is that it is hard to know if you are being tricked or told the truth.

[whatshisface]

>I can think of a number of cases where someone could have expressed that opinion seriously and been pretty much correct, including Jews under the Nazis, and the Ukrainians now.

The problem is that if you place yourself in a random time and party, you are more likely to be a Nazi than a Jew, because a crucial element of evil is the power to do it, which is associated with having greater numbers, and that rigs the odds so that your random insertion will be among them rather than their heroic enemies.

[michaelmrose]

In early 30s the Nazis only got 33-37% of the vote not too much unlike the portion of the electorate who support ending democracy in favor of our own would be dictator.

"Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler was not appointed chancellor as the result of an electoral victory with a popular mandate, but instead as the result of a constitutionally questionable deal among a small group of conservative German politicians who had given up on parliamentary rule. They hoped to use Hitler's popularity with the masses to buttress a return to conservative authoritarian rule..."

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nazi-r...

If you place yourself at a random time of trouble you will 2 to 1 find yourself behind the eyes of someone indifferent or scared neither victim nor victimizer.