WOT: About Chomskey, and the Truth
Jane
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15096
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/sept04/keith.htm
That's just to start.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Crowfoot
"Jane" <Jane...@aol.com> wrote:
Interesting and provcative attacks on the man and other
positions he has taken in the past. Yes, he has a lot of
critics as well as a lot of supporters, and no doubt he is
much less than perfect intellectually as well as in other
ways; but none of this actually takes on the informational
points he makes about the history of the Israel-Palestine
problem, which is what I was posting about.
Doubtless there are many such articles: they present the
pervasive US/Israeli side of the argument via different
selections of facts, different interpretations, and very
different conclusions. I'm not an expert, but over the
years I've found the argument that Chomsky makes in
the interview cited convincing and his selection (as it
must be) of supporting facts even more convincing.
Anyone who wants to follow up in detail has a choice of
many, many well researched and argued books and
articles to choose from (see below).
I wanted to point out that there is an opposing argument
to the common US pov of Israeli good guys and Arab devils;
short of devoting my life to studying the whole literature
of the conflict for myself and trying to sort out reality from
propaganda, which I'm not about to do, my response must
be to choose the argument that makes the most sense to
me. It's the argument that convinces, not the man making
it, since many others have been making it for some time.
It came to my attention when when I came across Israeli
historian Bennie Morris and his challenge to the sanitized
version of history taught in Israeli schools, backed up with
documents from Israeli government archives that exposed
that version as a deliberate self-justifying fabrication.
Other interesting sites, for those interested in the subject
rather than the reputation of Noam Chomsky:
http://www.bitterlemons.org/about/about.html
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=71
1997
The second one, the Tony Judt article, in particular is
recommended as a summary of the argument I'm
speaking up for.
I must add, though, this sidelight: I think that what I
see as a more realistic view ("righteous victims" on both
sides, not heroes on one side and devils on the other) of
the situation leads to the possibility of a negotiated peace
based on a two-State solution. The dominant US/Israeli
govt. position leads nowhere but to a species of Apartheit,
ethnic cleansing, and maybe even that rapturous
Armageddon that fanatical Islamists and fundamentalist
Christians say they are so eager for. I prefer the first, and
that's what I'm putting my individual weight behind. Yes,
it might eventually bring us to the same brink, of course,
if compromise breaks down and the fanatics on both
sides have their way.
But I'd like to see at least at attempt the detour into a
more reasoned place.
Suzy
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
>
> I must add, though, this sidelight: I think that what I
> see as a more realistic view ("righteous victims" on both
> sides, not heroes on one side and devils on the other) of
> the situation leads to the possibility of a negotiated peace
> based on a two-State solution.
No, Suzy, it DOESN'T.
If what the Palestinians and their allies wanted was a two-state
solution, they'd have it already. There have been three such treaties
signed up to now. The Israelis have broken none of them. The
Palestinians have broken all of them.
If what they want is a two state solution, why is that?
The dominant US/Israeli
> govt. position leads nowhere but to a species of Apartheit,
> ethnic cleansing, and maybe even that rapturous
> Armageddon that fanatical Islamists and fundamentalist
> Christians say they are so eager for.
The only Armageddon being preached here is entirely from the Arab
side. We're going to wipe Israel off the map. It's a good thing if
the Jews gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of rounding
them up later. Jews are pigs and apes.
And on and on and on.
Vicious, genocidal anti-Semitism has been the rule and not the
exception in the Muslim world for 70 years, long before there was a
state of Israel to blame the conflict on. Mein Kampf was a best seller
in Egypt before the Second World War. Recently, Egypt produced a
"documentary" based on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
It's in something like 24 parts and is being shown all across the
middle East.
I prefer the first, and
> that's what I'm putting my individual weight behind. Yes,
> it might eventually bring us to the same brink, of course,
> if compromise breaks down and the fanatics on both
> sides have their way.
>
> But I'd like to see at least at attempt the detour into a
> more reasoned place.
There have been plenty of such attempts--the Israelis have made
all of the concessions. The Palestinians have simply gone back to
suicide bombers and missles as soon as the ink was dry on the
agreements.
Why does a "nuanced view" require not acknowledging who is doing
what here--and not believing what the Palestinian side says when they
say what they want to do?
There's only one way this conflict will "detour into a more
reasoned place." That's if the Palestinians decide to accept a
two-state solution. So far, they haven't done so. They still think
they can destroy Israel entirely. That's what they say they want.
And they follow up on what they say with suicide bombing after suicide
bombing.
And they'll go on doing what they're doing as long as they think
they have allies in the West who will help them, just like we did by
getting Israel to "compromise" (read: cave) in Lebanon.
Why should they settle for a two-state solution if they think
they can have it all?
And where do you see them working for such a solution, in any way
at all?
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
>
> Interesting and provcative attacks on the man and other
> positions he has taken in the past.
Uh, no, Suzy.
The Kamm article specifically outlines almost a dozen places where
Chomsky has claimed as "fact" things that are not anything like facts,
and the Windschuttle gives a few more.
The articles both speak directly to the question of whether
Chomsky's claimed "knowledge" can be relied on.
How often does a man have to lie before you decide that you ought
to be careful about what he says before you cite it?
Chomsky--like Zinn, and Vidal--has adopted a mythology. What
those articles do is outlined lots of places where he distorts the
truth to make that mythology seem "real" in the real world.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Mary
Jane wrote (some snipping has occurred):
>
>
> Vicious, genocidal anti-Semitism has been the rule and not the
> exception in the Muslim world for 70 years, long before there was a
> state of Israel to blame the conflict on. Mein Kampf was a best seller
> in Egypt before the Second World War. Recently, Egypt produced a
> "documentary" based on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
> It's in something like 24 parts and is being shown all across the
> middle East.
>
>
> all of the concessions. The Palestinians have simply gone back to
> suicide bombers and missles as soon as the ink was dry on the
> agreements.
>
> Why does a "nuanced view" require not acknowledging who is doing
> what here--and not believing what the Palestinian side says when they
> say what they want to do?
>
> There's only one way this conflict will "detour into a more
> reasoned place." That's if the Palestinians decide to accept a
> two-state solution. So far, they haven't done so. They still think
> they can destroy Israel entirely. That's what they say they want.
> And they follow up on what they say with suicide bombing after suicide
> bombing.
>
> And they'll go on doing what they're doing as long as they think
> they have allies in the West who will help them, just like we did by
> getting Israel to "compromise" (read: cave) in Lebanon.
>
> Why should they settle for a two-state solution if they think
> they can have it all?
>
> And where do you see them working for such a solution, in any way
> at all?
Say, Jane, have you heard of a guy called Avi Shlaim?
Mary
Crowfoot
"Jane" <Jane...@aol.com> wrote:
> > I must add, though, this sidelight: I think that what I
> > see as a more realistic view ("righteous victims" on both
> > sides, not heroes on one side and devils on the other) of
> > the situation leads to the possibility of a negotiated peace
> > based on a two-State solution.
>
> No, Suzy, it DOESN'T.
>
> If what the Palestinians and their allies wanted was a two-state
> solution, they'd have it already. There have been three such treaties
> signed up to now. The Israelis have broken none of them. The
> Palestinians have broken all of them.
That's one version. There is another, which I find much
more realistic, in which the Israelis have not been nearly
so gentlemanly as this version maintains. I'm not about
to go through the whole long list of reports -- there are
detailed sources to go to, if one wants to know this
unflattering side of things. Most of us don't. I sure as
blazes didn't, and still wish I didn't have to. I fought
this ugly trail of shared responsibility for years, because
it leads to the unhappy conclusion that treaties and
accords have been accidentally or deliberately flawed in
ways that made them hollow promises on both sides
from the get-go.
> The only Armageddon being preached here is entirely from the Arab
> side. We're going to wipe Israel off the map. It's a good thing if
> the Jews gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of rounding
> them up later. Jews are pigs and apes.
You've never come across the correspondingly
fanatical ultra-Orthodox rantings about driving all
the Arabs into the sea and occupying the entire area of
Palestine/Israel because "God gave it to us?" I have.
It's a position taken by many of the settlers (most of
them followers of a rabbi from Brooklyn, as I recall) who
have made it their practice to go camp out on some
advanced position on the W. Bank that didn't belong to
them and then demand to be protected by the IDF from
the angry Palestinian response, effectively taking more
Palestinian land by squatting on it and declaring that
they have no intention of stopping until they have taken
it all. Sharon was trying to rein them in, after decades
government subsidies at enormous cost to the rest of
Israel. There are not a vast number of them, but on the
scale of population, geography and clout in such a small
country, they are significant. They are strong enough to
always come up in discussion of coalition politics in the
Israeli parliament as swinging a lot of weight toward
the establishment of a complete Jewish theocracy from
border to border.
I'm saying that extremist tails are wagging both these
dogs, not just one of them, and now we see yet another
destructive result. The attack on Lebanon has been an
unmitigated disaster, having vastly increased the power
and prestige of the Arab extremists, which by a sort of
law of political thermodynamics inevitably creates
more extremists on the Israeli Right in response. A
great victory indeed, it was doomed from the beginning.
There is no military solution short of genocide.
> Vicious, genocidal anti-Semitism has been the rule and not the
> exception in the Muslim world for 70 years, long before there was a
> state of Israel to blame the conflict on. Mein Kampf was a best seller
> in Egypt before the Second World War. Recently, Egypt produced a
> "documentary" based on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
> It's in something like 24 parts and is being shown all across the
> middle East.
The same kind of crap is disseminated all over the world
out of Illinois, and every time the Israelis launch one of their
50-to-one (Palestinian to Israeli casualties, that is) operations
the audience for it grows. It's endemic in some Christian
countries too; should Israel invade them to stop it? Shouting
and fist-shaking is one thing, used by various governments
for their own self-protective purposes; buckling down to
attempts at diplomacy is another. The record on doing the
latter appears to be a great deal more complex and multi-
shaded, in terms of who did what to whom *and why*, than
your comments suggest.
Suzy
Crowfoot
"Jane" <Jane...@aol.com> wrote:
> Crowfoot wrote:
> >
> > Interesting and provcative attacks on the man and other
> > positions he has taken in the past.
>
> Uh, no, Suzy.
>
> The Kamm article specifically outlines almost a dozen places where
> Chomsky has claimed as "fact" things that are not anything like facts,
> and the Windschuttle gives a few more.
>
> The articles both speak directly to the question of whether
> Chomsky's claimed "knowledge" can be relied on.
Yes, and they are disturbing, no question about it, and
I thank you for bringing them to my attention. I have
seen attacks on his accuracy before (usually pretty foamy-
mouthed ones that I couldn't give much credit to), and
I've found his rhetoric over the top about many things
by my own standards; but not his description of another
side of the development of this godawful mess over time.
I've seen a good deal of his account of this particular
matter backed up by other writers, although in sources
that you would no doubt discount. The New York
Review of Books, for example -- having found them
reliable on other matters (like the Serb-Croat war, and
the genocide in Rwanda) according to eye-witnesses
and participants, I trust them (a hell of a lot more than
I trust, for example, the Israeli lobby people in the US
who scream "anti-Semitism!" every time anyone raises
a question about the stainless purity of Israeli behavior
and the deep-dyed demonic nature of the Palestinians).
When Chomsky tells much the same story, I don't
decide that it's all a lie because he's saying it. As for
Vidal, I don't often read his work; he comes off as too
self-satisfied and pleased with his own cleverness for
my taste. Pompous, actually.
Was it Thomas L. Friedman who wrote, a year or two
ago, that both the Israelis and the Palestinians must in
effect turn inward and have mini-civil wars against their
own extremists wings and throw them out of power before
saner heads on both sides could make a deal that both
populations could and would at least make an honest stab
at living with?
Now, of course, after Lebanon, that's less likely than ever.
Suzy
Pogonip
Do you mean Meir Kehane? Who died in 1990? His followers are few in
number, and while a thorn in everyone's side, can hardly be compared to
AlQuada and Hezbollah.
--
Joanne
stitches @ singerlady.reno.nv.us.earth.milky-way.com
http://members.tripod.com/~bernardschopen/
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
> I've seen a good deal of his account of this particular
> matter backed up by other writers, although in sources
> that you would no doubt discount. The New York
> Review of Books, for example
I've been a subscriber to the NYR for 30 years.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
>
> That's one version. There is another, which I find much
> more realistic, in which the Israelis have not been nearly
> so gentlemanly as this version maintains.
No one is claiming that Israel is being "gentlemanly." Nobody
is claiming that Israel never does anything wrong, or that there aren't
Israeli INDIVIDUAL extremists.
All I'm pointing out is the fact--and it is a fact--that when
accords are signed, Israel does not immediately go back home and start
launching rockets.
> You've never come across the correspondingly
> fanatical ultra-Orthodox rantings about driving all
> the Arabs into the sea and occupying the entire area of
> Palestine/Israel because "God gave it to us?"
From the Israeli GOVERNMENT?
No.
Please, tell me what Israeli government has supported these ideas.
Tell me in what elections the Israeli people have elected
representatives who supported these ideas.
Yes, indeed, there are individual Israeli extremists, but no
Israeli government has been elected on such a platform.
The platform of Hamas, on the other hand, is to drive Israel into
the sea, and the Palestinians just elected them. It's the President of
Iran, not just some individual Iranian extremists, who is now calling
for the extermination of the Jews. It was Egyptian GOVERNMENT
television that produced the "documentary" based on the Protocols.
>
> I'm saying that extremist tails are wagging both these
> dogs, not just one of them, and now we see yet another
> destructive result.
When the Israelis elect a government whose explicit position is
to exterminate the Palestinians, get back to me.
The attack on Lebanon has been an
> unmitigated disaster, having vastly increased the power
> and prestige of the Arab extremists,
Oh, I agree. But only because Israel let the UN cut it off at
the knees--and for what? Hezbollah has already declared it has no
intention of disarming.
which by a sort of
> law of political thermodynamics inevitably creates
> more extremists on the Israeli Right in response.
Define "extremist." Right now, if I lived in Israel, I'd think
that "the UN is not our friend and we should stop listening to them"
would be a pretty mainstream, middle of the road, sensible opinion.
A
> great victory indeed, it was doomed from the beginning.
No, actually, it wasn't.
>
> There is no military solution short of genocide.
But I'm not asking for a "military solution." I'm saying that
there is one way and only one way that this problem will be solved--IF
the Palestinians and their Arab allies accept a two-state solution. So
far, they don't.
And they won't, unless they understand that it's that or nothing.
>
> > Vicious, genocidal anti-Semitism has been the rule and not the
> > exception in the Muslim world for 70 years, long before there was a
> > state of Israel to blame the conflict on. Mein Kampf was a best seller
> > in Egypt before the Second World War. Recently, Egypt produced a
> > "documentary" based on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
> > It's in something like 24 parts and is being shown all across the
> > middle East.
>
> The same kind of crap is disseminated all over the world
> out of Illinois,
By the United States GOVERNMENT?
and every time the Israelis launch one of their
> 50-to-one (Palestinian to Israeli casualties, that is) operations
> the audience for it grows.
Which still fails to explain why such attitudes to the Jews
PREDATE the founding of the State of Israel by 50 years.
There was no Jewish State when Mein Kampf was first a best
seller in Germany.
The secret "flaws" in those treaties must be mystical indeed,
if they can exist before the state of Israel was ever founded.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
>
> That's one version. There is another, which I find much
> more realistic, in which the Israelis have not been nearly
> so gentlemanly as this version maintains.
No one is claiming that Israel is being "gentlemanly." Nobody
is claiming that Israel never does anything wrong, or that there aren't
Israeli INDIVIDUAL extremists.
All I'm pointing out is the fact--and it is a fact--that when
accords are signed, Israel does not immediately go back home and start
launching rockets.
> You've never come across the correspondingly
> fanatical ultra-Orthodox rantings about driving all
> the Arabs into the sea and occupying the entire area of
> Palestine/Israel because "God gave it to us?"
From the Israeli GOVERNMENT?
No.
Please, tell me what Israeli government has supported these ideas.
Tell me in what elections the Israeli people have elected
representatives who supported these ideas.
Yes, indeed, there are individual Israeli extremists, but no
Israeli government has been elected on such a platform.
The platform of Hamas, on the other hand, is to drive Israel into
the sea, and the Palestinians just elected them. It's the President of
Iran, not just some individual Iranian extremists, who is now calling
for the extermination of the Jews. It was Egyptian GOVERNMENT
television that produced the "documentary" based on the Protocols.
>
> I'm saying that extremist tails are wagging both these
> dogs, not just one of them, and now we see yet another
> destructive result.
When the Israelis elect a government whose explicit position is
to exterminate the Palestinians, get back to me.
The attack on Lebanon has been an
> unmitigated disaster, having vastly increased the power
> and prestige of the Arab extremists,
Oh, I agree. But only because Israel let the UN cut it off at
the knees--and for what? Hezbollah has already declared it has no
intention of disarming.
which by a sort of
> law of political thermodynamics inevitably creates
> more extremists on the Israeli Right in response.
Define "extremist." Right now, if I lived in Israel, I'd think
that "the UN is not our friend and we should stop listening to them"
would be a pretty mainstream, middle of the road, sensible opinion.
A
> great victory indeed, it was doomed from the beginning.
No, actually, it wasn't.
>
> There is no military solution short of genocide.
But I'm not asking for a "military solution." I'm saying that
there is one way and only one way that this problem will be solved--IF
the Palestinians and their Arab allies accept a two-state solution. So
far, they don't.
And they won't, unless they understand that it's that or nothing.
>
> > Vicious, genocidal anti-Semitism has been the rule and not the
> > exception in the Muslim world for 70 years, long before there was a
> > state of Israel to blame the conflict on. Mein Kampf was a best seller
> > in Egypt before the Second World War. Recently, Egypt produced a
> > "documentary" based on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
> > It's in something like 24 parts and is being shown all across the
> > middle East.
>
> The same kind of crap is disseminated all over the world
> out of Illinois,
By the United States GOVERNMENT?
and every time the Israelis launch one of their
> 50-to-one (Palestinian to Israeli casualties, that is) operations
> the audience for it grows.
Which still fails to explain why such attitudes to the Jews
PREDATE the founding of the State of Israel by 50 years.
There was no Jewish State when Mein Kampf was first a best
seller in Egypt.
Crowfoot
"Jane" <Jane...@aol.com> wrote:
Then you may have seen a series of articles they ran
several years ago now, one giving a very sobering
account of how the constant friction between Israel
and Palestine was in fact very much a creation of
*both* sides, not just one; and two others around the
same time, both very unsettling, about how issues of
water scarcity have underlain (and sometimes set off
fireworks about) the peace/war issues. It was noted
and shown in maps and diagrams how the location of
major Israeli settlements on the West Bank maps
perfectly over the main underground aquefers on
that side and are clearly meant to control all that
water for Israel even though the land is nominally
Palestinian (although the Israelis have simply annexed
it via settlement).
That's the kind of material I'm talking about; also a
horrifying exchange over one of these articles with
a reader writing in citing and quoting Israeli archive
documents containing perfectly clear statements by
high-ranking Israelis of an official policy of driving
the Arab population out of Israel by force so that it
could become the "land without a people for a people
without a land" that it was, in fact, not. But the "land
without a people" became part of the Israeli national
myth although it was a bald-faced lie. So: an imperial
power -- Britain -- turned over a chunk of land they
did not own to Jewish nationalists, who moved in and
chased out as many of the neighbors as they could
at gunpoint, and then lied for half century about
having done so. Why *shouldn't* the Arabs hate
them for that? What people wouldn't?
There were also articles in the NYR on the Mitchell
Report, which made it clear to me, at least, that its
recommendations, if implemented, could set up a
viable two-State solution, no matter how grudgingly
accepted by both sides due to the necessity for
compromise. That's what the position that I take
on the matter. And, really, so what? Seriously --
nothing is going to happen along those lines until
enough Israelis and Arabs come to think something
similar. Will it happen?
It had better. Otherwise, the region is doomed to
an endless round of mutual destruction until it all
goes up in smoke, and probably much of the rest
of the world with it.
So I'm not pulling these ideas out of the air, or out
of my own sentiments; I've formed them, very
unwillingly (I was a fierce supporter of Israel for a
my entire youth, like most American Jews), from
reading and hearing the opinions of good journalists
like those who publish in the NYR.
Suzy
Crowfoot
> Tell me in what elections the Israeli people have elected
> representatives who supported these ideas.
> Yes, indeed, there are individual Israeli extremists, but no
> Israeli government has been elected on such a platform.
No; but the party that represents the ultra-Orthodox regularly
gets enough seats in the Knesset to be able to influence the
building of coalitions, always pulling hard to the far, far Right.
I'm sorry, the name of the party escapes me at the moment --
anybody? They've been very active for a long time, and have
disproportionate influence on government policies, as has
been reported in the Israeli press very often.
> > > Vicious, genocidal anti-Semitism has been the rule and not the
> > > exception in the Muslim world for 70 years, long before there was a
> > > state of Israel to blame the conflict on. Mein Kampf was a best seller
> > > in Egypt before the Second World War. Recently, Egypt produced a
> > > "documentary" based on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
> > > It's in something like 24 parts and is being shown all across the
> > > middle East.
> >
> > The same kind of crap is disseminated all over the world
> > out of Illinois,
>
> By the United States GOVERNMENT?
Of course not. When you say "Egypt", just what do you
mean? And how does that fit with the fact that the Egyptian
Government recognizes Israel?
> and every time the Israelis launch one of their
> > 50-to-one (Palestinian to Israeli casualties, that is) operations
> > the audience for it grows.
>
> Which still fails to explain why such attitudes to the Jews
> PREDATE the founding of the State of Israel by 50 years.
Oh, come on; anti-Semitism was a standard attitude in
Europe, America, and the Middle East for a very long
time before the founding of Israel.
> There was no Jewish State when Mein Kampf was first a best
> seller in Germany.
Precisely.
> The secret "flaws" in those treaties must be mystical indeed,
> if they can exist before the state of Israel was ever founded.
>
> Jane Haddam
> http://www.janehaddam.com
Sorry, I wasn't clear: I meant flaws and in various supposed
offers to settle with Palestine, typified by the ridiculous
Palestinian enclaves-arrangement proposed by Israel for the
West Bank. That was clearly unacceptable, and would be by
any people trying to establish their own State.
Suzy
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
>
> So I'm not pulling these ideas out of the air, or out
> of my own sentiments; I've formed them, very
> unwillingly (I was a fierce supporter of Israel for a
> my entire youth, like most American Jews), from
> reading and hearing the opinions of good journalists
> like those who publish in the NYR.
>
> Suzy
"Good journalists"?
I've read innumerable articles in NYR--and The Nation, and Z,
and the American Prospect, etc--on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
And the NYR pieces especially lack credibility for me because
they are so totally out of any meaningful context.
The meaningful context is this: practically since the day of
its founding, Israel has been under relentless attack by "Palestinians"
and their allies in the Arab world. This has included everything from
outright war to nonstop suicide bombings to remote missile attacks, but
the one important factor is that the Palestinians NEVER stop their
violence.
Why is Israel in Gaza and on the West Bank? Because, after
suffering decades of attacks, they're looking to put a buffer between
themselves and the violence.
Should Israel simply ignore the need for such a buffer
because--well, because why? Because the Palestinians et al don't
really mean it? Because the violence will stop if they'll just
concede? But they often do concede. They give back territory. They
do all kinds of things. But the violence never stops, and it never
will, because the Palestinians are not looking for a two state
solution. Hamas is, in fact, committed to refusing one and to seeing
Israel destroyed.
Any "good journalism" that does not take THAT fact as of
singular importance is a sham.
There are also innumerable calls for Israel to return to its
pre-1968 borders--it's because Israel won't do that that the
Palestinians are violent.
But that's not true. There are post-1968 borders in RESPONSE to
Arab violence.
Should Israel retreat to pre-1968 borders?
No. Israel should operate under the same rules of war everybody
else does--if country A commits aggression against country B and loses
and country B takes some of country A's territory--tough on country A,
they were the aggressor. That's a good rule. Knowing you have
something to lose makes you less likely to launch yourself into war
against other countries.
An article that holds Israelis and Palestinians "equally at fault"
for the violence in the region is not "good journalism." It's willful
blindness, and moral bankruptcy.
The bottom line is this: the suicide bombings and the missile
attacks NEVER STOP. And they're not coming from the Israelis.
Quite frankly, Palestinian violence and aggression have been so
relentless, so singlemindedly aimed at civilians and not the military,
that by any ordinary standard I'd say that the Palestinians have lost
any right they ever had to that two-state solution. But Israel is
willing to give it to them--willing to send soldiers in to Gaza and the
West Bank to bouldoze the homes of her own citizens; pull back their
armies--and it might work, so we should probably try it.
But--Hezbollah situates its command posts and missile launchers in
civilian areas and fires at Israel. Israel fires back and (inevitably,
given the circumstances) kills some civilians. Palestinian suicide
bombers directly target civilians by blowing themselves up at bus stops
and in pizza parlors full of people.
How are these two things "faults on both sides"? What kind of
simplistic, UNnuanced thinking does it take to equate accidental
civilian casualties with deliberate ones?
Why doesn't Hezbollah establish their launch sites AWAY from
civilian areas? Oh, wait--it's because they know that if they put them
IN civilian areas, Israel loses no matter what it does. If it holds
back out of fear of hurting civilians, then the launchers are safe and
Hezbollah can launch missle after missile into Israeli CIVILIAN areas.
If the Israelis go after the launchers--look at how evil they are!
they've killed civilians!
It's not about water. It's not about settlements. It's really
not about a two-state solution. Nor is it the neo-Leftist fairy tale
where it LOOKS like the Arabs are the violent ones, but really,
underneath, it's the US and Israel secretly keeping a devils pact to
destroy the Arabs.
The Palestinians and the Arabs commit violence against Israel
every day. They target and kill civilians every day. They do it
because they know that they can find lots of people in the
"international community" who will defend them, and who will in the end
blunt any response Israel can give to the violence.
They do it because they think they're going to win, and the
reason they think they're going to win is all that "good journalism"
declaring that both sides are "equally at fault" (except, of course,
that Israel is worse, because it's sneaky and allied with the US).
"Good journalism" has killed more people in the Middle East than
all the crusades combined.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
> No; but the party that represents the ultra-Orthodox regularly
> gets enough seats in the Knesset to be able to influence the
> building of coalitions, always pulling hard to the far, far Right.
> I'm sorry, the name of the party escapes me at the moment --
> anybody? They've been very active for a long time, and have
> disproportionate influence on government policies, as has
> been reported in the Israeli press very often.
Likkud. But they still haven't formed an Israel government.
In other words, NO Israeli government signs on to Eretz Israel, but
ALL Arab governments, including that of the Palestinians themselves,
sign on to the idea that Israel should be destroyed.
>
> Of course not. When you say "Egypt", just what do you
> mean? And how does that fit with the fact that the Egyptian
> Government recognizes Israel?
>
I don't know. How does it? It was Egyptian GOVERNMENT money
and Egyptian GOVERNMENT run media that produced that little
"documentary" based on the protocols. I'm talking about official acts
of government here, not the views of any one individual.
> > Which still fails to explain why such attitudes to the Jews
> > PREDATE the founding of the State of Israel by 50 years.
>
> Oh, come on; anti-Semitism was a standard attitude in
> Europe, America, and the Middle East for a very long
> time before the founding of Israel.
And?
In Europe, the result was the Holocaust. When the Germans
said they wanted to kill all the Jews, they meant it. When the Arabs
say they want to kill all the Jews--and they do say it, not just that
they want to drive Israel into the sea--I tend to believe them.
But you can't have it both ways, Suzy. Arab anti-Semitism
can't be "caused" by Israeli conduct if it existed before Israel did.
The Arabs are not anti-Semitic because of the existence of
Israel or because of anything Israel does. The Arabs are just
anti-Semitic. And given what happened the LAST time people talked
like this, I think we ought to take that anti-Semitism seriously.
>
> > There was no Jewish State when Mein Kampf was first a best
> > seller in Germany.
>
> Precisely.
It was a typo. It was supposed to read "first a best seller
in EGYPT."
Actually, Mein Kampf has been a best seller throughout the
Arab world since the day it was published.
>
> > The secret "flaws" in those treaties must be mystical indeed,
> > if they can exist before the state of Israel was ever founded.
> >
> > Jane Haddam
> > http://www.janehaddam.com
>
> Sorry, I wasn't clear: I meant flaws and in various supposed
> offers to settle with Palestine, typified by the ridiculous
> Palestinian enclaves-arrangement proposed by Israel for the
> West Bank. That was clearly unacceptable, and would be by
> any people trying to establish their own State.
The Palestinians commit act of violence after act of violence
against Israeli and its citizens. They target civilians. They blow
up children and old people in pizza parlors and bus stops and
laundromats.
Who the hell are they to say what is "unacceptable"?
If the Palestinians want a better deal, then they need to give
evidence that it is safe for Israel to give them one--they need to end
ALL the violence, NOW. Permanently. Then wait a couple of years and
come back to the table and say, "see, we were serious this time."
Why should the Israelis trust them now? They negotiate treaties,
sign them, talk about how groundbreaking it all is, and the ink isn't
even dry before they suicide bombings have started again.
If you're going to hold "both sides" responsible, how about
holding the Palestinians and their allies responsible for their
behavior--which means nailing them when they blow things up, not
"understanding" it.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
>>
> Now, of course, after Lebanon, that's less likely than ever.
>
> Suzy
By the way, I agree with the above. But not because Israel made a
mistake to attack Hezbollah. Because of this
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/thornton082306.html
THAT'S a nuanced, NON-simplistic analysis of the problem.
And Elf, bless him, has sent me a copy of the Chomsky interview on
Lebanon. I'll try to get to it this afternoon.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Crowfoot
"Jane" <Jane...@aol.com> wrote:
> Crowfoot wrote:
> >
> > So I'm not pulling these ideas out of the air, or out
> > of my own sentiments; I've formed them, very
> > unwillingly (I was a fierce supporter of Israel for a
> > my entire youth, like most American Jews), from
> > reading and hearing the opinions of good journalists
> > like those who publish in the NYR.
> >
> > Suzy
>
> "Good journalists"?
>
> I've read innumerable articles in NYR--and The Nation, and Z,
> and the American Prospect, etc--on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
>
> And the NYR pieces especially lack credibility for me because
> they are so totally out of any meaningful context.
They did not lack credibility for me. That's the difference,
and there's no point, really, in arguing this further. Neither of
us is going to budge: our premises are too different. So I'm
bowing out of this discussion here; too much else to do, such as
trying to talk my local Democratic Party people into thinking
about "defense spending" being used for actual *defense* --
building real barriers to sea level rise at our major ports, for
instance, and implementing the recommendations of the 9/11
Commission instead of just talking about doing so -- while the
November election draws nearer. I'd rather put my energies
where I think they might stand some chance of being effective.
Thanks, though, for your comments; I have a lot of respect for
you based on your contributions to this forum. I just don't
agree with you on many political points. C'est la vie; but la
vie is also a great deal more than political argument.
Best,
Suzy
Larisa
Jane wrote:
>
> > > Which still fails to explain why such attitudes to the Jews
> > > PREDATE the founding of the State of Israel by 50 years.
> >
> > Oh, come on; anti-Semitism was a standard attitude in
> > Europe, America, and the Middle East for a very long
> > time before the founding of Israel.
>
> And?
>
> In Europe, the result was the Holocaust. When the Germans
> said they wanted to kill all the Jews, they meant it. When the Arabs
> say they want to kill all the Jews--and they do say it, not just that
> they want to drive Israel into the sea--I tend to believe them.
>
> But you can't have it both ways, Suzy. Arab anti-Semitism
> can't be "caused" by Israeli conduct if it existed before Israel did.
>
> The Arabs are not anti-Semitic because of the existence of
> Israel or because of anything Israel does. The Arabs are just
> anti-Semitic. And given what happened the LAST time people talked
> like this, I think we ought to take that anti-Semitism seriously.
Thank you, Jane. Incidentally, you might want to check out how Jews
were treated by Arabs in Arab nations before Israel was founded; the
word "dhimmi" should bring up all sorts of interesting Google
citations. (one of the Islamic laws in question dictated that Jews had
to pay a special tax in order to remain alive...)
> Actually, Mein Kampf has been a best seller throughout the
> Arab world since the day it was published.
As are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
> > Sorry, I wasn't clear: I meant flaws and in various supposed
> > offers to settle with Palestine, typified by the ridiculous
> > Palestinian enclaves-arrangement proposed by Israel for the
> > West Bank. That was clearly unacceptable, and would be by
> > any people trying to establish their own State.
>
> The Palestinians commit act of violence after act of violence
> against Israeli and its citizens. They target civilians. They blow
> up children and old people in pizza parlors and bus stops and
> laundromats.
>
> Who the hell are they to say what is "unacceptable"?
>
> If the Palestinians want a better deal, then they need to give
> evidence that it is safe for Israel to give them one--they need to end
> ALL the violence, NOW. Permanently. Then wait a couple of years and
> come back to the table and say, "see, we were serious this time."
>
> Why should the Israelis trust them now? They negotiate treaties,
> sign them, talk about how groundbreaking it all is, and the ink isn't
> even dry before they suicide bombings have started again.
>
> If you're going to hold "both sides" responsible, how about
> holding the Palestinians and their allies responsible for their
> behavior--which means nailing them when they blow things up, not
> "understanding" it.
Exactly. Couldn't say it better myself. Thank you for saying it so
eloquently.
LM
Larisa
Jane wrote:
> By the way, I agree with the above. But not because Israel made a
> mistake to attack Hezbollah. Because of this
>
> http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/thornton082306.html
>
> THAT'S a nuanced, NON-simplistic analysis of the problem.
>
> And Elf, bless him, has sent me a copy of the Chomsky interview on
> Lebanon. I'll try to get to it this afternoon.
Who is this Thornton guy? I want to read his other stuff. It's a
wonderful article.
Though one of the things that he's not mentioning is that the Israeli
army was really, alas, in no condition to continue the war - I have the
feeling that that was the reason they agreed to that ridiculous
cease-fire.
LM
elf
Jane...@aol.com says...
>
>Crowfoot wrote:
>>>
>> Now, of course, after Lebanon, that's less likely than ever.
>>
>> Suzy
>
> By the way, I agree with the above. But not because Israel made a
>mistake to attack Hezbollah. Because of this
>
>http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/thornton082306.html
>
Hmm.Yah, in many respects I'd have to agree with Thornton, but still,
there's a thing or two I don't think the jihadists are taking into
account. Historical ignorance? I dunno.
But right here in RAM comments have been made about what the
allied forces did to Germany - and that is primarily the US and
England/Great Britain (Tweeldee and Teeldum so far as the jihadists are
concerned)- which people were at least culturally related to the allies.
Then there's the fire bombing of Tokyo, with the time delayed
shrapnel enhanced high explosives dropped along with the incendiaries
specifically to target fire fighters or other rescuers.
And of course all the crafts the terrorists practiced were first
practiced and perfected by the people whom they elect to despise.
Just standing back and taking a look at the relative
industrial/military capacity of the jihadists vs their primary targets,
and the actual track record of those targets when they finally get
pissed off, well, I'm not really worried about the final outcome of any
jihad.
Maybe what we ought to do is simply provide the what'ca'ma'callit
schools over there with some graphic histories of the two world wars so
the jihadists can see what their favorite enemies are really like once
they get pissed off enough.
They can't feed themselves, they probably can't provide themselves
with water for that matter. We assuredly can blockade them and utterly
destroy all their major cities and infrastructure. Nature would do the
rest. And yes, I'd bet we can capture and hold the oil fields against a
rapidly dwindling force of starving jihadists.
Contrary to what some Sheik said, we don't need *them*, we just
need what's under some of the ground we chose to recognize as theirs and
currently pay them for instead of just crowding them off like we did the
Native Americans or the Aborigines in Australia.
Yah think if we finally get pissed enough to carpet bombed Tehran
for a few days and then drop incendiaries as night fell one day they'd
be able to read the message in the night sky, or would they continue to
commit suicide?
elf
Jane
I found this on Mark Steyn's site this morning, and it occured to me
that it might help some of you understand why so many of us who support
Israel think there's more than a little anti-Semitism in the criticism
of Israel, even when those criticisms are supposedly about "Israeli
policies."
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ZmVlNTEwOThkMDU0Y2I3OTEzMTI4MTdjMjI3YjBjYmU=
You may have to cut and paste that.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Jane
elf wrote:
\>
> Yah think if we finally get pissed enough to carpet bombed Tehran
> for a few days and then drop incendiaries as night fell one day they'd
> be able to read the message in the night sky, or would they continue to
> commit suicide?
>
> elf
I don't think the question is what we could do, but what we
would do. There are a few differences between WWII and now.
For instance:
1) the existence of a large and vocal, and educated and
influential, group highly critical of Western societies and their
motives, aims and moral status WITHIN those societies themselves, and
in an unbelievably unbalanced way. For all the talk about moral
equivalency--there's blame on both sides!--the real analysis of Chomsky
proposes anything but. The assumption is that there is blame on ONE
side (ours) and that therefore the relative heinouses of their actions
as opposed to ours doesn't matter.
Consider, for a minute, the whole thing about Abu Ghraib. It
was nasty, but it was also by and large very mild, and next to what
went on in that prison before the US got there, it was laughable. Ask
yourself for a minute why it was that people like Chomsky, Zinn,
Vidal, et al, could go bonkers over the American actions at Abu Ghraib
while never once doing the same over Saddam's security forces AS LONG
AS SADDAM WAS AN ENEMY OF THE US. As long as Saddam was anti-Bush, the
"Abu Ghrab shows that America is morally corrupt" crowd never even
mentioned little things like drilling through the hands of subjects
being interrogated to get them to talk; putting a mother in a cell next
to her own infant and letting her hear it scream for days as it went
unfed and uncared for because she wouldn't talk; rape squads to punish
the wives and daughters and mothers of political enemies. If they're
forced into a corner by the evidence, the response is, "well, what do
you expect--Saddam is a creature of US foreign policy."
You get a very similar situation vis a vis Israel. Palestinians
send suicide bombers into Israel every day. Hezbollah was sending
missiles into Israel on a regular basis, always aimed at civilian
targets. But although I've seen CNN do stories about ISRAELI bombing
in Lebanon that included pictures and personal stories of Lebanese
women and children killed in the raids. The only time I've ever seen
anything similar done on the Israeli victims of Palestinian suicide
bombing or Hezbollah missile attacks has been on Fox.
It's one thing to wage a world war when your entire society is
supporting it, another when your media is relentlessly putting across
the message that the war is being fought for money and oil, that your
own side is no better than the other side and probably worse, that
soldiers who die have had their lives wasted, etc, etc, etc.
And the jihadist know this, and they're counting on it. They say
so--Bush is an aberration. He'll leave office, and the next guy will
be your usual American, soft and weak and without the will to fight, a
coward.
But if there's anything that doesn't get reported here in the
MSM, THAT'S it. For all the complaints that the views of people like
Chomsky aren't heard, or the issues he cares about aren't reported the
way he wants them to be--I can find a lot of Chomsky, Zinn and Vidal in
the American media, and PLENTY of reports on how badly the Israelis are
treating the Palestinians, but very few on what they jihadist media
says about the West, the war on terror and the war on Iraq.
2) In spite of that, I do think it's a matter of "pissed off
ENOUGH." Emphasis mine. France's response to the threat of terror
attacks on its soil was--do it and we'll nuke you. I don't for a
moment believe that France, Germany, et al actually believe the
multicultural crap they spout, not even the "America is the worst
terrorist in the world" crap they spout. Push comes to shove, and all
the old chauvinism will come out.
Bruce Bauer had it right, I think, when he said that the real
danger in Europe is not that the Islamists will take over, but that as
Islamist power and influence grow, the old nativist parties will come
back in force. That somehow Europe (not including Britian) has not
been able to find a middle ground between craven capitulation and
hysterical racialism.
3) And if the Chomskyites were right in the analysis of US goals
in the region--the region would look like you described it above (i.e.,
we'd just go in and take over), and not like it looks now.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:>
> They did not lack credibility for me. That's the difference,
> and there's no point, really, in arguing this further. Neither of
> us is going to budge: our premises are too different.
So, I've been thinking about this.
What ARE my premises, exactly?
Well:
1) that all cultures are NOT created equal. Morally decent
cultures show certain characteristics:
a) they protect individual rights--freedom of speech, press,
religion/conscience, association.
b) they persue justice as a procedural enterprise (that is,
justice resides in things like the right to a speedy trial, with a jury
of your peers, the right not to incriminate yourself, etc). Justice,
in other words, resides in the process, not in the outcome, and
therefore they protect the process.
c) they provide equal protection of the laws to all citizens.
That is, neither rights nor government benefaction is distributed
UNevenly on the basis of race, religion or sex. Your private golf club
is within its rights (under freedom of association) to admit only male
Lutherans, the jury at your trial for embezzlement will include women
and Catholics whether you like it or not.
2) that it is a given that nothing and nobody is perfect, which
means that no society will fulfill all of the above absolutely and
without exception.
3) BUT that societies that enshrine those principles in their
law and try to carry them out are different IN KIND than those that
explicitly deny them. Most Americans wouldn't vote for an atheist for
President, but there is nothing in American law that would forbid an
atheist from becoming President and that means that the lack of votes
for atheists does NOT mean that there is moral equivalence between the
US and Iran on the matter of freedom of religion.
4) that civiliations of this sort--liberal democracies that come
out of the Enlightenment (and, especially, the English
Enlightenment)--are fragile and need to be defended, and have both the
right and the duty to defend themselves against both physical attacks
against them and attacks on the principles on which they are founded.
5) and finally, that liberal guilt is a crock, a transposition
of an essentially Christian impulse without the Christianity.
Christianity presents to us the substitutionary atonement and, with it,
the victim as hero. Some of us have left Christianity--or simply
imbibed it from the culture around us--but kept the "victim and hero"
thing. So we see heroes only in those people we can imagine as
victims. The word imagine was chosen deliberately.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Mary
Lieberman and Lamont, my ass. You ought to run for Senate.
Mary
Crowfoot
"Jane" <Jane...@aol.com> wrote:
> Crowfoot wrote:>
> > They did not lack credibility for me. That's the difference,
> > and there's no point, really, in arguing this further. Neither of
> > us is going to budge: our premises are too different.
>
> So, I've been thinking about this.
>
> What ARE my premises, exactly?
>
> Well:
This certainly conforms to everything I've seen of your
posts on this board. I think you lean more toward idealism
than I do. I'm an idealist myself, in the abstract: I know
how I'd *like* to see the world work. But my approach to
actual life as I see it unfold leans sharply toward the
practical (or at least what I see as the practical), as in,
There's no point doing the same thing time after time
expecting a different result than the one you keep getting,
which repetition of failure usually indicates a glitch in your
perception of the problem. If it's broke, review a wider
view of the facts and try to come up with something *else*
to do. Not very complex, I'm afraid, but it seems to fit the
way the world works, when it works.
Which is why you and I will not see eye to eye on Israel.
> 1) that all cultures are NOT created equal. Morally decent
> cultures show certain characteristics:
I disagree right here, in this sense: cultures are not created at
all but are grown by populations, which means that they are
organic and exist in a state of constant flux, some changing
more quickly than others, some in long, stagnant drags
punctuated by violent change, some rapidly morphing into
more or less different versions of themselves. What they all
have in common is that at different times in their "lives" they
develop different responses to local conditions that (more or
less) meet those conditions in ways that their populations
accept as good and useful. Sometimes it's a good fit, some-
times way out of phase with an environment that has altered.
Some cultures are really, really crappy in terms of the
conditions imposed on certain classes of their members: it's
extremely painful for people from cultures that have
developed high levels of individual choice to confront
cultures in which the majority of members subscribe to
high levels of prohibition and control for various classes of
their members instead. But:
Those who try to force foreign cultures to change to fit their
own sense of how the world should work are prone to wreaking
unforseen and often appalling havoc in the name of an ideal of
the one, true, good culture: see Hitler and Stalin, Pol Pot, and
Kim Il Jun, many (but not all) of the Christian missionaries I
met in West Africa, etc etc etc. (This last I have seen close up,
and I didn't like it).
In our own Western version of cultures that continually try to
widen the areas of choice for individuals, internal populations
bent on circumscribing choice in some throwback to more
hidebound, traditional ways continually persist -- I'm thinking
of extreme fundamentalist groups, from Hutterites to the sort
of radical-Right fascistic thinking that the Catholic Church
seems to generate when it feels under threat.
Ideally, one size does indeed fit all -- that one size depending
on your ideals, although idealists will dispute this -- that's
what holding to absolute ideals means. In the real world,
in practice, not all prefer to choose that one size (whichever
it is that this or that idealist espouses), and I don't see it as
my job as an individual or as a member of my culture to
force everyone to try it on anyway -- though I will certainly
back efforts to convince others to try ways that I think are
about a million times better than what they're currently
doing, and support as best I can members of that culture
who want to move it in directions that I think are intrinsically
better. And if my own ideals are threatened here in my
home, I will of course defend them -- because they are *my*
choice, and the choice of a varying proportion of my home
population (which right now seems to be varying in the
direction of canceling the Bill of Rights, so the threat is
coming from within). The Hutterites may do their thing,
but they have no right to force me to do their thing. Which
no doubt makes me one of the "liberal" people you so
despise, though not out of guilt: out of observation.
I think you may see human life in a more schematic way
than I do: more like something adhering more or less
effectively to a basic blueprint of The Good than I do. I see
it as a wildly varied and rich efflorescence of variations on
basic themes that grows according to its own laws. You can
try to shape it, but if you take your shears to it in a determined
effort to prune it to fit a blueprint, murderous chaos ensues
that takes a very long time to recover from.
So no, we are not going to agree, though we hack and haver
over and back across this ground; and life's too short for
banging our heads against brick walls, IMO.
Suzy
Jane
Mary wrote:
>
>
> Lieberman and Lamont, my ass. You ought to run for Senate.
>
> Mary
Well, it occurs to me that I have a few more premises. Such as:
1) that capitalism is by and large a force for good in the world, and a
better economic system than any of the others that have been tried so
far. People--including the poorest people--live better in advanced
capitalist economies than they do under any other economic form. I
say "by and large" because I don't mean we should just let companies do
whatever they want without regulation, but only that the regulation
should be aimed at making good behavior worthwhile and not under the
assumption that all the "resources" belong to "us" because
2) I also think the right to private property--held as close to
absolutely as possible while still making the country workable--is an
important foundation of freedom even for poor people. Actually, the
principle isn't the "right to property" but the "right to security in
property," that is the right to actually own thing, but first of all
yourself.
3) I don't think the US government is in "thrall to the corporations,"
or that US policy is driven always and absolutely by the interests of
corporations, under this President any more than under any others. If
anything, we're less in thrall to "our" corporations than the French
and the Germans are to theirs. And
4) I think that the US is by and large a force for good in the world,
and yes, even in the wake of the Iraq war and ESPECIALLY because of our
support for Israel. As far as I know, no other country on the planet
upholds freedom of speech, press, religion, etc--the fundamentals of
individual rights--more thoroughly than we do. Which doesn't mean
we're perfect, but does explain why I do NOT want the UN running the
Internet. A week after they got hold of it, they'd be banning
"offensive" speech right, left and center. And
5) I think most Americans are decent, reasonably intelligent people. I
think they know what they're voting for when they vote, including the
working class people who vote for Bush. I'd rather be here than
anywhere on the planet if I was down and out--I don't know any nation
anywhere whose ordinary, not-very-well-off citizens routinely reach
into their own pockets and into their own lives to help people in need
that they don't even know. And that
6) I have to admit is at least partly due to their religious
convictions, which I don't share but which I often admire the fruits
of. Nutcases like the creationists get the headlines, but the real
test of American religion is what happened in the wake of Katrina--not
only the tens of millions of dollars donated to relief funds by
ordinary citizens, but the thousands more who took in Katrina refugees
for months at a time on their own dime. I read a fair amount of the
international press on the Internet--and not only in English--and
almost none of that got reported, and what did get reported was wrong.
But then
7) I have a lot of problems with the lack of religious toleration. I
want "under God" out of the Pledge because it implies that people who
don't believe can't be "real" Americans (thereby violating the first
amendment), but the high school valedictorian should be able to credit
her success to Jesus in her speech if she wants to. The tendency
these days to litigate the least bump on the road to Everybody Being
Just Like Me is making me crazy. I don't like it when the RR does it,
and I don't like it when the atheists do it. And I think banning
Silent Night from the school chorus's repertoire is worse than stupid.
8) on the other hand, I do think there is a bottom line, and the bottom
line is Americanization. That is, my basic take on immigration is:
bring it on. Give me your tired, your poor, etc. But there's a price
for everything, and the price for immigrating here should be actually
becoming American. I'm for getting rid of bilingual ballots,
documents, etc, and stressing American ideals, American history and
patriotism in elementary school social studies classes. Of course,
send your kid to a private school, and he can learn that the US is the
Great Satan or whatever else you want. In general
9) however, I think that the government should treat people as
individuals rather than members of groups. I don't care if you
self-identify as an Irish-Cherokee-American Wiccan vegan socialist, the
government should see you as an American, period. And
10) I like patriotism. I've even got a flag on my car.
I'm having a day, obviously.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Jr@Ease
Many a Quaint and Curious Forgotten Post, and then wrote:
--------------------------------------------------------------
You need to put this on your website. Don't let it get lost in the
ether of newsgroups.
John P
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
> There's no point doing the same thing time after time
> expecting a different result than the one you keep getting,
> which repetition of failure usually indicates a glitch in your
> perception of the problem. If it's broke, review a wider
> view of the facts and try to come up with something *else*
> to do. Not very complex, I'm afraid, but it seems to fit the
> way the world works, when it works.
>
> Which is why you and I will not see eye to eye on Israel.
But PRECISELY what I want is for us to stop doing the same thing
over and over and over again re Israel and Palestine.
What we do is this: Palestine and company attacks Israel. Israel
responds. The "international community" jumps in and makes Israel give
most of it back and sign another peace treaty.
I think we should stop most of that third thing.
>
> > 1) that all cultures are NOT created equal. Morally decent
> > cultures show certain characteristics:
>
> I disagree right here, in this sense: cultures are not created at
> all but are grown by populations
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Suzy, I don't think cultures are "created" either. It's a
rhetorical device, referencing the Declaration of Independence. It
doesn't mean I think cultures are deliberate "created" but that I
reject that idea that cultures are all fundamentally morally equal.
However, if any culture had a right to call itself created, the
US is probably it. It was a conscious creation in many ways, by a
small group of men relying on a specific strain in political philosophy
(Locke, et al). You should read the Federalist papers to get a sense
of HOW deliberate a lot of it was.
,: it's
> extremely painful for people from cultures that have
> developed high levels of individual choice to confront
> cultures in which the majority of members subscribe to
> high levels of prohibition and control for various classes of
> their members instead.
Oh, I think it goes a lot farther than that. I think that
"cultures that have developed high levels of individual choice" are
morally superior to ones that haven't. I think that is universally
true, and that those "cultures" that subscribe to "high levels of
prohibition and control" are morally wrong in doing so.
But, and this is important--not JUST because it's "control." It's
the KIND of control that matters.
But:
>
> Those who try to force foreign cultures to change to fit their
> own sense of how the world should work are prone to wreaking
> unforseen and often appalling havoc in the name of an ideal of
> the one, true, good culture:
Oh, absolutely. I don't think it's possible--and I really think
it's wrong--to try to "force foreign cultures to change."
But that's not the same as saying that I cannot recognize the
wrongness, dysfunction, and moral bankruptcy of those foreign cultures.
Nor does it mean I have to give lip service to a cultural
equality that is not true in fact.
Denying the inherent, inalienable individual rights of citizens
isn't just morally wrong, it's pragmatically dysfunctional. The
Muslim oil states are some of the materially richest and culturally
backwardest (is that a word?) countries on earth--and by culturally
backward I don't mean women in chadors, but the lack of invention and
creativity in the sciences, in medicine, in engineering. They invent
nothing, they contribute nothing but violence. If there wasn't oil
under their ground, nobody would pay any attention to them.
see Hitler and Stalin, Pol Pot, and
> Kim Il Jun, many (but not all) of the Christian missionaries I
> met in West Africa, etc etc etc. (This last I have seen close up,
> and I didn't like it).
Pol Pot and Christian missionaries? You know Christian
missionaries who have killed people who would be baptized?
>
> In our own Western version of cultures that continually try to
> widen the areas of choice for individuals, internal populations
> bent on circumscribing choice in some throwback to more
> hidebound, traditional ways continually persist -- I'm thinking
> of extreme fundamentalist groups, from Hutterites to the sort
> of radical-Right fascistic thinking that the Catholic Church
> seems to generate when it feels under threat.
But those groups SHOULD exist--if they didn't, then this
society would NOT grant individuals any real choice.
It's what the government does--what's OFFICIAL--that matters.
>
> Ideally, one size does indeed fit all -- that one size depending
> on your ideals, although idealists will dispute this -- that's
> what holding to absolute ideals means.
Actually, I don't think there are "absolute" ideals. I think
there are objectively derived truths about human existence.
In the real world,
> in practice, not all prefer to choose that one size (whichever
> it is that this or that idealist espouses), and I don't see it as
> my job as an individual or as a member of my culture to
> force everyone to try it on anyway
But who said you should?
I don't want to force anybody to do anything.
Choice is meaningless unless you can choose to make a mistake. I
want creationist parents to be able to send their kids to schools that
diss evolution, Muslims to build mosques saying that the US is the
great Satan, evangelicals to preach publicly against homosexuality and
gay men and women to preach publicly in favor of it, side by side on
the same block.
Precisely what I object to are "cultures" that force their one
size fits all ideas on everybody--a description that fits the Muslim
states perfectly.
And if my own ideals are threatened here in my
> home, I will of course defend them -- because they are *my*
> choice, and the choice of a varying proportion of my home
> population (which right now seems to be varying in the
> direction of canceling the Bill of Rights, so the threat is
> coming from within). The Hutterites may do their thing,
> but they have no right to force me to do their thing. Which
> no doubt makes me one of the "liberal" people you so
> despise, though not out of guilt: out of observation.
Mmm, no. See above.
But a couple of things--first, I've NEVER said anything about
"liberal" people, and certainly nothing about despising them. Leftists
I've said things about, liberals, no.
Second, the Bill of Rights is nowhere near being cancelled here at
home, nor is anybody trying. You have wider latitude under the BOR now
than at any time in American history in everything but free association
(which is hemmed in by anti discrimination law), and even there the
tide is going in the right direction.
But defending your "ideals"--I wouldn't defend ideals, I only
defend principles--at home sometimes can't stay at home. The worst
cave-in I saw--of people not defending their "ideals" at home--came in
the refusal of most of the American press to publish the Mohammed
cartoons, and the rush this government made to apologize for the
"offense."
The way to defend the BOR at home would have been to say, "if you
were offended, that's too bad, because the right to freedom of
expression is fundamental, and it cannot and should not be limited by
what would give offense."
>
> I think you may see human life in a more schematic way
> than I do: more like something adhering more or less
> effectively to a basic blueprint of The Good than I do.
I have no idea what that means.
I see
> it as a wildly varied and rich efflorescence of variations on
> basic themes that grows according to its own laws. You can
> try to shape it, but if you take your shears to it in a determined
> effort to prune it to fit a blueprint, murderous chaos ensues
> that takes a very long time to recover from.
I'm not too sure what these means either. It SEEMS to me that
you think it doesn't much matter what we do, the course of history and
culture is entirely out of our control and has little or nothing to do
with our choices.
But that is, one would think, manifestly wrong.
>
> So no, we are not going to agree, though we hack and haver
> over and back across this ground; and life's too short for
> banging our heads against brick walls, IMO.
>
> Suzy
You see, I never understand this sort of comment.
Was the purpose here to change each others minds? I didn't think
it was. I don't usually get into these discussions to change
somebody's mind.
I'm still fairly bowled over by the fact that I seem to have
changed your mind about the stance of modern feminism towards women in
Islam.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Larisa
Mary wrote:
> Lieberman and Lamont, my ass. You ought to run for Senate.
I'm all for it!
LM (making campaign buttons...)
Larisa
Jane wrote:
>
> It's one thing to wage a world war when your entire society is
> supporting it, another when your media is relentlessly putting across
> the message that the war is being fought for money and oil, that your
> own side is no better than the other side and probably worse, that
> soldiers who die have had their lives wasted, etc, etc, etc.
>
> And the jihadist know this, and they're counting on it. They say
> so--Bush is an aberration. He'll leave office, and the next guy will
> be your usual American, soft and weak and without the will to fight, a
> coward.
I would even say more - the jihadists are the ones who are paying for
the American media to keep broadcasting the above message, the ones who
are brainwashing American college students to keep transmitting the
above message to their peers, the ones who are influencing the American
intellectual elite in various subtle ways. They are financing it, and
they get the final say in what gets said.
I saw this first-hand, kinda sorta. A group called A.N.S.W.E.R was
staging an anti-war rally in San Francisco, shortly before the war in
Iraq started. They refused to allow a prominent pacifist rabbi to
speak at the rally; not because of his views, not even because of his
views on Israel, but merely because he was Jewish. I got rather
incensed at this, and showed up at the next rally with a picket sign
describing the injustice. All - every one - of the people I spoke to
were anything but anti-Semitic; they were just as shocked as I was.
The anti-Semitism was not coming from the people themselves; it was
coming from the leadership. Who was interested in forcing a pacifist
group to behave in anti-Semitic ways? I think the answer is fairly
obvious.
I used to be an enthusiastic subscriber of salon.com - a news website
that seemed refreshingly free of bias. They used to be quite unbiased
on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. And then - it was as if someone
clamped a hand over their mouth. All of a sudden, all one could see on
their website were articles on Abu Ghraib, over and over and over again
- and it's been what, a year since that happened? I think someone got
to them and convinced them that they'd better stop it with the honest
reporting if they want to keep breathing. Or, convinced them that
they'd better stop it if they want a big payoff.
LM
Crowfoot
> "cultures that have developed high levels of individual choice" are
> morally superior to ones that haven't.
And so? The moral high road isn't always available to cultures,
particularly those living in extreme physical environments.
And how do you square high levels of individual choice with, say,
female infanticide in very male-centric cultures (which I think
means most "Third World" cultures)? Keeping in mind that,
among other things, female children are deliberately aborted
or killed or sold away because a poor family in India, say, can't
afford the (relatively) huge outlays needed to marry off girls,
and can't afford to keep them at home either and feed them,
and live in places where "jobs" for women don't exist. People
exercise individual choice all the time and everywhere, even
under strictly controlling systems; they don't necessarily have
the freedom or the mind-set to make the choices that we would
approve of, and when their choices are interfered with balances
can be upset that cause a lot of unforseen damage.
> Oh, absolutely. I don't think it's possible--and I really think
> it's wrong--to try to "force foreign cultures to change."
The trouble with the moral high ground is that it is used to
justify things like the invasion of Iraq; not by you, or by me,
but by people with the power to "fix", as they see it, those
"inferior" cultures, with the kinds of results that we see in
action there now.
> Denying the inherent, inalienable individual rights of citizens
> isn't just morally wrong, it's pragmatically dysfunctional. The
> Muslim oil states are some of the materially richest and culturally
> backwardest (is that a word?) countries on earth--and by culturally
> backward I don't mean women in chadors, but the lack of invention
> and creativity in the sciences, in medicine, in engineering. They
> invent nothing, they contribute nothing but violence. If there
> wasn't oil under their ground, nobody would pay any attention to
> them.
I think it takes a fair bit of gall to decide whether a culture you
only "know" from the outside produces anything worthwhile or
not. Worthwhile for whom? Lots of cultures have existed for
long periods of time entirely unknown to the rest of the world,
"contributing" nothing anybody knew about but answering the
needs of their members to their satisfaction. Western culture
is very expansive, and part of that is because it has a lot of good
stuff to offer -- which other cultures should be just as free to pick
and choose among as we are free to pick, say, interesting and
potential-packed natural drugs from an Amazonian shaman's
bag of healing tools but not his use of Ayahuasca (although
some foreign visitors *do* try Ayahuasca and find its effects
very positive).
A little tribe of Amazonians just walked out of the forest
recently saying they were fed up with living the way their
people have lived for generations past and would like to join
the dominant, imported culture. Chances are they will come
to regret this when they realized that they have no skills that
anyone will pay them a living wage for, so the men start
selling their women for money to buy hooch (as is common
now in some timber and mining camps down there) and by
then it will be way too late to return to their old ways even if
they want to; but meanwhile, they've made a choice as a group
of individuals, so they'd probably agree with you.
On the other hand, many communities (muslim and other-
wise) all over the world would not agree, feeling no particular
impulse to "contribute" to the common technological pot and
holding to a sense of morality of their own that they find
comforting and supportive. They value the smooth, steady,
relatively unchallenged running of their societies over the
more dynamic, chaotic results that they see (or think they see)
of putting a premium on individual choice outside of the
control of religion. That's their choice, not yours and not mine,
and if they want to partake of some of the fruits of a more
dynamic creativity, they can find things to sell that will buy
them sunglasses and blue jeans and penicillin from us. Why
is that a problem? Who are we to tell them that they have to
change? And, of course, vice versa -- who are they to tell us
that *we* have to change? The violence tends to erupt over
precisely those insistences, from one side or the other, being
promoted on one side and resisted on the other.
I don't see how solving this by *making* all other cultures
over in our own image can be done while honoring the idea
of the pre-eminent value of individual choice. People *do*
have choices; a lot of 'em just don't happen to make them
the way you'd like them to. The ones who come here, to live
in America, should have to shift over to American mores -- I
agree with you about that, though I didn't always. I do now:
you come here to make a better life, so make it an American
life in the ways that we say matter the most to us. But if you
stay home -- well, I think we have a right, even a duty in some
cases, to come talk to you about how we think we've got a
better way to do certain things, and maybe sometimes to
take over and make some changes -- as in your example of
India and suttee, I think it was. But you also have the right
to exercise your choice, throw us out of your country, and
decide for ourselves whether we're going to return to the
custom of suttee or not.
> see Hitler and Stalin, Pol Pot, and
> > Kim Il Jun, many (but not all) of the Christian missionaries I
> > met in West Africa, etc etc etc. (This last I have seen close up,
> > and I didn't like it).
>
> Pol Pot and Christian missionaries? You know Christian
> missionaries who have killed people who would be baptized?
Now who's being too literal? I'm talking about approaches to
problems: some, those of dictators, are particularly savage and
destructive. Others are less directly destructive but can have
equally awful effects in more indirect ways. All of the wars
currently plaguing Africa are essentially wars about fights of
burgeoning populations over scarce but essential resources --
farmland, grazing land, clean water, mineral wealth. Some
of those wars have been exacerbated by the religious divisions
created by the work of different sects of missionaries
"converting" different tribes, so that they now slaughter each
other ostensibly in the name of this or that interpretation of
Christianity. For a more indirect example, consider this:
when Xian missionaries demand that their converts kick out
wives #2, 3, and 4 because God says so, those discarded
women can't go home -- their families can't support them,
thanks to Xian values here making birth control technology
unavailable there so there are too many mouths to feed. There
are no jobs for single, rural women except prostitution, which
as practiced in countries where males make the rules does
not involve condoms, so these discarded women have become
a widespread transport system for the rapid spread of STD's,
including AIDS. The extreme masculinism of most African
cultures has been backed up by similar attitudes in
fundamentalist Christianity and Islam, so women become
the major victims and carriers of AIDS and get blamed for
it. Nobody *intended* any of this; missionaries have only
the best, most idealistic intentions. But there it is.
> >
> > In our own Western version of cultures that continually try to
> > widen the areas of choice for individuals, internal populations
> > bent on circumscribing choice in some throwback to more
> > hidebound, traditional ways continually persist -- I'm thinking
> > of extreme fundamentalist groups, from Hutterites to the sort
> > of radical-Right fascistic thinking that the Catholic Church
> > seems to generate when it feels under threat.
>
> But those groups SHOULD exist--if they didn't, then this
> society would NOT grant individuals any real choice.
Exactly. So how does that not work when you turn to look at
a fundie group in another country? Or a whole country that
adopts a fundamentalist program? The Ayatollah Khomeini
had not army when he returned to Iran; he was the choice of
a majority of the people. Now that many people there have
become disillisioned with the rule of his successors, things will
change there, although not slowly enough or (probably) in just
the right ways for you (or, for that matter, for me, in the
abstract).
> It's what the government does--what's OFFICIAL--that matters.
Why? Women in West Africa are going from village to village
organizing meetings about how ruinous and dangerous FGM is
at which local women at last dare to speak to their men about
the horrors of this practice, and the men are slowly abandoning
their demand that their sons only marry women who have been
mutilated. Women did this when governments still turned a
blind eye to the practice, but in some places where governments
have *officially* prohibited it, the practice continues. What
individuals do matters too -- because of the crucial importance
of individual choice, remember that? Enough individual choices
change official policies. Tail, dog; again.
>
> >
> > Ideally, one size does indeed fit all -- that one size depending
> > on your ideals, although idealists will dispute this -- that's
> > what holding to absolute ideals means.
>
> Actually, I don't think there are "absolute" ideals. I think
> there are objectively derived truths about human existence.
That's what I mean by "an idealist". I think perception plays a
huge role in what truths people operate by, outside of the
repeatable measurements of the hard sciences.
> Precisely what I object to are "cultures" that force their one
> size fits all ideas on everybody--a description that fits the Muslim
> states perfectly.
I don't like them, but it's not my job to change them. When
the people living in those cultures see alternatives that they
prefer, they will change those cultures. That's what happened
with Khomeini in Iran, only it went the wrong way -- in our
opinion. They have the right of self-determination, just as we
do -- although I don't like many of their choices and sure as
hell wouldn't make them for myself.
> But defending your "ideals"--I wouldn't defend ideals, I only
> defend principles--at home sometimes can't stay at home. The worst
> cave-in I saw--of people not defending their "ideals" at home--came in
> the refusal of most of the American press to publish the Mohammed
> cartoons, and the rush this government made to apologize for the
> "offense."
No disagreement there; that was stupid and cowardly, IMO.
> It SEEMS to me that
> you think it doesn't much matter what we do, the course of history and
> culture is entirely out of our control and has little or nothing to do
> with our choices.
>
> But that is, one would think, manifestly wrong.
It is wrong, and I don't mean that. But I do think that change
is made by many individual choices, sometimes supporting
what a government does, sometimes opposing it, sometimes
shifting from one to the other as individuals apply their own
experience to their understanding of how things ought to be.
> > So no, we are not going to agree, though we hack and haver
> > over and back across this ground; and life's too short for
> > banging our heads against brick walls, IMO.
> >
> > Suzy
>
> You see, I never understand this sort of comment.
>
> Was the purpose here to change each others minds? I didn't think
> it was. I don't usually get into these discussions to change somebody's
> mind.
No? To demonstrate that you are right, then? Well, you have
demonstrated to me that you *think* you're right, and why. I
agree with some of what you've said, disagree with much else.
Got other things to do. And I think you enjoy argument for its
own sake (or whatever it is you're doing) than I do; one of the
choices I have as an individual is to say that I'm a bit bored
with this for the time being, and ready to talk about other
things for a while; and as it takes two to carry on a conversation . . .
> I'm still fairly bowled over by the fact that I seem to have
> changed your mind about the stance of modern feminism
> towards women in Islam.
Did you? In this way, yes: prodded by what you wrote here,
I went and did some asking around among feminist friends,
young and old, and lo, I found a whole lot of waffling and
whiffling about the subject which I didn't like one bit, though
I can see where it came from: if you take as a *principle* the
idea that individual women have the right to make their own
decisions, then how can you say to some of them, you can make
your own decisions just as long as you *don't* decide to wear
the hijab? It's at that point that the confusion sets in, and
there's been a lot of arguing over it on a couple of feminist
usenet lists that I consulted. So, some attitudes and events
have changed, and a deep division has appeared where I
hadn't noticed one before: no point saying that it's not there
when it is.
Suzy
Crowfoot
"Larisa" <purple...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Jane wrote:
>
> >
> > It's one thing to wage a world war when your entire society is
> > supporting it, another when your media is relentlessly putting across
> > the message that the war is being fought for money and oil, that your
> > own side is no better than the other side and probably worse, that
> > soldiers who die have had their lives wasted, etc, etc, etc.
Jeez, guys, your media? Newspapers and journals are fighting for
their existence against the inroads of quick-fix news on TV for
people increasingly pressed for time and interested in celebrity
over news. Every poll I've seen in nearly forever tells me that the
huge majority of Americans watch Fox News and its various arms,
which most certainly do NOT peddle the line you describe above;
quite the opposite. And have you listened to any of your local
talk radio lately? *Some* of the media are taking an anti-war
stance; most of the people are not attending to those media sources.
They're watching Fox.
Just on the local front, I live in a soutwestern city where the
morning paper is firmly Right wing. There's a running-to-catch-
up afternoon paper that has hardly any news stories, mostly
opinion pieces, which are Left. The morning Journal outsells the
afternoon Trib by several orders of magnitude.
Suzy
Larisa
Crowfoot wrote:
> > Oh, I think it goes a lot farther than that. I think that
> > "cultures that have developed high levels of individual choice" are
> > morally superior to ones that haven't.
>
> And so? The moral high road isn't always available to cultures,
> particularly those living in extreme physical environments.
What extreme physical environments? Oh, you mean the extreme physical
environment that Israel exists in and still manages to function as a
normal first-world country? Amazing how they can handle that "extreme
physical environment", no?
> > Oh, absolutely. I don't think it's possible--and I really think
> > it's wrong--to try to "force foreign cultures to change."
>
> The trouble with the moral high ground is that it is used to
> justify things like the invasion of Iraq; not by you, or by me,
> but by people with the power to "fix", as they see it, those
> "inferior" cultures, with the kinds of results that we see in
> action there now.
Umm, isn't the problem that the Islamic fanatics want to "fix" us -
hence 9/11, the suicide bombings of Israel, the 7/7 bombing in London,
the unrest in Paris, etc?
> > Denying the inherent, inalienable individual rights of citizens
> > isn't just morally wrong, it's pragmatically dysfunctional. The
> > Muslim oil states are some of the materially richest and culturally
> > backwardest (is that a word?) countries on earth--and by culturally
> > backward I don't mean women in chadors, but the lack of invention
> > and creativity in the sciences, in medicine, in engineering. They
> > invent nothing, they contribute nothing but violence. If there
> > wasn't oil under their ground, nobody would pay any attention to
> > them.
>
> I think it takes a fair bit of gall to decide whether a culture you
> only "know" from the outside produces anything worthwhile or
> not. Worthwhile for whom?
For them - look at how their elite lives. Their sons go to Harvard,
Oxford, and other Western universities. They use all the technological
fruits of Western civilization - telephones, electricity, computers,
automobiles, etc. They watch Hollywood movies and wear jeans. They
build luxury hotels that copy those of Europe and the US - and exceed
them in sumptuousness. This is the weirdest thing about it; that they
want to destroy Western civilization while profiting from it in every
possible way. What will they do when the US is gone and Europe is a
third-world mess? I don't know.
LM
Crowfoot
"Larisa" <purple...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Crowfoot wrote:
> > > Oh, I think it goes a lot farther than that. I think that
> > > "cultures that have developed high levels of individual choice" are
> > > morally superior to ones that haven't.
> >
> > And so? The moral high road isn't always available to cultures,
> > particularly those living in extreme physical environments.
>
> What extreme physical environments? Oh, you mean the extreme physical
> environment that Israel exists in and still manages to function as a
> normal first-world country? Amazing how they can handle that "extreme
> physical environment", no?
With a steady feed of vast amounts of $ from the US over the
entire life of the country, why not? And yes, huge amounts of
$ have flowed into some of the Arab countries in exchange for
oil, but their "trickle-down" economics work even more lousily
than ours, so the cases are not comparable. Actually, what I
was thinking about was many tropical and sub-tropical areas
in Africa where extremes of weather and disease vectors make
"moral" decisions rather different than they are here; if you'll
recall, this was in the context of a discussion of comparing
cultures, not specifically about Israel and the Arab states.
> Umm, isn't the problem that the Islamic fanatics want to "fix" us -
> hence 9/11, the suicide bombings of Israel, the 7/7 bombing in London,
> the unrest in Paris, etc?
That's part of the problem; another part of it is US
interests busily trying to "fix" other countries to make
them into cheaper suppliers of labor and raw materials
and easier markets for our finished goods, even if it has
meant rather quieter forms of involuntary "regime change"
in the past. A book called "Confessions of an Economic Hit
Man" has interesting cases to offer.
Suzy
ps -- interesting little sidelight from the BBC tonight, on
politics in Gaza: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5293854.stm
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
> > Oh, I think it goes a lot farther than that. I think that
> > "cultures that have developed high levels of individual choice" are
> > morally superior to ones that haven't.
>
> And so? The moral high road isn't always available to cultures,
Sure it is. There
> particularly those living in extreme physical environments.
I don't really see how "extreme physical environments"
prevent freedom of speech, for instance.
> And how do you square high levels of individual choice with, say,
> female infanticide in very male-centric cultures (which I think
> means most "Third World" cultures)? Keeping in mind that,
> among other things, female children are deliberately aborted
> or killed or sold away because a poor family in India, say, can't
> afford the (relatively) huge outlays needed to marry off girls,
> and can't afford to keep them at home either and feed them,
> and live in places where "jobs" for women don't exist.
In other words, they live in a culture that is already
fundamentally NOT morally decent, and it forces them into even more
fundamentally indecent decisions?
First, "choice" isn't the whole story. A decent depends on a
legal framework which sees each individual as an end in him/herself,
not as the means to the ends of another person, and therefore no decent
society allows wholesale infanticide.
Second, everything else you list up there IS choice--in other
words, there is no reason why ANY society should have high dowries,
except that it wants to. Maybe that's an indication that that culture
is dysfunctional and should either cease to exist or significantly
modify itself.
>
> The trouble with the moral high ground is that it is used to
> justify things like the invasion of Iraq; not by you, or by me,
> but by people with the power to "fix", as they see it, those
> "inferior" cultures, with the kinds of results that we see in
> action there now.
Oh, I don't agree at all.
The basis for invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with whose
culture was inferior or superior, and everything to do with the neoCon
analysis of the dynamics of power--that is, the thesis (which has more
going for it than anybody gives any credit to) that when the UN did not
enforce its own treaties with Saddam it thereby increased terrorist
activity in the world by making it appear that the countries that
opposed that terrorism would not use their full force to defend
themselves.
And that analysis is not wrong--hell, bin Laden himself has
said it's not wrong (that Islam will win because the West is too
cowardly to fight back).
That said, I've seen an awful lot of people--on this forum
even--willing to force their opinions down the throats of their fellow
citizens in spite of piously declaring that they think morality is
relative and no culture is better than any other.
>
> I think it takes a fair bit of gall to decide whether a culture you
> only "know" from the outside produces anything worthwhile or
> not. Worthwhile for whom?
For the human enterprise. Vaccines. New methods of
agriculture. That kind of thing--the kind of thing that means
everybody lives longer and better and in better health than they would
have otherwise. Yes, technology has its downside, but on the whole
things like that have indeed benefited all of us. Those things are
visible for all to see, even people who know nothing about the culture
"from the inside." And right now, nothing like that is coming out of
any of the Islamic states.
Lots of cultures have existed for
> long periods of time entirely unknown to the rest of the world,
> "contributing" nothing anybody knew about but answering the
> needs of their members to their satisfaction.
So? The Islamic states are not unknown to the world.
>
> A little tribe of Amazonians just walked out of the forest
> recently saying they were fed up with living the way their
> people have lived for generations past and would like to join
> the dominant, imported culture.
Actually, this sort of thing is quite common.
Chances are they will come
> to regret this when they realized that they have no skills that
> anyone will pay them a living wage for, so the men start
> selling their women for money to buy hooch (as is common
> now in some timber and mining camps down there) and by
> then it will be way too late to return to their old ways even if
> they want to; but meanwhile, they've made a choice as a group
> of individuals, so they'd probably agree with you.
So, the fact that some people will find modernity hard to handle
means that it's bad, and they were better off living without modern
medicine, agriculture, or comforts like central heating? That
struggling with the obvious drawbacks of being untrained in the modern
world is worse than watching your child die of polio or cholera
because, hey, seems like that traditional medicine doesn't do quite the
same job as vaccines and antibiotics? That it's better to let your
women die in childbirth year after year than to go to work for a timber
company that will pay you not much to work long hours?
I don't know. I think that tribe might have had a point you're
missing.
> On the other hand, many communities (muslim and other-
> wise) all over the world would not agree, feeling no particular
> impulse to "contribute" to the common technological pot and
> holding to a sense of morality of their own that they find
> comforting and supportive.
Well, they're certainly welcome to their opinion.
They value the smooth, steady,
> relatively unchallenged running of their societies over the
> more dynamic, chaotic results that they see (or think they see)
> of putting a premium on individual choice outside of the
> control of religion.
Um...you really think that what was going on in Afghanistan
under the Taliban was "the smooth, steady..." etc?
You don't think that the number of executions of women for
adultery, of men for homosexuality, etc, doesn't give SOME indication
that these societies never run smoothly?
That's their choice, not yours and not mine,
> and if they want to partake of some of the fruits of a more
> dynamic creativity, they can find things to sell that will buy
> them sunglasses and blue jeans and penicillin from us. Why
> is that a problem?
It isn't a problem, until they want to blow me up because I
insist on criticizing Islam and Muhammed in my newspapers or my web
sites.
But there IS something wrong with executing women for adultery
and men for homosexuality, and there IS something wrong about banning
women from learning to read or drive, and there IS something wrong
about slavery--something MORALLY wrong that is wrong from them as it is
for us, that is not a matter of opinion. And they can structure their
society as they want, but I am not only within my rights to point out
th immorality of it, I am morally obliged to do so.
Who are we to tell them that they have to
> change?
I haven't suggested we tell them they have to change. I've only
suggested that we point out that they're wrong. Because they are
wrong, in the instances per above.
And, of course, vice versa -- who are they to tell us
> that *we* have to change? The violence tends to erupt over
> precisely those insistences, from one side or the other, being
> promoted on one side and resisted on the other.
Um, no. The violence tends to erupt from the wounded amour
propre of a culture that has failed in ITS OWN eyes and won't accept
responsibility for that failure.
>
> I don't see how solving this by *making* all other cultures
> over in our own image can be done while honoring the idea
> of the pre-eminent value of individual choice.
First, the "pre-eminent value" isn't "individual choice." The
issue is individual RIGHTS, which is based on the pre-eminent value
that each human being must be treated as an end in himself and not as
the means to the end of any other person.
Second, I have not suggested making anybody over into our
image, but only recognizing that some choices are dysfunctional and
wrong. They are. You certainly have the right to drink and drug your
way to an early grave, but that doesn't mean that that choice is "just
as good" as spending your life working as a cancer researcher.
>>People *do*
> have choices; a lot of 'em just don't happen to make them
> the way you'd like them to.
Oh, I agree. PEOPLE have choices--not "cultures." "Cultures"
decide nothing. Individuals make the decisions.
But please, tell me about the choices people make that you don't
approve of that you'd still allow them to make. How about opening a
restaurant where smoking is allowed in all the rooms? What about
hiring only white people--or men--in their businesses?
The ones who come here, to live
> in America, should have to shift over to American mores -- I
> agree with you about that, though I didn't always. I do now:
> you come here to make a better life, so make it an American
> life in the ways that we say matter the most to us. But if you
> stay home -- well, I think we have a right, even a duty in some
> cases, to come talk to you about how we think we've got a
> better way to do certain things, and maybe sometimes to
> take over and make some changes -- as in your example of
> India and suttee, I think it was.
Interesting. I wouldn't in general have supported the British
takeover of India even given things like suttee.
> > Pol Pot and Christian missionaries? You know Christian
> > missionaries who have killed people who would be baptized?
>
> Now who's being too literal? I'm talking about approaches to
> problems: some, those of dictators, are particularly savage and
> destructive.
No. By making the statement that way, you're at least implicitly
setting up a moral equivalence between Christian missionary activity
and genocide. They're not the same thing. They're not even the same
category of thing.
For a more indirect example, consider this:
> when Xian missionaries demand that their converts kick out
> wives #2, 3, and 4 because God says so, those discarded
> women can't go home -- their families can't support them,
> thanks to Xian values here making birth control technology
> unavailable there so there are too many mouths to feed. There
> are no jobs for single, rural women except prostitution, which
> as practiced in countries where males make the rules does
> not involve condoms, so these discarded women have become
> a widespread transport system for the rapid spread of STD's,
> including AIDS. The extreme masculinism of most African
> cultures has been backed up by similar attitudes in
> fundamentalist Christianity and Islam, so women become
> the major victims and carriers of AIDS and get blamed for
> it. Nobody *intended* any of this; missionaries have only
> the best, most idealistic intentions. But there it is.
And your point is--what? You seem to be confirming my point, not
yours--some cultures are deeply dysfunctional. Some cultural systems
are morally wrong and we should say so. "Masculinism" isn't a force of
nature like a hurricane. It's a matter of individual moral choice.
Nor are traditional Christian attitudes to the status of women in
any way comparable to Muslim ones. Whatever the public rhetoric, there
were always powerful and influential women in the Christian churches,
and missionary societies tend to rely heavily on women to teach.
There's no chador, and no "you always have to be accompanied by a male
or you're considered defiled and must die."
>
> > It's what the government does--what's OFFICIAL--that matters.
>
> Why?
Because what's official is the policy of the country.
Individuals within a country can believe a lot of things, but only once
their view has been enthroned by law is it the actual view OF THE
COUNTRY.
It's like my thing with Ian on whether Britian is a racist
society. That's determined not by whether some INDIVIDUAL Britons hold
racist attitudes, but by the laws of the country, which are
determinedly ANTI-racist in the case of Britain.
It's also the case that the government has an enforcement arm,
and individuals only have one IF the government allows them to. So,
actively or passively, the government must enforce an attitude or idea
before it has real force. If the government does neither--if FGM is
outlawed in law and vigorously prosecuted (rather than ignored) when it
occurs--then individuals are free to refuse the practice.
Yes, public opinion is a powerful thing, but there's a BIG
difference between "my neighbors will hate me" and "the government will
execute me."
>
> That's what I mean by "an idealist". I think perception plays a
> huge role in what truths people operate by, outside of the
> repeatable measurements of the hard sciences.
Perceptions do play a role, but truth--including moral
truth--does exist, is objective, and can be discovered.
>
> > Precisely what I object to are "cultures" that force their one
> > size fits all ideas on everybody--a description that fits the Muslim
> > states perfectly.
>
> I don't like them, but it's not my job to change them.
I never suggested that anybody should change them.
> > But defending your "ideals"--I wouldn't defend ideals, I
only
> > defend principles--at home sometimes can't stay at home. The worst
> > cave-in I saw--of people not defending their "ideals" at home--came in
> > the refusal of most of the American press to publish the Mohammed
> > cartoons, and the rush this government made to apologize for the
> > "offense."
>
> No disagreement there; that was stupid and cowardly, IMO.
Yes, but there's no way that that stand could have stayed "at
home." Those cartoons went up on the Net. There's no way to
completely isolate a culture any more unless you do what the Taliban
did. Therefore, defending freedom of expression will inevitably mean
that I insist that Islamic countries who don't like things like the
cartoons are just going to have to put up with them, even on their OWN
territory, when they enter via things like the Internet.
> >
> > Was the purpose here to change each others minds? I didn't think
> > it was. I don't usually get into these discussions to change somebody's
> > mind.
>
> No? To demonstrate that you are right, then?
No. For the sake of the exposition. I don't think that the
chief arguers in these discussions ever change their minds--but a lot
of people who have NOT made up their minds read the threads, and the
point of the threads is to lay out the various positions in such a way
that they are clear to those third party readers.
> I can see where it came from: if you take as a *principle* the
> idea that individual women have the right to make their own
> decisions, then how can you say to some of them, you can make
> your own decisions just as long as you *don't* decide to wear
> the hijab? It's at that point that the confusion sets in,
Mostly because you don't make a distinction between individual and
government action.
OF COURSE an individual woman has the right to decide to live in a
traditional Islamic marriage and wear the hijab.
It only becomes problematic when the government REQUIRES her to,
or when a government does not enforce its own laws (against, for
instance, domestic violence) in order to "honor" that culture.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
> > Jane wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > It's one thing to wage a world war when your entire society is
> > > supporting it, another when your media is relentlessly putting across
> > > the message that the war is being fought for money and oil, that your
> > > own side is no better than the other side and probably worse, that
> > > soldiers who die have had their lives wasted, etc, etc, etc.
>
> Jeez, guys, your media? Newspapers and journals are fighting for
> their existence against the inroads of quick-fix news on TV for
> people increasingly pressed for time and interested in celebrity
> over news. Every poll I've seen in nearly forever tells me that the
> huge majority of Americans watch Fox News and its various arms,
> which most certainly do NOT peddle the line you describe above;
> quite the opposite. And have you listened to any of your local
> talk radio lately? *Some* of the media are taking an anti-war
> stance; most of the people are not attending to those media sources.
> They're watching Fox.
You miss the point.
First, only 55% of people watching cable news watch Fox, which is
a majority, but not a "vast" one, and most of those people--as with
most of the other 45%--don't watch ONLY Fox.
Second, Fox definitely pushes against prevailing establishment
media takes on the war, but that in no way makes it the sort of media
we had in WWII. Fox argues against the 'blood and oil" thesis, but
that means that the "blood and oil" thesis is out there and people ARE
aware of it, as they are aware of (and Fox can neither prevent nor
fix) stories about American "atrocities," soldiers doing evil things,
etc.
Some soldiers did evil things in WWII, but they were not reported
or, if they were, were reported as abberrations, not as if they gave a
true picture of the state of the military. And war
secrets--wiretapping, infilitration, etc--were never reported at all.
>
> Just on the local front, I live in a soutwestern city where the
> morning paper is firmly Right wing. There's a running-to-catch-
> up afternoon paper that has hardly any news stories, mostly
> opinion pieces, which are Left. The morning Journal outsells the
> afternoon Trib by several orders of magnitude.
And that tells you...what?
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
> In article <1156800680.4...@75g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
> "Larisa" <purple...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> > What extreme physical environments? Oh, you mean the extreme physical
> > environment that Israel exists in and still manages to function as a
> > normal first-world country? Amazing how they can handle that "extreme
> > physical environment", no?
>
> With a steady feed of vast amounts of $ from the US over the
> entire life of the country, why not?
Well, for one thing, because most of the money that comes from
the US is in military aid, which Israel needs because it is under
relentless and unending attack. It still has managed to build a
modern industrial society.
And yes, huge amounts of
> $ have flowed into some of the Arab countries in exchange for
> oil,
Far more than goes to Israel, as a matter of fact. So if it was
just US AID that explained the difference, the Arab countries should be
mare more technologically advanced and scientifically productive than
Israel.
but their "trickle-down" economics work even more lousily
> than ours, so the cases are not comparable.
In other words, the Arab countries made different cultural
decisions than Israel, and failed where Israel has succeeded.
YES the cases are comparable. If anything, the Arab states have
BETTER "environments" than Israel. Israel seems to be the one place
in the region without oil.
And, by the way, Arab countries do not practice "trickle down"
anything. "Trickle down" is a thesis with quite a complicated set of
controls, NONE of which operate in the Islamic Middle East. Why is it
that people who insist on calling me "simplistic" never seem to be able
to work out the nuances in cases like this? The vaguest, most nebulous
and uninformed apparent "similarity" is enough to equate two things
that are, in reality, nothing like each other.
But the fact remains--the Israel and Iran, Israel and Iraq,
Israel and Afghanistan ARE comparable cases, and they tell us a lot
about the relative morality of cultural decisions, and the relative
morality of cultures.
>
> > Umm, isn't the problem that the Islamic fanatics want to "fix" us -
> > hence 9/11, the suicide bombings of Israel, the 7/7 bombing in London,
> > the unrest in Paris, etc?
>
> That's part of the problem; another part of it is US
> interests busily trying to "fix" other countries to make
> them into cheaper suppliers of labor and raw materials
> and easier markets for our finished goods, even if it has
> meant rather quieter forms of involuntary "regime change"
> in the past.
Oh, I don't agree with this at all. I don't think this has been
our customary position in the world--if this is what we were really
after, the world would look very different than it does now--nor do I
think this is the driving force behind our policies in the Middle East,
etc. I'm not saying it NEVER is, but only that it is not as a rule.
And quite often we clearly violate our own interests in the
interests of upholding ideas of fairness and justice, some of which are
misguided, but none of which amount to this sort of cynical
realpolitik. In reality, the US is very bad at realpolitik.
As for this:
A book called "Confessions of an Economic Hit
> Man" has interesting cases to offer.
Perkins' book was interesting enough, but it in no way "proves"
your contention that US policy is based on making labor cheap, etc, in
other countries. His "examples" are largely uncorroborated, his
interpretations of other people's motives are just
that--interpretations--and he does an awful lot of emotional
hyperventilating. I get very suspicious when somebody produces a work
that is not particularly original and then claims that people were
trying to kill him to stop him from publishing.
I think that for all the incredibly disheartening confusion in
thinking, the IMF, etc, including us, are indeed trying to do the right
thing by the Third World, because it really isn't in anybody's
interests to keep them poor and disenfranchised. Most businessmen can
count. They know that trading very low wages for higher wages and
VASTLY expanded markets would be a massively good deal for them.
>
> ps -- interesting little sidelight from the BBC tonight, on
> politics in Gaza: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5293854.stm
Okay, this was actually funny.
Especially this:
<<<Such frank self-criticism is rare among Palestinian leaders,
analysts say.
>>>
RARE? It's bloody nonexistent, most of the time.
<<<Hamas has also been paralysed by the crushing Western and Israeli
economic boycott imposed because it has refused to renounce violence
and accept Israel's right to exist.
Ah, yes. Well, it's the BBC. So, of course, in the end, they
have to confirm that it's at least PARTLY the fault of the US and
Israel.
Bad Israel, refusing to deal with a country that says it wants
to exterminate it! Bad US, supporting them!
Jane
And here's another one from the Ottawa Citizen, the same David Warren
Chris was surprised to find he agreed with. Who is this person?
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/08/the_west_invites_attack.html
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
elf
Jane...@aol.com says...
>
>And here's another one from the Ottawa Citizen, the same David Warren
>Chris was surprised to find he agreed with. Who is this person?
>
Well, FWIW:
http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/about.php
elf
Jane
Okay. The 100 facts about himself are hysterical, if a little
heavy on the religion in the early stages (if you get into the 60s, it
turns out he's a convert to Catholicism, which explains a lot).
But, hey--Bach! Indian food! Hayek! Jane Austen!
The man at least has reasonably good taste.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
elf
Jane...@aol.com says...
Well, except for the dog thing.
But then he's never met my little fox terrier.
elf
Crowfoot
"Jane" <Jane...@aol.com> wrote:
> . . . most of the money that comes from
> the US is in military aid, which Israel needs because it is under
> relentless and unending attack. It still has managed to build a
> modern industrial society.
The official part, yes; but there have always been large
amounts funneled to Israel by supportive groups here in the
US as well; and much of the formal US aid, according to
various articles I've seen, has in the recent past been spent
on first luring settlers to the West Bank with (comparatively)
luxurious living quarters (swimming pools included) and
other subsidies, and then more recently on rewarding some
of them -- a token few from the most outlying, difficult to
defend settlements -- for returning from there to re-settle in
Israel proper.
> but their "trickle-down" economics work even more lousily
> > than ours, so the cases are not comparable.
>
> In other words, the Arab countries made different cultural
> decisions than Israel, and failed where Israel has succeeded.
Another view is that repressive, oil-rich Arab regimes supported
by the US have, not surprisingly, behaved like tyrants and kept
everything for themselves. Some surprise, and entirely in
character for their US patron as well -- see outrageous hand-outs
that our Congress persists in giving to itself, tax-breaks and huge
non-bid contracts tossed to Admin cronies, and yesterday's report
that the latest US economic expansion in the upper ranks hasn't
touched the working poor but has merely left them further behind.
> YES the cases are comparable. If anything, the Arab states have
> BETTER "environments" than Israel. Israel seems to be the one place
> in the region without oil.
Oil isn't the real treasure in that part of the world, not any more;
water is. Israel has taken control of most of the water in the region,
which makes it very rich indeed, and permanently subject to the
possibility of wars over resources, even if the Israelis were ice-
cream worshippers from Neptune.
> And, by the way, Arab countries do not practice "trickle down"
> anything. "Trickle down" is a thesis with quite a complicated set of
> controls
Controls? Where are the "controls" in a system justified by the
expression "A rising tide floats all boats"? Which turns out to be
balderdash, by the way, with regard to our economy, at any rate
(see poverty figure reports and alarmed articles about same in
today's news).
> But the fact remains--the Israel and Iran, Israel and Iraq,
> Israel and Afghanistan ARE comparable cases
No, they are not, IMO.
> A book called "Confessions of an Economic Hit
> > Man" has interesting cases to offer.
>
> Perkins' book was interesting enough, but it in no way "proves"
> your contention that US policy is based on making labor cheap, etc, in
> other countries. His "examples" are largely uncorroborated, his
> interpretations of other people's motives are just
> that--interpretations--and he does an awful lot of emotional
> hyperventilating. I get very suspicious when somebody produces a work
> that is not particularly original and then claims that people were
> trying to kill him to stop him from publishing.
Right; you didn't like it. I found it very interesting, and a
lot more of it was convincing to me than to you. So?
> I think that for all the incredibly disheartening confusion in
> thinking, the IMF, etc, including us, are indeed trying to do the right
> thing by the Third World, because it really isn't in anybody's
> interests to keep them poor and disenfranchised. Most businessmen can
> count. They know that trading very low wages for higher wages and
> VASTLY expanded markets would be a massively good deal for them.
You know, I'm sure a lot of them do know this; but knowing
something and acting on it, when there are so many pressures on
you and your corporation to act out of plain, ordinary greed, are
two different things. The annals of colonialism are loaded with
examples of nations that practiced these odd forms of exchange --
"We take your raw materials for a pittance, add on lots of value
by processing it at home, and then we sell it back to you at a nice
high price" -- for long periods of time without running out of
markets worth selling to. See the British Raj and the cotton
trade, e.g.
> > ps -- interesting little sidelight from the BBC tonight, on
> > politics in Gaza: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5293854.stm
>
> Okay, this was actually funny.
>
> Especially this:
>
> <<<Such frank self-criticism is rare among Palestinian leaders,
> analysts say.
Yes -- so your response to someone having the nerve to come out
and say this stuff is to laugh? Seems a little odd to me,
considering that the guy has probably put his life in danger by
saying things so unpopular on his home ground.
> <<<Hamas has also been paralysed by the crushing Western and Israeli
> economic boycott imposed because it has refused to renounce violence
> and accept Israel's right to exist.
>
> Ah, yes. Well, it's the BBC. So, of course, in the end, they
> have to confirm that it's at least PARTLY the fault of the US and
> Israel.
I think it's just the news. Are you denying that there's been
a boycott in place? There's also been an Israeli blockade of
the Lebanese coastline that has prevented essential and
immediate action to clean up a vast oil spill in that portion of
the Mediterranean Sea, caused in the first place by Israeli
bombing of -- as I recall -- a power plant at that location; news
that comes from several sources, though no doubt you will
dismiss it because it doesn't support your view of the Israelis
as blameless no matter what they do.
> Bad Israel, refusing to deal with a country that says it wants
> to exterminate it! Bad US, supporting them!
"Bad" Israel, pretending for decades that it never displaced
an Arab population from Palestine, and then beating up on
the Palestinian Arabs for insisting that they had and objecting
to it. That has been the root cause, IMO (not, I know, in yours)
of the whole damned mess, although refusing to address it in
any responsible way for so long has exacerbated the situation
so that it might no longer be settle-able by any means short of
all-out war; which would probably take a good deal of the rest
of the world with it, which, frankly, I think is way too high a
price to pay for ill-advised Israeli policies vis a vis its own
local Arab populations. My position is pretty fairly laid out
in an article called "A Tale of Two Failures" by Martin
Jacques, Guardian, August 16-24 of this year, which you (and,
presumably, Jane H.) will dismiss out of hand as "anti-
Semitic". Tough. I'm a reasonably nice Jewish girl myself,
and I do not agree, and neither do a whole lot of other Jews
with a sense of justice that reaches back further than the last
Hezbollah rocket launched from Lebanon.
Now flame away if you wish to, I'm done with this; it's too
far OT, in my opinion, for a list that's normally friendly and
smart and which people frequent for the rewards of friendly
discussion of mystery novels, not (speaking for myself anyway)
caustic and basically pointless political wrangling.
Suzy
Larisa
Crowfoot wrote:
> In article <1156852785....@75g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
> "Jane" <Jane...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > . . . most of the money that comes from
> > the US is in military aid, which Israel needs because it is under
> > relentless and unending attack. It still has managed to build a
> > modern industrial society.
>
> The official part, yes; but there have always been large
> amounts funneled to Israel by supportive groups here in the
> US as well; and much of the formal US aid, according to
> various articles I've seen, has in the recent past been spent
> on first luring settlers to the West Bank with (comparatively)
> luxurious living quarters (swimming pools included) and
> other subsidies, and then more recently on rewarding some
> of them -- a token few from the most outlying, difficult to
> defend settlements -- for returning from there to re-settle in
> Israel proper.
Data? Figures? Facts? How much was spent on this, versus
weapons/defense?
> > but their "trickle-down" economics work even more lousily
> > > than ours, so the cases are not comparable.
> >
> > In other words, the Arab countries made different cultural
> > decisions than Israel, and failed where Israel has succeeded.
>
> Another view is that repressive, oil-rich Arab regimes supported
> by the US have, not surprisingly, behaved like tyrants and kept
> everything for themselves.
Umm, and this is our fault... how? We made them repressive? If so,
why isn't Israel repressive and tyrannical? It gets US money, too.
Or can we admit that the US is not the only player in this game, and
that the blame should rest with the Arab nations who are depriving
their citizens of their basic rights?
>
> Oil isn't the real treasure in that part of the world, not any more;
> water is. Israel has taken control of most of the water in the region,
> which makes it very rich indeed, and permanently subject to the
> possibility of wars over resources, even if the Israelis were ice-
> cream worshippers from Neptune.
Look at a map. No, really - look at a map. "Most of the water in the
region" is contained in Israel? What is it, a reservoir? It's tiny,
and just as much of a desert as the surrounding countries. Please,
support your assertion by a map of the water resources of the region -
I have the feeling the map is going to show something other than what
you're saying.
> I think it's just the news. Are you denying that there's been
> a boycott in place? There's also been an Israeli blockade of
> the Lebanese coastline that has prevented essential and
> immediate action to clean up a vast oil spill in that portion of
> the Mediterranean Sea, caused in the first place by Israeli
> bombing of -- as I recall -- a power plant at that location;
... caused in the *first* place by unprovoked, and relentless,
Hizbollah bombing of Israeli civilians. Or are we forgetting that?
LM
Jane
Crowfoot wrote:
> In article <1156852785....@75g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
> "Jane" <Jane...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > . . . most of the money that comes from
> > the US is in military aid, which Israel needs because it is under
> > relentless and unending attack. It still has managed to build a
> > modern industrial society.
>
> The official part, yes; but there have always been large
> amounts funneled to Israel by supportive groups here in the
> US as well;
None of which can even begin to equal what the Arab oil states
make from oil--do you have any idea how MUCH that is? And lately, with
oil prices high, it's more.
It's not the amount of money coming in, but what people do with
it, that matters here.
> >
> > In other words, the Arab countries made different cultural
> > decisions than Israel, and failed where Israel has succeeded.
>
> Another view is that repressive, oil-rich Arab regimes supported
> by the US have, not surprisingly, behaved like tyrants and kept
> everything for themselves. Some surprise, and entirely in
> character for their US patron as well -- see outrageous hand-outs
> that our Congress persists in giving to itself, tax-breaks and huge
> non-bid contracts tossed to Admin cronies, and yesterday's report
> that the latest US economic expansion in the upper ranks hasn't
> touched the working poor but has merely left them further behind.
Oh, nonsense. More moral equivalence where none is warranted.
But what exactly is the solution here? We can't have regime
change--that's wrong. But it's equally wrong to support the regime.
The Arab states aren't tyrannical because we made them that way.
They were tyrannical before we ever got there. If we withdraw every
single dime of our support tomorrow, they'd go on being tyrannical and
they'd go on being in power. Hell, the EU would provide them with
whatever we stopped providing them with, if they decided they needed
even more handouts.
As to the working poor, etc, and the terrible evil Bush
administration, taking all the money away from the middle class, I read
an interesting article today, from Third Way, a Democratic think tank.
You might want to check it out, because misunderstanding what this
economy is really like for most people is one of the big problems with
Democratic Party campaigns:
http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/0609/kima.php
>
> Oil isn't the real treasure in that part of the world, not any more;
> water is. Israel has taken control of most of the water in the region,
> which makes it very rich indeed, and permanently subject to the
> possibility of wars over resources, even if the Israelis were ice-
> cream worshippers from Neptune.
Israel has taken over control of most of the water IN THE
REGION? It controls the water in Iraq? In Saudi Arabia? In Egypt?
That's some trick--it has managed, in spite of being bombed
endlessly and having a country to run, to take control of the resources
of states that hate it and that are several countries away from it.
Let's face it. Israel must be full of geniuses.
If our need for oil disappeared tomorrow, so would any interest
the rest of the world has in "the region." "The region" might fight
among itself for water, but the money would dry up--no more hundreds of
millions of dollars in revenues A DAY. We really wouldn't pay it for
water.
>
> > And, by the way, Arab countries do not practice "trickle down"
> > anything. "Trickle down" is a thesis with quite a complicated set of
> > controls
>
> Controls? Where are the "controls" in a system justified by the
> expression "A rising tide floats all boats"? Which turns out to be
> balderdash, by the way, with regard to our economy, at any rate
> (see poverty figure reports and alarmed articles about same in
> today's news).
Well, as to "balderdash," see that article I posted above.
That said, "trickle down" is an economic theory, and it rests on
a set of assumptions about the structure of the economy. Without that
structure, "trickle down" isn't even projected to work. Among the
other things the "trickle down" theory assumes will be true as part of
the economic environment: a stable investment environment (that is,
the rule of law upholding contracts, especially); the fluidity of labor
(relatively few bars to personal advancement--no laws against Jews
owning businesses or Hindus teaching school); the fluidity of capital
(a stable monetary system and institutions protecting the integrity of
stock and other markets so that you can move your money around when you
see a need to).
None of these conditions applies in the Arab oil states,
althought most of them do in Israel.
"Trickle down" says this: if you want to increase the standard
of living of all your people, your best bet is to make sure money is in
the hands of people both able and willing to invest it, because when
you invest money that money goes to build businesses, and growing
businesses hire more workers, who in turn need goods and services that
make other business grow to provide them, in turn hiring more workers,
who...
This is not entirely silly. In fact, it's a fair description of
how the world works. Whether that description justifies any particular
tax policy is another story, but "trickle down" was never a little
throwaway line with nothing behind it.
> > Perkins' book was interesting enough, but it in no way "proves"
> > your contention that US policy is based on making labor cheap, etc, in
> > other countries. His "examples" are largely uncorroborated, his
> > interpretations of other people's motives are just
> > that--interpretations--and he does an awful lot of emotional
> > hyperventilating. I get very suspicious when somebody produces a work
> > that is not particularly original and then claims that people were
> > trying to kill him to stop him from publishing.
>
> Right; you didn't like it. I found it very interesting, and a
> lot more of it was convincing to me than to you. So?
Actually, I didn't just say I didn't like it. I said that it
did not provide the evidence it needed to to support its allegations.
>
> > I think that for all the incredibly disheartening confusion in
> > thinking, the IMF, etc, including us, are indeed trying to do the right
> > thing by the Third World, because it really isn't in anybody's
> > interests to keep them poor and disenfranchised. Most businessmen can
> > count. They know that trading very low wages for higher wages and
> > VASTLY expanded markets would be a massively good deal for them.
>
> You know, I'm sure a lot of them do know this; but knowing
> something and acting on it, when there are so many pressures on
> you and your corporation to act out of plain, ordinary greed, are
> two different things.
Well, I was talking about the IMF, not corporations. The only
duty of a corporation is to maximize its value to its stockholders. I
don't even want it to do anything else, and I'm not worried that by
doing that it will lead us down to all that nasty "greed." Greed tends
to be dysfunctional, too.
But I think the real issue is this: too many people who criticize
the actions of the first world in the third world don't accept what
should be obvious--that it isn't always possible to know what would in
fact work to fix the situations involved.
But I'll go farther than that--I think the overall effect of
global capitalism has been positive, ESPECIALLY for most of the Third
World. That's NOT the same as saying that corporations never do
anything nasty--of course they do, all the time--but that some of what
looks to us, from where we sit in comfort, like "exploitation," looks
to the people who work in it like opportunity, which is why they
abandon they're "traditional" ways of life to go work in clothing
factories instead.
I think too many people in the West romanticize the hell out of
"traditional" cultures, something that is only possible because we can
have central heating and antibiotics any time we want, and our lives
are never circumscribed within the narrow confines of a
pre-technological village.
>
> Yes -- so your response to someone having the nerve to come out
> and say this stuff is to laugh? Seems a little odd to me,
> considering that the guy has probably put his life in danger by
> saying things so unpopular on his home ground.
No. I was laughing at the rather disingenuous way the BBC
reported on it.
>
> I think it's just the news. Are you denying that there's been
> a boycott in place? There's also been an Israeli blockade of
> the Lebanese coastline that has prevented essential and
> immediate action to clean up a vast oil spill in that portion of
> the Mediterranean Sea, caused in the first place by Israeli
> bombing of -- as I recall -- a power plant at that location; news
> that comes from several sources, though no doubt you will
> dismiss it because it doesn't support your view of the Israelis
> as blameless no matter what they do.
But I have no such view of Israel. The only two choices aren't
"Israel is always blameless in everything they do" or "the two sides
are equally at fault."
But I don't have to dismiss the news as reported above--as far as
I'm concerned, Israel had the moral and (in the history of war)
customary right not just to take out a power plant or to blockade
Lebanese ports, but to flatten every stick in Hezbollah-controlled
Lebanon to the ground.
My position is pretty fairly laid out
> in an article called "A Tale of Two Failures" by Martin
> Jacques, Guardian, August 16-24 of this year, which you (and,
> presumably, Jane H.)
Actually, you're responding to me (Jane)
Do you always tell other people how they're going to respond to
things? With me, you're largely wrong, and you seem to think I've said
things I've never come close to saying.
> Now flame away if you wish to, I'm done with this; it's too
> far OT, in my opinion, for a list that's normally friendly and
> smart and which people frequent for the rewards of friendly
> discussion of mystery novels, not (speaking for myself anyway)
> caustic and basically pointless political wrangling.
I don't think anybody has flamed anybody on this list, nor do I
think that anybody has been less than friendly.
The other day, I got sent to a newsgroup I hadn't seen before,
called soc.history.medieval. I bring it up because you may remember
it--in lurking around on it for a day or two I found a post from you.
I don't know if you spend any time there regularly, but it
reminded me right away of MOST of the forums I've seen where people
discuss politics. On the liberal forums, there are a lot of very
aggressive liberal posters abusing the hell out of the one
conservative, who is a complete and utter idiot.
(Elf and Cathy, take notice: the conservative on
soc.history.medieval sounds EXACTLY like Tip. He finds everything
"hilarious." Etc. I kept wondering if this was a pseudonym.)
Anyway, the conservative forums are the same way--a whole bunch
of very aggressive conservative posters abusing the hell out of the one
liberal, who is also a complete and utter idiot.
Therefore, people on both sides, never venturing from the coccoon
of their biased little newsgroups, can pronounce triumphantly: see?
there's my way or stupidity!
But RAM is not like that. There are intelligent posters on
several sides of every issue here. It's not so easy to say, "well,
there are my positions and those are rational, and the only reason
anybody disagrees is because he's stupid."
And that makes any poltical discussion here far from pointless.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com
Jr@Ease
Many a Quaint and Curious Forgotten Post, and then wrote:
--------------------------------------------------------------
>several sides of every issue here. It's not so easy to say, "well,
>there are my positions and those are rational, and the only reason
>anybody disagrees is because he's stupid."
>
> And that makes any poltical discussion here far from pointless.
Let me pipe in on this particular point. I agree with Jane that
discussion, even robust, sometimes aggressive, discussion, is not the
same as flame. I've said it before, but it's what I really admire
about this newsgroup. I don't know whether it's the force of
personailities here, or the underlying fact that we are all voracious
readers, or some other self moderating factor, but even though I FEEL
like I'm sometimes being abused, I don't actually THINK I'm being
abused when someone disagrees with me, and even tells me in no
uncertain terms what an idiot I am.
Big difference.
John
Larisa
Yup. I am always impressed by how deeply people can disagree here
while still maintaining an impressive level of civility. Personally, I
enjoy the chance to hear other people's views and to air my own, and to
find some common ground between opposing views (I'm going to be a
lawyer in 3 years - this is good practice...) There's nothing wrong
about disagreement, as long as it is conducted in a civilized fashion.
LM
Mary
Don't worry, Larisa, we'll still talk to you then.
Mary
Pogonip
> Ditto.
>
> I like to come here to see what people are thinking about (as Bill
> Clinton endearingly said on WORDPLAY.) I honestly doubt whether
> off-topic postings drive the on-topic ones out; I think they attract a
> good many people who then post on topic as well as off.
>
> Strangely enough, I am bothered by off-topic postings on boards and
> lists that officially discourage them.
>
This is a newsgroup about mystery. Life is a mystery. Therefore,
everything is "on-topic."
Well, maybe not everything.....
--
Joanne
stitches @ singerlady.reno.nv.us.earth.milky-way.com
http://members.tripod.com/~bernardschopen/
A R Pickett
(as Bill
> Clinton endearingly said on WORDPLAY.) I honestly doubt whether
> off-topic postings drive the on-topic ones out;
I know quite a few former regular posters who no longer participate. I
haven't polled any of them to know why, but I recognize quite a few familiar
names on various moderated mystery forums on other servers.
I continue to hang around, and I have done my share of off topic posting. I
don't make these comments to change RAM or to attempt to squelch off topic
conversations.
But anyone who thinks off topic discussions which go on and on for days and
sometimes weeks, while there is little or no discussion of books (and be
honest with yourselves folks, this DOES happen) have not prompted book
lovers and avid readers to move to another forum is kidding him/herself.
--
A R Pickett aka Woodstock
"Sometimes the facts threaten the truth"
Amos Oz, prize winning Israeli author
Read my book reviews at:
http://www.booksnbytes.com/reviews/_idx_ws_all_byauth.html
Remove lower case "e" to respond
Pogonip
> vj found this in rec.arts.mystery, from "A R Pickett"
> <WOODeS...@PReODIGeY.NET> :
>
> ]I know quite a few former regular posters who no longer participate. I
> ]haven't polled any of them to know why, but I recognize quite a few familiar
> ]names on various moderated mystery forums on other servers.
>
> but without the OT posts on RAM, and alt.callahans [thanks again, Dusty]
> where NOTHING is OT, i wouldn't have anyone to share opinions WITH!
> or to find out there really are other people out there who share the same
> opinions.
>
> [yes, i need to get out more, why do you ask?]
>
>
People change. Needs change. Available time changes. My own past is
littered with abandoned email lists, boards, newsgroups, that no longer
meet my needs or interests, although they did at one time. That's just
life!
Mary
A R Pickett wrote:
> Naomi wrote - > I like to come here to see what people are thinking about
> (as Bill
> > Clinton endearingly said on WORDPLAY.) I honestly doubt whether
> > off-topic postings drive the on-topic ones out;
>
> I know quite a few former regular posters who no longer participate. I
> haven't polled any of them to know why, but I recognize quite a few familiar
> names on various moderated mystery forums on other servers.
>
> I continue to hang around, and I have done my share of off topic posting. I
> don't make these comments to change RAM or to attempt to squelch off topic
> conversations.
>
> But anyone who thinks off topic discussions which go on and on for days and
> sometimes weeks, while there is little or no discussion of books (and be
> honest with yourselves folks, this DOES happen) have not prompted book
> lovers and avid readers to move to another forum is kidding him/herself.
Sure, but I think that's okay. If people are looking for a moderated
forum, Usenet isn't it. They were in the wrong place, and they
corrected it by finding something that's more to their liking.
Me, I find the moderated, be on topic or be gone discussion groups to
be dull as hell. I haven't read DorothyL in years.
Mary
Joan in GB-W
> I know quite a few former regular posters who no longer participate. I
> haven't polled any of them to know why, but I recognize quite a few
familiar
> names on various moderated mystery forums on other servers.
>
> I continue to hang around, and I have done my share of off topic posting.
I
> don't make these comments to change RAM or to attempt to squelch off topic
> conversations.
>
> But anyone who thinks off topic discussions which go on and on for days
and
> sometimes weeks, while there is little or no discussion of books (and be
> honest with yourselves folks, this DOES happen) have not prompted book
> lovers and avid readers to move to another forum is kidding him/herself.
>
> --
> A R Pickett aka Woodstock
And that is all right. That is there choice.
If they would rather be talking mysteries, what is stopping them from
initiating mystery book discussions here. Do they just sit and wait for
others to do so. Again, their choice.
I found this site through a Jane Haddam book and after the initial
puzzlement over trying to figure out what was going on . . . have enjoyed it
very much. I love the OT discussions and have certainly learned a lot from
them. I don't pop into them all that often as I doubt that I can keep up
with the clever posters dispersing opinions, both ones I agree with and ones
I disagree with. Ah, such fun.
Joan (who likes discussing her own and other's cats . . . and maybe dogs,
but not as much as cats)
Jr@Ease
Weary, Over Many a Quaint and Curious Forgotten Post, and then wrote:
--------------------------------------------------------------
>sometimes weeks, while there is little or no discussion of books (and be
>honest with yourselves folks, this DOES happen) have not prompted book
>lovers and avid readers to move to another forum is kidding him/herself.
>
>--
>A R Pickett aka Woodstock
>
Yes, as it should be. To each their own.
Actually, to be honest, I don't think of RAM as a mystery newsgroup. I
think of it as a social interaction group where everyone has at least
one thing in common. We build off that.
John P
Mary
Joan in GB-W wrote:
>
> If they would rather be talking mysteries, what is stopping them from
> initiating mystery book discussions here. Do they just sit and wait for
> others to do so. Again, their choice.
Good point, Joan. If you ask me, anyone who's NOT starting on-topic
threads shouldn't be complaining about the off-topic threads. If
you're just sitting and waiting for everyone else to post to your
personal preference you're not really participating. You're just
turning on RAM like you'd turn on the TV and then complaining because
we're not showing your program.
But it's not TV. If you don't like political threads, start one about
books. That's how Usenet works. You gotta put in to get something out
of it.
Mary
A R Pickett
I think John comes closest to summing up how I feel about RAM. My only aim
in posting what I did was to make clear that the persistent threads about a
myriad of non book topics which go on and on and on and on HAS operated to
send elsewhere people whose participation I used to enjoy very very much.
And a lot of what they had to contribute was not always on topic. I miss
them. I regret their lack of participation.
And in response to those who say "why not start a thread about books, then?"
I have done this quite a few times when I was weary of some lengthy
discussion of something or other which no longer interested me. Most of the
time, the response to my book related post was lukewarm at best. I could
ask why, I suppose. Maybe next time it happens, I will.
And to quote Naomi directly "I honestly doubt whether off-topic postings
drive the on-topic ones out;" Various responders have said that being able
to disagree politely is one of the things which makes RAM unique. I agree
totally. That said, I think sometimes our "social interaction group" does
operate to send some former regulars elsewhere.
--
A R Pickett aka Woodstock
"Sometimes the facts threaten the truth"
Mark Alan Miller
"A R Pickett" <WOODeS...@PReODIGeY.NET> wrote in message
news:cy3Kg.464$MF1...@newssvr25.news.prodigy.net...
> And to quote Naomi directly "I honestly doubt whether off-topic postings
> drive the on-topic ones out;" Various responders have said that being
able
> to disagree politely is one of the things which makes RAM unique. I agree
> totally. That said, I think sometimes our "social interaction group" does
> operate to send some former regulars elsewhere.
And it always has, for better or worse. People a decade ago came and left
for many of the same reasons they do now. Back then we were always getting
flak from the Dorothy-L regulars for being off-topic, whereupon most of us
nodded and wished they'd go back to their fake-nice petty bickering about
what was and wasn't allowed. It was those silly discussions that made many
of us aware how rare RAM's unmoderated civility was (and is). I can't
imagine anywhere else I'd be allowed to watch important ideas bounced around
by such smart, informed folks, and be listened to politely as one of the
gang, even by people who know their stuff better than I do. I learn as much
here as I do anywhere else.
Mark Alan Miller
Joan in GB-W
"Cheryl Perkins" <cper...@mun.ca> wrote in message
news:edacu5$fo8$4...@coranto.ucs.mun.ca...
> Joan in GB-W <jjk...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > Joan (who likes discussing her own and other's cats . . . and maybe
dogs,
> > but not as much as cats)
>
> have to try to decant him into the official cat drawer because this is
> awkward.
> --
> Cheryl
I am down to one cat since mid-March. Winston is 17 and very creaky and
taking Cosequin for his creakiness (hum . . . wonder if I could take it?).
A friend of mine offered me her black cat, Pepper, but I felt I couldn't
foster a new cat on Winston in his older years. Anyway Pepper is only 2 and
if and when I get another cat it will have to be an older one as I am no
youngster myself.
Joan (who occasionally frequents alt.pets.cats)
Mary
Yeah, same, here, only I learn it from you.
Mary
Bookwyrm
> Joan in GB-W <jjk...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I am down to one cat since mid-March. Winston is 17 and very creaky and
>>taking Cosequin for his creakiness (hum . . . wonder if I could take it?).
>>A friend of mine offered me her black cat, Pepper, but I felt I couldn't
>>foster a new cat on Winston in his older years. Anyway Pepper is only 2 and
>>if and when I get another cat it will have to be an older one as I am no
>>youngster myself.
>
>
> agreed to take in a young cat with an elderly territorial one already in
> residence. Today, I separated them again while I was going to be out
> because I discovered that one of the periodic squabbles had resulted in
> one cat being unable to get to the litter box in time and without being
> attacked en route. This is not good.
vj and I frequent a group where there is a gentleman who has 3 cats
and 5 litterboxes, I believe.
That kind of helps in situations like yours.
'wyrm
James Nicoll
One of mine is a rescue who was going to be put down over
inappropriate pooping. The other two cats in the household decided
that he was never going to be allowed to come out into the open ever
again and he was a pretty spooky little cat to begin with.
He's now at the point where he has made pals amongst the rest
of the herd*, has spots in the house that he will defend (esp if he can
stand behind me) and he no longer goes into paranoid fits at random
moments.
* Oddly, it's the status-conscious, stand-offish psychotortie who he is
buddies with, as well as the Maine Coon who likes everyone and so doesn't
count.
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)
John Oliver
wrote:
>vj found this in rec.arts.mystery, from Cheryl Perkins <cper...@mun.ca> :
>
>]I'm beginning to wonder if I was letting my heart overrule my head when I
>]agreed to take in a young cat with an elderly territorial one already in
>]residence. Today, I separated them again while I was going to be out
>]because I discovered that one of the periodic squabbles had resulted in
>]one cat being unable to get to the litter box in time and without being
>]attacked en route. This is not good.
Two litter trays at opposite ends of the house?
--
John Oliver
jdol...@westnet.com.au
AIM or MSN jdoliver98
Mark Alan Miller
"Mary" <mrfea...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:gOhKg.24540$aJ.13373@attbi_s21...
Much snipped
> Yeah, same, here, only I learn it from you.
Welcome, and thank you. And likewise. We all know different bits and
pieces. And think differently about what we do know, which I find more
interesting than the raw materials.
Mark Alan Miller
Crowfoot
Cheryl Perkins <cper...@mun.ca> wrote:
> John Oliver <aussie...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> > Two litter trays at opposite ends of the house?
> I've got two litter trays, and when I'm trying to calm things down a
> bit , one goes downstairs.
I established two when Celeste joined our household as a
three month old kitten, when we'd already had Rufio for
about a year (he arrived at the same age she did). She spent
her first month in her own room (an enclosed side-porch),
with her own litter box, and a door with a full-length glass
panel so that they got to look at each other quite a bit before
we let her out into the rest of (his) house. Now they use
each other's littler boxes, and not many of their play-sessions
end in fights. The trick is that I only play with one of them
at a time, the other being sequestered in his or her own
quarters. It cuts down on the jealousy problem.
Suzy
Mary
> James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com> wrote:
>
>> One of mine is a rescue who was going to be put down over
>> inappropriate pooping. The other two cats in the household decided
>> that he was never going to be allowed to come out into the open ever
>> again and he was a pretty spooky little cat to begin with.
>
>> He's now at the point where he has made pals amongst the rest
>> of the herd*, has spots in the house that he will defend (esp if he can
>> stand behind me) and he no longer goes into paranoid fits at random
>> moments.
>
> can't open cat food containers, but she did eventually accept the
> existence of the late Betsy, so there is still hope she'll accept Sam.
> And Sam might become less likely to get on with the bopping and
> wrestling as his testoterone levels continue to drop.
>
Oh? Is it nearly snippy-snip time?
Mary
James Nicoll
>> inappropriate pooping. The other two cats in the household decided
>> that he was never going to be allowed to come out into the open ever
>> again and he was a pretty spooky little cat to begin with.
>
>> He's now at the point where he has made pals amongst the rest
>> of the herd*, has spots in the house that he will defend (esp if he can
>> stand behind me) and he no longer goes into paranoid fits at random
>> moments.
>
>can't open cat food containers, but she did eventually accept the
>existence of the late Betsy, so there is still hope she'll accept Sam.
>And Sam might become less likely to get on with the bopping and
>wrestling as his testoterone levels continue to drop.
One of the two exciting cat crises I had last month involved
discovering that Blotchy's teeth were _all_ bad, thanks to an undetected
injury he may have got as a street cat 12 years ago. Now he has no teeth.
Also, his diabetes is at the point where I may be able to control it with
diet. As a result, he feels great! And cats who feel Great! have to pick
on the other cats. The Maine Coon was thoughfully grooming Blotchy, as is
his way, only to find Blotchy wrapped around him, gnawing away fiercely.
Had a strong enough grip to get pulled about a meter, too.
The Maine Coon calibrates his behavior to the cat he is dealing
with and weights 25 pounds so I expect fun times in the future. So far
the only revenge has been for him to groom Blotchy fur backwards.
Pogonip
>
> One of the two exciting cat crises I had last month involved
> discovering that Blotchy's teeth were _all_ bad, thanks to an undetected
> injury he may have got as a street cat 12 years ago. Now he has no teeth.
> Also, his diabetes is at the point where I may be able to control it with
> diet. As a result, he feels great! And cats who feel Great! have to pick
> on the other cats. The Maine Coon was thoughfully grooming Blotchy, as is
> his way, only to find Blotchy wrapped around him, gnawing away fiercely.
> Had a strong enough grip to get pulled about a meter, too.
>
> The Maine Coon calibrates his behavior to the cat he is dealing
> with and weights 25 pounds so I expect fun times in the future. So far
> the only revenge has been for him to groom Blotchy fur backwards.
So, Blotchy is viciously gumming the Maine Coon cat? ROFLMAO!!!!!
--
Joanne
stitches @ singerlady.reno.nv.us.earth.milky-way.com
http://members.tripod.com/~bernardschopen/
James Nicoll
>James Nicoll wrote:
>>
>> One of the two exciting cat crises I had last month involved
>> discovering that Blotchy's teeth were _all_ bad, thanks to an undetected
>> injury he may have got as a street cat 12 years ago. Now he has no teeth.
>> Also, his diabetes is at the point where I may be able to control it with
>> diet. As a result, he feels great! And cats who feel Great! have to pick
>> on the other cats. The Maine Coon was thoughfully grooming Blotchy, as is
>> his way, only to find Blotchy wrapped around him, gnawing away fiercely.
>> Had a strong enough grip to get pulled about a meter, too.
>>
>> The Maine Coon calibrates his behavior to the cat he is dealing
>> with and weights 25 pounds so I expect fun times in the future. So far
>> the only revenge has been for him to groom Blotchy fur backwards.
>
>So, Blotchy is viciously gumming the Maine Coon cat? ROFLMAO!!!!!
his teeth were holding most of the drool back. Now the smallest scritch
on the head gets the fountain of drool going.
Pogonip
> In article <44fa42d7$1...@news.bnb-lp.com>, Pogonip <nob...@nowhere.org> wrote:
>
>>James Nicoll wrote:
>>
>>> One of the two exciting cat crises I had last month involved
>>>discovering that Blotchy's teeth were _all_ bad, thanks to an undetected
>>>injury he may have got as a street cat 12 years ago. Now he has no teeth.
>>>Also, his diabetes is at the point where I may be able to control it with
>>>diet. As a result, he feels great! And cats who feel Great! have to pick
>>>on the other cats. The Maine Coon was thoughfully grooming Blotchy, as is
>>>his way, only to find Blotchy wrapped around him, gnawing away fiercely.
>>>Had a strong enough grip to get pulled about a meter, too.
>>>
>>> The Maine Coon calibrates his behavior to the cat he is dealing
>>>with and weights 25 pounds so I expect fun times in the future. So far
>>>the only revenge has been for him to groom Blotchy fur backwards.
>>
>>So, Blotchy is viciously gumming the Maine Coon cat? ROFLMAO!!!!!
>
>
> Yep. ALso, it turns out that while B was a very drooly cat,
> his teeth were holding most of the drool back. Now the smallest scritch
> on the head gets the fountain of drool going.
Oh dear! I have had drooly cats, and currently have one drooly cat. Of
course, the worst was the Saint Bernard I took care of for a
friend....that's not drool -- that's slime!
Cyli
<cper...@mun.ca> wrote:
(snipped)
>
>I'm beginning to wonder if I was letting my heart overrule my head when I
>agreed to take in a young cat with an elderly territorial one already in
>residence. Today, I separated them again while I was going to be out
>because I discovered that one of the periodic squabbles had resulted in
>one cat being unable to get to the litter box in time and without being
>attacked en route. This is not good.
>
That's why we didn't get a new cat when Demo died at age 14. All we
had left was Violet, who dominated Demo a lot. We feared that any new
kitten was at high risk of physical damage or that Violet would simply
wither away and die. Violet is now 17. Every year we are astounded
at his tenacity and his good heath. So, no new kitten in view for
some time for us.
--
r.bc: vixen
Speaker to squirrels, willow watcher, etc..
Often taunted by trout. Almost entirely harmless. Really.
James Nicoll
>>
>> Yep. ALso, it turns out that while B was a very drooly cat,
>> his teeth were holding most of the drool back. Now the smallest scritch
>> on the head gets the fountain of drool going.
>
What's even funnier is another cat, Hillary, who sticks her tongue
out when she is happy. As she gets older (now that it seems she will have
the chance to get older*), she has begun to drool just a bit. If you
combine drool + tongue + purr, you get a feline spinkler system.
* According to her blood tests, she died in July of chronic kidney failure.
This makes her insistance on running around and eating like a horse somewhat
puzzling.
Joan in GB-W
>
> I'm trying a variation of this. I'd started with two 'territories' -
> computer room, and, basically, everywhere else. Then I let them meet,
> but ended up separating them again sometimes. Now, I'm going to try a
> kind of separation and switching, so they can become really familiar
> with each other's smell and presence - Mandy's with me now, in Sam's
> former quarters in the computer room with me, and I'll soon go out and
> spend some time with Sam in the main part of the house. Tonight, I'll
> reverse them again.
> Cheryl
I read this and I know why I will not foster another cat on my old Winston
(as much as I'd like another one). When Winston was my third cat, he was
always the odd cat out. Since the other two crossed the rainbow bridge,
Winston has been enjoying life so much more than he ever did with a brother
and a sister.
Joan
Lynn allen
> Now, I'm going to try a
> kind of separation and switching, so they can become really familiar
> with each other's smell and presence - Mandy's with me now, in Sam's
> former quarters in the computer room with me, and I'll soon go out and
> spend some time with Sam in the main part of the house. Tonight, I'll
> reverse them again.
When you're going to allow them access to each other the next time,
drain a can of tuna, and rub some of the water all over each of them.
Really. They'll sit down together and wash for hours, then be exhausted.
When they wake up, each will still smell vaguely like tuna rather than
"foreign cat smell."
While some hostile reactions to territorial incursion are visually
triggered, many are triggered by odor. Neutralizing that can lead to
faster acceptance of a stranger into the resident's territory. And
while they're licking their butts, they're not chasing each other
around!
Lymaree
Crowfoot
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
> In article <44fa42d7$1...@news.bnb-lp.com>, Pogonip <nob...@nowhere.org> wrote:
> >James Nicoll wrote:
> >>
> >> One of the two exciting cat crises I had last month involved
> >> discovering that Blotchy's teeth were _all_ bad, thanks to an undetected
> >> injury he may have got as a street cat 12 years ago. Now he has no teeth.
> >> Also, his diabetes is at the point where I may be able to control it with
> >> diet. As a result, he feels great! And cats who feel Great! have to pick
> >> on the other cats. The Maine Coon was thoughfully grooming Blotchy, as is
> >> his way, only to find Blotchy wrapped around him, gnawing away fiercely.
> >> Had a strong enough grip to get pulled about a meter, too.
> >>
> >> The Maine Coon calibrates his behavior to the cat he is dealing
> >> with and weights 25 pounds so I expect fun times in the future. So far
> >> the only revenge has been for him to groom Blotchy fur backwards.
> >
> >So, Blotchy is viciously gumming the Maine Coon cat? ROFLMAO!!!!!
>
> Yep. ALso, it turns out that while B was a very drooly cat,
> his teeth were holding most of the drool back. Now the smallest scritch
> on the head gets the fountain of drool going.
Rufio has all his teeth (he's only a year or so old) but slurps
audibly when he grooms himself; weird little slurpy noises,
immensely loud in a normally quiet house.
Suzy
kat >^.^<
"Joan in GB-W" <jjk...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:4ltl08F...@individual.net...
>
> "Cheryl Perkins" <cper...@mun.ca> wrote in message
> news:edacu5$fo8$4...@coranto.ucs.mun.ca...>> > Joan (who likes discussing her own and other's cats . . . and maybe
> dogs,
>> > but not as much as cats)
>>
>> I'm getting right-handed typing practice thanks to my new cat Sam. I
>> have to try to decant him into the official cat drawer because this is
>> awkward.
>> --
>> Cheryl
>
>
> I am down to one cat since mid-March. Winston is 17 and very creaky and
> taking Cosequin for his creakiness (hum . . . wonder if I could take it?).
> A friend of mine offered me her black cat, Pepper, but I felt I couldn't
> foster a new cat on Winston in his older years. Anyway Pepper is only 2
> and
> if and when I get another cat it will have to be an older one as I am no
> youngster myself.
>
>
>
Enjoy Winston, and let him have his quiet. By the way, if he suddenly
starts yelling in the middle of the night, you might put a night light near
his litterbox. We found that Clawdia, age 17, was losing her night vision
and this helped US sleep.
However, Her Royal Highness, Princess Clawdia, High Priestess of Mousing and
Beheader of Bunnies (retired) passed away this weekend. We took her to the
vet's on Saturday where she went drastically downhill, and we had to make
The Decision. Sadly, it was almost easy to make.
Hunter built her a little wooden coffin, with wooden pegs instead of nails.
She's buried in the back yard above her best dog, Dusty. Then we came in
and had a funeral feast featuring fish.
Chris is 30 and Hunter is 26. We'd had Clawdia most of their lives, and it
was like reaching another major milestone to lose this little bundle of fur.
Heck, I'd had her 1/3 of MY life.
kat >^.^<
in Wisconsin
Joan in GB-W
>
> Enjoy Winston, and let him have his quiet. By the way, if he suddenly
> starts yelling in the middle of the night, you might put a night light
near
> his litterbox. We found that Clawdia, age 17, was losing her night vision
> and this helped US sleep.
> However, Her Royal Highness, Princess Clawdia, High Priestess of Mousing
and
> Beheader of Bunnies (retired) passed away this weekend. We took her to
the
> vet's on Saturday where she went drastically downhill, and we had to make
> The Decision. Sadly, it was almost easy to make.
> Hunter built her a little wooden coffin, with wooden pegs instead of
nails.
> She's buried in the back yard above her best dog, Dusty. Then we came in
> and had a funeral feast featuring fish.
> Chris is 30 and Hunter is 26. We'd had Clawdia most of their lives, and
it
> was like reaching another major milestone to lose this little bundle of
fur.
> Heck, I'd had her 1/3 of MY life.
> kat >^.^<
> in Wisconsin
Oh, I'm sorry to hear this, Kat. Those of us who have pets know how
important they become in our lives. When they cross the Rainbow Bridge it
is like losing a "real" member of our family.
Joan
A R Pickett
Woodstock
Priscilla
> However, Her Royal Highness, Princess Clawdia, High Priestess of Mousing
> and Beheader of Bunnies (retired) passed away this weekend. We took her
> to the vet's on Saturday where she went drastically downhill, and we had
> to make The Decision. Sadly, it was almost easy to make.
> Hunter built her a little wooden coffin, with wooden pegs instead of
> nails. She's buried in the back yard above her best dog, Dusty. Then we
> came in and had a funeral feast featuring fish.
Kat, I'm so sorry. We lost our 15-year-old dog and our 15-year-old cat to
"The Decision" in the past year, and I still miss them. Condolences and hugs
to you and your family.
Priscilla
Jane
Naomi wrote:
Oh, and I hate it when people use no-flame or
> no-politics rules to be sneakily snotty or to make arguments without
> the inconvenience of people arguing back.
What I found, when I was first on the Net, was that off-topic is
often in the eye of the beholder in a moderated forum. So what would
happen is that 15 people would post anti-Bush rants, and as soon as the
one dissenter showed up to argue, the moderator would jump in and
insist that all this OT posting stop. Or the other way around,
politically. Left and right were equally enamored of that ploy.
So I no longer participate in moderated forums of any kind.
Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com