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Fidel Castro has died

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Re: Fidel Castro has died

#701

Post by abandonliberty »

erokar wrote: post #365
jknoepfler wrote: post #119

I would encourage the commenters in this thread who see Fidel's legacy as a black-and-white matter of an "evil dictator who did bad things and was wrong about economics" to step back, bear witness to the objective facts about Fidel Castro's life ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Castro ), think sincerely about what could lead a highly intelligent and charismatic person to become or follow Fidel Castro (as many ha…

On the contrary, it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is. Of course it might be wise to try to analyze what genetic/family/social/economic/political factors shape people like Castro, Gaddafi, Franco etc. — but if you think you're dealing with people like you and me you fail to grasp the phenomenon. Dictators that prosecute and murder their opponents, like Castro did, share a very predictable set of psychop…

Is is dangerous to not call out evil for what it is; unfortunately, you're looking at a symptom rather than the cause. Effort wasted hating Castro, Hillary, Trump, climate change policies, or GB surveillance laws is lost from actually fixing our world.

It is easier to hate people than to accept that their behavior is emergent and afflicts us as well. The most intelligent, benevolent AI or angel will fail in our complex systems/organizations. This is an incredibly desperate understanding, particularly when you realize that those in power are disincentivized from making improvements.

Organizations DEMAND 'evil' behavior. It is not User Error.

CGP Grey has a great video that can help open your mind, if you are willing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#702

Post by iiiggglll »

paradite wrote: post #462
iiiggglll wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He believed in freedom > I detest the hypocrisy I see in many (not all) western commentators. A counterexample: this photo was taken in NYC after the most recent US presidential election: http://i.imgur.com/DcVbqAm.jpg It's a picture of someone standing in front of Trump Tower holding a sign that says "You're not my president. Fuck you." Can you imagine someone getting away with that in Castro's Cuba?

I understand you point on freedom of speech, but in this case I don't see it as something to be particularly proud of. Maybe Americans value their rights more than anything else, but to me as a Chinese citizen, this is both laughable and disrespectful.

> Maybe Americans value their rights more than anything else

I certainly do, but sadly not every American agrees. There are many "law and order" types who would have that person arrested and beaten if they could. Fortunately our rights are still intact, even after all this time. People can do such things without fear. Far from being "laughable and disrespectful", I consider it a sign of a healthy, functioning society. "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism", as the saying goes.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#703

Post by ianamartin »

erokar wrote: post #365
jknoepfler wrote: post #119

I would encourage the commenters in this thread who see Fidel's legacy as a black-and-white matter of an "evil dictator who did bad things and was wrong about economics" to step back, bear witness to the objective facts about Fidel Castro's life ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Castro ), think sincerely about what could lead a highly intelligent and charismatic person to become or follow Fidel Castro (as many ha…

On the contrary, it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is. Of course it might be wise to try to analyze what genetic/family/social/economic/political factors shape people like Castro, Gaddafi, Franco etc. — but if you think you're dealing with people like you and me you fail to grasp the phenomenon. Dictators that prosecute and murder their opponents, like Castro did, share a very predictable set of psychop…

Good and Evil are great examples of abstractions gone wrong. They are too high level to mean anything now.

They've become a psychological comforting mechanism where we apply "good" to things we like or want to like and "evil" to things that we don't. But the words themselves connote something deeper than that--something foundational about morality.

It's convenient. Tidy. We all want to think of ourselves as "good." We don't want to think that we, individually or as a nation or whatever group identity we cling to, is capable of being "evil." Calling something evil is a way of creating cognitive distance between ourselves and what we don't like.

I think it's dangerous. Literally dangerous to engage in the world this way. The real fact of the matter is that perfectly normal, sane, rational, "good" people are capable of doing atrocious things. Even you. Even me.

Hitler wasn't fundamentally different from any of us. Any one of us could become just as bad under the right (wrong?) circumstances.

Pretending that we are different in some basic way paves the path for us to become "evil." It allows us to believe that we are immune to certain types of bad actions.

But we aren't.

Any single individual among us has the capacity to do awful things. Some people were simply able to scale awfulness effectively. That doesn't make them fundamentally different from us.

Calling some individual "evil" isn't semantically different from applying the "good" label to yourself. And when you believe that you are good, it's a lot easier to bend the rules.

There's a specific and frightening chain of logic that goes like this:

I'm good. Good people don't do evil things. So this [insert bad behavior here] is good. Because I'm good.

But the good/evil lens of the world has another drawback. It removes accountability and consequence. If I believe that I'm "good", there's no credit to be given when I choose not to do "evil" deeds. Of course I wouldn't do that. I'm not "evil".

When you apply a label like "evil" to a person, what else could you expect? Of course that person is going to do horrible things. That person is "evil."

The Good/Evil abstraction is pernicious, self-fulfilling, and circular.

We need to be better than that. We need to own up to the full spectrum of our nature and accept it so that we can guard against the worst parts of it.

Pretending that we are not capable of being "evil" is pretty much the foundational mechanism that allows truly terrible things to happen.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#704

Post by chillacy »

kgwgk wrote: post #464
chillacy wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose I didn't pick the best examples. Though Mandela was a critic of the US in later years regarding Iraq / Israel, and Hitler's sentiment on America seems to be complex: a combination of not taking america too seriously and not desiring conflict too early. But I don't think that changes my original point, which is that all dictators can be seen as serving their people, depending on how you define "their people"…

I don't disagree, but the comment you replied to was about the direct correlation between "the amount of anti-American rhetoric" and "how much they screw their country over" so the fact that you choose as example dictators which were not very high in the anti-American rhetoric axis kind of supports his case.

True. I suppose better picks would have been leaders of Russia, Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, etc. going off of http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/15/which-countr...

In all those cases they're helping some group in their country, even if its the political elite.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#705

Post by woodpanel »

macspoofing wrote: post #440
woodpanel wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to see the Cuban revolution as something different than the sole work of Castro etc. wether you regard their work as accomplishment or atrocity. Also Socialism, Communism, Marxism are just the packaging. The core of the whole movement back then was the wast income inequality combined with US-foreign-affair meddling with Cuban domestic affairs, perfectly illustrated by mafia movies depicting Cuba as the play…

>Also Socialism, Communism, Marxism are just the packaging. That's like saying modern terrorism as practiced by groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS has nothing to do with a particular interpretation of Islam, but is rather just a response to colonialism and foreign interference in middle eastern countries, etc. There was an ideological basis to the Cuban revolution that tapped into a existing global Marxist ideology. 'Pack…

Packaging wasn't critical. That's my point: without the product (the Foreign meddling + social fragility) there wouldn't have been anything around for being packaged.

If you blame the atrocities committed on the packaging alone and not on the market that was created beforehand, you're not provinding any help to make sure history doesn't repeat itself.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#706

Post by wooter »

andrepd wrote: post #656
cmbailey wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I agree that Fidel Castro made many mistakes and is responsible for many atrocities. But the plight of Cuba is not his doing alone. In American English, the phrase, "He murdered thousands," can't be followed by the word "but..."

Obama didn't murder thousands? Yet I hear good things about him. FDR? Any US president basically? The people responsible for staging coups abroad to replace democratically elected leaders, install sympathetic dictators and overall fuck up life in a region for 50 years? Yet I hear good things about them too. Why can't the same be applied to Fidel? He committed atrocities and he did good for the country. And indeed muc…

I'm a cuban american and I don't see how people don't understand the most obvious viewpoint. You can condemn both the evil actions by the US and by Fidel. The fact that they've both committed atrocities doesn't mean that we can't criticize either harshly, it means that we MUST criticize BOTH. I hate the whitewashing of Obama's wars. Its a BIG reason I was against Hillary (and pro Gary Johnson). The left is spineless and completely abandons the anti-war rhetoric when its their team. AND I hate the apologism I'm hearing about Castro. He was an evil, hateful, murderous, greedy, lying dictator.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#707

Post by geezerjay »

varjag wrote: post #348
geezerjay wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also ended up a lot better than non-intervention in Syria. It ended marginally better because NATO's intervention decisively tipped the scales against Gaddafi's regime. The Syrian civil war has been in a stalemate for years, and only recently has Assad's regime been making inroads due to Russia's decisive and no-holds-barred military intervention.

If by marginally we mean a difference of half million dead and three million seeking refuge, I beg to disagree. And yes Syria is an intangible mess now, probably the same would have been in Lybia if it was left to own civil war for 5 more years.

> If by marginally we mean a difference of half million dead and three million seeking refuge, I beg to disagree.

Now, factor in the fact that Libya is now a failed state and the refugee crisis is largely caused by human traffickers using Libya as a staging area to send those countless lifeboats packed with countless unwitting victims, a great number of which end up dead in the Mediterranean.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#708

Post by geezerjay »

Trombone12 wrote: post #472
geezerjay wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but comparing Cuba before Castro and after Castro wouldn't be fair. Pre-Castro there was a lot of foreign investment, post-Castro there was an embargo. Seems to be a direct consequence of Fidel Castro's political initiatives. I'm sure we can agree that Castro's regime has at least some responsibilities in this outcome. > You can argue whether that's something that can be blamed on him, but if we were to give him th…

Well, it's weird to call the foreign policy decisions of bordering nations "naturally arising". They are quite obviously very different consequences compared to pollution or traffic jams following heavy car subsidies.

> Well, it's weird to call the foreign policy decisions of bordering nations "naturally arising".

So, you believe that the Cuban missile crisis was yet another misunderstanding that Fidel Castro had absolutely no say in the subject, do you?

What an unfortunate saint, Fidel Castro has been. Those countless political asylum-seekers risking their lives in makeshift boats must be a whole bunch of ungrateful fools for not enjoying living in Castro's paradise on earth.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#709

Post by laura2013 »

andrepd wrote: post #656
cmbailey wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I agree that Fidel Castro made many mistakes and is responsible for many atrocities. But the plight of Cuba is not his doing alone. In American English, the phrase, "He murdered thousands," can't be followed by the word "but..."

Obama didn't murder thousands? Yet I hear good things about him. FDR? Any US president basically? The people responsible for staging coups abroad to replace democratically elected leaders, install sympathetic dictators and overall fuck up life in a region for 50 years? Yet I hear good things about them too. Why can't the same be applied to Fidel? He committed atrocities and he did good for the country. And indeed muc…

Many highly educated professionals in Cuba live in poverty while the top ranking officials live lavishly. The Castro family takes vacations abroad, aboard fancy yachts in fancy hotels while regular citizens are not allowed to leave the island and until recently not even allowed to stay in Cuban hotels (i say recently because that was the case when i lived there and i'm not 100% sure that's changed). There's no good he did that equates or overcompensates the harm to the general population.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#710

Post by varjag »

geezerjay wrote: post #707
varjag wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by marginally we mean a difference of half million dead and three million seeking refuge, I beg to disagree. And yes Syria is an intangible mess now, probably the same would have been in Lybia if it was left to own civil war for 5 more years.

> If by marginally we mean a difference of half million dead and three million seeking refuge, I beg to disagree. Now, factor in the fact that Libya is now a failed state and the refugee crisis is largely caused by human traffickers using Libya as a staging area to send those countless lifeboats packed with countless unwitting victims, a great number of which end up dead in the Mediterranean.

The cause of the current refugee crisis is not Libya, this is really creative interpretation of the results of Syria non-intervention policy.
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