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'it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is' Really have to question this reification of "evil" per se. Evil is most immediately a religious construct.

'it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is' Really have to question this reification of "evil" per se. Evil is most immediately a religious construct. Or, in the words of Hannah Arendt, it is "banal." When did calling people evil ever lead to more justice in the world? As if George W Bush having the courage to call Iran and Iraq and Libya the "Axis of Evil" led to the US promoting peace in those countries? No, there's been a proportional increase in US-led suffering (death toll in Iraq post-invasion around .5 million). I don't honestly know too much about Fidel Castro, but take a minute to look at the US-installed Batista, who was overthrown. And, gawd, what about JFK? What about Kissinger These leaders had all the advantages of starting out in a relatively functional industrially-developed democracy, and they managed to do all kinds of evil, mainly to countries like Cuba. Tangentially, IMHO, I don't believe Castro was nearly as "pathological" a human being as a number of US presidents.

bad_user 10y ago
> Evil is most immediately a religious construct. No dude, "evil" is a social and cultural construct. We are doing this as a species, as in relying on taboos and moral rules, in order to survive. It's why we don't fuck our relatives, kill our children or eat our dead. This inherited culture is how 7 billion of us live on this earth without killing each other. And we need it because frankly many of us are too stupid to be rational all the time. As for calling "evil" when seeing it, this is basically about communicating to other human beings a danger sign that can be universally understood. Which is in itself an act that can be used for evil, like the US propaganda for entering Irak, but then again we are flawed creatures trying to live our lives. What I'm trying to say here is that this isn't an argument that you can win. And I'm not even sure that being more rational would be good for us. Because IMO even perfectly rational people can be easily fooled into believing flawed statistics and logical fallacies and I don't even care what Fidel's dream was for Cuba because the end never justifies the means IMO.
- samirillian 10y ago
  I'm not saying that the term "evil" should have no currency at all (I used it later in the comment). I'm questioning the usefulness/honesty of the metaphor for describing political actors. If we call Fidel Castro evil, it is either for essentially propagandistic purposes or, if used in earnest, it leads to a slippery slope. Heads of state always wield the power of life and death over some group of people--since, in the words of Weber, to be a state is to have a monopoly on violence. How many people have to unjustly die or be imprisoned as a result of a leader's choices for that leader to be evil? If we try to avoid this sorites' paradox (how many grains of sand make a pile) by psychoanalyzing the leader, then we must talk of pathology rather than morality. But psychoanalyzing a head of state leads to wild speculation/sneaking the assumptions back into the question (well, he must be a megalomaniac because he killed x people). So, we discover that neither morality nor psychology are particularly useful conceptual tools when addressing essentially political/structural actors (as Gramsci observed). In practice, calling people that the USA doesn't like evil is just lazy, and usually justification for making the population of said state even more miserable than already were under their "evil" leader.
- Daishiman 10y ago
  > I don't even care what Fidel's dream was for Cuba because the end never justifies the means IMO. Well, history is effectively written by the victors, so it will be written so that the ends will retroactively justify the means, or at the very least will be scrutinized far enough into the future that we can disengage emotionally. If Castro's dream was to avoid Cuba from turning into a Haiti or a Honduras, it was a resounding success. If it was about turning it into a socialist utopia where people lived as if was the first world, it would probably be unrealistic in the first place but things remain to be seen. The point is that, in fact, we do justify evil when it aligns with our policies and goals, because a lot of our well-being depends on it. The American quality of life depends a great deal on the intervention and installment of puppet regimes in countries that provide natural resources to guarantee a steady stream of supplies for manufacture; that was the basis of the Monroe Doctrine and it justifies atrocities to a level where Castro's worst was just baby play. I actually do agree that there is evil in the repression of the country, but at the same time good is not the absence of evil either, and you can't talk about the evil without recognizing the successes of the Cuban regime. Otherwise you cannot even begin to make a single claim on the good things of the US because it has been based, to a great degree, on the control and oppression if millions of innocent people through projected global power.

bad_user 10y ago

> Evil is most immediately a religious construct. No dude, "evil" is a social and cultural construct. We are doing this as a species, as in relying on taboos and moral rules, in order to survive. It's why we don't fuck our relatives, kill our children or eat our dead. This inherited culture is how 7 billion of us live on this earth without killing each other. And we need it because frankly many of us are too stupid to be rational all the time. As for calling "evil" when seeing it, this is basically about communicating to other human beings a danger sign that can be universally understood. Which is in itself an act that can be used for evil, like the US propaganda for entering Irak, but then again we are flawed creatures trying to live our lives. What I'm trying to say here is that this isn't an argument that you can win. And I'm not even sure that being more rational would be good for us. Because IMO even perfectly rational people can be easily fooled into believing flawed statistics and logical fallacies and I don't even care what Fidel's dream was for Cuba because the end never justifies the means IMO.

samirillian 10y ago
I'm not saying that the term "evil" should have no currency at all (I used it later in the comment). I'm questioning the usefulness/honesty of the metaphor for describing political actors. If we call Fidel Castro evil, it is either for essentially propagandistic purposes or, if used in earnest, it leads to a slippery slope. Heads of state always wield the power of life and death over some group of people--since, in the words of Weber, to be a state is to have a monopoly on violence. How many people have to unjustly die or be imprisoned as a result of a leader's choices for that leader to be evil? If we try to avoid this sorites' paradox (how many grains of sand make a pile) by psychoanalyzing the leader, then we must talk of pathology rather than morality. But psychoanalyzing a head of state leads to wild speculation/sneaking the assumptions back into the question (well, he must be a megalomaniac because he killed x people). So, we discover that neither morality nor psychology are particularly useful conceptual tools when addressing essentially political/structural actors (as Gramsci observed). In practice, calling people that the USA doesn't like evil is just lazy, and usually justification for making the population of said state even more miserable than already were under their "evil" leader.
Daishiman 10y ago
> I don't even care what Fidel's dream was for Cuba because the end never justifies the means IMO. Well, history is effectively written by the victors, so it will be written so that the ends will retroactively justify the means, or at the very least will be scrutinized far enough into the future that we can disengage emotionally. If Castro's dream was to avoid Cuba from turning into a Haiti or a Honduras, it was a resounding success. If it was about turning it into a socialist utopia where people lived as if was the first world, it would probably be unrealistic in the first place but things remain to be seen. The point is that, in fact, we do justify evil when it aligns with our policies and goals, because a lot of our well-being depends on it. The American quality of life depends a great deal on the intervention and installment of puppet regimes in countries that provide natural resources to guarantee a steady stream of supplies for manufacture; that was the basis of the Monroe Doctrine and it justifies atrocities to a level where Castro's worst was just baby play. I actually do agree that there is evil in the repression of the country, but at the same time good is not the absence of evil either, and you can't talk about the evil without recognizing the successes of the Cuban regime. Otherwise you cannot even begin to make a single claim on the good things of the US because it has been based, to a great degree, on the control and oppression if millions of innocent people through projected global power.