[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

I missed that. Please reread the OP.

Exhibit One in the case to be made that you're ducking the point: You've resorted to pointing out irrelevant exceptions instead of answering the argument in depth.

But as we're about to see, even that strategy doesn't protect you from being incorrect.

My apologies for causing you to reread the original post. My assumption was that you understood the acronym also means original poster. But since I also mentioned (in the very comment you quoted) that the OP felt a particular way, and posts, unlike posters, are unable to feel anything, I trusted you were sufficiently detail-oriented to understand the distinction.

However, I did mistake a post by a later poster as having been written by the original poster, and that was indeed an oversight on my part. (Just think: If I hadn't noticed it first, you could still bring that up in yet another red herring!)

Your post gets a bit better as it goes, but this ruined it for me.

Again, you're using specious correctness to avoid focusing on the issue.

Terribly sorry to have "ruined" my post for you by using a distasteful word. I'd try to serve your diction demands more sensitively in the future if my word choice had not in fact served you already.

Your strategy of ignoring the substance of my argument to focus on a perceived slight resembles that of your attempt to ignore the inherent literary value of Chabon's novel based on its subject and the author's political views, which you claim is a matter of "emphasis" even as you repeatedly return to the subject and tenet rather than the degree to which political views are stressed.

This brings us to Exhibit Two in your attempt to find irrelevant reasons to object to a post with which you have difficulty arguing:

Your quote, "you enter the thread as a troll," leaves out the next word who, which modifies the word troll by describing the very actions which define the trolling behavior.

Re your mention of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, et. al., these are mostly authors who are, rightly or wrongly, known for personal bigotry. That indeed cannot make their works, which AFAIK do not focus on particular disliked minority groups, bad.

You really haven't the read the modernists, et al., have you? And given your fascination with irrelevant detail, you might want to note the absence of a period after et, since the Latin for and is not abbreviated in that phrase.

Pound's Pisan Cantos not only focus on bigotry in certain passages but contain classic anti-Semitic portrayals -- and insinuations that Jews were responsible for destroying Western culture -- yet they also contain deathless poetry. T.S. Eliot was specifically and intrinsically anti-Semitic in at least six of his most important poems ("Gerontin," " "Sweeney among the Nightingales," "Burbank," The Waste Land and Four Quartets), and even those who began as his apologists have come to understand there can be no apology. This despite Pound's friendship with the Jewish-American poet Louis Zukofsky and Eliot's with Groucho.

The reason that few dispute The Waste Land's greatness is not because it is insufficiently anti-Semitic to be objectionable. Many critics, academics, fellow poets and readers respect the work despite its disgusting anti-Semitism because it is a great work of literature. It is respected for many of the same reasons as Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice: We forgive the "pound of flesh" metaphor, anti-Semitic portrayal of Shylock and the speech which begins, "the quality of mercy is not strained."

Besides which, Shake lived in a time in which anti-Semitism was more or less the house rule, and that also speaks to my point: If works of literature may be inherently bad because of their political/moral viewpoint, then what do we do with the many works by authors who wrote before anti-Semitism or a given political view was deemed immoral?

As for Wyndham Lewis, whom Kenneth Rexroth once called "the last uncivilized man since Wotan": He once wrote a biography of Hitler which praised the dictator as a man of peace!

Michael Chabon may be perfectly charming. . . . That doesn't make this particular book any good.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is, in my reading, a morality tale about villainous religious Jews, evangelical Christians, and what they are plotting against Muslims. Others may focus more on it being a fantasy detective mystery. Maybe I'm right, maybe they're right, maybe we are both right. All are descriptions of a novel, not of an author.

In point of fact, you're not describing the novel at all. You're only describing its plot.

And again, to condemn the novel as bad because of its plot is to dismiss the writing and execution in favor of the merits of your sentence-long synopsis. "Les Miserables is bad because it's about someone stealing a loaf of bread and stealing is wrong."

EDIT: Am I making the mistake of thinking that just because the villain is a certain religion, that makes the book against that religion? Does this Eisenberg think that if a mystery novel has a physician-murderer, the book is against doctors? No. But if the government of the United States was portrayed in the novel as having been taken over by physicians, maybe the novel would be anti-doctor. That's closer to the situation here.

Among the five mistakes you've just made, I'll respond to these:

First, you're ignoring the tone of the book, which is satirical. "Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' is a bad essay because it advocates eating the children!"

Second, your inference seems to be that Jews and fundamentalists are above satire but that Muslims are not.

Third, having "the government of the United States taken over by physicians" cannot not be construed as inherently "anti-physician." Unless the intent were to characterize the state of being a physician as inherently immoral, the argument would have to be that the industry, not the individual, had been corrupted.

The problem in terminology stems from certain popular conservatives' (certain politicians and talk radio hosts) appropriation of Civil Rights Movement terminology, which tends to abandon correctness and context for empty dramatic effect. Anti-black and anti-Semitic are technically correct uses of the term when the object's focus is on the evils/inferiority of a race and not the crimes of a state.

Calling Netanyahu a fascist for his ramping of non-militant Muslim casualties, and for his damage to the rights of the citizens of Israel and the peace process itself, is not an act of anti-Semitism unless the implication is that Netanyahu is a terrible leader because he happens to be Semitic.

(And as a Jew myself, I actively disagree with the idea that Judaism can be defined as a race, which seems inhumane as well as incorrect: To define us racially is to invite the idea we can be exterminated for good. To define culture as race without understanding race to be an artificial cultural construct seems a backdoor excuse for eugenics whether the argument is pro or anti.)