[californiadreem]

But is this actually a personal attack or pointing out a fact and providing an opportunity for introspection?

He declared, unsourced and uncited, that Winston Churchill thought that people with "brown skin" were "subhuman savages." He then declared that because Churchill had these supposed opinions, he was not worthy of any human decency, that he was in effect a subhuman.

Furthermore, he declared that anyone who had any issue with that assessment had a share by contagion of Churchill's unpersoning. That's not civilized or cultured. There is a word for that.

A core trait of civilization is that members are entitled to the rights of citizens, which almost categorically include equal protection under the law and in the West a recognition of a shared humanity even among those that aren't citizens.

More explicitly, this is a trait of Christian civilizations. Churchill, who did believe in a developmental hierarchy, also believed that Anglo-Saxons were superior to other peoples because they had this categorical understanding of human value.

If someone arbitrarily rejects this core aspect of civilization (i.e. lacking in it), attempts to dehumanize those who do have it in a combative and dismissive manner is by definition a savage.

If pointing out that words mean things results in warnings and threats of bans, then I don't want to be a part of your circus anyway. I hope your city and industry meet the fate it deserves.

[dang]

"You seem to lack the restraint of a normal civilized person" is unquestionably a personal attack and the sort of thing we ban accounts for, so please don't do that again.

I gather from your reply that you didn't intend it that way! and that's fine - except that what matters is how the comment lands with a reasonable reader. Readers don't have access to your intent - it's in your head, not ours - so the burden is on you (i.e. all of us) to disambiguate your intent explicitly.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(Btw, please don't do religious, ideological, and/or nationalistic flamewar on HN. Your comment here has elements of all three. We want curious conversation here, and that sort of flamewar is the antithesis of it, so we have to be proactive about trying to avoid it.)