So, there are two possibilities. One is that casebash has simply written a tedious and overextended article out of mere incompetence. That’s certainly possible. Another is that the article is tedious and overextended because it is in fact trying to do something else besides arguing for the very obvious thesis contained in its title.
Personally, I suspect casebash might be Russian, and that’s why it is written this way.
What other thing might it be doing? Well, the conflict it describes seems like it pattern-matches tolerably well to various hot-button issues of exactly the sort that people sometimes try to approach obliquely in the hope of not pushing people’s buttons too hard. Hence the conjecture, made by more than one reader, that there was some somewhat-hidden purpose.
Given that it’s a parable describing a common fault mode of human political interactions, it could easily be pattern-matched onto a dozen different situations. Indeed, pretty much any situation in which there are historical grievances; I doubt there’s a European country around to which one side or the other could not apply.
More to the point, it can be pattern-matched to claims about real-world political situations that may not necessarily describe the actual real-world political situation very well, where the parable is being used to sneak those claims through as “hypotheticals” so that people don’t dispute them.
Personally, I suspect casebash might be Russian, and that’s why it is written this way.
Given that it’s a parable describing a common fault mode of human political interactions, it could easily be pattern-matched onto a dozen different situations. Indeed, pretty much any situation in which there are historical grievances; I doubt there’s a European country around to which one side or the other could not apply.
More to the point, it can be pattern-matched to claims about real-world political situations that may not necessarily describe the actual real-world political situation very well, where the parable is being used to sneak those claims through as “hypotheticals” so that people don’t dispute them.