Man, unironically, I do believe you. I don’t think you’re some fuckwad who uses ‘anti-imperialism’ as an excuse to play apologist for other imperialists. I’ve seen you around. I could be wrong, but you don’t seem like the type.
But at the same time, you do have to understand how it looks when someone says “America supporting oppressors is bad, and Russia supporting oppressors is bad”, and your response is to bring out the list of grudges on America, and then to say that it’s justified because there aren’t many supporters of Russia and China ‘on here’ (when both on the source of the original pic and on this site itself, there very much are), looks more like an attempt to focus the discussion on ‘bad camp’.
When the discussion is started based on “Bad Camp being Bad does NOT justify supporting other shitheads”, can you see how an immediate response of “I want to emphasize that Bad Camp is REALLY bad!” comes off as grating?
And yes, you need to extra proactively reject the camp you were born in, because the default is to assume you support where you’re from out of tribalism and selfish self-interest overriding moral consistancy.
You need to be extra proactive in watching for unintended campism in yourself and in your statements. Not extra proactive in the sense of disproportionate focus or changing every discussion to how the camp you were born in is Really Bad. Otherwise you’re just replacing the standard of beating the drum of “My camp is bad, but THEIR camp is worse!” with “Their camp is bad, but MY camp is worse!” in practical effect.
Thank you for that, I appreciate it. I see where you’re coming from.
From my perspective, rejecting campism starts at home. With rejecting the bad actor camp that, if you don’t actively reject it, can be seen as a self-serving bias.
An American saying Russia bad, which it clearly is, means far, far less than an American saying America bad, or a Russian saying Russia bad, because if you speak against another country, it’s easy to be perceived as just being a loyal tribalist.
It’s more powerful to reject the camp you’ll feel the consequences of than to more loudly attack another bad actor or actors, as that can easily be seen as campism.
I’m glad we could have a reasonable conversation about this.
As to your point about rejecting campism starts at home, I think we’re in partial agreement. It is important to reject one’s own ‘camp’, as failing to do so is… well, literally just campism. And we ‘in’ a certain camp are often better poised to examine and denounce certain aspects of our own camps, and insofar as we are gifted with that perspective, we have a very strong and serious moral duty to do so.
I’m just wary of the idea that we all ‘end up’ with the duty to denounce our own camp extra hard, rather than the duty to police ourselves and ensure that the moral failings of our own ‘camp’ don’t escape our notice or our condemnation. We can’t control whether others’ condemnations are correct in target or intensity; only our own.
Man, unironically, I do believe you. I don’t think you’re some fuckwad who uses ‘anti-imperialism’ as an excuse to play apologist for other imperialists. I’ve seen you around. I could be wrong, but you don’t seem like the type.
But at the same time, you do have to understand how it looks when someone says “America supporting oppressors is bad, and Russia supporting oppressors is bad”, and your response is to bring out the list of grudges on America, and then to say that it’s justified because there aren’t many supporters of Russia and China ‘on here’ (when both on the source of the original pic and on this site itself, there very much are), looks more like an attempt to focus the discussion on ‘bad camp’.
When the discussion is started based on “Bad Camp being Bad does NOT justify supporting other shitheads”, can you see how an immediate response of “I want to emphasize that Bad Camp is REALLY bad!” comes off as grating?
You need to be extra proactive in watching for unintended campism in yourself and in your statements. Not extra proactive in the sense of disproportionate focus or changing every discussion to how the camp you were born in is Really Bad. Otherwise you’re just replacing the standard of beating the drum of “My camp is bad, but THEIR camp is worse!” with “Their camp is bad, but MY camp is worse!” in practical effect.
Thank you for that, I appreciate it. I see where you’re coming from.
From my perspective, rejecting campism starts at home. With rejecting the bad actor camp that, if you don’t actively reject it, can be seen as a self-serving bias.
An American saying Russia bad, which it clearly is, means far, far less than an American saying America bad, or a Russian saying Russia bad, because if you speak against another country, it’s easy to be perceived as just being a loyal tribalist.
It’s more powerful to reject the camp you’ll feel the consequences of than to more loudly attack another bad actor or actors, as that can easily be seen as campism.
I’m glad we could have a reasonable conversation about this.
As to your point about rejecting campism starts at home, I think we’re in partial agreement. It is important to reject one’s own ‘camp’, as failing to do so is… well, literally just campism. And we ‘in’ a certain camp are often better poised to examine and denounce certain aspects of our own camps, and insofar as we are gifted with that perspective, we have a very strong and serious moral duty to do so.
I’m just wary of the idea that we all ‘end up’ with the duty to denounce our own camp extra hard, rather than the duty to police ourselves and ensure that the moral failings of our own ‘camp’ don’t escape our notice or our condemnation. We can’t control whether others’ condemnations are correct in target or intensity; only our own.