Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to re: Thoughts

Dang Tom!
SDAI-Tech1 — (archived)

You see those "living in tents" and "Barbary pirates" lines are going to get you into trouble!

To folks like Robert or MA, that just confirms there suspicions that you're insensitive to the cultural contributions of the Arab people and are secretly harboring some 1930's image of Arabs wielding scmitars and looking like this:

Evil Arabs in tents

You, Tom, are a modern day smug Tintin, convinced of your superiority, while thumbing your white, aryan nose at Arab culture when you make such comments.

Similar stereotyping and failing to see all these Arab contributions (such as algebra) makes you 2 dimensional in their eyes and they fail to follow your line of reasoning and, more importantly, discount your ability to reason.

Robert and MA share a European "cosmopolitan" view of Bush and the Iraq war. It is not just about Bush, but America's personality as a whole. Your defense of Bush is irrelevant. To the cosmopolitan it is the entire retrogressive war consciousness that they find distasteful or even repulsive.

In this sense they hold not just Bush responsible, but rather the entire conservative movement that empowered him to "rush to war".

It's not about Iraqi's or suffering by itself. If it were about suffering they could look at half a dozen other nations where folks make the Iraqi lifestyle seem idealized. It's about the US involvement in such suffering and the uneducated redneck masses that support Bush in his "You're either with us or against us" foreign policy.

They feel both ostracized because they don't support the actions taken, and at the same time are aghast that they even have to defend their positions which are obviously more enlightened/educated.

This creates even more tension as they feel they are the victims of a rightwing witchhunt which seeks to divide and conquer the American masses using machismo and "bring it on" type flim-flam. They feel the ignorant are empowering a tyrant and genuinely see parallels between Bush and other dictators.

That you are not a redneck, they know, but they perceive your philosophy is straight out of the backwoods reactionary extremist handbook.

They have hopes to educate you eventually or await your personal political epiphany, while you, likewise, await their awakening to "reality".

Robert seeks a deeper level of discourse akin to think-tank communique. From now on we leave all the uneducated stereotyping to the 'fly over regions' and discuss rational alternatives to violence and how to proceed with a common-ground course, building constructive bridges between social, cultural and ethnic disparities.

Understood?

;-)

SDAI-Tech1

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