by Eric Martin
This is an utterly shocking display of anti-Semitism, especially coming from a major media figure:
But, frankly, Jewish life is cheap, most notably to Jews. And among those Jews, there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.
Actually, that's not exactly how the above quote reads. It's from The New Republic's Marty Peretz, and it actually goes like this:
But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.
Can you imagine the uproar that would occur if a major media outlet had published the first example? Yet there is relative silence because instead of directing rank bigotry at Jews, Catholics or some other religious group, the hate is directed at Muslims. Which serves to put a respectable veneer on something that is truly vile.
When will people understand that First Amendment rights are privileges, not rights?
How is this any different at all from Dr. Laura’s racist tirade? And yet Peretz didn’t say the magic n-word, so of course he won’t lose his job or any of his Village prestige.
F**k every single one of these media sociopaths.
Tobasco: Please don’t spell out profane words as it interferes with some readers’ work filters. I’m fixing for you. Thanks.
I read that this morning on TPM, and was just stunned at its monstrosity. How is filth like Peretz not shunned by polite society for saying things like this? To be clear, he has the right to express his opinions–a right he’d obviously like to strip from others–but that should not exempt him from the social consequences of this kind of callous bigotry.
I think part of what galls so much about this is that Marty Peretz is Jewish, and ought to fscking know better. He ought to know where this kind of thinking leads, and the fact that he can still say things like this suggests that either the depth of his bigotry has caused him to lose all perspective, or that he knows where it leads and hates Muslims so much that he doesn’t care.
But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap
But you can’t just decide that every different perception or feeling is automatically bigotry, Eric! What about all the images of ‘Muslims’ (sic) Americans have watched on tv for all these years?
How is this any different at all from Dr. Laura’s racist tirade?
Dr. Laura was being stupid and insensitive, not racist. She was trying to demonstrate that the N-word has lost its power, and ran into the brick wall of the fact that it hasn’t.
Peretz, on the other hand, is a Klansman.
How is filth like Peretz not shunned by polite society for saying things like this?
What ‘polite society’ are you speaking of? Seriously, I’m not aware of one of those in this country, except in DC, where people are polite even when they shouldn’t be.
I do wonder, though, how some of the better writers at TNR can, in good conscience, stay there. I know good writing gigs are hard to find, and that Marty P. has said stuff almost this bad before, but…
Exterminate the brutes!
The society that occasionally deigns to shun people who cross a particularly egregious line, like the one that Peretz crossed here. There was a time when saying things like Peretz did actually had social consequences. From time to time it still does.
I suspect, though, that there will be no such consequences here, because Peretz was only treating Muslims as subhuman and undeserving of American constitutional rights, and a sickening number of Americans do seem to agree. This says a number of things about the state of this country, all of them shameful.
Are we criticizing failure to stand up for right or failure to stand up for right?
Are we criticizing failure to stand up for right or failure to stand up for right?
Can you explain this? I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at.
Dr. Laura was being stupid and insensitive, not racist.
I beg to differ.
the reason Peretz will get away with this that, in a rough estimation, essentially nobody knows who he is or what he does.
if you’re not widely known, nobody will talk to anyone else about you (hey, the ostensible editor at an obscure political magazine said something ignorant and racist about Muslims! OMG!) and therefore no wave of criticism will build. and it’s the big wave that knocks people over. ripples in the shallow puddle of meta-pundits won’t do it.
Cleek: See, ie, Ward Churchill.
But seriously, I get your point to a certain extent, but if someone in Peretz’s exact position had said that about Jews, or Catholics (or an ethnic group even), there would be a firestorm.
Islam is ‘defined’ by ‘routine and random bloodshed’? If I didn’t know better, Id say that this was intended as a parody of anti-Semitic positions. And, of course, we have the parody of an ignorant, bigoted, hatemongering screed complaining about who ought to get First Amendment protection. And the parody of Peretz (elsewhere in his rant) complaining that American Muslims ought to be singled out because they owe allegiance to foreign nations.
But then, sometime around 2003 I stopped being able to tell the difference between parody and reality.
and it’s the big wave that knocks people over.
Well, big waves are one way of knocking people over. But they’re not the only way that people get knocked over.
Another way is having most of their friends and professional acquaintances shun them because they recognize them as vile repugnant monsters. Peretz is said to be close to Al Gore. What do you think would happen to his influence in Washington if Al Gore publicly said “I want nothing to do with this vile hate monger”? What do you think would happen if TNR’s writers and editors and staff all signed a letter saying that unless Peretz was removed from his position, they’d all resign? Do you think his co-investors would be happy with that? Do you think TNR could function at all if 95% of its writers/editors/staff just quit?
So I think you’re half right. Peretz will get away with this. He’ll do so in part because normal people will have no idea who Peretz is or what kind of horrific bigot he is. But he’ll also do so in part because the people who know him and can influence him like anti-Muslim bigotry or at least don’t mind it so much. That’s probably one reason why Spencer Ackerman isn’t at TNR anymore.
I’m sure Mayor Fenty appreciates this just after the New Republic endorsed him.
‘Are we criticizing failure to stand up for right or failure to stand up for right?
Can you explain this? I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at.’
Are you sure you don’t want to take a stab at it?
‘This intense epidemic of slaughter has been going on for nearly a decade and a half…without protest, without anything. And it has been going for decades and centuries before that.
Why do not Muslims raise their voices against these at once planned and random killings all over the Islamic world?’
GOB:Are we criticizing failure to stand up for right or failure to stand up for right?
Eric:Can you explain this? I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at.
I think GoB is missing an “a” before the first right.
I think what GOB is getting at is that 1.5 billion people can be treated the same way as a single individual like Marty Peretz. It’s not like each of the 1.5 billion voices in the head of Marty Peretz can be held responsible for the actions or words of all the others anymore than each Muslim can be held responsible for the actions of all other Muslims. Or is it that the world’s Muslim population has a single mind and that each Muslim is actually responsible for the actions of all others, just as Marty is solely responsible for what he does, writes and says? It must be one or the other. Either way, the equivalency is obvious.
Why do not Muslims raise their voices against these at once planned and random killings all over the Islamic world?’
You mean like the candlelit vigil in Tehran right after 9/11 where thousands of tearful Iranians gathered in an act of solidarity with suffering Americans? Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ve never praised that particular raising of voices. And if you don’t notice events like that, isn’t it quite likely that there are many Muslim critiques that you simply ignore as well?
I mean, let’s be honest GOB: like most good old boys, you’re pretty ignorant. You don’t speak Arabic. You don’t read Farsi. You don’t read books or news articles in translation from the Arab world. You probably don’t watch Al Jazeera’s english channel on the internet. So you don’t really have any clue what Muslims and Arabs are saying, do you?
Yesterday, before these comments, Aryan pollster Rasmussen had Peretz up by seven percentage points in a generic poll against any opponent described as an enemy Democrat.
Rasmussen polling after the comments among citizens most likely to vote for any candidate who promises to kill Muslims, destroy the U.S. Government, and drag a homeless person facedown via pickup truck through the streets of Macon, Georgia, and whose last names start with hard-K Koch, showed Peretz up a full 21 percent over the generic Democrat/traitor/socialist/elitist ticket.
When voters self-identified as those likely to begin every political rejoinder with the words “all I know is that ….” were informed that Peretz is Jewish and that he publishes a magazine of political commentary, his lead dropped to 16%.
The difference was explained by American voters who said “Oh” when informed of Peretz’s heritage and then pulled their support.
The voters who remained in Peretz’ camp explained that he would be useful for the immediate future of American relations with the world as long as he returned to Israel as the designated time to participate in the End-Times.
A small percentage of voters/bloggers answered Rasmussen affirmatively when asked if American Muslims should be rounded up and confined in designated holding areas near major transportation hubs, but only if the areas could be named Jewish Ghettos, for nostalgia’s sake.
Which of these offenses, that derive from differing cultural influences, is more egregious?
The first isn’t true. It’s a hateful, bigoted rant comprised of lies, distortions and exaggerations. And regardless, not exactly what I was addressing.
I was addressing Peretz’s suggestion that Muslims don’t deserve 1st Amendment rights.
As to this:
This intense epidemic of slaughter has been going on for nearly a decade and a half…without protest, without anything. And it has been going for decades and centuries before that.
Why do not Muslims raise their voices against these at once planned and random killings all over the Islamic world?
Again, it is simply not true in any sense. There are plenty of voices in the Muslim world that condemn this violence, loudly and repeatedly, every time an incident occurs.
And, further, the incidents are not nearly as common as Peretz suggests, and there has been much violence at the hands of non-Muslims in Muslim countries over the past decade and a half, so it’s a bit rich to paint Muslims as the violent ones.
There is also something to be said that simply being a Muslim does not make you a compulsory spokesman for all things that all Muslims do.
Nevertheless, so many do. So often. Repeatedly.
Ironically, Rauf has spoken out against that violence repeatedly, and he is one that Peretz singles out.
Here’s a tip GOB: If you want facts, don’t read Marty Peretz because he doesn’t deal in them.
Either way, the equivalency is obvious.
My Catholic neighbor is a child molester. I mean, she’s never condemned the Catholic church for molesting children and launching a huge cover up campaign. In my hearing at least. Well, she might of, but since I don’t speak Portuguese, I couldn’t really say for sure, but the point is: I’ve never heard her denounce the church’s child molestations in english to my face. Which would be tough since I don’t talk to her much. But she’s a child molester.
As noted above, they do–which renders your begged question a meaningless distraction.
Your ignorance of those voices does not mean they do not exist.
You say this as if the badness of one has any bearing on the badness of the other. This is nothing more than a deflection that amounts to, “yeah, but look at what these guys over here did!”
Stepping out of the trees for a moment to get a good look at the forest, it sounds an awful lot like you agree with Peretz’s bigoted screed. If you agree with his opinions of Muslims, come out and say so. But don’t waste our time with question-begging and counterfactual tu quoque distractions.
This intense epidemic of slaughter has been going on for nearly a decade and a half…without protest, without anything. And it has been going for decades and centuries before that….
Which of these offenses, that derive from differing cultural influences, is more egregious?
I think that there is no support for the idea that, over the past several centuries, Muslims have been responsible for some vast majority of bad behavior worldwide.
Again, it is simply not true in any sense. There are plenty of voices in the Muslim world that condemn this violence, loudly and repeatedly, every time an incident occurs.
This reminds me of how the US right ignored women’s issues in the Third World while women’s groups in the US were trying to draw attention to them, and then once those issues became politically useful decided that not only were they important, but because the right had ignored the earlier protests they decided that they were the first group to say anything. And, to add insult to injury, derided the very groups who had been protesting all along for not doing so.
“There is hardly one who has raised a fuss…” This is just completely false, and insisting on it despite its documented falseness disqualifies anyone from claiming to have an informed opinion about the Park51 project. The truth is Peretz (like everyone else who keeps saying the same thing) has already decided that no amount of anti-terrorism “fuss” from Muslims will ever be enough.
At least once a month I think to myself, “I should subscribe to TNR” — if only because I enjoy Jonathan Chait’s blog so much. Then I remember the reasons I don’t subscribe, of which Peretz is number one. My conscience wouldn’t allow it.
I think this kind of phenomenon is a large part of why I have an increasingly hard time being anything close to civil when responding to conservative arguments: they are increasingly and overwhelmingly disconnected from reality, and usually in a very transparently bad faith way.
Whether that bad faith is from a deliberate intent to deceive or merely a chronic disregard for facts that are inconvenient to their worldview, the end result is the same. I’m really at an end to my willingness to treat bigotry and dishonesty as legitimate differences of opinion that bring value to public discourse, deserving of polite consideration and civil response. There comes a point where the only appropriate response is “what the fsck is wrong with you?”, or words to that effect.
“Why do not Muslims raise their voices against these at once planned and random killings all over the Islamic world?'”
May I help?
They do. Constantly. Endlessly.
I recommend Marc Lynch as informative as to actual Middle Eastern and Islamic opinion and commentary.
Ironically, Rauf has spoken out against that violence repeatedly
And for his trouble he got called a “jihadist” on national TV by Sean Hannity.
Kafka would have a ball with this.
Another useful resource on Islamic voices against terrorism.
How many of General Petraeus’ troops did Marty Peretz just murder?
Can he outgun the Southern Koran-burning Christian?
General David H. Petraeus couldn’t comment.
How many of General Petraeus’ troops did Marty Peretz just murder?
I doubt that Peretz’ words make much of an impact. But they do, in some small part, serve to stoke the anti-Muslim bias and hatred that does impact our foreign policy objectives in Muslim countries – as one would expect.
This is getting depressing. Our only hope is that good ole boys all over the Muslim world will be informed enough and tolerant enough to understand that not ALL Americans are Koran-burning, mosque-denouncing, Islam-hating warmongers. In other words, we’re screwed.
–TP
I don’t understand what you’re pointing to, Uncle Kvetch. I see stupid, I see ignorant, I see insensitive, I see complacent, I see dismissive, I see someone who should not be giving anyone advice more complicated than “My watch says the big hand is on the three”, but I don’t see any racial animus or suggestion that non-whites are inferior, scary, or hateful. It isn’t in the same universe as Peretz’s wish that Muslims all FOAD.
I don’t understand what you’re pointing to, Uncle Kvetch.
You know, maybe you’re right, Mike. The big “story” with Dr. Laura was her use of the n-word, and when I actually read the transcript I thought that was really minor in the grand scheme of things.
I’ll concede that she didn’t say anything flat-out racist in the Peretzian sense. It was the cumulative effect of [paraphrasing]:
– her initial reaction to the caller’s complaint: “How do you know you’re not just hypersensitive? A lot of people are.”
– “If this kind of thing is really a problem for you, maybe you should stick to relationships with your own kind.”
– The fact that there’s an African-American in the White House somehow somehow renders accusations of anti-African-American racism automatically suspect, if not ridiculous (or, as she puts it, “hilarious”)
– Even if she’d avoided actually uttering the n-word, the blind pig-ignorance of the old chestnut “How come they get to say it and we don’t?” still floors me, no matter how many times it gets dragged out.
Bottom line: in and of itself, minimizing or dismissing the reality of racism may not be racist, but it’s certainly a central trope of racist discourse in this country today, along with the concomitant cries of white victimization. And that’s what led me to apply the r-word here.
But having mulled it over, I’ll concede the point.
Can I call her an *ssh*le?
I don’t care if Dr. Laura is a bona fide racist or not, as long as she’s off the air.
If I ever hear the word “bunchkin” again I’ll puke.
There was a time when saying things like Peretz did actually had social consequences. From time to time it still does.
Don’t mean to pick on you, Catsy, but it just makes me feel impatient when fellow liberals are so remedial as to believe in something like what you mean by ‘polite society’ in the US. It’s long gone, and was probably overestimated even before. I hope I’m wrong, but Al Gore is not going to denounce Marty, and Jon Chait is not going to resign. They’re *too* polite to do that, actually, and they are the only ‘polite society’ we have.
This is not a polite, genteel, well-educated, entirely civilized, country. We are merely rich. We – as a country, or at least as the elite of the country – aspired to those former qualities for a while, but that was an aberration, evidently. Things like believing in, and relying on, ‘polite society’ are why Liberals and Progressives are so hopeless at politics. We project our self-image of open-mindedness, generosity of spirit, and higher levels of education onto the country; movement conservatism projects its self image, too: superstition, religious and otherwise, ignorance, bigotry, and most of all, resentment. Guess which of the two visions finds easier purchase?
For pity’s sake, it’s not 1965 (or 1945). Depending on how it was polled, I would bet a pile of money that a majority of Americans would pretty much endorse every word Peretz said. That doesn’t make it right – it’s appallingly wrong! – but let’s deal with the country as it actually IS, shall we? It’s impossible to change anything until we do. What tiny ‘polite society’ we still have actually uses manners to *avoid* doing its own duty.
I don’t disagree with Catsy’s general point (I rarely do), but this is a little problematic if taken literally: “There was a time when saying things like Peretz did actually had social consequences.”
That is, I’m skeptical there was a time in America when saying, or writing, “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims” had social consequences.
But cleek’s point, way above, is also well-taken: consequences from what you say tend to be proportional to degree of celebrity.
Non-famous people utter sentiments like Mel Gibson’s every minute of the day in some bar, hair-style joint, or street, in America, with little or no consequence.
Also proportional to not-right-wing-ness, see also: Ward Churchill or Shirley Sherrod.
One thing that struck me about Peretz’s editorial is the poor quality of his writing. It’s only one sample but parts of it are nearly incomprehensible.
Additionally, his mutterings about “commitments to foreign governments and, more likely, to foreign insurgencies and, yes, quite alien philosophies” could easily have come from any number of 19C. anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic screeds.
So, however the injustice of the charge might be, Peretz comes off as a semi-literate bigot.
“Also proportional to not-right-wing-ness, see also: Ward Churchill or Shirley Sherrod.”
Yes.
“One thing that struck me about Peretz’s editorial is the poor quality of his writing. It’s only one sample but parts of it are nearly incomprehensible.”
He’s been like that for well over a decade.
“So, however the injustice of the charge might be, Peretz comes off as a semi-literate bigot.”
He’s been like that for well over a decade.
I don’t disagree with Catsy’s general point (I rarely do), but this is a little problematic if taken literally: “There was a time when saying things like Peretz did actually had social consequences.”
That is, I’m skeptical there was a time in America when saying, or writing, “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims” had social consequences.
Hmm, I think there was a time when saying things like that in public as a public figure *did* have social consequences, if by ‘social’ you mean some sort of elite society. It wasn’t a very long time, in duration, but I think that throughout much of the latter half of the 20th century, that sort of thing would get you into trouble, socially, in, say, Washington, or in academia. If you said it at a party or in an informal group, maybe not.
But the whole idea of a belief in ‘polite society’ in this country just rubs me the wrong way – not because I don’t wish there were such a thing, but because there isn’t – or isn’t enough to speak of.
I’m pretty sure the main reason people would react much differently if Perez had said, “But, frankly, Jewish life is cheap, most notably to Jews. And among those Jews, there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood.”,
is that it’s conspicuously not true.
Mind you, it’s not true about Muslims, either, but much less conspicuously so, given the nasty nature of so many majority Muslim states. There certainly are Muslims raising that fuss.
But there’s no point in pretended they don’t have an awful lot to raise a fuss about.
The man owns a magazine. Doesn’t he employ one or more editors? The guy from timecube.com writes approximately as well as Peretz.
I can understand the desire to write bigoted screeds. I don’t condone it, I don’t do it, and I don’t want to do it, but fear and hatred of “the other” is a common and comprehensible motive.
I cannot understand why he doesn’t edit them better.
“I cannot understand why he doesn’t edit them better.”
He doesn’t have anyone to edit them.
Neither have I ever read anyone praising Martin Peretz’s skills as a line editor, though it’s certainly entirely possible I missed many such articles, and I expect Jamie Kirchick has written one, if not several, such pieces.
But this is why actual editors exist.
And don’t tend to be employed to edit their boss, or someone who brings more income into their company than they do.
“But, frankly, Jewish life is cheap”
For you, a bargain!
Mind you, it’s not true about Muslims, either, but much less conspicuously so
For “Muslims” we could also try substituting “ignorant cracker rednecks” and see how far that trial balloon flies.
Insert any demographic you like and it’s still stupid.
Seriously, if you’re going to lead with “mind you it’s not true about Muslims either” than why freaking bother to say anything at all.
If you want to get into “nasty states” then we should probably lump Koreans, central Asians, and any of your pick of post-colonial African folks in the mix as well. There’s probably a dysfunctional Balkan state or two still floating around. Maybe even a South American banana republic.
But nobody is talking about depriving any of those folks living here of their first amendment rights.
The reason Peretz gets away with it is that hating on Muslims is a low-risk activity in the US right about now.
I know people joke about winning X number of internets and whatnot, but seriously, shouldn’t Dan get some sort of prize?
Gary Farber didn’t get much of a rise with his notes on articles where Muslims objected to terrorism, etc.
Just to be snarky off to the side – something I do so well most miss the point – there are many Palestinian semites too, once called Samaritans. It seems they – followers of Islam – honour that Jesus fellow as a prophet…since he spent some time there as a teacher. Not to mention those in Iran…which also has a Jewish population not interested in ‘Right of return’ to racist Israel…outpost of British-American colonialism promoting media controlled hatemongering.
Now I know other people follow different sources for headlines than I do. This thread is definite proof.
http://world.mediamonitors.net/Headlines/Terrorism-I-am-a-Muslim-I-am-a-victim-of-terrorism
“What do these people have to talk about Islam as a source of terrorism? And how could they accuse Muslims of terrorism, while they themselves are major exporters of terrorism? Can those who use torture, assassination, corruption and wars as their declared method of occupying one Muslim country after another and killing millions of innocent Muslims accuse those who defend freedom, dignity and sovereignty of terrorism?…The phrase which should be promoted on Arabic-language TV channels should be “I am a Muslim, I am a victim of terrorism”. As to our enemies, the stigma of terrorism, war, Judaization, settlement building, home demolishing, assassination and other crimes will haunt them throughout history, because they are the makers of terrorism regardless of their religion.”
On the Road to Political Power and Theocracy
http://www.publiceye.org/eyes/sd_theo.html
Since 1975, leaders of the Christian Right have built one organization after another, with the avowed purpose of winning state power, i.e. the power to influence, if not dictate, public policy. Leaders of the Christian Right worked hand-in-glove with the Reagan and Bush administrations to wage murderous wars on civilians in Central America and southern Africa. Meanwhile, the North American left cackled along with the rest of the country at the ridiculous TV preacher scandals, which diverted people’s attention from the really important players in the Christian Right. While everyone else was laughing, the Christian Right grew into the most formidable mass movement on the political scene today. We will enter the new millennium with the Christian Right in positions of state power.
Exit poll data indicate that about 25 percent of the people who voted in November 1994 were white evangelical Christians. Among these, about two-thirds voted Republican. There was nothing “stealth” about it. The stated agenda of the Christian Right in 1994 was to help deliver the Senate and Congress to the Republicans-and to credibly claim credit for doing just that. Each time around, the Christian Right is doing a better job of getting its people to the polls. In the 1992 presidential election, about 18 percent of the voters were self-identified white evangelicals. The figure for the 1990 midterm election was 15 percent.
Now, I really don’t have to work too hard to collect intel which shows in graphic detail how controlled ‘public discourse’ really is. What kills me is the way you guys do a wonderful job of acting as if you know whether you’re punched or bored…without ever getting down to explicit proof.
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2010/09/3-september-fighting-terrorism-is-meme.html
I didn’t even mention that there are Palestinian Christians….and Assyrians Christian pacifists who have told the world that they have been victims of Ethnic Cleansing by Kurds ever since Saddam Hussein was ousted. See aina
In other news, it has now been revealed that the deep dark secret of Islam is not violence, but pedophilia.
Just ask pastor Robert “Bob” Jeffress of the First Baptist Church in Dallas.
h/t TPM
Now that it’s been demonstrated that talking wild irresponsible crap about Muslims will get you in the headlines in a New York minute, we can expect more and more and more of this.
“There’s probably a dysfunctional Balkan state or two still floating around.”
Why, yes, there are. Albania, 70% Muslim, and Kosovo, 90% Muslim, come to mind…
“central Asians…”
Kazakhstan? 57% Muslim. Uzbekistan? 88% Muslim.
Tajikistan? 97% Muslim.
Kyrgyzstan? 75% Muslim.
Turkmenistan? 89% Muslim.
“post-colonial Africa…”
Sudan? 70% Muslim.
Senegal? 94% Muslim.
Somalia? 99.9% Muslim.
…..
“But nobody is talking about depriving any of those folks living here of their first amendment rights.”
I’m not, either. I’m just pointing out that the reason people would roll their eyes if you made remarks like that about Jews, but not if you made them about Muslims, is that such a remark would be conspicuously WRONG about Jews. About Muslims? Not so wrong. Majority Muslim states DO tend to be nasty places. Some are poor, some have, thanks to oil, great wealth. But they’re almost uniformly nasty.
Which way does the causality run? Are they nasty and poor because they’re majority Muslim? Is it just coincidence? I don’t know. But you really shouldn’t pretend that those aren’t the facts on the ground. Just because prejudice is morally wrong, doesn’t make it always irrational.
“About Muslims? Not so wrong. Majority Muslim states DO tend to be nasty places. Some are poor, some have, thanks to oil, great wealth. But they’re almost uniformly nasty.”
And Brett palms the card where he attempts to substitute “some majority Muslim states” for “Muslims.”
Peretz: “But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.”
Not “to the leaders of of some Muslim states.”
And how failed is Indonesia, with a population of 228,582,000, 86.1% Muslim, anyway?
Or Turkey? 71,517,100 99.8%
Morocco? 33,723,418 99%
Malaysia? 27,730,000 60.4%
Uniformly nasty?
Regardless, it doesn’t make Muslim people anything.
Brett: “Just because prejudice is morally wrong, doesn’t make it always irrational.”
Should people be particularly cautious in financial dealings with Jewish people?
If not, why not?
Just because prejudice is morally wrong, doesn’t make it always irrational.
Actually, the reason prejudice is morally wrong is exactly and precisely because it is irrational.
Prejudice is pre-judging. It’s forming or holding opinions or feelings, especially negative opinions or feelings, about things before you have all of the relevant information in hand.
If you’d like to argue the case that there is some cause and effect relationship between the fact that some states are majority Muslim and their crappy governance, feel free, but your argument will have to be stronger than the fact that some such states exist.
Gary’s already provided the short list of majority Muslim states that are, actually, quite functional, and among others they include Indonesia, the largest majority Muslim state in the world.
If you need a short list of crap states that are not majority Muslim, either present-day or historical, I’m sure that can also be provided readily.
You’re not presenting an argument here, you’re slandering a billion and a half folks who practice a particular religion. And then you’re not even owning it, you’re hiding behind the “some might say…” dodge.
And for the record, if you want a second opinion on the nastiness or tendency toward violence of the world’s only Jewish political state, ask any Palestinian.
One man’s ceiling etc.
You often have very good points to make. This isn’t one of them, IMVHO.
“Gary’s already provided the short list of majority Muslim states that are, actually, quite functional,”
Oh, the list of such states that are quite functional is much longer. Whatever we think of their policies, Iran and Syria are quite functional states. And certainly so are the U.A.E., Kuwait, Brunei, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Eqypt, Saudi Arabia, and so on.
I didn’t want to confuse an argument about the “nastiness” of a state — which is something we’d have to agree on some criteria for — with an argument about functionality, which is something that can be pointed to without difficulty by avoiding marginal cases.
Note that “politically repressive,” no matter how strongly, is not the same as not-functional. Functional meaning here, more or less, that the state has effective control comparable to that of most states, and is reasonably economically successful.
Stuff like political repressiveness, or state violence, would be a question of how “nasty” a state is or not, not a question of functionality.
Someone needs to get Brett a copy of Guns, Germs and Steel.
It would splode his head.
Gary’s already provided the short list of majority Muslim states that are, actually, quite functional, and among others they include Indonesia, the largest majority Muslim state in the world.
If you need a short list of crap states that are not majority Muslim, either present-day or historical, I’m sure that can also be provided readily.
“Quite functional”. I would say currently functional for the most part. If you were to prepare a list of all crap states, the incidence of governments negatively informed by Islam would be relatively small. However, the incidence of governments informed by totalitarian thinking would be high. The question, and Brett’s point, if I have am getting it correctly, is that Islam can and does equate to totalitarian regimes at least as often as not. The frequency of Islamic populations being ruled in a totalitarian fashion in the name of Islam is not statistically insignificant. It is easy for casual observers, when you stack up a series of terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims going back to the early 80’s, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the current regime in Iran, to a lesser extent Syria, Lybia and elsewhere and cap it with 9-11, to conflate “many or most” Muslims with these events.
Kind of like the very rare commenter one can find on the web who conflates ‘conservative’ thinking with bad faith, economically illiterate, hyper-religious lunacy. But then, perhaps some generalizations are true and some prejudices are rationally-based.
It is easy for casual observers, when you stack up a series of terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims going back to the early 80’s, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the current regime in Iran, to a lesser extent Syria, Lybia and elsewhere and cap it with 9-11, to conflate “many or most” Muslims with these events.
This is a country where a significant number of people believe that the sun revolves around the Earth. The vast majority of Americans are incapable of locating Syria and Libya on a map, let alone discoursing on the nature of their governments. The truth is that most Americans don’t know a damn thing about foreign countries in general, and that goes double for countries that are not highly developed nations. Which means that arguments premised on detailed knowledge of many states’ internal political arrangements are simply absurd.
McTex: Have you ever read Guns, Germs and Steel?
If so, what do you think of Diamond’s theses on the developmental advantages of certain geographies?
Yeah, Perez is a racist a-hole. At some point he just decided that Muslims are the enemies of Jews and stopped thinking.
There are a lot of people like him in this world, sadly.
“Quite functional”. I would say currently functional for the most part. If you were to prepare a list of all crap states, the incidence of governments negatively informed by Islam would be relatively small. However, the incidence of governments informed by totalitarian thinking would be high.
Yeah, I would add Hitler and Stalin to the list of Islam’s greatest monsters.
They were Muslims. Right?
And the colonial European powers spreading love and genocide to the “New World” as well as Africa and Asia.
Also Muslim IIRC.
Must be their religion that makes them do such things.
Catsy:
“I think part of what galls so much about this is that Marty Peretz is Jewish, and ought to fscking know better.”
I’ve given up on my belief in this. I think it’s pretty clearly not true that Jews “know better” about such things.
I’m not entirely sure it’s fair to expect people who have endured trauma (or whose parents or other relatives have) to then be more tolerant, more intelligent, more… whatever. In fact, it might well be the opposite. Like the kid who is abused and grows up into an abuser.
The frequency of Islamic populations being ruled in a totalitarian fashion in the name of Islam is not statistically insignificant.
If you drop “in the name if Islam,” you might almost have a point; “majority Muslim” is not at all the same is “ruled in the name of Islam.” Libya is not an Islamist state; neither is Syria; neither is Egypt; neither are most of the Gulf states. (Look at places where the Muslim Brotherhood is banned.) Iran is no more totalitarian under the mullahs than it was under the Shah, and probably less so. Meanwhile, Turkey, Pakistan (for the moment), Indonesia are at least minimally functioning democracies.
Iraq, as it were, under Saddam was a secular state FWIW.
I’ve given up on my belief in this. I think it’s pretty clearly not true that Jews “know better” about such things.
Speaking as a non-Jew, it seems like Jews in the US often do know better. In my rough experience, American Jews seem much more likely to know better than the average WASP. And I think that remains true even if you exclude Peretz and the other crazy Likudniks. I’ve often felt that the one thing I really don’t like about American Jews is how damn few of them there are; I suspect our politics would be better off if we had a lot more Jews.
Turb,
All we have there is our experiences, I guess. I have 3 Jewish friends whose politics is fairly well known to me (that sentence sounds awful, sorry). They do to 2-for-3 on “knowing better.” Sadly, the 3rd is an “average Joe” version of Perez.
Which means precisely nothing, of course. As does the fact that I’m mostly WASP (does the 1/4 Sicilian wreck things?) 😉
does the 1/4 Sicilian wreck things
I refer you to the Walken/Hopper scene in True Romance.
Otherwise, based on anecdotal evidence alone, I agree with Turb that we would be better off.
Almost all of my American Jewish friends are consistently thoughtful, progressive and, generally, “know better.”
Best Family Guy episode ever. (Humanity advisory: deeply offensive. Well, you know, Family Guy.)
Eric:
I’m not McKinney, but having read GG&S I found it fairly persuasive re: why did “Old World” nations have an edge on the “New World” peoples. I don’t think it really explains very well why certain Old World nations gained edges on other Old World nations. For instance, Europe & the ME were even on the “Germs” factor. “Guns” IIRC, was really more about his argument about population density (more pop = more specialists = tech advances), which the ME was fine for as well. Which leaves Steel. I don’t think that really explains the different developments of, say, the UK and the Ottoman Empire.
I liked GG&S quite a bit, but I think you may be overselling it?
LOL. Yeah, I recall that scene. Very well, I’ll turn in my “WASP” card.
One last comment on “knowing better” – do you think it’s fair to expect that? I think it is only to the extent that the individual in question holds themselves out as someone who does (by, say, being a professional spotter of anti-semites). Which is to say, for example, Marty Perez. A private citizen? Unfair, IMO.
I don’t think Diamond’s point was that absolutely every cultural advantage could be explained by GG&S; just that certain large-scale differences could.
“Quite functional”. I would say currently functional for the most part. If you were to prepare a list of all crap states, the incidence of governments negatively informed by Islam would be relatively small. However, the incidence of governments informed by totalitarian thinking would be high.
Yeah, I would add Hitler and Stalin to the list of Islam’s greatest monsters.
They were Muslims. Right?
And the colonial European powers spreading love and genocide to the “New World” as well as Africa and Asia.
Also Muslim IIRC.
Must be their religion that makes them do such things.
Eric, did you miss the bolded part? Do you deny that Muslim countries are a minority of totalitarian countries but that a majority of Muslim-majority countries are totalitarian?
McTex: Have you ever read Guns, Germs and Steel?
I have not. I recall reading about it. What theory are you referring to?
If you drop “in the name if Islam,” you might almost have a point; “majority Muslim” is not at all the same is “ruled in the name of Islam.”
Hogan, how does that change things? The majority of Muslim majority countries are totalitarian seems to support the tendency to conflate, doesn’t it?
I think you’d have better luck explaining outcomes in the middle east by citing the resource curse.
Of course, as Hogan and Eric point out, McTex’s point doesn’t make any sense given that most of these totalitarian regimes are not even remotely Islamic.
McTex, I know that you don’t have a lot of experience with science and control groups and rigorous analysis, but before you calculate the fraction of Muslim majority nations that have non-democratic governments, shouldn’t you calculate the fraction of non-Muslim-majority nations that have non-democratic governments?
The majority of Muslim majority countries are totalitarian seems to support the tendency to conflate, doesn’t it?
Only if one handwaves away the fact that most of the other countries in the same regions are also totalitarian; or, IOW, what Turbulence pointed to just above me.
I mean, it’s not for nothing that:
A) As the world’s nations go, liberal democracies are fairly rare
B) They’re all in mostly the same place
C) The few that aren’t were largely settled or colonized by the people from countries in B above.
If one were to go strictly by GG&S, you’d expect some of the predominantly Islamic ME countries to be ascendant, because of where the Fertile Crescent is located.
Islam can and does equate to totalitarian regimes at least as often as not.
McK – The point is that this proves nothing, not that either Eric or I didn’t see the bolded part of your comment. Correlation, causality, etc.
Also not sure what ‘equate’ means in this context…
but before you calculate the fraction of Muslim majority nations that have non-democratic governments, shouldn’t you calculate the fraction of non-Muslim-majority nations that have non-democratic governments?
No, I don’t think so. I doubt if the incidence of totalitarian vs. liberal regimes is subject to much in the way of meaningful statistical analysis other than to identify recurring markers. Majority Muslim countries tend toward totalitarianism. It’s a marker. Not an exclusive marker, but a marker nonetheless.
Me: Islam can and does equate to totalitarian regimes at least as often as not.
JB: The point is that this proves nothing, not that either Eric or I didn’t see the bolded part of your comment. Correlation, causality, etc.
IOW, it’s a fact, but it’s a meaningless fact? And to believe otherwise–even to raise the question–is irrational bigotry?
Also not sure what ‘equate’ means in this context…
Fair point. See my “marker” comment. I am not positing a cause-and-effect relationship.
No, I don’t think so. I doubt if the incidence of totalitarian vs. liberal regimes is subject to much in the way of meaningful statistical analysis other than to identify recurring markers.
What does that even mean? Why do you think this question is not subject to meaningful statistical analysis whereas the exact same question focused on muslim-majority nations is?
Majority Muslim countries tend toward totalitarianism.
This is irrelevant. Countries in general tend toward totalitarianism. You have provided zero evidence indicating that Muslim majority nations are more likely than non-Muslim-majority nations to have authoritarian politics.
It’s a marker. Not an exclusive marker, but a marker nonetheless.
You keep using this word marker. As far as I know, it does not appear in the political science literature at all.
Actually, if I remember my GG&S correctly, Diamond touches on this at the end of the book, giving some suggestions why the Fertile Crescent’s comparative advantage eventually disappeared, but since these are more recent history (in terms of the book’s scope), he only offers suggestions rather than fully fleshed out theories. At any rate, while the Fertile Crescent was rather fertile comparatively, when you started getting the large areas where grain could be grown, that advantage starts to disappear.
I liked GG&S quite a bit, but I think you may be overselling it?
No, he talks about how and why the fertile crescent got turned into desert, and it had nothing to do with Islam. But the effects were devastating for centuries to come.
I don’t think Diamond’s point was that absolutely every cultural advantage could be explained by GG&S; just that certain large-scale differences could.
Me too.
If one were to go strictly by GG&S, you’d expect some of the predominantly Islamic ME countries to be ascendant, because of where the Fertile Crescent is located.
But they were when the Fertile Crescent was still Fertile. Quite ascendant. Leading the West in fact.
Eric, did you miss the bolded part? Do you deny that Muslim countries are a minority of totalitarian countries but that a majority of Muslim-majority countries are totalitarian?
The question is of causality.
One could also point out that Muslim countries tend to be in warm climes. But does that mean that Islam affected the weather, or that the weather created an environment conducive to Islam?
Or was it the hot weather that led to totalitarianism? Or vice versa?
Point being: you are vastly overselling the causality quotient, and you are able to achieve this by dismissing the exceptions and ignoring other determinant factors explored in books like Diamond’s.
(this conversation aside, I think you would really enjoy it)
Fascinating.
1) Allegedly liberal magazine publisher says something undeniably racist.
2) Actual liberals here and elsewhere are appalled and disgusted. They condemn the publisher for his undeniable racism.
3) This blog’s handful of conservative commenters immediately argue with the liberals; they clearly can’t ever agree with the liberals, but they also can’t come right out and say the racist publisher is right or is not actually racist.
Either they agree with Peretz or they disagree, but they just can’t bring themselves to agree with liberals.
Why can’t they join the condemnation of the racist Peretz? Because they apparently agree with him that Islam is bad and its followers are bad people.
Don’t deny this, fellas: What’s the point of any of your comments here if not to say that Peretz isn’t wrong?
Why can’t these guys, just once, condemn bigotry rather than defend it?
Deck-Stacking (def.): ” I doubt if the incidence of totalitarian vs. liberal regimes is subject to much in the way of meaningful statistical analysis other than to identify recurring markers.”
I know I did.
Although obviously I need to go back and reread it, because the discussion that dealt with the climatic changes in the Fertile Crescent has completely fled my memory banks.
Me too. I’d forgotten that part.
Hogan, how does that change things?
Adding “in the name of Islam” gives major causative status to Islam. If you want to say that Islam isn’t necessarily the cause of totalitarianism, then you really shouldn’t put it that way, and you need some explanation of secular totalitarianism in Muslim states.
In any case you’re up against a much more difficult historical problem than you’re admitting: totalitarianism is a phase that lots of countries have gone through; taking a snapshot at any one moment and using that as your baseline doesn’t make sense unless there’s some feature of the current landscape that you want to argue is permanent. (See also “stacking the deck.”) And at the risk of raising the ghost of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, you might want to consider whether any authoritarian government can be reasonably called “totalitarian.”
McTex,
Naturally, Ive got a couple of problems with your thesis. People have already touched on eg the resource curse, but
1)you can’t ignore the history: Iran appeared to be evolving into a democratic state until their desire to nationalize their oil industry led to a US- and UK-backed coup. Several Middle Eastern and North African states became Cold War pawns where- like Latin America- dictatorships were commonly supported by one side or the other.
2)You are counting numbers of states, but Im not sure how that becomes a good metric- again, because of accidents of history, there are many small countries in the Middle East. Between Bangaldesh (145m), India (160M), Indonesia (200M), Pakistan, (175M), Nigeria (80M), and Turkey (75M) more than half of the Muslims of the world live in democratic states. And that’s not even counting the small Muslim populations in eg the US (which is considerably larger than the Muslim population of eg Qatar or Bahrain).
Slarti and Rob:
From the google, some excerpt’s from Diamond:
Thus, Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment. They committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base. Power shifted westward as each eastern Mediterranean society in turn undermined itself (…)
That is how the Fertile Crescent lost its huge early lead over Europe.
You did, Slarti? All I see from you are comments about GG&S. (And I’m not sure I get your last point. It looks like you’re implying, but not saying outright, that ME countries should be far more advanced but being mostly Islamic they’re not? If that’s your point, I’d refer to Turb’s point about the Resource Curse as a more likely explanation. If that’s NOT what you’re saying, then, uh, never mind…)
Anyway, I was really aiming at GOB’s ignorant “why don’t they condemn terror?” comment (nicely eviscerated by several others) and BB’s and McKT’s insistence that Islamic countries are nasty which means… what exactly? That Peretz is right about Muslims? That Muslims don’t value human life like “we” do (bombing campaigns notwithstanding) so we shouldn’t grant American Muslims the “privileges of the First Amendment?”
If they agree with this, they should say so, instead of beating around the bush like they are, trying to come up with justifications for anti-Islam prejudice without coming right and saying they agree with someone the rest of us recognize as a bigot.
In other words, what exactly is their point?
And to reiterate Hogan’s point at the top of the thread- since when does the First Amendment give us privileges and not rights?
I’m guessing Peretz chose that word deliberately. He damned well does know the difference- rights can’t be denied anyone. If they can be denied, they are not rights at all but privileges. He wants to deny Muslim citizens their 1st Amend. rights so he has to pretend that they’re not rights at all. Because he’s a dishonest hack as well as a bigot.
Eric,
I wonder if their environment was really more fragile or if they just had a head start on destroying it…
Oddly, I think I remember his arguments in Collapse even less than I remember GG&S, though I read Collapse more recently (his argument about the root cause of the rise of Islam struck me as weak – that I do remember).
I didn’t say he/they did know better, I said he/they ought to. History being what it is, you’d think that would be unassailable.
We’re not talking about an abusive parent, we’re talking about the assembly-line murder of millions that left incalculably deep cultural scars which persist to this day. Those scars very specifically include hard lessons, passed from generation to generation, about the consequences of a society deciding it doesn’t like a particular religious minority.
The child abuse analogy is almost offensively inapt.
I think it’s entirely fair. Just as I think it’s fair to expect gays to know better than to trash transgenders and other sexual minorities, for women to know better than to favor sexist policies, and for Lego enthusiasts to not make fun of people who collect My Little Ponies. It’s an expectation that someone who is a member of a given group that has endured something unjust to know better than to inflict that injustice on another. And it is particularly fair in the case of Jews, who have been the favorite scapegoats of dozens of cultures across thousands of years and suffered one of the most horrific and brutal acts of genocide of the 20th century for no other reason than that they were Jews, to know better than anyone what happens when a society makes a particular religion their whipping boy.
“The frequency of Islamic populations being ruled in a totalitarian fashion in the name of Islam is not statistically insignificant.”
Would you care to measure it against the frequency of non-Muslim populations being ruled in totalitarian fashion in the last fifty years? Or even just today?
Eric: “Almost all of my American Jewish friends are consistently thoughtful, progressive and, generally, ‘know better.'”
I know a bunch more American Jews than you do, I bet, which is why I can’t say the same thing.
The older generation does tend to be worse, but there are plenty of younger Jews who don’t question what they brought up to believe as regards the Israeli/Palestinian narrative.
This doesn’t make sense to me; either you want to make a point about non-democratic governments using numbers, or you don’t.
“We’re not talking about an abusive parent, we’re talking about the assembly-line murder of millions that left incalculably deep cultural scars which persist to this day. Those scars very specifically include hard lessons, passed from generation to generation, about the consequences of a society deciding it doesn’t like a particular religious minority.”
It’s my extremely strong opinion that non-Jews overwhelming over-estimate the import of the Shoah/Holocaust on post-Shoah Jewish paranoia and overwhelmingly under-estimate the import of the three thousand-year history of antisemitism that is the history of the Jewish people that goes before that.
Zionism predates WWII. So does Jewish worry about antisemitism, to put it mildly.
The Shoah was just a recent iteration of particular efficiency, but in the overall narrative of the Jews, it’s just a recent blip in a story of exile, slavery, persecution, and mass killings, to Babylonia, Egypt, Europe, etc. The Shoah did not contribute to Herzl’s reasoning, nor that of his contemporary followers, nor that of Jews for thousands of years before.
“And it is particularly fair in the case of Jews, who have been the favorite scapegoats of dozens of cultures across thousands of years and suffered one of the most horrific and brutal acts of genocide of the 20th century for no other reason than that they were Jews, to know better than anyone what happens when a society makes a particular religion their whipping boy.”
I’m pretty sure it’s not fair to treat individuals primarily as representatives of any group they haven’t been elected to represent.
There’s a period at the end of that sentence.
I know a bunch more American Jews than you do, I bet, which is why I can’t say the same thing.
Ironically, the older ones I know are the less progressive ones.
And Gary, I know a lot. Grew up in NY and LI.
Those scars very specifically include hard lessons
The trouble with scars is that they don’t have specific meanings. If all you’re doing is examining scars, the hard lesson of “don’t let this happen to anyone else” is no more or less likely to be learned than the hard lesson of “do it to them before they do it to you.” Both of which could be summarized as “never again.”
The older generation does tend to be worse, but there are plenty of younger Jews who don’t question what they brought up to believe as regards the Israeli/Palestinian narrative.
Sure, there are many Jews in the US that have political beliefs regarding I-P that I, as an Arab, find distasteful or completely nuts. But I can say the exact same thing about tens of millions of Christians in the US. And when it comes to pretty much any foreign policy topic outside of the middle east, American Jews seem a great deal more sane than the average non-Jewish American.
I think perceptions might be confused on this issue because the traditional American Jewish organizations seem to espouse a politics far to the right of the median American Jewish voter. Hence the rise of J Street. My sense is that the Jews dominating the national conversation are often not representative of American Jews.
Both of which could be summarized as “never again.”
Hogan, thanks for saying this much better than I could have.
That would, I believe, be the three-thousand year history of antisemitism that I very explicitly called out in a passage on which you even quoted me.
And I’m pretty sure that’s not even remotely what I’m doing. And if you re-read what I’ve written carefully, I think you’ll see that., which is a completely different assertion. And that’s particularly true for someone like Peretz, who has no imaginable excuse for being unaware of the history and consequences of antisemitism and its applicability to how Muslims are being treated in this country now.
I’m not generalizing about the traits held by a given group or holding individuals of that group responsible for or representative of the whole group. There is a vast gulf of difference between saying, “you are a ___, that means you can be described as X or are representative of all ____”, and saying, “you are a ___, a member of a group that has suffered and continues to suffer X simply because of who they are, and ought to know better than to treat others the same way.” I’m not saying all Jews do know better–that’s a self-evidently false generalization. I’m saying–and have consistently said from the very first comment–that they
A period at the end of your sentence does not make that sentence any less a misreading of my point.
Hm, somehow part of my comment got eaten. Should read:
Hmm. Catsy, my question was just that – a question. You answered it. Will ponder.
As for my “almost” offensive analogy… well, no offense was meant. I was thinking about individuals and picked an individual trama (child abuse). It seemed to me that a Jew, persecuted for being a Jew, might naturally have a reaction other than the one you’re looking for: instead of going the tolerance route, he/she goes the pre-emptive strike/safety through full spectrum dominance route. I know which I prefer, but I remain unsure I have some sort of right to expect Jews to reach the same conclusion at a higher rate than non-Jews.
I think there are plentiful examples of Jews doing exactly that. A few others above phrased a similar point as there being more than one means to the end of “never again”.
My point was never–not ever, not from the very beginning of this thread–to say that “all Jews know better than to X”. That would be a silly and somewhat offensive generalization.
My point was very specifically that they ought to. Gays ought to know better than to persecute other sexual minorities, but there’s a very strong thread of anti-transgender bigotry in the gay community. Women ought to know better than to favor sexually discriminatory policies, but the Republican Party is filled with counterexamples.
The phrase “ought to” is an expression of idealism, not an assertion of fact.
Gays ought to know better than to persecute other sexual minorities, but there’s a very strong thread of anti-transgender bigotry in the gay community.
I learned within a few months of coming out that my gay brethren could be every bit as racist, misogynistic, and all-around reactionary as their straight counterparts. It was not a lesson I was happy to learn, but it was a necessary one.
Catsy – I know what you said. You were clear.
Saying someone “ought to” know something is expecting/demanding that they do. I questioned that expectation. I still question it, but thank you for your responses. They add to my thinking on the matter.
That sounds sort of Borg-like, doesn’t it? Your opinion will be assimilated into our collective…
I have a story similar to Uncle K’s @ 3:26. It was an end of innocence for me — not by far the only one, but a significant one.
Catsy — “ought to” comes across as normative and judgmental, not idealistic. So does this:
I think it’s entirely fair. Just as I think it’s fair to expect gays to know better than to trash transgenders and other sexual minorities…
It’s not “fair” to “expect” anyone to be anything other than the flawed human beings we are. What I’ve seen is that people rarely learn the things I think it’s “fair” to “expect” them to learn. I’m sure the same goes in reverse.
I couldn’t disagree more strongly. I think it’s entirely fair to expect people to behave decently and show compassion and perspective. I think it’s entirely fair to expect people from a disadvantaged group to be more conscious of and averse to inflicting on others the kind of treatment their group suffers or has suffered. I expect people to be honest with me, to not try to harm me or my family, and to respond to reason with reason. That doesn’t mean that I think they all will do any of these things, and it doesn’t mean that I let people take advantage of me. It means I have certain baseline expectations of what decent civilized behavior ought to be and am not in the habit of making excuses for bad behavior by chalking it up to the fact that people are flawed human beings. I’m well aware that I myself don’t always live up to the same expectations, which neither excuses me nor makes those expectations any less reasonable.
This world would be a lot better if we all set the bar a little higher and expected better of each other.
I think it’s entirely fair to expect people from a disadvantaged group to be more conscious of and averse to inflicting on others the kind of treatment their group suffers or has suffered.
I couldn’t disagree more strongly.
Set the bar higher for yourself if you want to, but no one has to pay the slightest attention to how high you’re setting the bar for the rest of us. If you think you’re setting the bar for me, then you’re whistling into the wind, is all I can say.
“Expecting” people who have been disadvantaged to somehow magically be more saintly than other people is really so over the top that I don’t even know where to start in responding to it.
We are all flawed human beings. That isn’t making excuses, it’s just facing reality. The air up there on your high horse is too rarefied for those of us who are just muddling along the best we can down here on the ground.
I’m sure the world would be a better place if we were all something other than what we are. It would be nice if we all had a pony, too.
First paragraph of 4:35 should have been italicized….it was a quote from Catsy.
I was going to make the point that “ought,” as used by you here, is aspirational: “The phrase ‘ought to’ is an expression of idealism, not an assertion of fact.”
But “expect” has a different meaning: an expectation is something you impose on others, rather than hold out as an ideal you’d like others to uphold.
But I see Rob in CT and JanieM have already covered that ground.
However: “I think it’s entirely fair to expect people to behave decently and show compassion and perspective.”
I agree with this.
“I think it’s entirely fair to expect people from a disadvantaged group to be more conscious of and averse to inflicting on others the kind of treatment their group suffers or has suffered.”
I strongly disagree with this. (I do not disagree with your right to your view, of course.)
But these are two separate points.
I do think it’s unfair to put greater expectations on individuals because they are members of a group.
If we put lesser expectations on individuals because they are members of a group, we tend to frown on that, don’t we? How is putting greater expectations on people because of their inclusion in a group significantly different and less prejudicial?
If you were saying you hoped people would learn from the experience of their group, I’d be right there with you. But I’m not going to judge them more harshly than people who are not members of their group who haven’t learned the same lesson.
Setting aside the entire issue of having different expectations of different individuals because of their inclusion in a group, we’re specifically discussing “people from a disadvantaged group.” Another word used for such people is “victims.” And holding victims to higher expectations than others wouldn’t be something I’d put in the “fair” column.
(Aka “blaming the victim.”)
I don’t imagine you’d think that’s fair, either, so I’m apt to think we’re not communicating our views well to each other more than it’s likely we’re expressing fundamentally different values.
And holding victims to higher expectations than others wouldn’t be something I’d put in the “fair” column.
(Aka “blaming the victim.”)
But doesn’t “blaming the victim” normally mean blaming them for being victims (as opposed to blaming them for later victimizing someone else)?
If we’re going to get into whether or not it’s fair to have different expectations of members of groups, I guess I’d put it this way: Being the member of a generally victimized or disadvantaged group doesn’t necessarily mean that one has personally been victimized or disadvantaged to the same extent or in the same way that the group has (in general). In that sense, I can understand not having expectations based on group membership.
But if the group you are a member of is defined as “the group of individuals whom I would expect to have learned something about tolerance based on their personal experiences,” then it tautological that each member of that group is someone that I would expect to have learned something about tolerance based on his or her personal experiences.
But those groups aren’t the same types of groups, necessarily.
You appear to have gravely misunderstood the difference between expecting decent behavior of others and holding them accountable to your own standards. No one is accountable to me except myself. But that does not obviate my right to have an opinion about what is the decent thing to do in a given circumstance. We’re not talking about judging other people’s sexuality here, we’re talking about the expectation that we treat each other with decency and not be bigoted. I can’t believe that anyone here is actually arguing whether or not that’s reasonable.
What’s over the top is your hyperbolic paraphrase of my position. If you’re having trouble figuring out where to start in responding to it, you can start be describing it accurately rather than caricaturing it. Nowhere did I express anything remotely close to an expectation that anyone “somehow magically be more saintly” than other people.
We ideally expect people to learn from their experiences and mistakes–it’s how human beings grow and mature. They don’t always, but it’s inarguably preferable that they do. The expectations I’ve expressed here ultimately boil down to that.
A statement of fact can be–and in this case, is–an excuse as well. I’ve been saying, broadly speaking, that I think we ought to expect people to treat others decently. Your response has been that that’s unreasonable because we’re all flawed. That is, by definition, making excuses for the behavior.
Oh for fsck’s sake, dial the passive-aggressive melodrama back a notch. Nobody’s judging your life, your sexuality, your career, your religion, or whether you like cats or dogs or Macs or PCs. We’re talking about whether or not it’s reasonable to expect people to treat each other decently and not be bigoted, sexist, or what have you.
When did it become out of line to expect a certain minimum standard of decency and reason from others?
Doesn’t Peretz’s wife own the New Republic?
Or is that an suburban legend?
Marty Peretz.
Maybe I’m thinking of the gossip surrounding the note (6) at the bottom of the page.
^ Turque, Bill (2000). Inventing Al Gore: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin. pp. 51. ISBN 0618131604. “His 1967 marriage to Anne Labouisse Farnsworth, an heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune, helped him buy The New Republic from Gilbert Harrison in 1974.” |quote = Marty Peretz bought the magazine in 1974 from Gilbert Harrison with $380,000 garnered from the wealth of his wife, Anne Labouisse Farnsworth, heir to one of the great fortunes created by the Singer Sewing Machine company. }}
I think US Americans have oversold the liberal democracies vs. all other forms of government argument.
Especially since most of the liberal democracies which grew out of European settler colonies were RACIST liberal democracies. And their racism was actually enforced by the state. So they weren’t polite socially bigoted country clubs, but had been genocidally racist “liberal democracies” and enforced racial hierarchies for most of their existence.
I agree with someotherdude’s 9:56 post. Too sleepy to add more.
“and BB’s and McKT’s insistence that Islamic countries are nasty which means… what exactly?”
My point is this: Prejudice is irrational, because it treats individuals as though they were simply interchangeable examples of a group, rather than on their own merits. But it is not, generally, completely irrational, in as much as it’s usually informed to some degree by statistical realities. You don’t, for instance, encounter a lot of prejudiced people who think Zulus are short, or that Italians are blond. Even though there are, of course, some short Zulus and pale Italians around, as the saying goes, that’s not the way to bet.
The reason the substitution of Jew for Muslim doesn’t work in the Perez example is that that’s not the typical prejudice concerning Jews. And it’s not, because it really runs contrary to statistical reality.
It IS the typical prejudice concerning Muslims, and it did not, sad to say, become that typical prejudice by accident. It became the prejudice because there’s some truth to it. Not a lot, given that there are a heck of a lot of peaceful, life affirming Muslims out there. But enough that the substitution really does not work.
A Jew trying to get his fellows to abandon stoning as a form of execution, murder of Jews who try to convert to other religion, and so forth, would probably be in need of medical attention.
A Muslim doing the same would be in need of a body guard, sad to say…
“A Muslim doing the same would be in need of a body guard, sad to say…”
Brett, exactly how many stonings do you know of that happened anywhere in on planet Earth, by Muslims, in the year 2009? Please provide cites.
Let me get out ahead, and let’s say you find as many as five cases.
Let’s double that, and say you find ten, although I’d really like to see some evidence of even five cases. But let’s say it’s ten.
Out of 1.5 billion Muslims, if there were ten cases of stoning on the planet Earth, how popular does that make stoning among Muslims?
Are there, in fact, bodyguards necessary for Muslims to say they’re against stoning? Or would it actually be the case that most of those 1.5 billion Muslims oppose stoning, don’t do it, and don’t call for it?
Hmmm. Not to add extra fuel to the fire, but I have discovered that when people who I expect not to, for example, be verbally and even physically abusing my daughter in school (because they’re members of my church), I’m extra disappointed when they fail to live up to my expectations. And extra pissed-off to the point of picking up and taking my church attendance elsewhere when the situation is not remedied upon request.
Whether that’s a fair analogy of what Catsy is saying or not is up to Catsy, but I don’t see that in any way as blaming the victim, just expecting people who really ought to know better to behave as if they do.
But one of Gary’s points is a fair one: people are people, and expecting certain groups to exhibit better behavior because they ought to know better is just begging for disappointment.
[Emphasis added later, because I forgot to, and because I can – Ed./Slart]
So, according to Brett’s line of reasoning/logic(?), all non-whites should assume white men are inherently bloodthirsty and are prone to theft? That is, all white-men have no respect for life or property?
Considering Iberian-Catholics behavior in Latin America, Anglo-Protestant’s behavior in the US, Canada, Australia and South Africa, Russian and Georgian behavior as rulers of the Soviet Empire, and European Zionists’ in Palestine?
Slarti got to it first. ‘to expect’ can mean two things. If I say that I expect rain then there is no moral pressure on the weather to provide liquid precipitation but a prediction. If I tell someone “I expect you to…” then this does not mean necessarily that I take it for granted (quite the opposite in fact). But there are many ambiguous cases like “I expect Obama to reform…”. This can mean that I demand that he keeps his promises or that I predict that he will. In case of victim groups and behaviour we have such an ambiguous case. I read it in the predictive sense (and agreed), Gary in the moral demand sense (and disagreed).
Which is not to say I don’t think Gary’s making any other fair points, just that I wanted to underscore (which I hope is a bit more useful than a me-too) as being particularly relevant to both what happens in the real world in general, when our expectations are not met, and something specific that happened to our family.
The majority of Muslim majority countries are totalitarian
Majority Muslim states, in descending order of population.
I haven’t taken the time to check the quality of the governance of each and every one, nor have I have added up the sums to see if the “majority of Muslim majority states” claim holds.
But there’s the source information if anyone cares to take the time to do so.
My money is on the unders.
And McTex, not to pick on you, but if you haven’t actually gone and done the homework before making the claim, you are pre-judging the situation, based on your intuition or some other general impression, in the absence of actual information.
That is called “prejudice”. We are all prone to it, so there’s no room here for judging or name-calling, but it behooves all of us to get the facts about things like this before we draw our conclusions.
When did it become out of line to expect a certain minimum standard of decency and reason from others?
It’s not out of line, IMHO, but it can be feckless, sometimes. First of all, expectation is active rather than passive. It can be very powerful both in a classroom and in a culture (no less in the latter than in the former). But it works only when the people being expected-of respect the former to some extent, and share at least some of the same basic cultural ideals – otherwise, ‘Judge Catsy has made her decision, now let her enforce it!’. If the expected-of don’t share them, not only will the expectation not have any effect at all, but persuasion and political efficacy have been forfeit. Expectation is an all-or-nothing thing.
My original objection was about effective politics. Maybe it wasn’t quite germane to what Catsy said initially. If so, I apologize for that. But I can’t get over a nagging feeling that it was germane, at least a little.
Our politics has become like a big game of Chicken. Republicans threaten to do something transgressive; Dems think ‘Oh, they wouldn’t go THAT far’. Repubs. DO go ‘that far’. Then they push harder; Dems say, ‘OK, the GOP is aggressive, but that’s beyond the pale’, and then the political GOP actually goes there. The transgressiveness itself is the source of their power. Their success is not in spite of, but because of this abrogation of norms of ‘decent’ or ‘polite’, or even fully rational behavior. And in that game, it takes two to tango.
It seems to me that it’s a responsibility for opponents of this kind of Reaction to see things as they are rather than as they ought to be. I agree with Catsy that, for example, Peretz’ disgusting comments *ought* to have negative social consequences for him. But I don’t at all *expect* them to do – not for a minute. I would hope that Jews in Israel – given their own history all over the world – would be barely capable of inflicting racist oppression of another people. But my eyes tell me that they are perfectly capable of it. Expectation plays no part in my formation of an opinion of what US/Israel policy should be.
I’m not advocating for Liberal abandonment of its own ideals in order to fight its opponent. But you surely can’t fight an opponent effectively if you don’t see the latter’s true nature. A lot of the GOP’s sky-high rhetoric is effective (at least on the margins) because it contains bits of truth, albeit twisted. When they called Democrats ‘appeasers’ of Islamists, they were wrong about the subject, but right about the predicate: Democrats and Liberals appease Republicans and reactionaries. ‘Expecting better’ of them actually makes their strategy for acquiring power more effective.
Part of my lovely and delicious white male hetero privilege is that when I act like a jerk, it’s not really a big deal, because hardly anyone expects better of me. It’s one of the things I’m going to miss after the electric UFO lords transphase in from the tenth dimension and become the new hegemons. Or the revolution, whichever comes first.
Regarding the controversy over Catsy’s comments, I share Gary’s thinking as stated here:
(…)I’m apt to think we’re not communicating our views well to each other more than it’s likely we’re expressing fundamentally different values.
I’d especially like to think that Catsy and JanieM don’t really disagree as much as their respective comments would indicate. (It’s like seeing two of your best friends suddenly getting into a serious fist fight over what very well may be a simple misunderstanding.)
Catsy: “When did it become out of line to expect a certain minimum standard of decency and reason from others?”
Nobody has, within my attention, disagreed with this.
What I, and I believe others, have disagreed with is this, different, statement:
Immediately prior to that you wrote:
But that’s not what we’re talking about: we’re talking about your statement that you expect “people from a disadvantaged group to be more conscious of and averse to inflicting on others the kind of treatment their group suffers or has suffered.”
It’s the putting of higher expectations on individuals because of their membership in a given group that’s at issue, and not “whether or not it’s reasonable to expect people to treat each other decently and not be bigoted, sexist, or what have you” in general.
I’m sure you don’t mean to imply the reverse of what you wrote, which would be that you “expect people from [the advantaged majority] to be [less] conscious of and averse to inflicting on others the kind of treatment their group [does not and has not] suffers[ed].”
Presumably you do not mean to imply or suggest that you hold members of a disadvantaged group to a higher standard than the majority, but what’s at issue is that what you wrote did seem to imply that.
Possibly clarifying that that’s not what you mean might help untangle this miscommunication. If all you are trying to say is that “[w]e’re talking about whether or not it’s reasonable to expect people to treat each other decently and not be bigoted, sexist, or what have you,” than I doubt anyone will disagree.
Warning: wall of text. There is no tl;dr.
Actually, I think you’ve helpfully identified a useful distinction. For the sake of not having to tediously repeat descriptions and qualifiers, I’m going to shorthand the general expectation of decency as Expectation A, and the more specific expectation that people from specific disadvantaged groups targeted by X behavior be particularly cognizant of and averse to that behavior themselves as Expectation B.
My comments on this thread began with B. Along the way I noticed that some of the pushback I was getting was generalized so that even A was being rejected as legitimate. I pushed back on that by affirming my belief that A was legitimate. In the process the argument in many places became more about that than about the more specific Expectation B, and the two became conflated. My exasperation about “when did it become out of line to etc etc etc” was directed specifically at objections to Expectation A, but because that was expressed in the same comments as argument about Expectation B, it became confusing.
Clear so far?
I think–I would hope–that we’ve exhaustively settled that there’s nothing out of line about Expectation A–having certain basic expectations of decency per se. Society depends on it, and the conflict occurs when there is a mismatch of expectations. There’s no real way around that other than communication.
But I take your general point about having higher standards or expectations for members of a given disadvantaged group. I don’t entirely agree, but I see where you’re coming from. Let me see if I can restate this in order to clarify my thinking:
I think that if you (the general “you”–not you specifically):
1. are a member of a group that endures a particular kind of injustice for no reason other than being a member of that group;
2. identify personally as a member of that group;
3. can be reasonably expected to be aware of the history and nature of that injustice, and;
4. are neither mentally impaired nor a sociopath;
–then it is reasonable to expect you in particular–moreso than any random person who lacks that connection to and awareness of said injustice–to be capable of the bare minimum of empathy and perspective necessary to not visit that same injustice on others, and to understand why it is wrong.
That does not mean that everyone who fits the above description will be capable of that, or that they will make that connection even if they are capable of doing so. But they ought to, and not doing so is a failure of empathy and moral decency that to one extent or another is more egregious than the same failure from someone who does not have the personal connection to said injustice to aid them in putting themselves in someone else’s shoes and understanding why it is wrong.
The reasoning behind this is similar to the reasoning behind laws against hate crimes. We classify hate crimes as uniquely bad and deserving of greater punishment because they are a crime not only against an individual, but against the targeted group to which the individual belonged. We recognize that hate crimes have an impact on all members of the targeted group who are aware of the crime, who cannot know whether or not they too will be targeted at some point by the same kind of hatred.
The flip side of recognizing that this broader impact has an effect on members of that group whether or not they themselves have been targeted is that this provides members of the targeted group with an experience that opens the door for them to place themselves in the shoes of someone who has been treated the same way. This is not the same as saying that they will. But it translates into a greater expectation for them to make the connection between their own experience and the experience of others, an expectation greater than what I would have of someone who did not have that experience. I think this is a reasonable response to basic human psychology.
To bring this back to the context that started it, Marty Peretz has no imaginable, conceivable excuse for being unaware of the history and nature of antisemitism, or of where the road leads when–as I put it earlier–a society decides it doesn’t like a given religious minority. No excuse at all.
My original statement of “Jewish and ought to know better” was imprecisely general in that I did not describe the above qualifiers, but it was general in the service of brevity more than anything else. I’m not really sure how to articulate what I mean in a way that fits in a single phrase or clear sentence.
I think that this description of my position–while superficially accurate–omits a great deal of nontrivial nuance and context, decribed above, that does matter.
I never objected to A. If I gave that impression, that’s my fault for not writing clearly. I was only questioning B.
Also, though I failed to mention this before, until recently I was firmly in your camp on this. I just recently questioned the underlying assumption involved and now I’m unsure about it.
“Clear so far?”
Yep.
I’m good with the rest of what you wrote, and thank you for the effort you put into making yourself so clear, but the one point I’d make a suggestion on is considering whether “possibility” might work as well or better in your sentence I quote above, rather than “expectation.”
It would then read thusly:
“But it translates into a greater possibility for them to make the connection between their own experience and the experience of others, a possibility greater than what I would have of someone who did not have that experience.”
*That’s* a statement I’d 100% agree with.
As for whatever tiny percent “expectation” leaves me uncomfortable, I think we’ve now sufficiently discussed this that we can bury the horse. Thanks again for the very thoughtful response.
I had my own “wall of text” mostly ready to post, but reading first Catsy’s @ 2:04 and then Gary’s conclusion that “we’ve now sufficiently discussed this,” I’m scrapping it. Before I go, however, and mostly because of hairshirt’s sweet comment from this morning, I’m going to add some parting thoughts/shots.
In relation to Catsy’s “B,” I was almost wooed by Gary’s suggestion of changing “expectation” to “possibility.” As far as that single passage goes, I don’t think I’d quarrel with it if that change were made. Then I remembered this:
That does not mean that everyone who fits the above description will be capable of that, or that they will make that connection even if they are capable of doing so. But they ought to, and not doing so is a failure of empathy and moral decency that to one extent or another is more egregious than the same failure from someone who does not have the personal connection to said injustice to aid them in putting themselves in someone else’s shoes and understanding why it is wrong.
A judgment like “failure of empathy and moral decency” does not fit with my idea of “possibility.” My own opinion of such a judgment is that it is pernicious, destructive, and damaging to politics, interpersonal relations, and personal psychology. If Catsy had said that people always do learn such and such from being victims of injustice, then I would put it down to naivete and wonder about whether time and experience would change his mind. But he has now said explicitly, more than once, that he isn’t saying that that’s what people do, but rather that that’s what they should do.
I’m not saying Catsy per se is destructive etc., at least any more so than the rest of us, but I am saying that such a way of assessing of human possibilities is destructive etc., and is itself a failure of compassion. It’s a very common one, though, so it fits neatly under my entire theory, which is that people will be what they are, however much we may wish they would be something else, and however much we judge them to be egregious failures when they are.
In one of the conflict resolution workshops I attended a long time ago, there was another participant named John Shuford, who actually does conflict work for a living. It was from him that I first heard the saying “hurt people hurt people.” I think this applies to victims of group injustice just as much as it applies to victims of interpersonal abuse. Not to say that some victims don’t make the journey all the way to where Catsy thinks they “should” go, but just to say that — IMHO — it’s pretty d*mned unfair to judge them as failures if they don’t.
*****
These are parting thoughts/shots because this thread, along with other things that have happened here lately (another same-old argument about tax brackets?), and stuff that’s going on in my own life have pushed me to where I have been heading for a while. I’m taking a break. Whether I will come back, as Gary has done, or stay away, as various others are still doing, I have no idea.
And I wouldn’t even be saying this out loud except that I want to say to hairshirt (from whom this morning wasn’t the first attempt at peacemaking in my direction — and I have appreciated it each time) — if you feel like dropping me a note at obwiboston at gmail, please do. I have a dear friend in Philly whom I’m always threatening to visit, and if I were to get down there, I would enjoy getting together.
Peace and constructive troublemaking to all.
I think Gary and I have pretty much settled our discussion. However, I need to respond to Jamie’s last, even though I’m not sure if he/she will end up reading it.
Well, yes, in point of fact. I can’t believe it’s even controversial to say that people should learn “such and such” from being victims of injustice, where “such and such” refers specifically to the minimal empathy and perspective necessary to not inflict the same injustice on others.
You seem to have some kind of visceral opposition to judging anyone else’s behavior or holding any opinion about what people “should” do. From what I recall of what you’ve said about your own personal circumstances in the past, it makes sense that you’d be averse to passing judgment on others. This, incidentally, is a perfect example of exactly the kind of dynamic that I’ve been trying to point out, and if that’s accurate then I’m glad you have taken that lesson to heart: it is certainly true that there are many, many situations in which it’s wrong to be judgmental of others.
But there are many situations in which it is not. It is not wrong to be judgmental of someone who lies. It is not wrong to be judgmental of someone who steals. It is not wrong to be judgmental of a bully, or a murderer, or someone who joins a Neo-Nazi organization. We do wrong by being judgmental when we are judgmental of the wrong things for the wrong reasons, and when we conflate the worth of a person with the wrongness of their actions. But we also do wrong when we refuse to chastise someone who commits a clear wrong. We do no one any favors when we refrain from calling out their misdeeds and exhorting them to be better than that.
If the term “judgment” has baggage for you, then substitute “disapproval” or any similar synonyms that fit. The point is the same: the disapproval of one’s peers is how one learns that their behavior is socially unacceptable. Refusing to call out bad behavior and expect better behavior of others isn’t respecting the unique snowflake-like qualities of every human being or a simple recognition that we’re all flawed, it’s conflict aversion that only enables the problem to continue.
As far as whether or not my disapproval carries any weight–it of course does not, unless you are someone who values my opinion and my judgment (in the other sense of the word). I am only one person. But if I tell you that it’s wrong to do X, and your sister tells you it’s wrong to do X, and your coworkers tell you it’s wrong to do X, then sooner or later most reasonable people are going to get the idea that maybe it’s wrong to do X. And every person who sees X happening and thinks, “well that’s just Bob, he’s only human” and says nothing–they are part of the problem, not the solution.
The issue isn’t with passing that judgment, it’s with the circumstances where X is not actually wrong and the judgment is the product of irrational biases–such as social disapproval of being gay or or black or Muslim.
“It is not wrong to be judgmental of someone who lies. It is not wrong to be judgmental of someone who steals.”
It depends.
Do you have perfect knowledge of the lie, the reason it was told, and all the circumstances? Are there not many times it’s valid and moral to lie?
Do you have perfect knowledge of the theft, the reason the item was taken, and all the circumstances? Even if you know for sure that one person took that which was in another’s possesion, do you know the full provenance of the item?
And so on.
Judgment has to be on a continuum that shifts with, and is open to, new information, and is dependent on establishing sufficient minimal information.
I thought that was implicit in my qualification that it should not be “of the wrong things for the wrong reasons”, that it should be a “clear wrong”, and that it should not be “circumstances where X is not actually wrong”. There are of course circumstances that can mitigate many different things that we normally consider wrong, such as lying and stealing. But that does not make it untrue that they are generally considered bad to do.
In any event, you admit to a much more difficult than historical problem you: Totalitarianism is a phase that passed, many countries, a snapshot at any time and use this baseline does not make sense unless there is some feature of the current landscape, which they argue is permanent.