Sure, and maybe I’m a racist too? Because everyone who thinks that Obama is the beneficiary of a cult of celebrity (who by definition is being propped up by gullible supporters) and has no achievement to speak of HAS to be a beer-guzzling, gun-toting conservative who’s more than likely a racist. And maybe you eat live kittens in your spare time. How’s that for poisoning the well?
I’m not going to answer the rest of this as there isn’t a point. Apparently, there is never a good reason to use force to stop an offending action unless there is a ‘social contract’ in place.
In Canada we have public and separate schools. Separate schools are ones that the fundamentalists send their kids to to get indoctrinated into their ridiculous religions. I’m all for doing away with that so that kids of all types have to associate with each other while they are growing up. If you think this is a wrong thing then you are not worth talking to anymore. If you think sending kids to schools where they have to leave their religion at the door is wrong, then I don’t know why you’ve been such a proponent of atheism on this board in the past.
Don’t try to pretty it up. You are talking about conquering countries, kidnapping children and trying to alienate them from their families. And you aren’t talking about schools, you are talking about prisons for kids that have schools attached. With serious guards and weapons, to keep the parents out and the kids in. And all this will be set in a wasteland that used to be a country.
I don’t recall ever calling for most of, say, Texas to be massacred and the surviving children to be rounded up and indoctrinated with The Way of Der Trihs. So don’t bother trying to draw comparisons.
I’m talking about sending kids to secular schools like we do in the west so that they have the basis of making objective decisions. What you read into that is your own paranoia.
No one doubts that fully secualr schools is the “best” solution, (with the proviso that there are religous schools that offer a state certified curriculum in addition to religious teaching) but you also have to be realistic in what the population will accept.
A solutiont that won’t be accepted is not a solution and will just be resisted, which is why whatever happens is going to have to be a long term solution, and cannot be imposed.
I’m arguing for reading, writing, and arithmetic, not the type of school where the student spends all day memorizing the Koran. Things that you probably were taught when you were a kid in school. If parents don’t like their kids being taught basic skills like that, then tough, that is where force comes in. Nothing would stop them from teaching the kids whatever they want at home at night.
No, it’s just knowing from history that is exactly what you’d do. And the fact that just “sending kids to secular schools like we do in the west” doesn’t involve conquest and rounding the kids up at gunpoint. Nor does it involve kids who know they’ve been taken against their parents will. Nor does it involve kids who know that their teachers are the agent of a genocidal power that has laid waste to their nation.
Yes, I agree that the three Rs are a universal right. But the devil is always in the detail, and the perceived detail.
What exactly will they be reading? Who will be doing the teaching?
Do the parents even believe in the “three Rs” for everybody. In the US in the 1800s was education considered desirable for ladies? I know US society has moved on from there, but it doesn’t mean everyone has.
Make no mistake here, I am totally in favour of providing universal schooling, secular education and the like, but the citizens themselves have to support it - as a whole, collectively so you need the ciritcal mass to buy in such that the outiers, although they may not believe in it aren’t in a suitable position to cause significant difficulties.
Perhaps a slight comparison, imagine that in 1850 you tried to enact a law in the US that a father couldn’t beat his son - how much success do you think you would have had with that? Would it have been a good law? YES, would it have worked? Totally not
He just doesn’t get it. Sigh.
The requisite amount of force would be genocidal.
Uzi, just how much force would be required to disabuse you and your society of your foolish infatuation with freedom, liberty, equality, and democracy and turn you instead into good, happy Muslims living perfect Koran-approved lives under an all powerful theocracy?
Shoe, meet other foot.
[quote=“CannyDan, post:489, topic:513172”]
He just doesn’t get it. Sigh.
You just don’t get it. Sigh
Do the police wipe out your neighbourhood if you don’t send your kids to school? No, they don’t. They come and get you. Most people want their kids to go to school even in fundamental areas of the world, yet can’t send them because they have no option to do so. I haven’t worked in Yemen all this time to not understand this.
So, you think fighting for freedom is the same as fighting to oppress people, do you?
Would you fight against someone taking away your freedom? Yes, you would. Should you fight against people trying to deprive people of their freedom? Yes, you should.
I’ll let you in on a little bit of information you may not like to hear. Most people who live in Iraq and Afghanistan would prefer to not live under theocracies and dictatorships. The reason they are pissed at us is because we’ve screwed up the security of their country. If we could keep the people causing the problems from being a problem, then they’d be quite happy having us there. But because we don’t have enough troops on the ground to control the enemy, we can’t make the country secure enough for the rest of them.
There are two ways to control a country.
- Ghengis Khan it and kill anyone including all their families and villages, etc.
- Put enough troops on the ground to ensure that those who wish to oppose you can’t.
We’ve done neither no matter that Der Trihs keeps saying about #1.
As we keep explaining, it depends entirely on which side you happen to occupy. My freedom equals your oppression. Or vice versa. From the perspective of the ones being forced to change, those doing the forcing are the oppressors, and will be resisted.
You really haven’t thought this through, have you? I’m going to type really slowly now, please try to follow:
Going with the preferred Option 2, we put in enough troops to stand shoulder to shoulder with each citizen of the er, ah – targeted, yeah that’s a good phrase, targeted population. In order to, as you say, “ensure that those who wish to oppose you can’t”.
And then, when that citizen-under-control objects, perhaps by trying to hold his kids back from your morning roundup or something, what exactly do you do? Throw him in jail? Beat the shit out of him? Threaten to kick his dog?
And when his brother/father/wife struggles with your soldier to prevent this, what do you do next? What if they draw a knife, or grab a rock? What if they sneak out at night and take a pot shot at random soldiers, as revenge? Or even plant an improvised explosive device where your troops gather? The only way to prevent such independent actions of individual resisting citizens is to literally attach each one to a soldier of your own, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Accompany them at home, at the grocery, at work, at home, even in bed. Looser control cannot work if the subjugated population really wants to resist. And do they want to resist! Just think of how you would act if someone from the outside tried this in your country.
Otherwise, of course, we are right back to Option 1. Kill those who resist, along with their families and perhaps their villages. Or at least sufficient murder and mayhem as to reduce the population dramatically, and terrorize the remainder.
In a word, as has been pointed out ad nauseum, Genocide.
Or I guess we could just explain to them that it is really for their own good, because after all, we know best, and they are just savages who need our help to “reform” themselves. Yeah, that’ll get their cooperation, no doubt.
And if someone was talking about boarding schools this would be pertinent.
Hey, Uzi, just for shits and grins, what’s your take on this quote from old Fred Nietzsche?
And what’s your sense of how relevant it is to the side subject under discussion (the main subject being President Obama’s Nobel Prize)?
Sure, because sending the little tykes home each night to be de-indroctrinated in the ways of the great satan is a heckuva good plan for sucess.
Turning em all over to Blackwater, or some other boarding school contractor, is the only way to have a prayer of getting the results you would like.
Naturally, profit driven contractors will become corrupt educators, so we’ll need to get the churches or other nonprofits involved. Nah, they’ll still skim the cream off the contracts and fail to properly inculcate the kids. Perhaps some sort of government run standards bureaucracy could help keep things in control? A US funded Afghani Department of Health and Human Services?. Congresscritters blue and red alike will run from that idea as if it were a radioactive plague rat. Reculturizing schools are simply not going to happen at a significant scale in any plausible derivative of the real world.
Hey Uzi:
Here’s a thought experiment for you.
I am the leader of a country with a powerful military, and I fully ascribe to your notions of going to war to save populations from their “deep held prejudices and faulty beliefs” The population might not like giving up these prejudices and beliefs, but I have Uzi as my foreign minister, and we know what we know.
Looking at the foreign country of Canada, we see a country that is keeping a french minority in terrible conditions. English is spoken in many places. In some places, little French is spoken. We do not like this crushing of the French culture and language. Clearly, we know that French is the best language in the world, and we know that the french culture is superior. The poor Canadians do not realize this, however, as they are trapped in their bubble of English predjudice and faulty beliefs. We will tell them to change - they merely have to see the light, and eliminate English culture and language. We KNOW that it is inferior. We’re doing them a favour. If they don’t do what they are told, we will invade and WE WILL MAKE THEM COMPLY.
We know we’re in the right. French culture is superior. They will eventually see the light.
<Drags chair up by the border to better watch the fun>
Actually, no it isn’t. Wanting to keep a theocracy in place is not the same as wanting to allow people to choose their religion or not choose a religion or any number of other choices that we make in a free society on a daily basis denied to people who live in a fundamentalist theocracy or dictatorship.
One man’s idea of freedom is another man’s idea of oppression. The difference is that if the one man wants freedom to make his wife wear a burka vs. the other man who lets his wife determine what she should wear. And please don’t accuse me of not thinking this through. I’m not the one arguing for theocracies/dictatorships here.
What do you do when some guy in your neighbourhood doesn’t send his kids to school? You send the police to sort it out.
If the guys starts to throw rocks or gets a gun what do the police do in your neighbourhood then?
Or, you could say to them that you will help train their kids in computers and other things and give them a chance to get advanced education and to make something more of themselves than just sitting there wondering when the next villiage will attack or the next warlord will demand tribute. Do you get cooperation at work by calling people savages?
You cannot depend on eradicating one form of evil by imposing another, it is possible that infecting someone with smallpox may kill their malaria, but its not a good bet. More to the point, you have no right to do so without their consent.
Are we oppressing the French in Canada? They can leave at any time yet after two referendums on their part they have chosen to remain. So, your scenario isn’t valid. It would be if we made laws banning French, or forced them to remain in ghettos. But we aren’t so it isn’t. If French is being oppressed in Canada it is because of the large majority in NA who speak English, not the deliberate actions of any of those people.
What you and others are defending in this portion of the thread is the rights of people, based upon their culture, to oppress other people. The arguments are that we can’t change people, that they don’t want us to change them and will fight against us. Yes, the people who want to oppress others will fight against us. What about those who don’t want to be oppressed by their culture, religion, or by the local warlord, mullah, or dictator? Do they fight against us? Do you think the majority of people in Iraq and Afghanistan are in arms against us? I don’t doubt they are pissed at us for screwing up so badly and not getting the international consensus required to get the resources on the ground to prevent the fighting.
You guys are unbelievable.