You admit that they were running interference for a nazi, but also want to give them the benefit of the doubt? Historians have a word for people who didn’t agree fully with, but still defended nazis. Want to know what they were called?
Nazis.
If you’re aligning yourself with them, running interference for them, I’m going to treat you as if it is intentional because the effect is the exact same. If it was an accident, there were plenty of opportunities to change opinions and apologize. That hasn’t happened, so all evidence we have points to the person defending Nazis being disingenuous here.
You have to make assumptions on people’s motivations either way. I’m just more willing to base my assumptions on how genuine someone is being whether or not they are running interference for Nazis.
You misunderstand my point. Let me explain again.
I don’t care if they’re being genuine or not and don’t feel a need to prove it one way or the other. I will treat anyone who is defending Nazis as if they are genuinely Nazis themselves because at the end of the day, that’s what they’re pushing for, intentionally or not.
The damage this can cause does not change if it was intentional or not, so our reaction to it should not change either.
Their initial comment was complete nonsense, and sarcastic derision is one of the few things that actually upsets people like that who ignore the content of the conversation while also pretending to have the moral high ground. Their point is often to get people arguing amongst themselves instead of realizing they just shifted the conversation from “Here is a Nazi in Indiana” to “You can’t prove that Chinese speakers aren’t Nazis.” (Like we’re doing now.)
What would you have called them out for that fits better than moving goalposts or a strawman argument?