You very much need to read this, from Current Affairs.
He’s right, and brave to say this.
Saying that someone was “responsible for the deaths of U.S. service members” does not, in and of itself, tell us anything about whether what they did was right or wrong.
Nathan Robinson
We need more people in public discourse who can be this correct.
In times like this, when the political class is starting up the drums of war, it can be dangerous to speak like this in public. Careers have been ruined over being way more timid than this, but he’s right and it needs saying now.
This is important.
If you’re going to understand the world clearly, you have to kill your nationalistic emotions. An excellent way to do this is to try to imagine if all the facts were reversed.
Nathan Robinson
This is absolutely true, and you cannot be a functioning member of a democracy without it. Without the ability to see situations from multiple angles you become just another echo.
Not that I agree with him 100 percent.
His focus is on peace, not justice.
This is, I think, a misguided approach to this world in general; in this case, though, they overlap.
So go read it.
It’s a fairly long read. I’m trying to manage around 500 words per post here, since my goal is just to communicate a single idea in each one, and not being much of a writer I sometimes struggle some with that. (I expect that I’ll get a bit better; I’ve only been doing this for two weeks now.)
Robinson, on the other hand, is trying to teach us something, which takes more skill with the writing and more effort in the reading.
But it’s worth the work here.
(I encountered this link on the Pharyngula blog.)
