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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Arwon |
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Arwon Bazu                 Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| And that's why the religious always have the home-ground advantage in these arguments. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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Too good not to post:
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| There's no right answer to this question, but there sure are some fucking WRONG answers... | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I just find it really weird that people can be so self-assured and ethnocentric as to believe they have it right out of all the cultures over all the times there have been, that they were born into the one true faith, and not, say, a billion Hindus or the Jews who were around before them. The "all worshipping the same thing" cop-out doesn't cut it. It's just an utterly confusing, alien perspective. (edited by Arwon on 10-29-06 04:40 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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I recognise the implicit bias and subjectivity in my views. but it's basically far easier to universalise an essentially nihilistic and negative and nonrational atheism than it is any particular religious views. Bear in mind I'm just saying the sheer number of mutually exclusive religions and the high degree of cultural relativism in my outlook is one of the main reasons I can't fathom religious faith and one of the reasons I accuse religions of inherent arrogance and ethnocentrism. Doesn't mean everyone thinks that way--most people don't necessarily look at any particular issue and think "now who would see this really differently?" whereas I usually do. Hence my obsession with Hinduism and the billion atheistic Chinese in this thread. Often in religious arguments it's easy to forget things other than Catholicism and Protestantism exist.
Well, yes, but I am a university debater so it kind of comes with the territory. Sometimes you have to advocate torture. You should have heard me argue for military intervention in North Korea a few weeks ago, or arguing that the Catholic Church shouldn't promote condoms in Africa the week after that. This is reflected in my politics. Consistancy and rationality is overrated, objectivity doesn't exist, sometimes you have to get subjective to really do something justice. Depending on the issue, who I'm talking to (are they to my left or right?) my mood, and how many drinks I've had, I'll cop to anything from a sort of mushy centre-left liberalism to some fairly full-on radical leftism to a sort of perverse frustrated conservative elitism. One of my favourite games lately is convincing people of the utility and justification in resorting to political violence if you can't make your leaders accountable through the mechanisms of the actual political system. (edited by Arwon on 10-29-06 07:30 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Random thing in the news today, apparently China hasn't shipped any oil to North Korea for about a month. Ho-hum.
Now let's play with this exporting democracy thing.
OK, firstly, Islam isn't a political system. Turkey is very differnet from Indonesia is very different from Yemen is very different from Nigeria is very different from Uzbekistan is very different from Syria is very different from Chechnya is very different from Lakemba. Second, Communism. Aside from the essentially imperialist imposition of the Stalinist model on Eastern Europe and, to an extent, North Korea, I can't think of a successful communist revolution that wasn't actually borne from a homegrown insurgency. And those were in both cases kind of a post-war tabula rasa (there's something in the theory that in order to change a country you have to completely destroy it in a long and exhausting war first) and at any rate, hardly the sort of model you want if you're going for the moral high ground. On the other hand, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, China, Laos and Cambodia were all independent revolutions--supported materially from abroad, yes, but still moving on their own internal dynamics and not possible without them. Hungary in 1919 was another short-lived one. Hell, even a couple of countries that WERE under the Stalinist boot attempted socialist or social-democratic inspired counter-revolutions against their alien and imposed system (see also: 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring, Socialism with a human face, etc). The notion of Communism as a successfully exportable system of government died with Guevara in Bolivia, surely. When were European monarchies exported? I'm really unclear what you mean by that. World War two analogies. OK, Japan. There was a pre-existing indigenous democracy (the Taisho period) to fall back on, a recurring tradition of embracing Western innovations in order to improve their own standing, there was the shame of defeat and the exhaustion of several years of aggressive warfare, and of course there was Hirohito's absolute authority being extremely useful. Politically, every single thing was in favour of the US in Japan. There was the ability to completely close the country and have MacArthur assume dictatorial control for about 4 years (a fairly draconian occupation, even if it was cooperated with fully--and you couldn't achieve that level of control these days either politically or practically). It's certainly the closest thing we have to a success we have ever witnessed in nation-building, but all the preconditions had to be exactly right in a way that occurs extremely extremely rarely. South Korea. Democracy wasn't exported there, period. It was a colony of Japan 1910-1945, its post-war republic quickly slipped into dictatorship, was a pro-US dictatorship until 1988 aside from a couple of brief periods of attempted revolution, then it overthrew that regime and became democratic as the Sixth Republic entirely under its own internal steam. ---- Oh and other options worth exploring? How about listening to what the South Koreans actually want instead of demanding they be used as pawns to facilitate geopolitical goals? Their view has broad bipartisan support even from South Korean conservatives and varies only in terms of partisan bickering and slight variances on how much pressure and leeway to apply. In the vast majority of sane South Korean eyes (and all major parties), the only concievable path to unification is helping close the income gap by encouraging trade and openness, while trying to avoid driving the North into doing something stupid--if I can quote the Economist here:
It's going to be interesting wathcing already fraught Seoul-Washington relations from here on in given the American assumption that they know what's best for everyone and lack of willingness to listen to their nominal allies. It really is. (edited by Arwon on 10-30-06 11:40 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I'm worried the nutzoid hate-monger base is going to be turning out to vote against the fags because of that NJ Supreme Court ruling. The Republicans must be thanking god there's so much stupidity and hatred to be tapped. | |||
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| The best analogies involve implicit anti-semitism.
Seriously. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| This speaks of far broader problems than just depleted fish stocks. If we can destroy one entire ecosystem, what's to say we won't destroy all the others? (edited by Arwon on 11-03-06 08:26 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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You're still making the fundamental mistake of thinking you can actively bring other systems into a country. Your point about European democracy as a successful model is noted, but you keep making the unjustified leap from that to assuming you can proactively create these things. I cite two examples from the last post:
Again, here's the confusion between a passive "successful model" and "actuvely creating it". It is utterly perverse of you to claim that, despite US comfort with, and support for, dictatorships in South Korea, somehow the eventual seizure of state that resulted in democracy was because of the US. That is infantile and wrong-headed in the extreme. If you're going to take credit for "inspiring" change every time a fucking political upheaval occurs, then sure, you can squint your eyes and say LOOK WE'RE SPREADING DEMOCRACY but no, that's not how it works. You don't even seem to recognise that what you're talking about is a massive program of geopolitical reordering. You don't see the ideology in your views, you think they're somehow neutral or natural or obvious to everyone. As Ziff/PSA points out, talking about hypothetical reorderings in the future is the very definition of geopolitical goals, and moreover, you continue to display a massive disregard for what people in these countries actually think and what they want because, hey, everyone must think democracy is like, the most important thing, ever. Democratising the world is a naive fantasy that exists only in the ivory towers of thinktanks run by people like Donald Rumsfeld. It is not good foreign policy. It's arrogant and counterproductive. My problem with the democratic peace theory is it's massively spurious and it tends to blind its followers to the real issues and the real things that need improvement. I mean, it's a harmless enough little theory on its own (except when it's inspiring people to do stupid things like invade Iraq), but the problem is, when you've got people running around thinking "lack of democracy" is the cause of so many problems, they forget about all the bigger problems in the world than a lack of formal political freedom. As if North Korea's the place with all the big problems. I mean, do you think the slum-dwellers of Lagos, Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro, Addis Ababa and Lima care much that their countries are democratic as opposed to dictatorships right now? Why not take this obvious zeal for improving the world and focus on real issues you can do something about. Things like debt relief, US farm subsidies, fighting AIDS, climate change, and so forth? Things that fuck millions of people over every day and, unlike Stalinist nuclear-armed dictatorships on isolated peninsulas, we can actually do something about. If you want to improve the world, drop the neoconservative fantasy that somehow "holding elections" improves the situation for people, and actually look at practical issues. As for Che, isn't the answer that he was both? (edited by Arwon on 11-06-06 03:43 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Men should have a say in situations where they're actually, you know, in a bonded relationship with the woman in question, sure. Duh. The thing is, though, this rhetoric isn't aimed at them and to claim this is disngenious. It's aimed instead at the numerous, mostly male, political types and opinion-maker whose anti-abortion rhetoric is almost inescapably also anti women. Sure they can have their opinions, but equally so, it's valid for women to utterly dismiss them as being of very limited utility. In the end, it's a woman's body and a woman's life, it has to be her call in the end. Not the call of a bunch of legislators trying to score points with voters.
The problem is that there IS a massive gender dimension to this. Pretending that the issue isn't also about femininity and sexuality is absurd. Especially when LOT of anti-abortion rhetoric from a lot of people flows well beyond "the sanctity of life" stuff into full-on sex-hating mysogeny. There's an undeniable element of "women who have abortions are escaping their punishment for having sex" sentiment, and a fear of sexually assertive, self-confident women, lurking beneath a lot of the anti-abortion campaign. You only have to troll around the comments section of the feminist blogsphere to see how often words like "slut" and "whore" are thrown around in this debate. It's a feminist issue because it's inescapably an issue of gender and sexual politics. (edited by Arwon on 11-06-06 11:26 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Thing is SS, they're kind of inseparable as you yourself have illustrated. You're the one who bought up the feminist rhetoric and I was merely pointing out that they're not primarily thinking of "loving couples calmly discussing their situation" when they say the things you quoted, when they say that men's views don't have the same validity as womens' on this issue. That sort of misrepresentation is a clever political tactic, and it gets used quite often. I'd be careful of it.
Moreover, it's hardly true that the idea that "if you don't experience or understand something, your opinions are less valid" is specific to abortions. Or at least, it shouldn't be. Sometimes, if you're offering an opinion not based in knowledge or experience, your views SHOULD be discounted. Observe: -Silver spoon politicians and dead-eyed suburbanites shouldn't lecture the poor about the need to work hard, and how poverty is the product of laziness. -People who've never seen the results of war or worried about loved ones being sent overseas should be far more circumspect and less gung-ho about demanding that wars be fought for peace and liberation. -People who've never met a muslim shouldn't go around saying Islam is bad and wrong. -People who've never experienced the wrong end of racial inequality and thus don't see the invisible structures of privelige surrounding them, should be careful about claiming we have achieved racial equality in society just because overtly discriminatory laws have been dismantled. Etcetera. In fact, I'd suggest that, as a general rule, the so-called "moral majority" in their safe little gated communities in their over-policed little suburbs should perhaps, once in a while, shut the fuck up and stop being judgemental prats about things they've never experienced, seen or suffered. But that's just my own rant because I'm sick of the "chattering classes" or "liberal intelligensia" or "chardonnay socialists" or whatever, being told they're out of touch, when the dead-eyed reactionary suburbanites that outnumber and outvote them/us aren't accused of said same despite being even more out of touch and prone to loud opinionating. So anyways. Sure, you're entitled to your opinions, but there's a severe limit on how valid they could possibly be. As a general rule, if you know less about a subject, have experienced less of it, your opinions tend to carry less weight in the minds of other people and you should carry yourself with a little humility and not be judgemental. That's neither right or wrong, just or unjust. It's just a basic fact of life. Mreh, fuck it. Maybe people should just get beaten up for stating their beliefs. (edited by Arwon on 11-07-06 01:29 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| War doesn't involve "the contentious issue of directly terminating a life"?
At any rate, this is not an absolute rule, it's a guiding principle which I am defending as entirely valid. Reducto ad absurdum and reducto ad relativismo arguments don't quite cut it. You argue that abortion is somehow an especially contentious or difficult issue. I do not agree. Firstly, for a lot of us, the issue simply isn't that important except inasmuch as people won't let it die. For mine, it's been mostly settled already, that the common sense position is "legal up to a certain point, then afterwards only for medical reasons". The view that ABORTION IS SPECIAL BECAUSE IT IS KILLING is, itself, a highly contestable position and therefore the view that it's somehow exempt from the general "butt-out" rule rendering the opinions of some people less important, doesn't automatically follow. I'm not saying people are not entitled to an opinion (well except when I'm advocating beating people up for stating their beliefs), I'm just saying just that people with a bigger stake in the issue dismissing it as not that important to consider, is a justifiable opinion too. And furthermore, I'm arguing that abortion is inescapably a feminist issue and a sexual politics issue, and framing it solely as a foetus-fetishist "life" issue is, in itself, a political and contentious move. Too many people seem to simply want to dismiss these other dimensions. I'd argue that the issue of abortion is actually far less pressing than many other more serious issues that get far less attention because a minority of people get all hysterical and fetishistic over foetuses and so politicians in America have to pander to them instead of, you know, worrying about shit that matters. I mean let's see.... millions dying of preventable diseases and labouring in relievable poverty, global warming looming ever larger and rendering millions homeless or worse, 40 million Americans without health insurance... or the moral politics of a bunch of people in robes or with bumper stickers on their SUVs? Hmmmm. Wake me when everyone in the US has health insurance and the budget is balanced. Now. Abortion isn't even the only political issue in which "is this killing?" is part of the philosophical contested space. I wonder how many people who think that abortion is directly ending a fully developed human life vote for pro-farm subsidy candidates or buy diamonds that support the suppression of human rights in African nations, for example. I wonder how many see the causality links that make them partly culpable for many many deaths, I wonder if they see the blood on their hands over that. Or is that just one opinion that makes this "killing someone" just like it's only an opinion that "Abortion is killing someone"? Besides which, with a few necessary caveats, moral relativism makes quite a lot of sense. It's a shame the word's been smeared by decades of hysterical right-wing kill-speak, like "liberal" and "welfare" have been. (edited by Arwon on 11-07-06 02:14 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| This of course raises the issue of why, exactly, do we have separate bathrooms for the different genders. Why not unisex bathrooms? We could just as easily have one big bathroom that was all cubicles. Toilets are pretty much the last gendered spaces left in society and I'm not sure there's a need for them, aside from socially instilled modesty.
I'm given to understand most toilets in Eastern Europe, for example, are unisex. *shrug* (edited by Arwon on 11-07-06 11:35 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Just like under Clinton? | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| It looks like the Dems may have the Senate after all the recounts and legal shiftights die down.
I think that "they're all conservative anyway" seems to be a bit of Fox News/Republican spin to hide the depth and breadth of the swing against them. Sure, I've no doubt that there's a few conservative-ish Dems (I mean, they are supposed to have a supporter base amongst the working class "little guys" in places like Tennessee) but they're still more liberal than most Republicans and even the most conservative Dem elected will still vote for a Democrat speaker, Democrat committee leaders, and help ensure Democratic a legislation programme goes through as far as the white house. Here's a decent analysis of that whole thing As far as I'm aware, not a single house seat or senate seat, or governors mansion, went from D to R last night. People can spin it all they want but that is a major major rejection of the Republicans, like hell it's not a shift or a mandate for change. The crazy death-cultists Freepers are going MENTAL at Free Republic at the moment. The short version is the terrorists have won and it's the end of civilisation and the election was like a sequel to September 11. Also: Donald Rumsfeld resigned (I bet he was terrified of a few Democrat-dominated inquiries against him). Things are looking up already. (edited by Arwon on 11-08-06 07:14 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I actually agree with Koryo, it's great that he's gone and a wonderful symbol of change... but from the point of view of the Republican bunker, it's a tactical blunder. Once the Democratic Inquisition really kicks off, they're gonna be out for blood and Bush has just let his best scapegoat go. Who's he going to sacrifice to appease them later on now that Rumsfed is gone?
My suspicion is that this was much more Rumsfeld's doing than pressure from above. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I bet you think that makes you better than other people. DON'T YOU? | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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Originally posted by Vyper BREAKING NEWS: SURGERY IS GROSS FILM AT ELEVEN!!! |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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Originally posted by kill(C:\WINDOWS\explorer) Haha, that guy's a bad soldier. |
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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Arwon |
What do you think?