DeadWalrus wrote:Basically, I was and still am very frustrated that so many people are happy to ignore incredible evil if doing something about it seems too hard. I also started getting this feeling that there is literally no foreign policy the US could adopt to counter dictatorships that would be considered acceptable or just. I'm not saying this is the case, just the feeling that I was getting and that lead to more reactionary opinions.
I think you may have misinterpreted as indifference to suffering, a criticism of the sincerity of the Neocons, they want America to be a Superman with Gaydar for Petroleum Reserves. If people on the left questioned the sincerity of the right's sudden existence of pity for oppressed people in such a way that it appeared to be indifferent to that suffering I think that might be more indicative of the breakdown in discourse than anything else.
Left: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Tibet, etc....
Right: Who gives a shit you faggot hippie?
Right: Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, etc....
Left: Oh, Suddenly you give a shit?
I understand this and agree with it but I will also say that this attitude really only seems to come out when addressing Islamic violence. No one gives a shit why anti-abortion terrorists feel compelled to gun down doctors, you know what I mean?
I do.... solely because my interest is in stopping those people, just like I would hope to know Islam to stop Islamic extremists.
I've heard people say pretty much exactly this, btw. "Those people need strong leaders, it's their culture, they don't want freedom, its not really oppression," etc etc
I fucking hate that nonsense.... for example....
Freedom is good and tyranny is bad? Really? Do we really have that absolute freedom? Every nation will have its internal injustices from the POV of some outside observer, and I am not sure it's EVER another nation's place to step in when those injustices remain internal. Imagine if some superpower tried Obama and had him hanged because abortion is legal in this country... it seems insane but in my opinion it's just as arbitrary a reason as anything Hussein did. We carry out corporal punishment, and so did Hussein - he calls the shots, and here sometimes one man does or sometimes many men do. There's no line to be drawn. These human rights and ethical calls are a swamp of arbitrarity and the only way I can imagine to de-mire is to let each nation do what it wants... internally. The BEST situation is one where everyone who wishes to leave are free to, but very few places practice this, e.g. in the case of a criminal. Exile should ALWAYS be a choice for a criminal or some other unwanted person/group.
but great job making DW's point.
Also, while this is generally true of the world's population as a whole, certain parts of the world have had their life expectancy radically decreased, especially in the last several decades. While perhaps most of the deaths in impoverished nations are not from axe blows or whatever, I think that death from lack of health infrastructure, treatable diseases, and the destruction of subsistence economy unambiguously represents "violence," especially when the structural conditions that lead to this degradation of living conditions is often the direct culmination of a 100+ years of state and corporate imperialism. I really can't convince myself that a world with these exaggerated forms of structural inequality is "less violent" than some arbitrary account of what the human past was like.
Yes, but the general trend, even for the worse off countries over a long term has been positive, you have a crisis, like HIV or the "Great Recession" and a few countries dip in life expectancy, or quality of life, or GDP or whatever, but these dips are anomalous in a generally well defined trend. I'll play the devils advocate here and argue against a side I am usually on, but you are not giving enough credit to modernity for it's successes, which corresponded to "100+ years of state and corporate imperialism".
I mean, you can say the health care infrastructure is fucked up, and I'd agree, but you can't say the world is worse off with the potential for mass distribution and delivery of anti-malarial, penicillin, clean syringes, etc...etc... Also I think you do a discredit to Pinker's theory since he specifically is speaking about death by violence and conflict. But in that spirit do you really think the poor had demonstrably more of a shot yesterday then today for advancement, stability, health, etc...
that's an angle, appreciated
