Ok, please Gaspode, enough. I am no longer sure what you are trying to argue. Perhaps a very brief summary will clarify your position.
My hat off to Pennylane for upholding humanism and humanitarianism as opposed to national boundaries with such patience.
For what it’s worth, I still think that Monty has a point with this pit thread, but I also strongly suspect that msmith did not mean to be a bigot. Msmith357’s posts did seem suspect, but I grant that mistakes,slips, oversights, generalizations, or poor word choice may have ended up looking like bigotry where none was intended.
Let’s also please not fence ourselves in with simplistic and limiting word definitions. Nationalism can be both a relatively harmless concept (in the sense of moderate patriotic feelings, etc.) as well as a more extreme form that reaches chauvinistic levels. Nationalism in the second meaning is definitely a form of bigotry.
And mswas, I got your points on bigotry and nationalism, I thought they were quite appropriate given the heat building up in this thread over super-tribal feelings and the like.
No, but you feel worse when a tall person is killed? Would that be more accurate? I wasn’t referring to your judgement of the seriousness of the crime.
Firstly, most Dyak people are no longer nomadic. Many of them live in camps due to the loss of their natural habitat. Secondly, I’ve spent time with nomadic people and they considered their belongings, including tents which they carried about with them and set up in different locations, as their homes. This is what I meant by what I said (believe it or not).
For me, my grief over the loss of a loved one would not be affected by that. So it wouldn’t occur to me to wonder when a bereaved spouse would be forced to face people again.
What are you talking about? That’s completely untrue. They form tribal villages in which each family group has a chief.
Yes, I did that for you. If it was not to your satisfaction, I’m sorry.
I feel that I share a bond with the Diak people, as I do with American people, by way of being a living, thinking human being. I have tried to prove this feeling to you, but if I can’t, so be it. And I as I know that it is not patriotism which dictates you, but your own personal prejudice, I know that you will not be swayed by reason.
In closing, I borrow the words of Richard Price: “A wise man… will study to think of all things as they are, and not suffer any partial affections to blind his understanding.”
:rolleyes:
No Penny, it wouldn’t. I have never said any such thing. This entire line of argument is a massive strawman.
Diak Penny, not Dyak. Big, big big, difference. Completely separate continents. The Dyak come from Borneo. Diak aren’t even Asian. I’m surprised by this Penny since you have said that you can gain an understanding of Diak history from imagination, yet never at any point in history have they lived in Asia. Of course the reason I chose Diak was because I knew it would be near impossible to find information eitehr via the internet or a library without already knowing where they live.
Imagine harder.
1)Diak don’t own tents, nor do they carry any such possesions with them.
2)You aren’t supposed to be basing this on your experiences living side by side with the people. You’re defeating your own assertion. My point was that spending time wiht people allows us to develop a deeper understanding of their beliefs systems, including for example how they view material possesions. You said that you didn;t need to do this, but could get all this information from imagination.
Please provide one site. Agian I’m astounded since Diak have never done such in their entire history. Which history have you imagined here Penny?
No you didn’t. Saying that you did doesn’t make it true. Anyone can go back and read your posts and see this isn’t true. You have made no mention of belief or history. Please tell us the history and belief system of Diak? You said that you could gain an understanding of a culture’s history and belief system just by imagination and that as such you didn’t need to be exposed to a culture to feel an empathy with it. Well that’s great if you can, but until you present some evidence consider me sceptical.
And no-one here disputes that or believes any different. I also feel I share a bond with cats by way of being a living, thinking mammalian lifeform. I also feel I share a bond with fish by way of being a living thinking verterbrate. I also feel I share a bond with jellyfish, and with plants. That does not in any way lessen the fact that I value people over carrots.
However you said that you can’t understand a person sharing a familiarity with a culture even after long-term, intimate exposure to that culture’s misfortunes, dreams, history, and belief system. Your stated reason for finding this hard to believe is that you can imagine the history and belief systems of people without living with them.
Now I would like you to demonstrate this. Please give us, from your imagination, one scrap of Diak history or one small portion of Diak belief.
I don’t want you to prove it. I would however like you to demonstarte that you can use your imagination alone to gain an insight into a culture’s history and belief, using no other information. This is virtually claiming a psychis link to the culture and for some reason I’m a little sceptical.
Which is funnily enough the explanation given by all people who claim psychic empathy with other people. Don’t try reason Penny, just give this board one shred of evidence that you can gain information on a culture’s beliefs and history using only imagination. It doesn’t even have to be as deep and detailed as my knowledge of American history and beliefs although you have implied that it would be.
Hell then go out and use this to win James Randi’s million bucks. Should be easy enough to do. He picks say 10 random and obscure cultures like Diak, asks you half a dozen pertinent questions regarding thier beliefs and history and if you can get a statistically significant number right he’ll hand over the cheque.
It isn’t my prejudice that motivates me Penny, it is a desire to fight ignorance. Any sugestion that information on the history, belief system and misfortune of a culture can be obtained through imagination is so obviously ingnorant as to not be worthy of a place on these boards. Beleive if you wih that all humans have a deep mystical link that allows us to share experiences simply by being aware of one anaothers existence, but don’t post it on these boards.
Yes Penny, study. Not imagine.
Think of things as they are, not how he imagines them to be.
If he hasn’t studied and he doesn’t know how things are then he cannot suffer partial affections. He knows nothing and has no affection, partial or complete, That is the whole point here Penny. Complete ignorance of a culture means that one will have no affection for that culture.
Your quote proves my point wonderfully.
I fearPenny that you know full well that you need information on a people to understand them.
Abe, Penny isn’t upholding humanism. Nor is she upholding humanitarianism. All participants here are upholding humanitarianism.
Penny is upholding psychism. She has stated that she has an ability empathise with a culture, not because she understands them, or accepts them as human, but because she can imagine their misfortunes, history and belief sysem without reference to any other source of information. That is not humanism, it’s a mystic bond between all humanity.
Cite please. Can we have one definition that supports this? That really sounds like jingoism to me.
I never said that I was against protecting my home based on a nationalist agenda, I just said that it was a form of bigotry, IE, I feel that my safety is more important to ME than theirs is to ME.
Oh yeah, as an addition to this, I have said that bombing anything besides the anti-aircraft targets is not to my liking and I do not support them. So please, where have I sacrificed my ideals?
I would like to commend Gaspode on continuing to be a very impressive poster IMO. Heh, remember our “Animal cruelty should be a felony” debate? Fucking relentless.
msmith (or should I say mrsmith in case you do get it changed), I think a great disservice has been done here. I think the position you have is commendable, honest, and supportable. If this weren’t the pit I might take Gaspode’s lead and run with it, but since it isn’t, I’ll just laugh at his detractors (and yours, as well), whose intellectual dishonesty, willful avoidance, or unfortunate grasp of what are admittedly complicated emotional states of existence can only parallel that fucking aynrandlover who used to post here.
Thank god that fucker left.
Ah, what the hell, I suppose I can toss a few cents worth in.
[list=1]
[li]I value human life.[/li][li]I value specific societal constructs.[/li][li]I find that the humans who interact and support the constructs I value to be more valuable to me than those who do not.[/li]li does not invalidate (1).[/list=1][/li]
Rock on, msmith.
I agree with your points, however I did think that some of msmith’s statements were a bit off the cuff in that they came across as “so the fuck what?” in regards to dead Afghani civilians, which he is not required to care about, though I think that’s kind of an asshole attitude to take. And if I am misjudging msmith’s character on this, I apologize.
So while he is not a morally repugnant human being, I think it’s fair to say he’s an asshole.
What is your definition of a “strawman”? I’m trying to understand your position. The comment which prompted this thread was “but the lives of Americans are worth a lot more to me than the lives of Afghans”. I know that you didn’t make this comment yourself, but I was under the assumption that you defended it and claimed to be privy to similar feelings yourself. Am I wrong? Taking your example of a hypothetical preference for tall people over short people, are we still talking about valuing certain people’s lives more than others? Or are we discussing a preference that does not extend to this degree? I understand that you would not think it better for a short person to be killed. You would condemn both crimes equally. So I assumed that if we are still talking about valuing certain lives more than others, you might, in your example, feel worse when a tall person is killed than when a short person is killed.
I’m sorry I misunderstood which people you were referring to when you asked me to imagine the Diak people. I could try again for you, if you like, but I feel that this discussion is going nowhere. I would like to know, however, how it is that you seem to have vast reserves of knowledge regarding these people but still claim to be unable to feel any emotional attachment to them.
I think this may be at the root of some of the misunderstanding between us. I did not mean to profess an understanding of the history and belief system of a culture, but rather of the individual persons involved.
I do understand the familiarity, it is the heightened emotional attachment which I don’t understand.
I believe no such thing, Gaspode. What I believe, however, is that certain circumstances evoke more or less the same emotional reaction in most human beings, and that the lives of most human beings are governed by the same human sentiments.
Study to think, Gaspode, not study.
**
He was speaking of affection for the culture which you do know over that which you don’t know. The word “partial” is used to mean prejudicial and not, in this case, incomplete.
Fucking relentless.
