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Post by miscmisc on Aug 25, 2017 8:41:03 GMT 1
I believe I'm not the only one who feels like screaming, "OK, so they found oil, nice!" every time someone says how awesome the Norwegian national wealth fund is.
I know, I know, there's more to it than that, there are indeed some things that we can learn from their risk management scheme and overall socially fair distribution of the funds, etc. but still, it feels like some lucky wealthy asshole bragging about his cock.
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Post by miscmisc on Aug 25, 2017 9:02:15 GMT 1
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Post by Fox on Aug 25, 2017 14:00:43 GMT 1
Frankly, you lost me when you equated a John C. Calhoun statue with a Pharaoh statue. I have no interest in such a purely abstract, academic (not in a positive way) framing of the issue that is more akin to a Neo-classical macroeconomic theory than to most other things that actually matter in this world. You seem to seriously believe that it's intellectually admirable to try to convince a black guy who's offended by a publicly-funded statue of the most important modern thinker for the racial theory in America that he should think of Pharaoh and his slaves, and cool it. You seem to believe that you can score a point against someone who's pressuring an institution to get rid of a Nethan Forest statue by bringing up the names of your favorite "slave owners" from your history database and challenging them to dare to do the same to those statues as well. Whatever you think you're doing, it's not you giving them a historical perspective at all, man; It's you missing their historical perspective. They would ridicule you rather than punching you. It's such a meaningless abstraction that erases the historical context and excludes the person and his agency in the moral universe where he finds himself. It's exactly the principled absurdity that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and others talked about. Your "principle" has no relevance to the people who find those statues grossly offensive for specific historical reasons, not least because your "principle" applied in such a way is plainly absurd. Actually I lied for the rhetorical effect, you didn't quite lose me, since yours is a textbook case of whataboutism, dancing to that Domino Theory tune while you're at it, the basic thought structure is the same as "Why do you single out XXX (e.g. South Africa, Israel, etc.) while others are doing this and that too", all of which I've been more familiar with than I would wish since my days in the US academia. The fact that you aren't doing that to defend the "white nationalists" doesn't make much difference. You basically argue that since many things can be used as "symbols" for horrible ideas, there is a "principle"-based equivalency there that all but invalidates the actions against any particular "symbol" because, because, well, when and where will it end etc. right? Well, you should be prepared for the inevitable question of "And when and where will your concern-trolling end?" back at you, but in any event, that's a classic (bad) argument that paralyzes many other legitimate political actions as well, as it cripples the agency of moral/political judgement at any given time and context, and if you value consistency and principle so much, it shouldn't and wouldn't just be limited to monuments. I don't think you're just a monument fetishist. Or maybe you kinda are. I'm sorry that I make my own moral judgment to think that given our historical context it would be an infinitely better world if no one took John C. Calhoun and his vile nonsense seriously and if no one officially celebrated him, that those other "slave owners" in history are utterly irrelevant in that political judgment, and that I don't fetishize "history" the way an archeologist does an ancient building. Your kind of a stance inevitably ends up reducing the actual experience of numerous actual people to an abstraction so as to satisfy your "principle". No matter what you say, what you engaged in there is the deletion of the historical context of each given political environment, which is ironic because you imply that you are doing the opposite, as if history was an objectively neutral timeline independent of our own lives and political contexts here and now, where the equivalency between John C. Calhoun and Pharaoh somehow exists or should exist in people's consciousness in 2017 America, where the Confederate flag is merely a "symbol" of mere "slave owners" (the flag means far, far, far more than "slave owners" to most Americans) that has the same weight as an ancient king for the historically discriminated in America who live today. That's a frighteningly ahistorical attitude if anything, an attitude of a pedant who lives in his own kingdom, or of a Hegelian superman. You seem to like the idea of escalation as a subject of concern, and there's indeed some validity in that concern, I agree, but I hope you also reflect on where your own "principled" stance, which frankly smacks of the South Park-ian moral universe of pop relativism, would take you at its logical end. We should probably stop it here and move on, perhaps with your final response at the end. As long as you cling to that whataboutism, which I'm sure you will given your "principled" stance, it will get nowhere. Thanks for the conversation, though. It was a clear case of two very different ideas in contrast, and readers can judge for themselves. Very informative, I think. Its been fun, brother. I hope you don't regard me as a pedantic whataboutistic fetishist for my Socratic musing.
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Post by miscmisc on Aug 26, 2017 6:33:27 GMT 1
Foxl, if you want to fisk a post that way in your reply here or in any other thread, I think the easiest way is copy-and-paste the entire post you're replying to, [q u o t e][/q u o t e] (without the backspaces) the parts you're going to address, and then write your own stuff in between those blocks.
Fisking is good, but let's do it properly, lol.
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Post by miscmisc on Aug 26, 2017 7:34:52 GMT 1
Reportedly, this pic convinced Trump that it's worth trying more in Afghanistan, after 16 years of failure, because, well, that know-nothing was shocked when he learned there were many, many women like these in Afghanistan not-so-long ago (seriously, how old is that fool?!), and went "Holy shit, we gotta get these girls back in town!" Never mind the US is one of the, or arguably simply THE biggest foreign contributor to making those miniskirts all but disappear from the Afghan streets. It's at least a contest between the US and the Pakistani deep state, but those two aren't completely different entities policy-wise. Fuck, more than a few truly influential American policy makers and analysts and scholars back in the '70s even argued that one of the "destabilizing" ills of the "invasion" of the socialist ideas in the region was exactly things like those goddamn miniskirts that would supposedly "offend the traditional religious sensibilities of the people, particularly the Pashtun majority." And... "allowing Afghanistan to be Afghanistan" That line from The Thick of It, "I feel like I'm in a therapy being run by my own rapist" pretty much sums this whole obscenity up, and even I, a non-Afghan, feel that way for real.
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Post by miscmisc on Aug 26, 2017 17:00:44 GMT 1
Needless to say, if the Syrian "opposition" had ever taken Damascus, those secular Syrian girls would've likely met a fate similar to that of those Kabul girls in the pic.
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Post by Fox on Aug 26, 2017 20:03:44 GMT 1
It must have been crazy to be someone who lived in 20th century Afghanistan with all the waves of social change. I wonder, if the Soviet and American occupations had never happened and Afghan society had an election between a Muslim Brotherhood style party and a Kemalist style party which they would choose.
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Post by miscmisc on Aug 26, 2017 23:43:41 GMT 1
It must have been crazy to be someone who lived in 20th century Afghanistan with all the waves of social change. I wonder, if the Soviet and American occupations had never happened and Afghan society had an election between a Muslim Brotherhood style party and a Kemalist style party which they would choose. It's pretty clear that both the Soviets and Americans thought that the former would win against everyone else. The Soviets thought they had to protect that secular elite minority precisely because of that, seriously enough to foolishly invade the country, while the Americans thought that the whole secular/socialist thing was more or less a Potemkin village. The Americans perfectly knew what it would do to the Afghan society to unleash Islamic fundamentalism on such a frightening scale, though. Zbigniew Brezinski said, before he departed this world for that particular corner of hell reserved for people like him, "Who cares about those brown people in such an insignificant region as the Middle East, we had to rescue Central/Eastern Europe from the Russkies, and Central/Eastern Europe is infinitely more important for the human kind." Of course it's not an accurate quote, but honestly that really was the gist of what he said. That twat wasn't just dangerous, but also asinine. One of those assholes who always think their life time is a singularly unique, special period in history. As for me, well, I don't pretend to know the answer for that question, but I do know how conservative the Pashtun culture is, particularly in the Eastern region.
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Post by Fox on Aug 27, 2017 18:12:37 GMT 1
It must have been crazy to be someone who lived in 20th century Afghanistan with all the waves of social change. I wonder, if the Soviet and American occupations had never happened and Afghan society had an election between a Muslim Brotherhood style party and a Kemalist style party which they would choose. As for me, well, I don't pretend to know the answer for that question, but I do know how conservative the Pashtun culture is, particularly in the Eastern region. Ya definitely, on the other hand though somehow Tajikistan managed to happen. I'd love to visit central Asia one day.
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Post by miscmisc on Aug 27, 2017 21:52:28 GMT 1
I'm also aware that it's always dangerous to make lazy assumptions about "traditional culture" and stuff. "Come on, those people have lived that way for centuries and centuries, it's laughable you think you can change that overnight" kind of arguments, while being certainly true to some extent, more often than not involve deceptions, ulterior motives to get someone off the hook, etc. The current Pashtun culture has been heavily influenced by recent events as well, including the influx of the foreign Mujahideen obviously. Many, many Pashtun people even in rural areas did let their daughters go to university back in the days after all.
But there's always the "silent majority" factor. Resentment votes, spite votes, and all that too. Being reactionary is, beyond the question of whether it's bad or not, always much easier after all.
As for Tajikistan, well, I don't have time to talk about it as much as I'd like to now, but I met this smart Uzbek-Tajik girl in the US many, many years ago. I still remember her getting infuriated when I bombarded her with ethnic questions (I really didn't know shit back then, didn't even know there was the nasty civil war in Tajikistan for real, but was curious about Uzbeks for non-political reasons), she was like, "Why do you act the way so many people back home do now? Why do you care so much about my Uzbek ethnicity? I'm Tajik, and that's all that matters!" And on another occasion later, she told me that she wasn't scared of religious fundamentalism at all because "there's way too much secularism in my country for that, it won't happen" (her exact words) but was very very concerned about petty tribalism and warlordism. I wonder where she is now. Probably very successful either back home, or in America.
I've visited Central Asia twice, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Unforgettable experience.
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Post by miscmisc on Aug 27, 2017 23:40:34 GMT 1
This is accurate enough. Sometimes (over-)simplification helps.
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gols
Novice Member
Posts: 159
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Post by gols on Aug 29, 2017 15:29:45 GMT 1
^ Yup, pretty much
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Post by Fox on Aug 30, 2017 1:49:37 GMT 1
My understanding is that the politicians only called a referendum to kill off growing support for UKIP, half or more of the leave voters simply voted out of fear of having a Germany-style migrant crisis, and now the politicians are just stuck in a position they didn't think they would be in.
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Post by miscmisc on Aug 30, 2017 17:01:23 GMT 1
It was pretty much David Cameron's almost-unilateral decision, though. That doesn't mean he didn't consult anyone in the party, but I don't see any clear collective party logic in that decision. It simply didn't make much sense to me. And if the main reason was actually UKIP, I'd have to say he's the most ridiculous PM in the modern British history.
I always ridiculed his typical Eton stupidity, but I do suspect that there was a lot more than the election logic going on behind his decision. That doesn't mean he had some deep, solid reasoning, though. By "a lot more", I mean his vanity and ego mostly, if not entirely. After all, the Remain win would've indeed largely ended the Tory civil war, with Cameron as the victor with that fine legacy for him to continue to brag about until the day he dies. He promised Merkel that he would TKO the Leave camp and consolidate the team UK for the future EU negotiations; His team's initial rough estimate was 70:30 for Remain.
Many of the Eurosceptic Tories must've understood what the Leave win at that point would do to, well, everything British, but they had to campaign for Leave for the consistency's sakes. They wouldn't commit electoral suicide as they had kept winning a significant number of votes with their anti-continental tunes in every previous election.
It's true that the EU referendum was the elephant in the room that everyone other than the Eurosceptic hardliners had pretended for years wasn't there, so I guess he fancied himself as the Brave One too. He probably wanted to impress other European leaders first and foremost.
I remember an FT article that said the EU issue wasn't even among the top 5 on the list of the issues that the voters cared about at that time. I really don't know if he even cared much about UKIP in actuality when he made that decision.
So, if it was pretty much UKIP indeed, Cameron is the most ridiculous PM in the British history. And if it wasn't, and if my guess was closer to the truth, he's...um, the most ridiculous PM in the British history.
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Post by miscmisc on Aug 30, 2017 17:15:42 GMT 1
"Iran is taking over Syria."
That's the popular phrase these days, it seems. Every single one of those who utter bullshit like that is a hack or idiot or both, though.
I mean, see? Now that Assad is clearly to stay, most of those passionate regime-changers moved on from Bomb Assad! to Iranian Aggression! Well, like I always said, the latter is what they truly care about anyway. The masks are off at last.
If you are a Syrian politician, and people think of you as an Iranian puppet, you have no bright political future in Syria. Assad is not Iran, and he's what you must be a "puppet" of in order to last long in that country. The fact that Assad owes a lot to Iran now won't significantly change that. Hell, Assad has been frustrating Iran over and over again in the last 12 months alone since he almost always took the Russian position over the Iranian one when he had to choose between the two.
I really have no fucking idea what kind of psychic power or Force they think Iran has. Iran simply CANNOT "take over" Syria or Iraq no matter how badly it wanted to.
Iran did gain a lot in Iraq and Syria, particularly in terms of economic ties and channels for general cooperations in all kinds of fields (which didn't exist in Iraq in the Saddam days) but by far the biggest reason for that is the USA and its actions. You'd almost think that Iran "took over" AMERICA for crying out loud. Are we sure the likes of Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton aren't Iranian moles?
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