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| Re: Palestinian university students’ trip to Auschwitz causes uproar (1182728) | |||
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Re: Palestinian university students’ trip to Auschwitz causes uproar |
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Posted by Nilet on Sun May 11 20:06:57 2014, in response to Re: Palestinian university students’ trip to Auschwitz causes uproar, posted by 3-9 on Sun May 11 18:41:59 2014. Not a dodge. I'm not concerned with a Christian majority, I'm concerned with how Israel deals with it.Well, considering that Israel has tried to prevent a Muslim majority by declaring a large chunk of the Muslims to be no longer Israeli, it's a fair question as to how they'd deal with a potential Christian majority. No it's not. You're promising to provide shelter to a persecuted person if the same faith, because you've experienced, or knows someone whose experienced, the same persecution. Yes it is. There is a world of difference between you, personally, providing shelter to a persecuted person and simply not raising a fuss if a persecuted person rents the house next door. Incidentally, you ignored my improvement on your analogy: 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? The question at the end was not simply rhetorical. Is an Israeli landlord allowed to tell prospective tenants that only Jews are allowed to rent from him? Or is religious discrimination illegal like it is in the US? Would the people who are experiencing these atrocities think that the overall situation is getting better because segregation was stopped in one place? No, but a hell of a lot fewer people would be experiencing those atrocities. It's not like the US and South Africa are tiny little places. If a treatment cured skin cancer, the suffering of bone cancer patients does not diminish its success nor stop it from demonstrating a positive trend. Of the "modern democracies" (if you can call them that), only ONE of them has free and fair elections. Just off the top of my head, Poland and Georgia appear to have free and fair elections. I know you're going to quibble over the definition of "free and fair," but Romania, Mongolia, and Bulgaria all have at least some degree of democratic representation despite having been absolute dictatorships under or closely tied with the Soviet Union. Except the point is Asia isn't really moving forward, and it's much bigger than Europe. Yeah, Asia has stagnated. Unless you count China and India - the two largest countries by population - which have advanced from backwaters to economic powerhouses, with slow creaking but noticeable steps towards greater freedoms as they do. Then, of course, South Korea somehow managed to transform itself from a backwater that was worse than its northern neighbor to a prosperous democracy in the last few decades. Taiwan isn't doing too poorly. Hong Kong and Macau remain as free as ever despite being handed over to China, with Hong Kong rumbling towards universal suffrage. Despite being a militant dictatorship in the era you're so fond of referencing, Japan is now fairly democratic as well. And if you're willing to look outside of Asia, you will notice that countries across Latin America have overthrown the dictators the US installed, and countries like Egypt and Syria are in the difficult transition period when a popular uprising ousts an unpopular dictator. Meanwhile, a good chunk of Europe has gone beyond democracy and instituted the free travel policy you've insisted is impossible due to "human nature." Over the past 70 years, China went from bad to really horrible and back to bad, unless you were an Uighur or Tibetan, in which case it went from OK to bad. Myanmar went from 'ehhh' to bad to not so bad. You're not seriously trying to claim that colonialism and civil war was better than the current situation in either country. Gee, you mean there are no Muslim countries which take other Muslims? Missing the point again, I see. How goes that? My point was twofold: (1) From where I'm sitting, Judaism and Islam are basically the same thing and drawing a distinction between them is a completely arbitrary division, and (2) The idea of specific states for specific religions and/or demographics is absurd and religious states even more so regardless of which religion or demographic is involved. Although I expect at least someone will ignore this point because it doesn't fit with their assumption that I'm somehow singling out Israel for special criticism. You said there was progress in Asia, you provided the remnants of the Soviet Union and examples in Europe. I said the majority of the new countries from the Soviet Union, among others in Asia, aren't all that great. You provided ONE example, possibly 3, out of a possible 8, and expect that to be representative of Asia. I said there was progress worldwide. The dissolution of the Soviet Union is a major example thereof. The Soviet Union covered territory in both Europe and Asia, and so it left remnant states in both Europe and Asia. Then you moved the goalposts and demanded exclusively Asian examples, so I gave you one. Now you've moved the goalposts again and demanded progress throughout ex-Soviet states in Asia. That I showed positive trends within Asia's biggest players is likely to be met by another goalpost shift— they weren't ex-Soviet. So how are things in the Asian ex-Soviet states you're trying to claim are representative of the whole of Asia and/or Earth? Well they're certainly doing better than under Soviet days even if they're not all that great. However, my point is that the trend of historical progress across the globe is positive and has not stagnated or started reversing— and if you can find a few local areas in which that is the case, then you're beating up another straw man. Global trends can and do have local exceptions. I missed it. A couple of your points were right, but since abortion rights are being eroded away, and since a very large portion of the population has not rejected their toxic ideology, I would call that a mixed bag. With six years of complete control (and a panicked population willing to accept anything for a few years), the Republicans have managed to make abortion more inconvenient and more expensive in some counties. Roe v. Wade is still the law. Meanwhile, even Arkansas is now allowing gay marriage. Shootings like that of Trayvon Martin (the modern day version of lynchings) still happen but they're much less common— enough to make the news when they do happen, and inevitably provoking national outrage when they do. And, of course, we have a black president. Sure, a disconcerting number of people still accept the Republicans, but nowhere near a majority and the remaining die-hards are slowly dying off as younger generations embrace more liberal policies. But if you want to make claims about worldwide trends, here's a wonderful little demonstration: Only until a better solution is implemented. Until then, changing the current policies is not a good idea. So we can't implement a better solution until a better solution is implemented. Yuh huh. It actually hasn't been banned that frequently, and unfortunately, it's possible it's not even universally despised. The right to free speech is fairly well established, so banning an idea is a truly extreme measure. That it has been banned at all in generally free countries show how thoroughly rejected it is. If you want to argue it's not all that universally despised, you can point to the populations or countries that accept it but I'll need more than "it's possible." And if the German economy were to collapse into what is was like during the Weimar Republic, I wouldn't bet against the rise of a hateful philosophy akin to Nazism. Yes, and if an asteroid the size of... Last time I checked, Germany is quite stable (even if some of its banks might have to eat bad loans, and even if they need to be bailed out) and it's also part of a larger union of countries with interlinked economies and a shared currency, all of which have a direct need to keep Germany from collapsing. Which is sort of the opposite to what happened under the Weimer Republic, when Germany was battered and broken by a failed war and then crushed under the debts that those other countries expected it to pay. No, I'm saying that human nature hasn't changed nearly enough for those goals to be practically implemented. So first you claim human nature is fixed, and now you claim it changes at a steady rate? The point I've been making repeatedly is that what you call "human nature" is mostly a product of culture which can and has been changed by a deliberate effort on many occasions. Can we establish worldwide free travel within the next ten years? Of course not. But we might be able to convince a few countries to accept anyone fleeing persecution, or shift popular opinion on the sort of foreign aid that's needed to help countries impoverished by colonial history reach the level of development needed to make free travel feasible without risk of a permanent one-way exodus. Doing nothing and declaring "human nature" just isn't ready for you is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The idea that people can be convinced your position has merit is not disproved by the fact that they don't agree with that position before you've even tried to convince them. Their first priority is to protect their people. Yes, and declaring a fairly arbitrary chunk of the worldwide population to be "our people" is called in-group bias, aka double standard, aka bigotry, and generally considered a bad thing. Whether they can handle more is debatable, but considering their size and resources, it's understandable that they don't take on the world's refugees. If they can take on any Jew, anywhere, anytime, then why can't they take on an equivalent number of refugees? More specifically, why do the non-persecuted Jews take priority over the persecuted refugees simply by virtue of religion? It doesn't make them easier to accommodate, it fits with the goal they set for themselves when they founded Israel. I've already addressed this point but you seem unable to understand the arguments— that a country's founders had a specific goal in mind does not mean the country must be permanently shackled to it. It does not mean the goal is justified in perpetuity. It doesn't necessarily mean the goal was ever justified. You have repeatedly stated: "Jews take priority because Israel was founded to give Jews priority." You have yet to explain why Jews should take priority. As for the "tenth as many", I already answered that. Answered elsewhere. I didn't feel like duplicating. Links, then. |
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