>Huh. You cover a lot of ground here.
i suppose it's jaw dropping when you haven't read much about materialist feminism and analyses of rape in the US.
>I'm not sure what your purpose is here - <...>
bluntly, i'm objecting to the racializing use of their barbarism in an argument. both you and brad use "their" barbarism as a political football.
OT1H, you want to point out that the US harbors terrorists like Rumsfield. here, you engage in relativism.
OTOH, ywhen it comes to their barbarism you refuse to relativize to the US case. indeed, you actually want to make a judgement when on the NA as worse than the Taliban.
yet, in both cases, the US has played a role in contributing to the conditions in which that alleged barabarism has errupted, whether the T or the NA. so what exactly is the difference? the US brought about the conditions under which both have engaged in practices you deplore, the taliban, no less than the NA.
go ahead and talk about it. but using it to try to "win" by trying to make your opponent appear callous to these issues is the problem.
perhpas angela's ( a former LOBster) on how the list is sexist, etc and on how these issues get used as political footballs:
"i am really becoming quite fascinated with the extent to which anything outside established orthodoxy on anti-racism gets so gleefully jumped on as (this is the implication - how can anyone really doubt what is being implied...) racism itself. what the fuck is going on? there have been anti-semitic statements i've seen passed by with very little mention, and some notable apologetics, there's even been some good old homophobia and sexism that i've seen defended as if it wasn't what was happening at all; including some pretty machismo 'polemics' that goes largely unnoticed because it is regarded as somehow standard marxist fare. this on the various left/marxist lists i've been on.
what is really incredible though, is that none of these things gets discussed at length. i'm not suggesting that they necessarily should, but the comparison is pretty interesting. (i quite agree, k) ... and on anti-racism as a political football: "anti-racism has become so instrumentalised within the left - something that some people feel accords them with a moralizing capacity they would not otherwise have - that it is no longer really a question of what the most effective anti-racist strategies might be, but rather how anti-racism can be mobilized in the service of various doctrines about the world."
archives: http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9901/0456.html