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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Mugwump wrote: | | Germany did not station tanks at the border, or fund separatists ; it simply declined to commit the German taxpayer to make more loans that were unlikely to be repaid, unless Greece started to live within its means. Greece could have defaulted, but that would have meant freezing itself out of international credit markets for an extended period, and exiting the Euro. So as a sovereign nation, it decided on the lesser of two evils. Was it in Gemany's interests not to have Greece default ? Yes, of course it was - but it was hardly psychopathic to bail Greece out of a situation that Germany had done nothing to create. Did it hurt innocent Greek people ? Of course - but the responsibility for that lies with the deeply flawed Greek political system. |
Wrong, wrong and wrong! Never a greater nonsense spoken.
If you think German lenders pumped money into Greece and other EU economies based on naive good will, then we probably need to go back and do a beginner's tutorial on global finance (which I know you don't need).
Germany had excess capital derived from the windfall it was very happy to receive as a strong-performing member of a single currency undervalued due to poor performers like Greece. Germany then took that same windfall and risked it on Greek (and other) borrowers.
Yes, German lenders took a risk with their eyes wide open. Shock! Horror! If you're an institution, the risk of lending is all yours! How hard is that to grasp for people who claim to believe in free markets?
Rather than take responsibility for making high-risk investments in full knowledge that the EU divorce between fiscal policy and monetary value posed huge risks, German and other lenders used their superior position and sheer mass to impose national suffering on Greece (and other countries) in an act of political thuggery.
Even worse, they then nuttily and unsuccessfully imposed ideologically-driven extreme austerity on those countries, making them less able to pay their debts.
Just imagine if you could calculate the combined suffering of millions of people under extreme financial stress. How much harm does that equate to? How much more human grief? How much more child development damage?
You've been brainwashed into an extremely narrow narrative of events based on an "us and them" imperialism, not on what actually happened. There are no "innocent, righteous lenders", just as there is no "innocent, righteous politics".
And, in the context of this thread, Germany is the country which has most overtly coddled Putin for years—again for its own economic interest.
And that's just one of your golden EU martyrs.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Mugwump wrote: | | David wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | | Tannin wrote: | | Prime Minister David Cameron: "This is a direct result of Russia destabilising a sovereign state, violating its territorial integrity, backing thuggish militias, and training and arming them. We must turn this moment of outrage into a moment of action." |
I did have to smile at this - I completely agree with the sentiment, but is this the same D. Cameron that put to the vote in Westminster, about 12 months ago, a motion to arm the Syrian rebels ? The world is a complicated place...
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Good point. As much as I want to see Putin brought to account over this, we shouldn't forget how many times American-supplied weapons have been used to cause carnage. Doesn't make this any more justifiable, but it does mean we have to take the same approach in all such cases if we are to be at all consistent. |
I suppose, when one tries to think this through, that "consistency" is not necessarily the highest virtue here. Ultimately, it comes down to your view of the intentionality of the actors, whether they are acting from good will toward a subject populace, and generally on the side of human progress (which I associate with liberty and democracy), or whether they are acting on the foul side of history. This is, of course, hard to prove, but it's what a political moralist should try to do. Bit it was an unfortunate formulation of the part of my adopted home's PM.... |
Crikey, you're on a nonsense roll, good fellow!
It's simply far easier and much more honest to admit the following: When those you identify with do something destructive, you are more likely to ascribe good intentions to them. When those you don't identify with do something destructive, you are more likely to ascribe bad intentions to them.
And that's nothing more than the blind nationalist heuristics we're all born into.
With exceptionalism as a moral bedrock, you then conflate national quality of living with individual morality. But plainly the "morality" of a society or a culture—whatever the heck it is—is not something like "the mean average of the sum morality of a group's individual constituents". Culture is far more complex product than that.
Cultures are pre-existing, blind, routine and programmatic ways of doing things we are brainlessly born into, regardless of where we're born on the planet. There is no thinking, no decision-making, no great moral reasoning about them; by the time you're an adult you've been thoroughly acculturated into something you had no power over.
And there are absolutely endless forces which shape culture, from physical geography, to wealth, geopolitical context, natural resource base, disease, technology, happenstance, and any number of natural phenomena we all have very little, if any, control over.
Just as no one has unified quantum physics and relativity, so too no one has unified national "quality" and individual "quality" in the way your worldview assumes. When you travel the planet, about the only thing you find out for sure is that every other group out there thinks outsiders have doubtful motives. That is, everyone else thinks they happen to be the exceptional ones.
But far from being individually exceptional, you and I are simply lucky enough to have citizenships in a country whose extremely good fortune we had very little, if anything, to do with.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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David 
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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^ But you'd still agree that some systems of government are objectively better than others, right? Whether or not our biases hinder our attempts to judge that impartially?
(By "systems of government" I don't merely mean "Western liberal democracy" vs "communism", I mean something more like "social democracy of the kind practiced in Sweden in the 1990s" vs "mediaeval feudal state". Or any given modern comparison.)
I do think this is very true:
| pietillidie wrote: | | It's simply far easier and much more honest to admit the following: When those you identify with do something destructive, you are more likely to ascribe good intentions to them. When those you don't identify with do something destructive, you are more likely to ascribe bad intentions to them. |
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"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| David wrote: | | I think it does actually work in this case because if they genuinely believed it was a military plane they could claim self-defence. |
But they did not. Even if we believe their own self-serving claims - not something one should do lightly - they believed it was a harmless Ukranian transport aircraft. In short, they deliberately chose to murder everyone aboard. The fact that they wound up murdering different people instead is irrelevant.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| Mugwump wrote: | | Tannin wrote: | | Prime Minister David Cameron: "This is a direct result of Russia destabilising a sovereign state, violating its territorial integrity, backing thuggish militias, and training and arming them. We must turn this moment of outrage into a moment of action." |
I did have to smile at this - I completely agree with the sentiment, but is this the same D. Cameron that put to the vote in Westminster, about 12 months ago, a motion to arm the Syrian rebels ? The world is a complicated place...
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I have no time for Cameron, Mugwump, none at all. I don't know much about the man but most of what I do know is bad. I quoted him this time simply because those few sentences seemed to sum up the situation perfectly and he happened to be the one saying them.
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�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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In war, a military transport is a legitimate target. This region is in open rebellion against the Ukrainian government and they have declared independence. In its many recent wars to either prop up certain governments or tear down others, the US and its allies (that would be us) would use the term 'collateral damage' to lessen the impact of civilian deaths during warfare. Seems we don't like it when those chickens come home to roost.
Also, I wouldn't suggest target identification played a big part during rebel training camp in Eastern Ukraine. Whoever operated the AA unit saw a blip on a radar flying the same flightpath as Ukrainian military transports and fired. The subsequent cover ups, conspiracy etc is another story but civilian deaths in a war zone are not 'murder'.
Again I contend that flying over this zone when almost every other carrier did not due to safety concerns is the primary reason for this disaster. Malaysian Airlines should never fly again. |
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Skids 
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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wow ... seeing the aussie victims in todays paper... Mr Norris, my English and French teacher amongst them... then reading some of the crap about who supplied the weapons ... FMD, do you blame coles if someone gets stabbed by a kitchen knife bought there? The scum who pull the trigger, they'd get the tools from wherever, somehow.
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Don't count the days, make the days count. |
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David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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Bit of a dodgy analogy there, Skids. Perhaps if a Coles employee walked up to a gang of thugs and gave them a kitchen knife which they then stabbed someone to death with. Or, more to the point, if the gang of thugs were Coles employees themselves.
_________________
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| Tannin wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | | Tannin wrote: | | Prime Minister David Cameron: "This is a direct result of Russia destabilising a sovereign state, violating its territorial integrity, backing thuggish militias, and training and arming them. We must turn this moment of outrage into a moment of action." |
I did have to smile at this - I completely agree with the sentiment, but is this the same D. Cameron that put to the vote in Westminster, about 12 months ago, a motion to arm the Syrian rebels ? The world is a complicated place...
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I have no time for Cameron, Mugwump, none at all. I don't know much about the man but most of what I do know is bad. I quoted him this time simply because those few sentences seemed to sum up the situation perfectly and he happened to be the one saying them. |
Agreed - i wasn't meaning to impute any Cameron-approval to you. I was just stepping off the quote.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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5150 
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
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| David wrote: | | Bit of a dodgy analogy there, Skids. Perhaps if a Coles employee walked up to a gang of thugs and gave them a kitchen knife which they then stabbed someone to death with. Or, more to the point, if the gang of thugs were Coles employees themselves. |
Or if Coles started selling "Gang o Thugs" kitchen knives and a gang of thugs purchased said knife and used it to stab a gang of thugs.
Yes, Coles should be bought to justice. They should go down... deeper down, down... |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | | ^ But you'd still agree that some systems of government are objectively better than others, right? Whether or not our biases hinder our attempts to judge that impartially? |
I think certain forms of government are preferable, but that is a mile from thinking they're universally "transferable".
Government is a product of culture, so you can't simply transplant modes of government on any random culture you like. This is why indigenous development is the ideal form of development.
So, for example, I don't agree with monopoly, but you're going to struggle to rid largely homogenous, centralised cultures such as Korea and Japan of monopoly. Or, I agree a certain scale and centralisation is needed for efficiency, but you're going to struggle to impose that on dispersed, decentralised tribal societies. Or, I highly value my free speech, but you're going to struggle to convince Confucian societies that free speech is more meritorious than keeping face.
So, the problem is not that we can't identify more and less preferable conditions, nor that we can't align more and less preferable modes of government with those conditions. The problem is that those apparently preferable forms of government assume very specific geo-cultural conditions which are not universally available.
Again, this is why indigenous development is so much more reliable and preferable; people aren't stupid, but that doesn't mean they're able to re-write their own cultural code to our liking.
Moreover, there's a second confounding problem. The motive of those wishing to "bring light to the unfortunate" is frequently sinister, and if history is any guide is more likely to result in the Philippines or Bolivia than South Korea or Chile.
So, not only is the geopolitical development game a highly unpredictable one, but there are all kinds of psychotic whackos waiting in the wings ready to rape and pillage in the name of development.
Take even a third confounding problem which also plagues naive Libertarian philosophy. A group might claim it believes in "free markets" and "fair competition", but how many members of that group are willing to put their money where their mouth is and give up "unfair advantage"? Should China entrust its energy supply to US platitudes concerning "fair competition"? I mean, really. Why would anyone in their sane mind do that?
Another way of putting it is this: Do you think China loves Russia or needs Russia? Plenty of countries tolerate a Putin for completely rational reasons, such as the fact they can't trust our wondrous moral claims and have hundreds of millions of people to clothe and feed. Or, more pertinently, do you think Putin and Co. can trust US and NATO actions on its doorstep? On what known rational basis ought they? (Not agreeing with Putin, but even thuggery has its own ability to reason).
European Imperialism 101 may no longer be in vogue, but as if any of this stuff has suddenly changed, David!
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm
Last edited by pietillidie on Sun Jul 20, 2014 7:58 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| 5150 wrote: | | David wrote: | | Bit of a dodgy analogy there, Skids. Perhaps if a Coles employee walked up to a gang of thugs and gave them a kitchen knife which they then stabbed someone to death with. Or, more to the point, if the gang of thugs were Coles employees themselves. |
Or if Coles started selling "Gang o Thugs" kitchen knives and a gang of thugs purchased said knife and used it to stab a gang of thugs.
Yes, Coles should be bought to justice. They should go down... deeper down, down... |
I like this view of the world.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| Wokko wrote: | | Whoever operated the AA unit saw a blip on a radar flying the same flightpath as Ukrainian military transports and fired. |
Oh yeah, right. As if. What possible lunatic explanation can you come up with in order to pretend that an international civil airliner flying high right across an entire continent would be "on the same flight path" as a military tactical transport? This had better be good, 'coz on face value it's howling mad loopy denialism.
(Hint: in your answer, remember that the high-tech military radar systems associated with and used to control very powerful medium and long-range surface-to-air missiles of the kind employed for this murder can see and track many aircraft at the same time, and track them from a very long way away. When you think about it, this must be the case, as you just can't use BVR SAMs without such a radar - the missiles cost from high tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for each round and as such cannot be fired in vague hope of finding a target the way you can use cheap and simple weapons like unguided bombs, artillery shells, and machine gun bullets.)
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| Wokko wrote: | | Again I contend that flying over this zone when almost every other carrier did not due to safety concerns is the primary reason for this disaster. Malaysian Airlines should never fly again. |
More pro-Russian garbage. MAS and 87 other airlines were overflying that region. 88 airlines in total. MAS were just plain unlucky that they were the ones who got murdered.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: | ^ But you'd still agree that some systems of government are objectively better than others, right? Whether or not our biases hinder our attempts to judge that impartially?
(By "systems of government" I don't merely mean "Western liberal democracy" vs "communism", I mean something more like "social democracy of the kind practiced in Sweden in the 1990s" vs "mediaeval feudal state". Or any given modern comparison.)
I do think this is very true:
| pietillidie wrote: | | It's simply far easier and much more honest to admit the following: When those you identify with do something destructive, you are more likely to ascribe good intentions to them. When those you don't identify with do something destructive, you are more likely to ascribe bad intentions to them. |
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Yes, this is very true, and it is one of many factors that make international relations tricky. The fact that one perceives through a filter, however, does not deny the importance of looking and judging intentions, effects and responses carefully. There is, for instance, a moral difference between the Soviet invasion/repression of 1953 and the Us invasion of Iraq. Both, in my eyes, were wrong - but one was to install a system which turned a whole country into a prison with armed guards. The other contemplated the possibility that free and fair elections might return a government that was unfavourable to the US. Is that just my Western eyes ? Or is it reality ? And if the latter, does the different intentionality make a difference, given that the death toll from Iraq II probably exceeded that of Stasi-ridden East Germany ? It really is difficult, and one should choose, but not become blinded with easy certainties. That's why, for all that I disagree profoundly with ptid's point of view, I do not regard his position as risible or without merits.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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