fpb | Entries tagged with debate

...and the reason why people debating it will never understand each other, is that there is a larger question about the current situation. Is it a war, yes or no? If it is a war, then a targeted assassination of an enemy leader such as this one is perfectly justified and correct; what is more, it is an excellent move, in the enemy's own code. Osama Bin Laden's most famous quotation - uttered within days of 9-11 - is " when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse." The American blow shows everyone that the West's reach is as long as its memory, and that it can strike at will even against the protection afforded Osama by a treacherous would-be ally who is also the Muslim world's strongest military power. America and her allies have proved the strong horse.

On the other hand, if we are not at war, if this is a matter of law enforcement on the grand scale, then the death of OBL is simply murder, with no ifs or buts. Even worse, it was done in the face of a sovereign state with claims to be an ally.

Unfortunately there is no consensus on this. The worldwide spread of banditry identified with OBL is a genuinely new thing, and nobody has so far presented an argument that can convince most people with an opposing viewpoint.

Finally, one thing cannot be in doubt. Whether or not the Obama administration agrees, waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the rest are torture, and torture has been banned from Western law codes - including military ones - for centuries. The supposed success in "interrogating" certain figures by such means no more proves it valid than the fact that a given individual is rich proves that he was right to rob a bank.

Teal Terror, you can post on my LJ as Anonymous. The comments will remain screened (invisible to anyone except me) until I unscreen them or comment on them. From what I've seen, that is not something that should worry you. One thing only: I suspect we are on different time fuses. The last time we debated, I was having a sleepless night, which is unlikely to happen regularly. So I may take some time ro respond to something you said, and I apologize in advance.

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My first point is that when I make a comment I don't look for responses, and most often I don't get them. If my comment dissents from something or someone, I make it in order to place my dissent on the record. Of course my dissent is worth the same as my assent - that is, precisely nothing. I am not a judge, not a rich man, not a politician or a columnist or a celebrity. I have nothing to offer except my consent or dissent. However, being a free man, I reserve the right to offer them.

If you respond, however, you must be prepared for a tilt with men. As far as I am concerned, debate is a serious thing, because ideas are serious matters. Nothing could possibly be more serious. Ideas kill people.

Ideas kill people. I grew up in a place and time when they were killing them in great numbers and in front of everyone's eyes - Italy, the seventies: the golden age of terrorists, many of whose worst crimes are still unpunished (and some of which have been certainly punished on the wrong person). If anyone thinks I am too ferocious in attacking, say, the notion of inevitable national doom - which is a chickenshit evasion from personal and group responsibility - or the idea of inventing religions to fit this or that notion of what would be good for society at large, I suggest that they first stop and think whether there is nothing about such notions that would lead people to justifying the shedding of blood. Of course, if you think bloodshed in the service of an idea or "right" or "future" or "quality of life" or any other reason whatsoever is ever justified, then there is nothing more to say. Thou shalt not murder, says my God. Yours, or whatever you may take for God, may say otherwise, in which case our most likely meeting is on the battlefield.

In the second case, the case of inventing religions to fit, I have a still more personal reason to loathe it. There is, everyone knows, a well-known modern religion that was invented by a science fiction writer purely for his own ends. I have been near it as I have been near Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and one or two other murderous cults; I have seen its results from close-up, as I have seen the results of paedophilia, physical and mental child abuse, organized rape, Mafia, dope addiction, and alcoholism; and I have no hesitation in saying that it is the most evil thing I have ever met. If it killed smaller amounts than the rest, it is because it is so far, God be thanked, smaller in reach and power; but I can tell you from having seen it with my own two eyes, that they managed, and managed routinely, what only the fevered and terrified imagination of a West staggered by Communist power could ascribe to Communism - brainwashing. It's what they do. They regularly brainwash human beings, destroying and rearranging their minds. I have seen this, I have had to help save one of their victims, and I hope I never have to do it again, because I never want to see again anything so evil. And that is an inevitable result of the notion of creating religions to fit certain purposes, because it amounts to intruding from outside on human minds to reframe the very frame of their thoughts. Religion shapes thoughts; a religion dedicated not to its own purposes, but having its supposed purposes designed purely to shape the thoughts of the faithful, will do exactly that, and do so with an instinctive efficiency, an innate ability to go for the most damaging strategy of demolition, that would stagger anyone who did not know of it. You, of course, could not know I'd had that experience; but to imagine that I get angry at ideas for some strange bizarre vice of my own - that I enjoy it or something - does not do honour to your imagination.

My comment about trying desperately to respect, etcaetera, was based on the point from which I started: that I neither demand nor expect a reaction from anyone to anything I publish. The only thing I want to do with it is do my free man's office of recording my view, especially when it is in disagreement with something. The only thing I really want is to make it known to anyone who'd made the statement, not so much that I disagree - that means nothing - as that disagreement exists, that it is possible to take a different view. I simply want their and their readers' attention brought to that. But, f someone resolves to take it on, then I expect them to play the game according to the rules: answer questions, avoid the infantile strategy of sneering and pretending that something is beyond the reach of intelligence (that only proves that it is beyond the reach of yours) and defend your views like a man. When that fails to happen, I may, according to how and to what extent it fails to happen, be angry or disappointed; but I will be twice as disappointed if the person who behaves so foolishly also and at the same time happens to be the author not only of some of the most judicious and valuable reviews I have read in a long time (and I am a great lover of reviewing and of criticism as literary forms), but also the onlie begetter of some of the most beautiful, valuable and vital fiction to have yet been written in this new century.

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There is still another point I want to make to

inverarity in particular. You have missed something utterly fundamental. Reflect on the different treatments I gave to Teal Terror and to a certain friend of yours with a fox-based name. Think on their different results and reasons.

I think there is a widespread habit of reading things that people said "benevolently", especially if the person in question is famous or respected. When a sentence starts with "What I think s/he REALLY meant is...", I go "uh-oh" inwardly. The classic case as far as I am concerned is John Lennon's song "Imagine", a song which postulates a dreadful and intolerable situation - no possessions (what, not even my stuffed toys?), nothing worth dying for, nothing that is loved enough to matter. I simply can't tell you how often I heard this song justified with: "I think that what he REALLY meant was..." peace on Earth, goodwill to all men, and so on. No: you can only go by the actual words he used, and the words he used describe a lifeless, spiritually dead world. The point is however that Lennon, a clever musician, placed music to those words which has such a pleading and convincing power that we are lulled into ignoring what they actually say. We become convinced that he cannot really have said things as dreadful as he did. But this only means that he cleverly got us to do his dirty work for him, to be, in a sense, his accomplices. (I will add that Lennon was a notoriously troubled person and that there is some excuse for his terrible beliefs in his rather sad personal life.)

Many of the people who get the same treatment have been attacked, even eviscerated, by such writers as Paul Johnson; but there is at least one who, as far as I am concerned, still gets away with intellectual murder. I mean Samuel Langhorne Clements. Mark Twain may have been the first truly great American writer and a really funny man, but he was also a fundamentally unpleasant misanthrope and a very provincial spirit, judging everything by what he knew (and hated) of the Missouri small towns of his childhood. Many of his witticisms amount to a desire that the human race should not exist. ("Such is the human race. Sometimes it seems a downright pity that Noah did not miss that boat.") And many more amount to a narrow-minded, ignorant judging of the whole universe as being nothing more than Small Town USA. I had something to say about that here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/406368.html

Current Mood: thoughtful

I have often found myself in the position of having to say: "You are talking nonsense. I know what Fascists are like. I have met them in considerable number since I was a child. I was born in the same country as Fascism. I have studied Fascism as a historian. [insert personal or group name] may be a detestable person, and his/her/their views may be obnoxious, but they are not Fascist. Do not cheapen real evil."

Now I am worried I may have to start saying: "You are talking nonsense. I know what Communists are like. I have met them in considerable numbers since I was a child. I was born in a country where Communism was a power in the land. I have studied Communism as a historian. President Obama may be a detestable person - or not - and his view may be obnoxious - or not - but he is no Communist. Do not cheapen real evil."

You don't believe me? http://townhall.com/columnists/LauraHollis/2009/10/21/they%E2%80%99re_all_communists

...You see, I am not Barrack Obama. I do not believe that unity or agreement are either a value or even a desirable goal. I believe that nobody has a right to demand or even to hope that someone else change their views, and that the primary purpose of debate is not to change the mind of the opponent. Anyone who thinks that has a positively fantastic notion of the power of persuasion - let alone THEIR persuasion. It also means a profound contempt for the opponent; whether or not his/her opinions are contemptible, s/he has taken just as much to reach them as you have, and when you treat them as silly notions that your clever persuasion can overcome, you insult, not just his intellect, but his character. No: you should start any debate you get into with the idea that you are not going to change your opponent's mind.

So why do it? Because if you always keep your opinions to yourself, if you never place them in the air to be properly contemplated and commented by others, you will never know what they are worth. Debate is about YOU risking YOUR certainties, not about the other guy risking his; and it is only from the other guy's point of view that the opposite is the case. Each person places his wares in the marketplace of ideas for any customer to look at, and hopes for the best. The primary point of debate is to expose your own viewpoints to criticism and to use it, if you can, to sharpen them. I also believe that debate is not necessary - and I will try not to force it on anyone who does not want it - but that once you enter it, you enter a fighting game, and if people seek a fight, they should not complain of the wounds.

You may remember the case of that disabled child in Canada for whom the parents obtained permission from a court to stop her growth by chemical and surgical means. I was very unhappy with the story when it came out, but I did not know enough, and I thought it better not to criticize the parents when I did not know what they had been through or what the medical prospects really were.

This woman, on the other hand, has every right to speak out on the subject; and I am glad to see that my inchoate sense of disapproval has sound reasons to exist. http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/escaping_from_peter_pans_prison/

Moral of the story: never, ever, EVER pretend that you can judge when a human life is not worth living.

Four years ago, the government of the French Republic took the lead in refusing to support the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The French, who had taken a very active and successful part in the first Iraq war, simply did not think that an invasion followed by the occupation of an Arab country was a good idea. That was their prerogative (see under "sovereign state").

(My position was that I loathed Saddam Hussein so much that anyone who wanted to drive him out was fine by me. I would even have supported an Iranian invasion. But I would not have started to insult people who disagreed.)

The idiot part of the American right suddenly made France the bout of all their hatred. Someone spotted a market opportunity, as Americans do (the French do that as well, but when the French do it, that's evil!) and prostituted a certain amount of historical knowledge in the search for a quick buck, producing some sort of tract which rewrote history with the claim that "France have always been our enemy, but they have concealed it under a pretence of friendship".

I would dismiss this intellectually contemptible and factually fraudulent thesis in as many words, and not even bother about it, were it not that one of the finest minds in my f-list seems to have been taken in by it. As it is, I want to ask how you imagine you can trace a consistent attitude of hatred, and what is more, of subtly disguised hatred, in a nation that has, since the foundation of the United States, experienced three royalist constitutions, five republican ones, two bonapartist ones, and one fascist tyranny, and completely boxed the compass in terms of attitudes, views, and alliances. This is the kind of things that rabid anti-Semites postulate about Jews - attitudes consistent across the centuries, constant vicious subtlety in carrying them out, hatred fertile in invention but completely barren of reason. The French ought to be proud: they have been promoted to the rank of Chosen People, next to that other target of unreasoning, blind, stupid, despicable hatred. In case anyone had any doubts, I regard Jew-bashing as a stain on the face of mankind.

No doubt the prostitute or prostitutes who set out on this bit of free enterprise got out of it what they wanted - money, admiting letters from ignorami and fanatics, and the odd spot on TV talk shows; rewards that serious historians get rather less often. But as we are still free people here, I want to use my own freedom of expression, rather less despicably than the prostitute or prostitutes concerned: first, by calling whoredom by its proper name; and second, by stating clearly that there shall be no pity here for such views. The historical slag or slags who sold their integrity for popular success will not be treated as anything but filth, and anyone who takes them seriously is warned that I will do what is in my power to restore them to sanity.

Current Mood: fighting

The Cuckoo: your dogma has no bearing whatever on historical fact, of which you are woefully ignorant. The sad thing is the cheerful confidence with which you retail the same old legends. For instance, the vast majority of early churches was built well away from pagan sites. You may have some fourth-hand notion of Gregory I's libellus responsorum to Augustine of Canterbury, allowing him to take over and adapt local rituals; but the fools who long ago added that item to the usual roster of rationalist cliches did not realize that Gregory meant that permission as an exception. IN point of fact, the transformation of pagan holy places into Christian churches is so rare, even in England (which is what Gregory was speaking about), that a special place-name for this kind of site was invented: Harrow (hence Harrow-on-the-Hill and so on). Apart from anything else, pagan temples in general did not meet the needs of Christian churches, such as meeting halls able to hold hundreds of faithful and burial areas in the immediate proximity. (Pagans always buried their dead outside the city walls, and never in sight of a temple.)

In short, I would tell you not to talk of what you don't know, but the trouble is that your situation is worse: you are ignorant and think you know.

I don't know. I just cannot seem to stay out of trouble. Time and time again, I encounter viewpoints, even among friends, that I have discarded with contempt long ago - if I ever accepted them at all - and which seem to me to violate all common sense and even basic fairness. And yet they are not only kept, but entertained and fed and honoured like sacred cows. And then there is a kerfuffle.

Case in point. I am reading recent postings from my f-list. One person has an entry in her LJ that seems to want to do nothing more than bash Ann Coulter. Fair enough, I don't much like her either, and I said so before. But this person does not seem to want to even understand whatever it is that Coulter is saying; just because it is like nothing she ever heard before, therefore it is condemned. It is unlike what I and my friends say. I never heard anyone talk like that. Therefore it is wrong, and, what is more, ridiculous. I have no need to understand it - just laugh at it, because she thinks and acts differently from the way my friends and I think and act.

Now, obviously, that sets me off. It is one thing to say that Coulter is ill-tempered, self-satisfied and very poor at arguing; it is one thing to take her points and dismantle them, or point out that she herself does not understand them; or even moderately approve some, with the proviso that her personality and her poor arguing skill make even those moments unloveable. And it is another, quite another, to ask whether "she even means" what she has spent a lifetime and several books to say; as if her ideas were such strange and uncouth things, that no ordinary human could ever contemplate such things. Of course she means it; and just because nobody from your own small circle ever says such things except in derision, it does not mean that they cannot be said and thought by intelligent and honest people. And you are too young to realize it, my friend, but it is you who, by treating ideas not as something to be discussed and refused, but as ordure that decent people do not dirty their hands with, are being dishonest.

Then someone else posts on the subject of JKR getting an award, and finds herself unhappy because JKR is not really that important. And why is she not important? Because she is not clever or original, and because she is successful. At which point I lose it completely. If there is one prejudice I utterly loathe, one false and prevalent idea that seems to me to stand near the core of all the poisonous and evil things that have happened to our culture since the beginning of the twentieth century, it is this crass and totally false opposition between popular and deserving. What underlies it is simple contempt for human beings; because the majority of human beings like something, therefore we have to assume that it is bad. The majority is bad in its tastes, its passions, its political and religious views, its artistic attitudes. If you cannot hear in these assumptions the murderous sound of self-satisfied elites resolving to treat the masses as mere vile bodies on which to practice their own political and intellectual views, in other words, if you do not hear the sound of the crimes and massacres of the twentieth century, you are not listening hard enough. And far from the multitude's tastes being automatically bad, nearly the reverse is true. Almost every one of the really supremely great artists and writers, with the single exception of J.S.Bach, was a huge hit in his or her time. Sappho became famous from one end of Greece to the other. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Eurypides, won dozens of theatre competitions judged by ordinary Athenians. Virgil, who was shy, had to duck into doorways to dodge his fans. Thomas Aquinas received letters on the most absurd questions from all corners of Europe. (One asked whether there really was a Book written up in Heaven with all the good and bad deeds in the lives of men; Aquinas answered, with typical patience, that as far as he could see it was not so, but that the idea could be entertained without damage.) Dante heard his own verses read by literate peasants and workers to their illiterate friends. Shakespeare was so successful that he was able to retire in his forties and buy the largest house in his native village. Cervantes, Moliere, Racine, were stars in their lifetimes. Voltaire's works were read as soon as published from one end of Europe to the other. Goethe spent most of his life being treated as the greatest living poet; not only Beethoven, but Napoleon too, made a point of meeting him - and in each case the meeting had something of a State occasion. Dickens was as popular as JKR, and, as in her case, bookshops had to open at midnight to accommodate eager fans. And the same is true in the other arts. Hell, when Michelangelo completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the populace of Rome were let in, and they went in an admiring and enthusiastic procession that lasted for weeks. The only thing as poisonous as the belief that popular equals bad is the absurd overrating of cleverness and originality. The greatest writers are only original in so far as they discover, or rediscover, an universal experience. But we have to deny their claim to greatness, which that every man and woman can see their greatness, in order to flatter a cancerous little presumption that only what the select few like is good - and, by our own singular fortune, we are among the selected few. Can you see why this kind of attitude makes me sick?

And yet... here are two more people, indeed considerably more, with whom I am likely to clash.

( Read more... )

Well, this, according to the majority of Americans, is what the "right to bear arms" is really about: to be able to point them at government if government gets uppity. Like trying to organize a rescue.

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The real issue about Osama Bin Laden's assassination...
For the use of Teal Terror and Inverarity
the danger of respect
It's deja vu all over again
From an otherwise private post: why do we debate?
Please read the linked article
Prostitution of the pen and the dark side of the free market
This is an attempt to move an online debate on my LJ
On being a stormy petrel
Some remarks about science, theory and the Catholic Church (assembled from other writings of mine)
Shots were fired at the rescuers in the New Orleans superdome

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Reflections of a stormy petrel

...from sleep and from damnation,/ Deliver us, good Lord!

Entries tagged with debate

The real issue about Osama Bin Laden's assassination...

For the use of Teal Terror and Inverarity

the danger of respect

It's deja vu all over again

From an otherwise private post: why do we debate?

Please read the linked article

Prostitution of the pen and the dark side of the free market

This is an attempt to move an online debate on my LJ

On being a stormy petrel

Some remarks about science, theory and the Catholic Church (assembled from other writings of mine)

Shots were fired at the rescuers in the New Orleans superdome