Commenter Profile

Total number of comments: 14 (since 2011-05-07 02:51:59)

Stogumber

German, age 60, with a background in christian pacifism, libertarianism and cultural anthropology.

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• 'Foreign Policy' peddles productive Iranian war theory
  • Stogumber May 23, 2012 at 5:58 am

    You see, the most important thing for a warrior is to get part of the peaceniks on his side. So did F.R. Roosevelt when he connected WWII with the United Nations project. A strategy which connects War against Iran with a Near East peace project will work the same way.

• Danish right-wing: ‘Made in settlement’ labels preempt Israel’s expanding borders
  • Stogumber May 19, 2012 at 4:49 pm

    It's not impossible that different peoples (tribes, "ethnies") grant each other an ethno-national state - in the same way in which different persons grant each other personal property like a house or a garden.
    It's difficult, of course. The most natural feeling will always be: I must have a "homeland" of my own, and at the same time I must have complete and equal access to all other countries. An idea, which can not work and which has to be dismissed.
    Both parts - the European nationalists and the Jews - have to go a long way to arrive at that goal. But it's not impossible, and it's not even more improbable than the leftist solution: that all ethno-national states are to be abolished.

• When the Methodist Church decided that slavery was regrettable but none of our business
  • Stogumber May 1, 2012 at 4:19 am with 1 replies

    The reasoning of Dr. A.J.Few of Georgia is indeed the reasoning of our time:
    "it is utterly impossible for it (the Jewish state) to exist without it (the inequality of the Palestinians); therefore it is not sinful to hold slaves (Palestinians) in the condition and under the circumstances which they are held at the South (Judaea, Samaria)."

• On the passing of Novick: the political limitations of 'The Holocaust in American Life'
  • Stogumber March 26, 2012 at 3:00 pm with 2 replies

    Problem is, it's infectious. Take neocons preaching the moral superiority of "the West"- misleading credulous Christians, which - as Christians - ought to remind that they are sinners among sinners.

• Ron Paul's antiwar position is simpleminded
  • Stogumber January 6, 2012 at 9:17 pm with 4 replies

    I'm not much impressed by Slater's just war theory. First, it's an invitation to abuse. Just war theorists may name some necessary presuppositions for making war, but that's only an invitation for unscrupulous politicians (like FDR) to create or feign facts which cover those presuppositions.
    Then, just war theory treats the problem as a categorical decision between peace and war, whereas it would be much better to treat it as a directional decision between escalation and deescalation. For example, if Britain and France hadn't declared war on Germany in 1939, the German expansion would have stopped in the middle of Poland - not nice for the Polish people, but a German occupation in peace time wouldn't have been harder than the occupation of Poland by Stalin or the occupation of the Westbank by Israel (which we all can put up with without declaring war to Israel). Escalation did make things worse, not better.
    At last, just war theory neglects that mutual trust is the most important presupposition for peace. And a world in which every state reserves himself the right to make war whenever he deems that morally justified is by necessity a world in which no state can trust any other state.

• Kampeas: Jewish neocons are more than 2 degrees removed from Bush's decision to invade Iraq
  • Stogumber December 31, 2011 at 3:28 pm

    Some publicists were contacted by the government before they began to write about that matter. Some weren't (above all the people who undersigned the three open letters against Iraq betweeen Bush I and Bush II) and don't have that excuse.
    The best which we can get out of this muddle are more clearcut concepts about where intellectual responsibility begins and where it ends. At the moment, I can only propose two test questions:
    1. If the war against Iraq had been a roaring success, would those publicists proudly have taken responsibility for it?
    2. If Iranian publicists had published similar articles against Israel - would Kampeas hold them responsible?
    And I suspect that the answer is yes and yes.

• More responses to Ron Paul's surge
  • Stogumber December 31, 2011 at 8:51 am with 1 replies

    There's a lot of stuff I don't know about Ron Paul's personal likes or dislikes. But the core problem isn't personal.
    If ever you want any kind of limited government, you have to accept (or put up with) the fact that anywhere in the world there will be some people that are out of your control and do things you don't want to have done (like Iran hanging gays, or states abolishing affirmative action or states making deals with Israel etc. etc. ). (The realm of limits and out-of-control area may be narrower or wider, but the principle is the same.) And that's a real argument with which neocons and leftists can make a point against Paul.

    Every political animal, when it dreams - even I myself -, dreams of an unlimited government, where we can enforce all people to do only what's good and appropriate. It's only when we wake up and get sober that we learn to accept our limited power as the price we pay for having every other one limited as well.

• Ron Paul and the left
  • Stogumber December 28, 2011 at 1:09 pm with 1 replies

    "Ron Paul is either incompetent, cynical, or racist."

    Indeed?

    The Ron Paul Newsletters were somewhat similar to a modern blog with commentaries. There are blog owners who are rather rigid about commentaries and other blog owners who are rather lax. A libertarian like Paul will tend to be lax.
    I don't doubt that there were some speculative assertions which he deemed at least possible or even probable, in any case worth to be debated. And in other cases, where people simply ranted (often over facts which were basically true but weighed out of proportion) he simply thought "let them rant".

    What's about Phil Weiss? He has allowed people to quote Kevin MacDonald in a blog who bears his name. Does it make him either incompetent, or cynical or a racist?

    I'd say that Ron Paul's relation to the right fringe is somewhat similar to the relation of Mondoweiss readers to Palestinians. Mondoweiss readers will make a difference between Jews and the dominant kind of Jewish activism; they don't get sentimental over the dominant kind of Jewish activism, but see that it can be ugly if you are on the wrong side of the stick - and so they will in a way put up with the fact (not accept) that some or many Palestinians tend to transfer their antipathy from Jewish activism to "Jews" as a whole.
    But you have to see that all kinds of activism have their ugly aspects, above all if you are at the wrong side of the stick. It's the same with black activism (and MLK was hated not simply as a black and not simply for his personal actions but as a symbol of black activism) and with gay activism (I'm a homosexual myself and there's a lot of gay activism where I want to say "not in my name").

• Little drone on the prairie: high-tech surveillance comes home
  • Stogumber December 13, 2011 at 6:43 pm

    Saying that the Brossarts "stole" the cows is saying more than can be proved here and now. The cows may (or may even not) simply have wandered into their area. And probably there have been feuds with the sheriff before (which may even have lured for a crime to fix on them), and they are in any case not the type of guys who would assume that a sheriff comes in good faith. So when they attacked the police, it mustn't have been for the sake of the cows.

• Gutman is right: Anti-Semitic incidents in England spiked after attacks on Gaza and flotilla
  • Stogumber December 7, 2011 at 4:24 am

    I suppose that most intelligent people agree over the basics.
    1. There exists some antisemitism which is only intrapersonally rooted: fostered by the person's inner insecurities etc and afterwards "projected" on jews.
    2. There exists a lot of antisemitism which is interpersonally rooted: fostered by experiences between jews and non-jews which are (perhaps mis-) interpreted and (more or less correctly) generalized.
    Those two kinds mingle with each other.
    That said, we must understand the message of the CST also in terms of strategical thinking.
    Jews in Europe are deeply divided over matters of strategical alliance: (a) ally with the immigrants against the natives (them still being the ruling majority), or (b) ally with the natives against the Muslim immigrants.
    What CST tells is basically, as Muslim antisemitism is not as bad as traditional Christian antisemitism, there's still room for an alliance with (the good of the) Muslims against (the bad of the) natives.

• When is it okay to say that Jews own Wall Street?
  • Stogumber November 6, 2011 at 7:59 am

    You are, of course, right in general. Many jewish publicists use double standards (as do, regrettably, a lot of other people, too).
    But you're not quite right in that particular case . Limbaugh argued that jews, for the sake of their own interest, should have voted against Obama (and now might have learned that). That means - whatever his personal feelings are - he argued in the best (alleged) interest of "the jews". Whereas "Occupy" may perhaps argue in the interest of mankind, but -, even if it's not anti-jewish - doesn't argue in the interest of "the jews".
    As for Foxman, he's a definite political actor; and as such, he has no "friends". He doesn't really regard Limbaugh as an "enemy", but as little as a "friend", but as someone who can be useful, but has to be intimidated from time to time in order to remain useful.

• For neoconservatives, Israel is a foreign and domestic issue
  • Stogumber October 24, 2011 at 5:15 pm

    I didn't understand why Mooser and Dan Crowther objected to Pohl. Is it really a problem to call Israel in the 1950s/1960s (economically) "socialist"? Or does someone challenge the statement that Israel represented itself as post-/anticolonialist in those times?

    My personal objection against Luban: He makes too much of the right/left resp. Republican/Democrat difference, underestimating the similarity between neocons and "liberal hawks". E.g.: the PNAC is here represented as a "neocon" organization, but in fact in Europe the organization recruited mostly politicians of the left (whose position is often described as "human rights imperialism").

• Fragile Egypt
  • Stogumber October 15, 2011 at 12:22 pm

    Being a Christian, I'm somewhat sad about Phil's description with regard to "male anger" in and around the Cathedral. And the formula "our blood will redeem you" is rather perplexing from a theological point of view. But I hopefully think that the demonstrants were not apt to kill but rather to suffer.
    As for the value of secularism or education I'm ambivalent. There has always been an undercurrent of pacifism in Christianity. It came to the surface with the Bohemian Brothers and Anabaptists which weren't educated, at least in a modern sense. So my question is rather: in what ways was the peaceful spirit revived at that time and in what way could it be revived in Egyptian Christianity?

• Land swaps? Israel doesn't have enough land to give the Palestinians
  • Stogumber May 29, 2011 at 5:06 pm with 7 replies

    There's one land swap which might make sense under terms of a two-state-solution. Namely swapping the Negev - which would give Palestinians the necessary connection between West Bank and Gaza strip.
    Has no one ever proposed that?

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