I think moral judgements are much easier for these self-proclaimed Libbo types: the single worst thing in the world is tax and anything else is better than that.

The problem I have is that the most outspoken critics of Cuba tend to be the same people who support pulling out of human rights treaties, emergency laws, restrictions on protests etc., all because we face a terrorist threat that is, even in its most nightmarish conceptions, minuscule compared to the threat Cuba faces just a few miles away.

They tend to be the same people who supported Pinochet.

The thing about Cuba is that it sends everyone nuts, in one way or another. It’s like Palestine- people start shaking with rage as soon as you mention it. People like Jesse Helms and the Venezuelan opposition talk about it as if it were the worst tyranny in history and a threat to the whole region, while people like Steven Spielberg and Naomi Campbell seem not to notice that there’s no free speech or that they’ve never held an election.

My view would be that a) in general, people don’t risk their lives on rickety boats to escape from really great places, but on the other hand b) if Cuba was genuinely a hell-hole then there would be Cuban refugees showing up in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic as well as in the USA; the fact that there aren’t suggests that we’re looking at economic migrants here.

I take the point that, if you look around the region, there are worse places than Cuba. And it’s true that they have a lot of genuine grievances against the US, which was sticking its nose in long before the Cold War began, and after it ended. And I agree that it was ridiculous American politicians pretending to be upset about human rights in Cuba when their clients were murdering hundreds of thousands in El Salvador and Guatemala. But even so, it isn’t great.

As I have argued [http://bartlettsbizarrebazaar.blogspot.com/2004/11/moral-relativism-response.html], there can be nothing but moral relativism.

This is not to say, ‘this is better, so it is good’, as I also explicitly argue.

You are one for empty statements, and I fail to see the point of your trolling, unless it is an expression of a particularly unpleasant personality.