I concede, but only partially.
I am pretty sure the Economist is not a bunch of “fucking dunderheads,” but okay, this time they were. Still, philosophically, I wonder if there is a better way to put it.
You wouldn’t catch someone in public yelling that, and I don’t really think of Boing Boing as a public space.
Mission accomplished, nonetheless.
Personally, slave apologia is just beyond the pale. It’s akin to holocaust denial. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for civil discourse, but would you take seriously someone advocating for the Holocaust not having happened or not being all that bad? We got to have limits, because not all points are equally valid in public discourse. The guy did not even engage the argument of the book (edited to add) and if he had, I doubt anyone would be upset. It’s a valid point of historical debate, whether or not American chattel slavery was capitalist. But that is not what he did.
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Personally, slave apologia is just beyond the pale.
It actually blows my mind, like much of racism. We need better systems of tools to fight it. People like MLK are so long gone, that despite having Obama around, we need elevated semiotic discourse in addition to the other tools, or we’re just yelling. That’s probably why it frustrates me. I mean where are the leaders on this. Is it up to blogs?
This retort attempts it:
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I completely think people should continue waving that brilliant Constitution around, even though it did not do its job immediately.
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Well, that and the renovations to the King David Hotel did get us the state of Israel.
YMMV.
The problem really isn’t the obvious examples of racism, it’s the sneakier stereotyping and racist structures that still exist that are the problem. The fact that we can’t have a conversation about the impact slavery has had I think illustrates the point. Not too long ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an article about reparations, and one of the points he made was that we still can’t even talk about the reality of the past without some white people freaking out and thinking they are being individually called racist. Too many people just can’t face the past and until we can do that, we’re not going to be able to move forward. This article was indeed an example of that problem.
But again, we should utterly dismiss stuff that tries to derail the conversation and call it out, harshly even. Because we can’t have a real grown up conversation about race unless we do that.
Edited to add: The WaPo review is much more what I would expect given the topic of the book. That’s something to drive conversation and debate. The Economist did nothing of the sort.
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Wait… what? Confused? I think the founding of Israel is a whole different issue, and one that is controversial in its own right.
check out Atina Grossman’s book about this issue:
Also, read Eichmann in Jerusalem if you haven’t, as Arendt addresses this in a round-about kind of way.
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I’m just saying, hypEerbolically for the sake of argument, is that without the horrors of the Holocaust (and perhaps some Zionist terrorism), there wouldn’t have been such an international agreement on “allowing” Isreal to come into being.
It’s really much of an argument. It’s akin to saying that if Helen Keller hadn’t been blind, she wouldn’t have achieved so much. Plus, the bombing was late in the game, anyway, and didn’t do much to change Britain’s stance.
Hear, hear. I still note that there’s no caveat in the Constitution about needing to be extremely civil in the face of an anonymous propaganda of the wealthy intended to subvert the spirit and letter of that Constitution.
I’m actually all for elevating the discussion, though my idea of elevation is to allow people to use big words and experiment with new ideas without being dogpiled by anti-intellectual derision. That’s my personal trigger to apply a counter-dogpile.
Policing for civil tone is a similar restraint, and if we have to show completely even-handed restraint in a corner of the Internet designated for tech-savvy, intellectual progressive-minded politics, where the hell can we? For me, a big part of allowing more people to experiment with academic ideas is to allow them the passion needed to take a risk with new ideas, new ways of looking at our enemies, and new ways of expressing our temper tantrums. And yes, there’s a limit to the aggressive tone that should be taken, but that limit should not make for stunted conversation.
So in this case, to challenge The Economist’s tendency to publish anonymous right-wing screeds seems to be well within the mission of the site. Begin following Paul Krugman’s blog; go back a decade or so and read a sample of his blog posts and columns at the NYT and compare with the comments and the responses from the right-wing financial/business media. How would you do anything different? Krugman constantly faces criticism that he’s too confrontational, despite the personal attacks he constantly suffers from every element of the right: named, unnamed, and by proxy.
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It’s hilarious you think anyone ever had that ability. The internet is a terrible medium for conducting any kind of meaningful discussion. If you took away the attention deficit, the ad hominem, and the ASCII dicks, this place would collapse under the weight of the collective ennui.
Every time some racist asshat says “maybe slavery wasn’t that bad” we can all dogpile him and feel good about ourselves, but have no illusions. That guy’s not going to be shamed into reforming by a bunch of angry forum posters any more than by a polite intellectual rebuttal. People are shaped by their environment, and the words of anonymous strangers mean next-to-nothing. Heh…I typed “butt”.
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I think that’s the core of that historical debate. the book I linked to actually argues that it wasn’t the holocaust that pushed things over the edge in favor of the Zionists, but it was the situation for Jewish returnees (there were some pogroms) and their experiences in the DP camps in Germany. Plus many of the older generation who had opposed the zionist project had frankly been killed off.
Yeah, the British had been making promises since the end of WW1 with their Palestine mandate. I’m honestly unsure what changed their mind against it, other than groups like the Stern Gang… It was the US that really backed it by the end of WW2.
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