Again, you are evaluating another culture from the bias and perspective of your own culture. Is it really for us to evaluate another culture psychologically and morally? I say no. Law enforcement, sure, but moral and psychological evaluation? Evaluation and judgement? No...that's part of the problem and a major reason why animosity grows from both sides. Rather than a simple law enforcement situation, it becomes the Crusaders vs. the Jihadists. RM's evaluation is clouded by his own personal experiences, hardly clinical in nature, and were he to be used as an "expert witness" his maladies and past experiences would be used to render him a terrible "expert" witness due to his own psychological damage and bias. In any reasonable analysis in which a solution of peace is sought....he may be right, he may be wrong, but all such methods of demonizing an enemy are useless beyond "rallying the base" with hate and rationalized violence, and are not used to genuinely to solve a problem but rather to act upon a predetermined goal. This is what Bush did to lead us into Iraq. He had a predetermined goal to invade Iraq, then played upon the lower instincts and emotions of a shell shocked electorate following 9/11. We can see the consequences of such decision making by looking at the quagmire that is Iraq, or looking at the quagmire that is Israel and the Palestinians. p.s. There are other countries that look at America, and especially the actions of Bush, and conclude that America is a culture of hatred, violence, imperialism, etc. that subordinates reason in the process as the actions are driven by emotionalism and nationalism, rather than a detached reasoned mentality.
this is the same guy that laughs at the human trafficking of sex slaves and makes jokes about getting cheap blow jobs from russian sluts. now he is all pius... excuse me while i go throw up. do me one favor RM and i will leave you alone. admit israel attacked the uss liberty on purpose, with the intent of sinking it, and were going to blame it on the arabs, in order to bring the US into the war at the time. do this... apologize and i will leave ur sorry ass alone. until then you have no business condemning any "peoples." and lose the paleosimian slurs.... do you want us calling your people names? what do you call people that slaughter their allies??? and then lie about it for close to forty years. what do you call them?
You'd be wrong. This is an assertion or an opinion. Of course we can look at another culture and evaluate it psychologically and morally. Why do you say that we can't? Genitally mutilating young girls is immoral. Murdering young women who have premarital sex or an extramarital affair is immoral. Burning alive young women who are found to have had an abortion is immoral. Telling a young man that if he straps a bunch of explosives to his body and then detonates them in a public place and kills a bunch of women and kids and tourists, he will go to heaven and be serviced by virgins, is immoral. Sending hundreds of thousands of people to Siberian camps because they wanted the right to determine their own form of government or to write about their feelings regarding government policy is immoral. How about the culture of Nazism? Not too tough to evaluate that culture, is it? Murder all Jews. That's not really too tough to 'evaluate'. There is no 'value' in that, is there? Within the cultures from which these various examples are drawn, there are large numbers of people who consider the behaviour in question barbaric. They agree with us - these are immoral acts. The fact is, the power structure in these societies is often primitive, and that power is wielded through quasi-religious institutions by powermongers who rule a populace for whom ostracization is equivalent to death. Shall I go on? No, it won't make an impression on you because to admit that you didn't make a complete analysis would mean that you would be shamed and RM has made it clear what that means to people like you. Again and again, Rearden metal reveals to us the reasons for your sometimes impossible to understand stances. Logic? You don't need no stinking logic. Jesus, this forum is turning me into a conservative. I see the worst of the doctrinaire thinking on the left here and it makes me sick. I am a liberal, but not in this (twisted) mold.
Hold on a sec. If you are against the judgmental evaluation of cultures other than your own, doesn't that necessarily preclude you from casting judgment on someone else's judgmental culture? Given the hypothetical assumption that internal logical consistency has value I mean. p.s. as a ranking commander in the PC brigades, I hereby inform all who read this notice that intolerance will no longer be tolerated. Those without the fundamental liberal decency to respect others' personal value judgments, no matter how questionable, will be shot on sight.
lol... don't make that assumption with Z, archimedes. Just check out this gem http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1124110#post1124110
Nik, here's an article you may be interested in: The left hates inequality, not evil By Dennis Prager Tuesday, November 22, 2005 If you want to understand the Left, most of what you need to know can be summarized thus: The Left hates inequality, not evil. As one raised as a New York Jew (who, moreover, attended an Ivy League university) and therefore liberal -- it took me a while to recognize this fatal moral characteristic of the Left. But the moment I realized it, it became immoral not to oppose leftist values. It is neither possible nor virtuous to be devoid of hatred. Even those who think it is always wrong to hate must hate hatred. The question therefore is not whether one hates but what (or whom) one hates. For example, on the basis of the value system that I hold -- the Judeo-Christian -- I try to confine my hating to evil. By evil I mean the deliberate infliction of unjust suffering on the undeserving; cruelty is the best example of such evil. Those who hate evil hated the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, after all, was a made-up country, created by a band of gangsters called Bolsheviks and Communists. They murdered between 20 million and 40 million innocent people, spread their totalitarianism around the world, and thereby rendered hundreds of millions of people slaves and automatons. From the 1930s to the 1950s, liberals and social democrats vigorously opposed communism. But the rest of the world's Left, especially its intellectuals and artists, not only did not oppose communist governments, they were the greatest defenders of communism. By the end of the Vietnam War (begun and prosecuted by liberals), however, most liberals abandoned anti-tyranny, anti-evil liberalism and joined the rest of the Left. Since the late 1960s, with almost very few exceptions (one is Sen. Joseph Lieberman), "liberal" and "Left" have become synonyms. (That is why The New York Times characterizes the Nation, a far-left journal, as "liberal.") Thus, when President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire," the liberal world condemned him. The Cold War, once regarded as an epochal battle between freedom and tyranny, came to be regarded by liberals as an amoral battle between "two superpowers." Likewise liberals almost universally mocked President George W. Bush when he labeled Saddam Hussein's Iraq, North Korea and Iran an "axis of evil." It takes a mind that either has little comprehension of evil or little desire to confront it to object to characterizing three of the worst regimes in modern history as "evil." How else can one explain the Left's enchantment with Fidel Castro, the totalitarian ruler of Cuba? Clearly his evil is of little consequence. What matters to people on the Left is that there is free health care and almost universal literacy in Cuba. Whereas non-leftists believe that it is far better to be illiterate but free, leftists believe that it is better to be a literate slave. Today, this inability to either recognize or to hate evil is manifested in the liberal opposition to the war in Iraq. As I pointed out in a previous column, opponents of the war should be asked to at least acknowledge that America is fighting evil people and an evil doctrine in Iraq. But even that is difficult, if not impossible, for most people on the Left. As noted above, everyone hates someone, and that includes people on the Left. The problem is that because they don't hate evil, they hate those who oppose evil. That is how liberals went from anti-communist to anti-anti-communist. To paraphrase one of the greatest moral insights of the Talmud, those who show mercy to the cruel will be cruel to the merciful. So, George W. Bush, not the Islamic terror world, is the Left's villain; life-embracing Israel is the Left's villain, not their death-loving enemies; and religious Christians who note moral weaknesses within the Islamic world are the real danger, not the moral weaknesses within the Islamic world. To be fair, it should be noted that confusion over evil and insufficiently hating it are not confined to the Left. There are religious people who conflate sexual sin with evil and/or advocate automatic forgiveness of all evildoers, even when no repentance has taken place. But the inability to acknowledge the greatest evils, let alone to join in fighting them, is the defining characteristic of the Left. That is why former Vice President Al Gore just announced that global warming was a worse threat to humanity than terrorism. He really believes that. As do the great many people on the Left whose moral passion focuses more on gasoline prices, drug prices, health care prices, and other expressions of material inequality than on people and movements dedicated to murder. That is why Robert Redford and friends from Hollywood can celebrate Fidel Castro. Castro may imprison political opponents, and most Cubans may have no right of dissent, but they are economically equal.
The Nazis evaluated the Jews, their culture, and their psychology...for the purpose of making them a scapegoat. Save your moral outrage for a Jr. High Ethics classs....or for lobbing phone calls to Rush, Hannity, or Savage.
huh??? What the heck does that have to do with the main point of my post, which was that, contrary to what you asserted, we can and should make moral evaluations of the behaviours we see in other cultures. Moreover... re-read my post. I was not saying anything about the way the Nazis evaluated the Jews... I was saying that we can evaluate the Nazis and find their behaviour immoral!! So what if the Nazis evaluated the Jews and then made them scapegoats? What does that have to do with the main point of the post??? Just because the Nazis evaluated the Jews and saw in them the reason for all the evils in the world, that means when we evaluate genital mutilation as being wrong, we are as wrong as the Nazis were about the Jews???? I swear... sometimes your thinking is so muddled.
No. Your practice in sophistry clearly misses the point. A clinic sociologist might evaluate the differences between cultures in the same way a biologist might evaluate the way one species interacts with their group compared to another species and the way they interact with their own species. For the biologist to then pass moral judgement, political judgement, psychological judgment that one animal group is superior psychologically, spiritually, politically and morally over another animal group would be absurd. It is just nature, and nature is filled with diversity. So the clinical sociologist would make clinical non judgmental findings, which have no agenda beyond clinical observation and recording of differences. These observations then invariably fall in the hands of the moralist, the religious, the politicians, that Zionists, the Muslims, the Christians, the Americans, the Europeans....and each group takes the data and twists it to support their own non scientific, non clinical agenda....purely political and ego driven agenda. None of this does anything beyond creating a climate of divisiveness, rather than acceptance and tolerance. These efforts don't bring peace and resolution to conflict, all they do is strengthen the animosity and cause of continuing wars...promoting a "my shit doesn't stink like their shit" mentality.
The Nazis felt the same way, that they should make their moral evaluations of the behaviors that they saw in their own culture and other cultures, focusing on Jews, the Polish, the Russians, the French, and anyone else who would not join their party and surrender to the "Master Race." The game is exactly the same....moral superiority, and the egocentric boost it provides, the justification for conversion to one value system over another. If you are bad, then I am good...the psychological payoff is obvious, and huge. The Jews condemn the Muslims. The Muslims condemn the Jews, and the Christians condemn those who do not believe in Jesus Christ. All 100% divisive, not inclusive nor tolerant and nor accepting and practicing a live and let live philosophy. Once again, effective law enforcement doesn't require moral, political, spiritual, psychological judgment of the behavior of others. A camera can catch someone committing a crime, and the camera lens has no moral filter, nor does it need one. Just the facts, mam...