9:43 PM
V: ... I am very wary of these kind of arguments about how something is socially regressive.
It's manipulative: there is implication of civilisational conflict between western liberalism and eastern fundamentalism. Look how terrible and regressive this fundamentalism is (true) - we have a duty to combat this!
This is exactly an argument that you see through when applied against China. That there is a very false concern that masks crasser political desires.
Yeah, I mean, I won't argue that these systems are backwards and awful, but it's not like they formed in parallel to a superior western system.
It's more like the western system oppressed, abused, and brutalised people, who then later turned to embrace backwards social systems.
It's flimsy thinking to turn this into a moral equivalence.
But it's equally sloppy to suggest that there is a developmental equivalence - that there is some new white man's burden to enlighten these natives - when the powers most interested and able to pursue this conflict are those who brutalised these people in the first place.
An NGO that opens a battered women's shelter? Is this what we oppose?
Or just the continued otherising by those whose brutalisation created a context for these social regression?
I mean, a lot of this backwardness is clearly unsustainable...
Actually, I mean the other way. That liberalism seems to accompany the development of wealth. The stabilisation of political systems and economies.
It is this constant state of conflict - this destabilisation - that seems a better culture for this sustained backwardness.
Do you think a wealthy (not just rich), politically and economically stable middle eastern nation is going to resist liberalisation?
The production of wealth has strong educational implications.
What is the other explanation? That brown people are just inferior and backwards and need to be enlightened? Their political situation is so backwards, it really isn't even such a terrible thing if they are killed as part of a larger political conflict - not like their lives are worth much anyway.
