Lessons posted:

getfiscal posted:

hmm.... donald, you call yourself a canadian communist, yet the communist party only got 0.1% of the votes in the last election. your views are marginal and extreme. here's a video from jon stewart explaining why we need a new centre free from the loons on both sides.


The point here isn't that you need to oppose Assad because Arabs do, of course you're free to support and advocate for whoever and whatever you want. But when you start saying anyone who doesn't believe the Syrian rebels are a CIA plot is an American stooges and racists to boot, well, that applies to 66% of Arabs which seems a little presumptuous to me.

But way more than any of that, the problem here isn't that people disagree with the majority of Arab public opinion it's that they're completely ignoring it and not even considering it as a factor. The position that people keep advancing in one form or another is, "Who cares what kind of government Assad runs, all we should care about is American involvement", but this view is so completely out of touch with the reality of the Middle East it's staggering. People don't want to live under shitty dictatorial rulers like Assad and Gaddafi, in fact they're despised, which is why you can have stuff like the leader of Hezbollah saying things like "Hezbollah expresses support to the revolutionists in Libya and we pray that they will triumph over this arrogant tyrant" while NATO bombs are falling on Tripoli. The reconstruction of these guys as anti-imperialist heroes is a joke, it's a carefully-constructed package for Western radicals looking for a cause to cheer for, rough edges and inconvenient facts purged.

And even that aside, the constant pronouncements that we should only care about America and disregard the record of Assad is totally at odds with the public in the Arab world. That doesn't mean it's somehow off-limits for debate but maybe the opinion of the people actually affected by American imperialism should have their views considered rather than being completely ignored? Just a little?

This raises some troubling questions for those of us who value authenticity above all else when it comes to choosing a political position. Do you have any suggestions for rather more organically-constructed causes to cheer for; their rough edges and inconvenient facts intact?

aerdil posted:

so you really think libya is better off now that gaddafi is dead and nato had its way with the country

I hate to pull a khamsek here but I Never Said That. These are just stupid questions anyway, like me asking "Are you glad that Assad didn't step down and now Syria is in a civil war?" Anyway I always opposed the NATO intervention.

Lessons posted:

aerdil posted:

so you really think libya is better off now that gaddafi is dead and nato had its way with the country

I hate to pull a khamsek here but I Never Said That. These are just stupid questions anyway, like me asking "Are you glad that Assad didn't step down and now Syria is in a civil war?" Anyway I always opposed the NATO intervention.

then what the fuck are you trying to say by pointing out that gaddafi and assad arent shining pinnacles of marxism-leninism reincarnated by the great duality of marx and engels?

no one is claiming they weren't/aren't dictators with sometimes selfish or flawed ideologies/programs. but their governments are worth supporting when they are either pursuing anti-imperialist goals or fighting for their life against imperialist goals. and the fact of the matter, as we've seen over and over again every time the U.S. is involved with supporting rebels, their opposition is invariably an uneasy cross-section of wealthy liberal businessmen and radical islamists, with a few other token groups here and there while the rebellion is in the protest phase. and each time, the opposition is funded and armed by front groups interested in looting the country in one way or another. and every time, the supposed atrocities committed by the government is either hyperbolic, sensationalized, wholly fabricated, or simply actually done by the opposition. this whole game has been done enough times that the media is played with aplomb, these guys have written books about how to do it best. you got to convince even americans that intervention is worth it for some played-up humanitarian reason, not simply that a government is anti-american or pseudo-socialist.

the only person being taken in by 'this crap' is you it seems. sorry there aren't any Beautiful Souls worth supporting in their entirety in the world, but you'd have to be pretty naive to make that your yardstick before lending vocal support to a side in a bloody conflict.

babyfinland posted:

This thread is awful, but not because of white "socialists" who are obsessed with anime.

thank you

Lessons posted:

Saddam didn't throw babies out of incubators but he really did gas the Kurds,

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/25/secret_cia_files_prove_america_helped_saddam_as_he_gassed_iran

Lessons posted:

OK lessons let's talk about those polls. I think your point about weighing local views is actually a good one. Let's look at the Pew poll (which is over a year old fwiw). First off, they didn't poll Syrians, so to use this as a counterpoint to crow's and discipline's positions you'd have to spell out why the views of non-Syrian Middle Easterners are a good stand-in. Anyway, from the link:

There is little public backing for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad from the mostly Sunni Arab publics in the Middle East. Only the Shia in Lebanon (91%) have a favorable view of him. (Assad comes from a family of Alawites, a branch of Shia Islam.)

So of course the Sunni/Shi'a thing can risk lapsing into Ancient Tribal Rivalries nonsense but it tends to be accurate as to broad contours of public opinion. Note that the question was just "is your view of Assad favorable," not "should he win":

The intensification of the conflict in Syria in the last year has not altered regional views of Assad. He was not liked in 2012 and he is not liked today.

Meanwhile according to Pew there is massive, massive opposition to U.S., European, or Middle Eastern governments supporting the armed opposition ("rebels"), even though there are highly unfavorable views of Assad.

According to the latest opinion poll commissioned by The Doha Debates, Syrians are more supportive of their president with 55% not wanting him to resign. One of the main reasons given by those wanting the president to stay in power was fear for the future of the country.

Backus posted:

Jesus Christ, I just looked at those other links and every single one of them is from 2011 within six months of the very start of protests. Those are useless. And even they don't all support your position! Doha:
According to the latest opinion poll commissioned by The Doha Debates, Syrians are more supportive of their president with 55% not wanting him to resign. One of the main reasons given by those wanting the president to stay in power was fear for the future of the country.

We already went over that earlier in the thread, the sample size isn't enough to be representative.

Doing the sums, this suggests that only 97 people took part. When the BBC checked with YouGov Siraj for the exact breakdown, the company said that in fact there were 98 respondents from Syria (the difference arising from the fact that averages given in the survey report were rounded).

This is a very low sample according to the managing director of survey company ORB, Johnny Heald, who has been carrying out polls in the Middle East for many years.

"When we poll and we want to find out what Libyans think, or what Syrians think, we would rarely do anything less than 1,000 interviews," he says.

"One thousand is the generally accepted industry minimum to be able to speak confidently about what people from a particular country think about an issue.

"If you say that this poll covers people from 18 countries, then that's fine. But you need to be very careful when you interpret the findings.

"It is not good to say that 55% of Syrians, for example, think that Assad should stay when only 97 people were asked that question."

But he has another criticism - according to UN figures, only 18% of people in Syria have access to the internet, which means that the sample polled is biased towards those who can get online.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17155349

Backus posted:

"this is all sectarian": They polled Iraqis who are majority Shia and they support Assad's resignation 51%-26%

"they don't poll Syrians": This is the last poll of Syrians, from 2011, vast majority oppose Assad. Numbers are basically the same in other Arab countries, and since there's been no reliable polling in Syria since the start of the conflict this + the data from other Arab countries is the best we have. Also regional opinion should matter generally imo.

"these are all from 2011, all out of date": No they're not, this and this are from 2011, this is from 2012, this is from 2013, nothing for this year. What we see from poll to poll is a really consistent levels of opposition to Assad from 2011-2013, why would it have changed in 2014?

"arabs oppose Western/Arab aid to rebels": me too

discipline posted:

you still haven't answered my question about what makes polling during the conflict unreliable. just sounds like a way to spit on the opinions that matter most in this equation.

The logistics of sending polling officers in a warzone are hard enough, let alone a warzone with massive internal displacement, millions of outright refugees leaving the country, and death squads from both sides terrorizing the populace, no one is even going to try. If they actually did it'd be better than the "basically no info" we have now.

discipline posted:

Lessons posted:

discipline posted:
you still haven't answered my question about what makes polling during the conflict unreliable. just sounds like a way to spit on the opinions that matter most in this equation.

The logistics of sending polling officers in a warzone are hard enough, let alone a warzone with massive internal displacement, millions of outright refugees leaving the country, and death squads from both sides terrorizing the populace, no one is even going to try. If they actually did it'd be better than the "basically no info" we have now.

but people did try and they did do polls which you discount as unreliable

Yeah I discounted it as unreliable because it had a whopping 98 respondents, drawn exclusively from the 18% of Syrian that have internet access. Either of these alone is enough to make the sample non-representative, this is just basic fact. If they had people interviewing the 82% of Syrians without internet access and got a decent number of respondents, maybe even something suboptimal like 500, it would at least tell us something rather than the basically nothing that the we get from 98 people on facebook.