One of the participants in David Goldstein’s podcast and Nazi jokefest last week says I seriously mischaracterized part of the discussion at last week’s Drinking Liberally. I said the panelists were asked if they agreed with Goldstein’s theory that the Building Industry of Washington’s criticism of mainstream environmentalists’ reaction to the Street of Dreams arson was projection “because the builders had done the arson themselves.”

I listened to the podcast again this morning and Rosenberg has a point. After Goldstein spells out his theory - which he told me later was meant as a parody - that the BIAW set the fires in Snohomish County, he says:

I want to go around the table; yes or no on this one. The BIAW accusing environmentalists of Nazism; projection?

The answers were “yes,” “nein,” “yeah, probably,” “yeah, a little,” and from Goldstein, “It’s projection. They are a bunch of Nazis.”

I stand corrected. The panelists were not asked if they thought the BIAW were arsonists. They were asked if they thought the BIAW were Nazis.

Rosenberg repeats some of what Goldstein said here last week about the inherent parody and satire I missed. But he also thinks there’s a serious point to be made. He writes at EFFin’ Unsound:

This was obviously meant to be funny, but I do think there’s a certain amount of truth to looking at the question in that light. If you’re going to have some basis for determining who the real “Nazis” are in a society, the best way is to see which people are more able to tolerate injustices against other subsets of the population. I have trouble believing that the BIAW would care in the slightest if they were profiting from something that was wholly unjust. Maybe they have examples from their past that would prove me wrong, but from what I’ve seen, I doubt it. It may or may not be projection (which was why I gave kind of a “sort of” answer to Goldy’s question), but the BIAW certainly has an odd persecution complex that quite transparently leads to inclinations to persecute others.