You`ve distorted his quote in any case – he said “currently doesn`t have much of a meaning”, and went on to very quickly package up the reason why – that its overuse has desensitized people to its meaning. Currently there are commenters on another thread here saying the same about the word genocide, and I`m sure you don`t disagree with them. What`s the problem? The problem is you need a disingenuous argument to shake off the whole bevy of reasonable quotes that Roy Belmont raised.

I have read this blog for a while now and I am stunned at the level you dragged the debate down to on this post, and how quickly you took it there. So while you might want to claim that Abb1`s inflammatory comment on some other thread has nothing to do with you, on current performance I`m not inclined to believe you. Which I am sure you don`t care about, and will make abundantly clear through sarcasm, putting any words which imply I have a thought or an idea in quotes, and/or calling me stupid. But I don`t think that will have proven me wrong, somehow.

[HF- Comments are now closed on this post – I can’t open them either without changing CT’s basic configuration – but this is preposterously silly. I’ve made it perfectly clear why I banned abb1. He persistently makes tendentious, overstated and inflammatory comments that drag comments threads off track, and keeps them there through repetition. Look to Ingrid’s post above on Iranian women prisoners – he jumps in with a comment about why can’t husbands have multiple wives. I don’t think that this is classic trolling – but it is attention-seeking behaviour and it surely screws up debate. I don’t particularly care whether you think that I am somehow responsible for abb1’s arseholery – but I will point out for general principle’s sake that in order to prove an argument wrong, there has to be an argument there in the first place. You didn’t care to grace us with such, instead making and repeating an unsupported claim which is really rather preposterous. When people have actual arguments, I usually respond to them. When people instead come in fists swinging to Fight the Oppression with innuendo and non-sequiturs I treat their remarks with precisely the amount of respect that I feel they deserve. If you want to be taken seriously here, come up with serious arguments – not cackleheaded claims that I somehow Put Bad Thoughts into abb1’s head]

That’s a cop-out of the highest order. If he were a mathematician or a chemist the defense could be made that the sciences are amoral (though I would not accept that argument) but the humanities at their core are concerned with questions of moral responsibility. Literature is no more or less than the questioning of rules and the risks and rewards of their abondonment. The Valve is subtitled “A literary Organ.” It’s a journal of literature. You’re puttng John Holbo in the company of de Man and Robbe Grillet, formalists who used arguments about language to elide responsibility for their pasts. As I’ve said more than once I’m in no position to be a moralist. It’s not the history that bothers me, it’s the elision. It’s not the crime it’s the cover-up. Without self-awareness, thought is no more than symptom.

And Holbo’s blog is called “The Examined Life”!!?”

I’ve never liked the Valve It’s representative of an anti-humanist scholasticism that I find deeply offensive; but I wasn’t smart enough to put 2 and 2 together. Now it just seems so obvious. Everything I railed against about Franco Moretti and the limits of academic philosophy. John Emerson should read your comment.
You’ve just blown a gaping hole in the moral discourse of that site. That John Holbo could spend so much time on Zizek astounds me.

sg – oh dear. If you really can’t see the difference between the statements ‘the bogus accusation of anti-semitism is often used to stop legitimate debate,’ and ‘anti-semitism is a meaningless concept,’ then we might as well give up, mightn’t we? On your other ‘point,’I don’t make any particular claim towards politeness – my politeness in a given situation varies depending on my doubtless idiosyncratic assessment of the merit of the arguments being offered – but I don’t really think that you can hang the blame for abb1’s inflammatory statement on me (nor do you offer anything that even faintly resembles an argument to that effect).

roy – I agree completely that the accusation of anti-semitism is often the first stone thrown – and that it’s frequently used in a manner that is at best sloppy, and at worst vicious and dishonest. But that still doesn’t mean that it’s a concept without meaning – the force of the slur lies precisely in its reference to a very real and peculiarly nasty set of ideas and practices. Thus, claims like abb1’s are liable to inflame debate. When I said that I was banning abb1 with some reluctance, I was being quite honest. I don’t see him as being a nasty individual, unlike other people who I’ve banned (such as Dan Simon, who indeed tossed around unwarranted insinuations of anti-semitism with no mean frequency). But his crudity of comment, combined with the frequency and persistency with which he posted (I suspect that he is our most frequent commenter by a substantial percentage) meant that certain topics became impossible to discuss seriously when he was around.

We are Jews with diverse opinions on the Middle East who share a deep concern about the crisis in the region and have formed a group, Independent Australian Jewish Voices.

…

Our concern for justice and peace in the Middle East is a legitimate opinion and should be met by reasoned argument rather than vilification and intimidation. In particular, we are concerned that the Jewish establishment does not represent the full range of Jewish opinion. Contrary to widespread concerns, anti-Semitism is not fuelled by Jews who publicly disagree with actions of the Jewish state.
…
We call upon fellow Jews to join us in supporting free debate to further the prospects of peace, security and human rights in the Middle East by signing our statement at http://iajv.org/.

Dr Peter Slezak Bellevue Hill and Dr Jim Levy, Antony Loewenstein, Professor Peter Singer, Robert Richter, QC, Louise Adler, Eva Cox, Professor Dennis Altman, Professor Arie Freiberg, Ian Cohen, MLC, Professor Ivor Indyk, Moss Cass, Dr Geoffrey Brahm Levey, Professor Andrew Benjamin, Henry Rosenbloom, Professor Andrew Jakubowicz, Professor Ephraim Nimni, Professor David Goodman, Hashomer Hatzair and more than 100 other signatories

Henry, will you write to these people and tell them their opinions are “idiotic”? The worst you can say about Abb1`s comment was that it was hyperbolic, but the substance of his comments over time is obvious and valid. Your response to people who criticise your opinions is, to say the least, excessive and certainly impolite. Is it any wonder that Abb1 becomes inflammatory in response?

The second point is something I’ve taken for granted and have had a hard time realizing that others do not. And that is that following the precedent of history I prefer barbarism to hypocrisy. Barbarism is ubiquitous to the history of the planet. Hypocrisy is not so much the invention of the modern period but seems now almost synonymous with it. One of the reasons I had no patience with leftists academics who argued against seeing beauty in the art and culture of European history is that whatever they would choose as an alternative, when it wasn’t an invented academic and sterile politically correct esperanto, was just as barbaric, but on a smaller scale.

It is possible to love Europe without loving Philip II or Louis XIV but interestingly, it makes no sense to love the culture of Germany in 1939 without loving the Fuhrer.

It is the hypocrisy of Israeli politics that makes it so grotesque as it is the hypocrisy of Singapore, an economic oasis where one can trust one’s ill gotten gains to be safe and secure in the hands of a moralizing police state. It was the hypocrisy of fascism and stalinism that made both so much more brutal, that allowed them to become no more than the sum of their brutality as I’m sorry to say Israel is little more than the sum of it’s hypocrisy.

China is a behemoth, economically and culturally. It’s both the wild wild east and the oldest continuous self contained culture on the planet. It’s government to the extent that its in control is made up of some very intelligent and very serious people and it’s culture is diverse and expansive even under duress.
Singapore on the other hand is a politics of lies and a culture of shit, and I put Israel and apartheid s. africa in a similar category.

Also with that in mind: I do not equate arabic anti-jewish sentiment with european anti-semitism, any more than I equate black racism in the US, the opinions of women who think all men are scum, of latinos who don’t like yanquis or of jews like my father (and myself to some degree) who don’t like germans much, with the history that precedes that anger.

These again are all arguments I’ve made before, here and elsewhere.

“The word ‘anti-semit’ currently doesn’t have much of a meaning at all. It’s simply used to insult anyone who disagrees with the wingnut apologists of the Israeli wingnuts.”

That’s a remarkably idiotic statement. For the record, I’ve blogged several times about the disgraceful way in which reasonable critics of Israel have been dubbed anti-Semites (and have banned one person who consistently insinuated this kind of slur from commenting on my threads)- but that doesn’t mean that anti-Semitism is a meaningless term. I certainly don’t believe abb1 to be an anti-Semite – but he does have a very particular talent for finding gross, offensive, and flat-out preposterous ways of presenting his arguments, which have a persistent tendency to derail debate.

Seth – fair enough – but what you’re saying now is surely rather different from your earlier implied claim that I and other CTites were somehow tainted by association because a co-blogger lived in Singapore? And while one might like to have discussion of this, I don’t think one can demand it as a right. If I was living in a semi-authoritarian country, and faced the risk of losing my livelihood, I might be circumspect in what I blogged about. Indeed, I’ve sometimes worried myself that some of the things I’ve said on the blog might get me into trouble with US authorities (as a non-citizen I’m in a more vulnerable position) – and the US, however bad it’s gotten, ain’t anywhere near the countries we’re discussing.

I`m not sure that I agree with you about Japan having not acknowledged their war crimes. A few scholars of Japan seem to think this isn`t the case, and point out Japan`s repeated apologies and admissions in the 70s and 80s as proof of this. The controversy was reunited after Iris Chang`s book and with the Yasukuni Jinja issue, but I think the issue is more nuanced than you suggest. For example the Japanese government generally takes responsibility for starting the war, admits to the Comfort Women issue, supports scholarship on Japanese atrocities, and acknowledges past crimes, as well as having apologised.

Japan is an interesting nation for another reason though – whatever their direct culpability might have been for the war, it is clearly the case that the western powers adopted a policy of stifling trade in the years before the war, as well as putting restrictions on their naval power, opposing moves in the League of Nations and meddling in Japanese foreign policy, primarily because of fear of a rising power. Some here seem to be advocating a similar attitude towards China, but a more realistic view might suggest that the same activities risk the same outcome.

Which is sort of funny, because nationalism provides the main ideological justification of the undemocratic but no-longer-quite-communist Chinese leadership’s rule.

There’s something questionable about most talk of how sanctions might encourage a country like China to improve its institutions and, more generally, about any consideration of China’s rise to great power status just as a “problem”.

I guess I’m not making a profound pronouncement if I point out that the viability of a political regime in any country is largely dependent on support for that regime on the part of that country’s denizens, not on the regime’s inherent moral legitimacy.

The unwillingness to acknowledge the new status of a country of China’s size and pedigree can only fuel Chinese nationalism. To all appearances, the current Chinese leadership stands to benefit therefrom.

Sadly, what passes for mainstream discourse on China’s future role in America and most of the West for that matter is in no small measure vintage neocon bullshit. It’s dangerous.

Nobody is pretending that all regimes are created equal in this thread, I reckon. Democracy is the least bad form of government and so on. But a country’s sensible restraint of its nationalist impulses and due consideration of other countries’ sensibilities are just as important in international relations as the quality of that country’s institutions and, yes, its internal human rights record.

The Chinese regime certainly falls well short of any standard one may care to establish in that regard, but they are not the only ones, by a long shot.

Which brings me to radek’s remarks on Japan. Sorry, but until the Japanese get their shit together and start acknowledging their war crimes, making the prospect of true reconciliation with Korea, China et al. a realistic prospect, I’ll regard the notion of Japanese rearmament with suspicion.

Obviously, the Japanese would be encouraged to come clean if what they rightfully perceive as wrongs done to them (i.e. the nuking) were addressed by an American apology. I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Concerning the notion of more European assertiveness on the international stage: it wouldn’t be bad if Europe spoke with the semblance of a common voice. However, the authority attached thereto will always be lessened by the continent’s chequered past.

“You are not going to teach us how we should run the country,” a foreign correspondent was told by Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s strongman since 1959, in response to a question about Singapore’s disastrous position – 144th out of 166 countries – in the Reporters Without Borders ranking. “We are not so stupid, we know what our interests are and we try to preserve them,” said the so-called theoretician of Asian values in defence of the government’s restrictions on free expression.
Information minister Lee Bon Yang had this to say about the Reporters Without Borders ranking: “This index is largely based on a news media model that favours the press’s role of criticism and opposition (…) We have a different model in Singapore. It has been developed in particular circumstances and allows our media to contribute to our nation’s construction.”
Singapore’s low ranking was due to the complete absence of independent newspapers, radio stations and TV stations, the application of prison sentences for press offences, media self-censorship and the opposition’s lack of access to the state media.”—-

China is too big to follow this model, but it’s related. And it’s an interesting thing to think about. It would be nice to have some discussion by someone who actually lived there.
On this site this is all I found. And it’s not by Holbo.

And between living in China and living in Singapore, I’d pick China hands down.

We all live our lives in shades of grey

You are talking like a neo-con, conditionals or not. You claim the right to transform other peoples` political systems even if those people have given little evidence that they want a change; you ignore the possibility that those people might know what is best for them; and you advocate thuggish methods (in your case sanctions) to do it. This is exactly what got all those people dead in Iraq. The only difference is that the neo-cons are a little more brutal. Big deal. Their fundamental error is their belief that they know best, not that they used bombs instead of sanctions.

Radek: I may be a certifiable idiot, but at least I know how to use pronouns, plurals and prepositions. Being unable to do so doesn`t make your argument less insufferable though.

Seth – if I could actually discern your arguments, perhaps I’d be doing a more accurate job of caricaturing them. They seem to me to be less arguments as I understand the term than repeated references to your various one-sided feuds elsewhere on the Internets, irrelevant proclamations of your working class street cred, and ad hominems that are less insulting than just plain weird. What relevance on earth does the fact that my co-blogger, John Holbo, lives in Singapore have to the price of a pint? Does the fact that I – or you – associate with people who live in the US mean that we can’t criticize the US government? (or I guess it would have to be that we can’t criticize the Canadian government for the analogy to work). And as for abb1 – if you think that the propositions that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist except in the mind of right wing Jews, or that authoritarian China is a freer society than the US because of flawed incarceration statistics are real world arguments, then be my guest. You have your own blog, and you can entertain them there. I’m of the opinion that these claims are obviously flat out wrong, and a waste of time – you can view this as evidence of my horrible biases if you like, but I can’t say that I’ll be especially fussed.

In terms of military budgets – the U.S. budget should surely collapse to somewhere around the Chinese budget – that is, fifty billion per annum – in our best of all possible multipolar worlds. The one thing America shouldn’t be doing now – and of course, it is – is trying to pursuade Central European countries to let us use them to install an anti-ballistic missile system. This is not helpful.