[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
Yea thats cute, I am a hypocrite for wanting society to progress. Right.
Wait - you can’t have progress on a global scale. You have no right to judge another culture because one culture is not superior to another. Progress means that one culture is better than it used to be - but that is impossible, by your own admission.
A tolerant society is no better than an intolerant one - so says you.
Sure. What’s the matter Thunder? “Relativism” the only word you can put me down with nowadays?
Nope. But I am not ‘putting you down’ - you’re just not making sense. And it seems you have brought a banana to a knife fight.
The fact is, other countries look at us as immoral, between the corporations running things, the blatant sex and violence, etc. They have not tried to invade the US (say what you want about 9/11, but it occurred because of foreign policy).
Yes, you are right - but shouldn’t you be condemning them for judging us? They have no right to do that, right?
And ‘intolerance’ of a culture is not a reason to invade, and don’t pretend like the US engages in such frivolous acts.
And maybe if we had a time machine, we could go back and change the Indian’s raw deal. But being as mine broke, and you don’t give a fuck either way, I guess they’re out of luck. And you know very little of my Irish heritage (ahem. Pric). As a matter of fact, my brethern didn’t come over “complicitly”.
You don’t need a time machine, so don’t scoot out with that excuse. You can repair what was taken from those who were conquered right now - give up where you live to a Native American family. Imperialism is imperialism - you gonna be complicit in it?
As for you Irish heritage - I don’t know anything about it, but since you introduced it into the conversation by waving your Irish heritage flag plus your victimology, you made it fair game as part of the analysis.
Taking a historic precedent and just saying, “Oh well its human nature. Sorry” is ridiculous. Yes, British imperialism counts among its casualties many Native Americans, Irishmen, Indians, Middle Easterners, Asians, and countless others.
And who do Native Americans count among their casualties? Who do Middle Easterners - for example the Ottomans - count aming their casualties?
One you learn to apply your standards universally, you can make some claims.
Why repeat British or Roman mistakes? Why do terrible acts like this time and again, when there is no reason or justification? How can you argue for that? At one time, people said the same thing about slavery in the US; “Oh, there was always slaves in history. Its just human nature”. Yea well I see that we managed to change that.
But the US is not doing the things that you seem to be so upset about.
Who had advocated that we go a territorially annex countries in the name of conquest?
There is nothing wrong with striving for a world where you can’t just walk in to another soverign state because you think they might…hurt you…someday…maybe…with some weapons that uh, we think are there…
Yawn. I’m not sure what kind of world you are striving for, but you’ll learn in time that there are limits on what can be accomplished.
The day we can’t walk into another sovereign state because they represent a threat is officially never. Strive for a utopia all you want - every attempt thus far has resulted in millions dead in the name of ideological mania and zeal.
No thanks. I read the French Revolution and Das Kapital as cautionary tales, not as shiney blueprint for flawless world.[/quote]
I understand your point about imperialism. However, as I said before-why repeat the mistakes of the past? Because cultures have launched wars upon or taken over other civilizations does not either rationalize it or make it right. The US, as the sole superpower, should not be doing the same thing. If anything, we should be setting the model for the right way to do things.
You say that the US is not being impeialistic. I do not believe that. We have overturned governments unfriendly to us in South and Central America. We have now launched an invasion of another soverign state. Imperialism is no longer colonies directly contirbuting to the mother country- it is the spreading of this type of coroporate democracy that the US is so mired in, and opposition to any government, especially the leftist ones, that oppose us.
The fact that other countries don’t want it is completely irrelevant to us- such as Mexico during the NAFTA agreements, when, in order to join, they had to revise their Constitution so that the section about governmental garauntee of land, regardless of social class, was taken out. I don’t see how this country is not imperialist- we do not use the military, we use the CIA and money to get what we want.
We are looking at things through different paradigms. I will never believe that the US cared at all about Iraqi independence, WMD, or anything else in that region. It makes alot more sense to attack a country like that so that we have a strong prescence in the middle east in order to affect global affairs, and prevent the rise of any other country to threaten our superpower status. This has all been documented in the “Project for a New American Century”, and the administration is following it to the “T”.
There have been more deaths in the name of Christianity, I would say, then the struggle for worker’s rights and internationalism.
You sound like an older guy. Maybe you do think that thre are limits to what can be accomplished; I don’t share this. It isn’t utopia I am aiming for, just a fair government that does not lie, start wars, and try to discredit all dissent.
The French Revolution was based off the same things ours was- look where there conservative government has gotten them: rewriting history to make their brutal colonial past seem brighter (that law was passed today, to the socialist party minority’s chagrin).
Even if striving for it is simply taking the first step, then that is something. Without the Medgar Evers’ of the world, the Martin Luther King’s would not have had a chance. But the struggle remains.
