re: #272 Fairly Sure I’m Still Obdicut

Because I think you can do better.

You have not made your points. You have dodged a fuckload of mine. Here, have a list:

1. Actually analyzing whether the US or Russia was a ‘better actor’ on the world stage between 2000 and 2009 is an incomprehensibly complex task. Defining ‘better’ on its own would take an immense amount of time, and then operationalizing the variables that you wanted to study would take more. Finding out the information would take more. This would be a thesis for a very smart, very hard-working grad student, and even then they would present it as “Given this conception of ‘better’, and these operational variables X is the better actor”. You just asserted this breezily, and have not even given a moment’s notice to the enormous problem in doing so.

i do not care about who was better - i care about what actions are taken in removing the hypocrisy - if you do not continually seek justice for iraq - then i fail to see a moral superiority to seek it for other international malfeasance..

2. Your idea of steady pool of blame spread out across the US, all of us in it up to the same extent, is both useless—in that there are some people in the US who did a lot more than others to fight against the Iraq war, and there are those who did a ton of work to make it happen. Treating those two groups the same is ridiculous, unless you think people should have actually fomented a Civil War over the issue—and it is also ethically simplistic in the extreme, and blames the victims of crimes for those crimes.

i agree…however - if you live in a democracy - then blame is shared.

3. Even if we grant you all your premises, all your arguments, you have yet to actually say ‘So what?” You have yet to say what you actually, practically, want to have happen. Not in the realm of emotion, but in action: What do you want us to do, based on this feeling of guilt? What is it you want it to inspire us to?

i’d like to see more people call for justice on iraq - so when do endeavor to tell others how to behave, we do so on strong, consistent ground.

again - this is not controversial - it only becomes controversial when you do not want to address it.