For liberals and other southpaws - your opinion on the Euston Manifesto

It is actually very easy to understand.

 

Not at all. It’s very similar to the idea of Hegel’s dialectic and Habermas’ description of communicative reason. Start by thinking about it in an interpersonal sense. This is how you would resolve a conflict with a family member, right?

A key part of what it means specifically is that you have to do some mental work and moral evaluation and that you can’t just climb up on your high horse and pretend that you are right and infallible and that everyone else is wrong and should bow down to your will. That is arguably the key to it.

 

What about the relativism on whether it is right or wrong to start wars with nations that aren't a threat to you?

What about the relativism to torture people? Is that always right or wrong?

 

I agree 100% that the holocaust was wrong. I also think torture is wrong, and it already has a legal definition.

I believe stopping an active and ongoing genocide is a valid reason for military intervention.

But unlike those that want to change the definition of what torture is, or believe it is ok to torture when we do it, but not when someone else does, or attacking a nation that isn't a threat, and isn't in the midst of a genocide, I stick to my principles. I am against the relativism.

 

I would almost say that you’re not understanding what I’m saying, but you seem threatened by it so perhaps you understand it more than you are letting on? Hegel and Habermas didn’t invent the concepts they were talking about, btw. They were merely describing what they saw happening in society, and imo the basics of these concepts are largely common on an interpersonal level. It’s when you make the relationships more distant that people seem to lose this understanding.

What my position would do with an issue like the Holocaust is to force people who support it to try to explain why they feel it’s just and fair. It’s not simply a one sided process. Of course there is next to no one who would even try to do this today, and those that do aren’t likely to be able to justify it with anything higher than a tribal warfare understanding of morality.

And what this kind of process is most successful at is exposing he moral relativism of those on their high horses, because they are inevitably the most hypocritical and morally relativistic. (And this is a basic Christian principle as well. We are all fallible and we are all always growing in our understanding of the world around us, and the moment that we proclaim ourselves infallible and able to judge others we are at that instant judging ourselves.) If we’re talking about the war in Iraq we can look at the fact that a certain group declared the other side to be part of an “Axis of Evil” and claimed to be morally outraged at the other for breaking international law by not letting inspectors do their work. This group set itself up as being law abiding and just and the enforcers of the law, but it promptly broke international law by invading Iraq, an act that has led to the deaths of over 30,000 Iraqi citizens and a crime wave that has included numerous rapes and kidnappings, and I have not yet seen it take responsibility for what it’s done. It just doesn’t get any more morally relativistic than that.

 

No wonder conservatives want liberals to adopt this manifesto. Ignoring the lead up and decision to go to war and only focusing on the future (as if we aren't thinking about it at all ) means no more looking for any possible wrong doing by the administration.

 

I didn't want to waste my time, by having you or others now claim that things that have always been torture shouldn't be considered torture, but here it is.

 

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Do you agree with this? If so then you must agree that failing to look back and analyse and learn from what happened would be a fatal mistake. People who merely assume that they are right and that everyone else is wrong don’t look back or sideways or anywhere else. They see no need to because they have convinced themselves that they are inerrantly right, or at least that they are above learning from anyone else, or from history itself. And it’s because that document is full of that kind of language that it reveals itself as conservative, not progressive, and therefore not the way to move forward.

 

Yes it would.

 

So do you apply that then to every situation? Situations are either holocaust or not holocaust and there's no gray inbetween?

I'm actually for relativism since context and cost and benefit should always matter. When I say that the idea of invading to spread democracy is a liberal idea isn't a compliment. IMO the idea that we should invade to spread democracy, as encapsulated in GW Bush's second inaugural, represents some of the worst aspects of liberalism that advocates the use of force without paying attention to the potential negative effects of using that force.

Saying Saddam is bad so we should remove Saddam is fine as long as you can realistically consider what happens when he's gone and how you are going to deal with that.

You are correct that we have to deal with the fact that occupation has happened but that said doesn't mean there shouldn't be political accountability for the decision to undertake the invasion or a robust debate on considering the policy of what we should be doing with Iraq. Its not enough to say that we invaded and occupy so we need to continue this course since that's reality. Withdrawl is an option.

 

sounds more like college.

 

Withdrawl is an option, but it should not be considered based on the reasoning behind the invasion, but rather based on what is happening there now and in the future. We can use the past to learn, to inform us as to what will possibly happen when a similar situation arises in the future, but we should not dwell on the past when there is no similarity between the situations we are looking at now and the conditions that existed then. There is no need to review the runup to the current war while we are fighting the war, if anything, we should be looking at examples of similar occupations and how best to proceed based on that information. Whether or not Bush lied about WMDs, if there was enough postwar planning, etc. has no effect on what we should do next. Those are things to look at when we are considering an invasion, not while we are fighting a war, IMHO.

 

But looking at who advocated for what policy and evaluating how their recommendations panned out, can tell us a lot about whose opinions and recommendations we should value in the future. Based on their past track record for honesty and competence, I would say if the Bush Administration proposes it, you want to take a hard look at doing the opposite.