But Che is the fashion of the day, and idealism is good, fashion is more of what I see with Che T-shirt, trendy way of showing you have middle class guilt for being one of the rich enough to visit these countries.

Rich boys from Argentina wishing to be famous.

I am not sure, revolution is not the answer here, there is a basic pirate mentality that is difficult to stop. The conquistadors were land pirates, and the people of South America are the children.

Che failed and the killed him in Bolivia, he is not popular with the South American or Central American people, but the ones that have nothing to do with this.. he is…

Injustice is a strange bird, when the small guy gets to the top, he becomes the same as the guy he replaced.

You people have some complicated lofty sentences…

Travel the world and you wil love your home.
Andy 8 years on the road.
Andy of HoboTraveler.com in Cuzco, Peru

“I ask this of all of you who insisted on moral relativism: was Che wrong to upset the more peaceful system of inequality in his violent persistence of equality? And if so, then why?”

This is an absurd question to any relativist. The whole point is that to answer such quetions you ahve to start making value judgments that are going to be inherently subjective.

It used to be hard to argue that getting rid of Saddam was a bad thing. Then Johns Hopkins finds that as many as 100,000 Iraqis died (mostly women and children killed by errant bombs) for this to happen, you have to start weighing values. Lives on one scale and “freedom” “democracy” etc. on the other. I am not competent, nor willing, to do such balancing.

You say you want equality. I say coerced equality is as bad as any other despotic rule, if not worse because it is done under the auspices of justice. I don’t want it, so you would have to impose it on me. My main contention though is that I dont think you can define equality in any meaningful sense. In fact, if you were to argue for equality I would try to show that any premises you use are inherently contradictory and defeat either the means or the end. “Everybody should be equal” is just like the statement “we should have a free market” in that you could be absolutely consistent with those premises and come to two exactly contradictory conclusions. A market example: should we allow predatory pricing? Being consistent with the free market ideal you could make perfectly rational arguments for either yes or no, so you would need to base any conclusions on external (to the argument) values. In other words, the premise “the market should be free” is meaningless and absurd. Same with the premise “Everybody should be equal”

- That is an absurd question to any relativist. Of course he was not wrong (in any fundamental sense) to take action for what he felt was right. The entire point is that to answer that question requires value judgment calculations that necessitate subjectivity. I’m not calling in to question whether people should act when they see injutice.

It used to be hard to argue with the fact that the world was better off for having been rid of Saddam, but then when a study from Johns Hopkins finds that 100,000 Iraqis (mostly women and children killed by errant bombs)had to die for this to happen, you have to start weighing values. What you end up with is a scale with lives on one side and “democracy” or “freedom” on the other. I am not competent, nor willing, to make such judgments. Same applies with Che, Castro, Stalin, Mao et al. (not to say those people in any way agreed on anything). You can’t put a price on a life and you can’t put a price on freedom and “equality”. Of course the real problem is that you can even define freedom and equality. Equality is incredibly subjective and relative and can be defined in so many (contradictory) ways as to make it meaningless. Like when Bush repeats catch phrases over and over again they become stripped of any linguistic or political meaning.

If you would define what you mean by “equality” then we could debate whether or not it is a good thing (I don’t think it is per se). The difference is that I will not be making moralistic arguments, I would try to show that using the premises defined that there is no such thing as equality in any meaningful sense.

Further, I can almost guarantee that I would not want to live in any society called a utopia by any large segment of the population.

I agree that we should strive for justice; I agree that we should strive for equality in some sense; I agree that we should strive for freedom. I also believe that when these ideals collide (and they very much will) then you have to make value judgments. This is the major theoretical contradiction in Liberalism and the left in general. How can you support freedom and maintain equality? Where do you draw the line when liberty and equality inevitably clash? Can you draw this line on any moralistic assumptions or are you just making a policy choice?