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| Re: Palestinian university students’ trip to Auschwitz causes uproar (1182685) | |||
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Re: Palestinian university students’ trip to Auschwitz causes uproar |
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Posted by Nilet on Sun May 11 16:45:53 2014, in response to Re: Palestinian university students’ trip to Auschwitz causes uproar, posted by 3-9 on Sun May 11 15:20:32 2014. Since they have never proposed a solution to that hypothetical problem, you will have to ask someone in the Israeli government.Nice dodge. Would a Christian majority cause an unacceptable loss of Israel's Jewish character or not? I guess I would say yes. If you deny equality, then I'm not sure what else to say. I gave up on CHIMM when I learned he was a Jewish supremacist. Now, here's a question to you. If you have an extra room or apartment that you promised a friend will always be available for them to live in, then a total stranger comes and demands you give him that place to live in, are you going to give it to him? Apples to oranges. A single private home is not a country, and giving special consideration to a friend is not the same as giving special consideration to any stranger who happens to perform certain rituals regardless of all other factors. Incidentally, having a house to rent would be a better analogy since then in both cases we'd be extending consideration to strangers we don't plan to share private space with, and it's not like refugees aren't expected to work and pay rent. If I was renting a property, it would actually be illegal to discriminate on the basis of religion. At least it would be in America— is an Israeli landlord allow to tell prospective tenants that only Jews are allowed to rent from him? And I'm sure all the ones who were raped, killed, etc., by widespread rampaging bands of people of a different religion or tribe would probably think segregation was the least of their problems. This statement is open to multiple interpretations which range from unpleasant to disgusting. I'd hate to assume, so please clarify exactly what you mean by it. So don't use countries in Europe as an example of how much better Asia is doing. I used countries in Europe as an example of how much better the planet was doing. That former Soviet territories are now modern democracies hardly supports your claim that historical progress is being reversed no matter where in the world they might be. China is still pretty totalitarian, in that they don't brook dissent and keep a hammerlock on the media. Maybe not to the level of Mao, but still. And being an Uighur or a Tibetan tends to suck more than usual. Being a Muslim in Myanmar is not very good thing these days. Thailand isn't moving forward either, with a festering racism problem. And nobody said Thailand by itself is disproving a global trend, just that the trend isn't as widespread as you claim. You claim that historical progress is being reversed. That the countries you hold up as examples of the trend have, in fact, progressed from completely horrible to slightly less horrible which is sort of the opposite of what you suggest. If you had to live in China but could pick the era, choosing today over the 1960s would be a no-brainer. Pity about the Muslims in Myanmar. If only there was a state that was specifically created to provide a guaranteed haven for people facing religious persecution because they believe God told them not to eat pork. But only one has had free elections, and to say that they're doing better than under the Soviets is a really mixed bag. Definitely not "all" or "most". You asked for signs of progress, I gave you the end of the Soviet Union. You demanded an ex-Soviet country in Asia and I offered you one. Now you say that's not enough. By the way, my response to your argument about the Republicans is absent from your reply. Am I led to believe you accept my point that the Republicans' failures to roll back progress in the country they control despite concerted efforts to do so serves as evidence that historical progress is not, in fact, being reversed? Your statement: "Moreover, you did a nice job of confusing a subset of humanity defined by geography with a subset defined by an ideology." What about it? I pointed out that people managed to change the Germans' minds about the whole Nazi thing, but you rejected the idea by conflating "Germans" with "Nazis" and pointing to the latter as evidence that we had to destroy them because they couldn't be convinced. No, I just think your approach to solving those problems is incredibly naive, flawed, and will end up causing more problems than it solves, at least in the short term. You're free to disagree on my position, but that's a separate debate. If you concede that current policies are not fixed products of human nature and attempting to change them is not a futile endeavour, then we can consider this point settled. My point is that human nature hasn't really changed, all we've done is knock out a particularly egregious example of it. The fact that such an evil philosophy as Nazism or various other racist tendencies are embraced by people who otherwise aren't mentally ill or mentally defective proves it. Everyone is different. "Human nature" is sort of an average. That Nazism has been diminished from the guiding principle of an entire country to a universally despised and frequently banned position across the planet represents a fundamental change not consistent with the idea that human nature is fixed and unchanging. For that matter, the creation of Israel is not consistent with that idea either. You talk about how much work went into achieving that goal while at the same time declaring bigger and better goals to be futile because human nature can't be changed. OK, since that was too much for you: the founders of Israel saw a need for a Jewish haven, and planned a solution they felt was doable and fulfilled that need. They were able to carve out a small country with fairly limited resources, but it's enough to accomplish that goal in the long term. However, in order to do that, they have to limit who can enter and stay in the country, or else the solution they created would become unfeasible in a much shorter span of time. The solution isn't perfect, but it's the best one they have for now. Now do you get it? Yes, and that they limit who can enter and stay by their subscription to a particular religion is a bigoted double standard not consistent with the idea of equality that has been embraced across the civilised world. You haven't yet answered why Judaism makes 100,000 refugees easier to accommodate even while saying Israel can take in them but not a tenth as many of any other religious persuasion. Banging on about how Israel was founded is irrelevant— America's founders explicitly intended that black people should be enslaved and indigenous people should be excluded (and killed or forced off their land whenever a single white person wanted it). That these were explicitly intended by America's founders and codified into America's founding charter does not justify them, it is not a valid reason to continue them, and it is not a valid argument for any country to make. Incidentally, I notice you passed over this bit: And that's exactly my point. Any comments? |
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