Unexamined Life: The too many faces of Edward Said | Hacker News Reader

Unexamined Life: The too many faces of Edward Said

thebaffler.com

20 pointstintinnabula10 comments

Strange how such a long article about imperialism in the middle east does not mention the Ottoman empire even once. An empire that genocided 300,000-900,000 Greeks a mere 56 years before Said's book was published [1]. Surely it played a large role in the West's perception of the Orient, which is what the field of Orientalism purports to study.

It's telling that the cover of his book [2] is The Snake Charmer painting, instead of, for example, The Slave Market [3], by the same artist, showing a very different relationship of the West with the Orient, than the one portrayed by Said.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Market_(G%C3%A9r%C3%...

Please don't use HN to perpetuate flamewar talking points. It really doesn't matter what your position is—that stuff is predictable, nasty, and boring.

As if we need to perpetuate war against the Ottoman Empire here. Good grief!

Edit: this is obviously some sort of agenda since you've posted like this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27228927. This is not what HN is for. If you do it again we will ban you, so please conduct these battles elsewhere.

I must admit I'm not sure how one would distinguish an agenda, from simply a viewpoint that has remained unchanged.

My education in history differs from most of HNs, so I find it difficult to let slide a field of study that omits half of the history it claims to represent. Nevertheless, if you insist, I'll refrain from commenting on this topic entirely in the future (I would offer to comment in a non-flamewar style, but if my above post counts as flamewar, I don't think there's a way to express my perspective without it).

By agenda I suppose I mean that these comments are repeatedly prosecuting some sort of battle, and battles on divisive topics produce flamewar, which is not what we want here.

When the topic is longstanding racial and religious grievance, the flames of hell burn particularly hot. Look at what your comment led to downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27853738. What a nightmare.

So yes, please don't post any more comments like this.

Feels a bit wrong to blame MikeUT for the post of some Atatürkian asshole.

You seem to be making the deeply flawed assumption that only one side can be breaking the site guidelines at a time.

No, why do you think so? I'm talking about the apparent apportioning of opprobrium in your comments.

I'm a bit out of date with this thread so I no longer know which other user you're talking about. My point is simply that I responded to MikeUT about MikeUT's comment. I wasn't blaming MikeUT for anything anyone else did—nor would I use the word "blame" in the first place.

Everyone here needs to follow the site guidelines regardless of what other users do.

Edit: if you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27853738, we banned that account for trolling.

Yeah, sorry, "apparent apportioning of opprobrium" may of course be misleading when I may not have seen everything.

Too long ago for me too now, can't recall if the comment you mentioned was among what I meant.

I don't remember either :)

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