Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam

[David Ewers]

I should probably be minding my own business (I've stuck my hand in the middle of more than one dog fight, duh...), but I'd like to say a word on Kai's behalf.  Some of you probably know Kai a lot better than I do and maybe you're giving him a hard time (pardon me, then) but he helped me with some writing recently and in my experience he's far from the image of a raving reactionary I'm seeing here.  I don't think much of the Maverick Philosopher's self-evident choir-preaching (calling people cowards is hardly the best way to invite dialogue...) and my knee jerks left with the best of them, but maybe we shouldn't be so smug.  I haven't heard any good solutions to the refugee crisis coming from the left.  Have you?  Aren't you frustrated by that?
I'm no xenophobe either, but I don't know how I would feel if thousands and thousands of traumatized Syrians arrived in Oakland amid total chaos and lack of planning.  I suspect that knowing my own country's lousy corporatist foreign policy is largely to blame wouldn't make the possibility of real instability any less scary.  The fact we seem to be flying blind is scary (and infuriating).  We need ideas.
By the way, I do think the Maverick Philosopher stumbled on one right thing about secular humanist types; in contrast to the idea (expressed in some circles) that atheists are more likely to become amoral monsters, I think there's something to the notion that an atheist is less likely to be willing to die for an idea (worse news for the MIC?).

That's my two cents...


On Jan 11, 2016, at 12:16 PM Jolly good day we are having, Jemmy Bloocher wrote:

> I actually did read most of it, but yes, as a 'terrorist sympathiser' (David Cameron tm) I can't say I agreed with er...any of it. It's because of course I'm a hatefilled leftist knob.
> 
> On 11 Jan 2016 20:00, "David Morris" <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/1/11/1467475/-Cartoon-The-Junior-Militiaman-Playset?detail=facebook
> 
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 1:54 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Leftists" is the new dirty word, it seems.
> 
> Kai?  Are you now a "Rightists?" (Is that a word?) You have made ideological bed-fellows with some very wing-nutty types.  I know you are too smart for that, deep down.
> 
> David Morris
> 
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 1:26 PM, Danny Weltman <danny.weltman at gmail.com> wrote:
> I learn so much interesting stuff about how much I hate when I read what other people think about me. I had no idea I harbored so much bile in my heart or that one of my best analogues in literature was Mephistopheles. It's really an eye opener. Maybe with enough time and help from the Right, I can divest myself of my hate of Westerners, Americans, Christians, and the Enlightenment and join the Right in hating Islam. Until then I guess I'll have to rest content with being a reactionary. At least now I know how it feels to be called one!
> 
> Danny
> 
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 11:18 AM, Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:
> This business about the how the left is reactionary was my favorite bit:
> 
> Leftists are fundamentally negative and oppositional.  In Faust, Goethe refers to Mephistopheles as Der Geist der stets verneint, the spirit that always negates.  That is the spirit of the Left: destructive, nay-saying, reactionary.   So leftists take the side of Islamists because the latter oppose traditional American values despite the deadly threat Islamists pose to their own values.  Compare Robert Tracinski:
> 
> The left is fundamentally reactionary. It is a reaction against capitalism and against America. The left are defined by what they are against, or more accurately who they hate. So they are drawn to sympathy toward Islam because it is not-us: non-Western, non-American, neither Christian nor a product of the Enlightenment. And I guess that’s what the two ideologies have in common: they are both reactions against the supposed evils of the West. Which explains why leftists tend to find themselves uncomfortable and look for excuses to retreat when they are called upon to defend the West against this rival group of reactionaries.
> 
> If that resonates with you in some way, I guess maybe the rest of it will make sense too. 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 10:08 AM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
> Pfff... this is ludicrous, asinine, sputtering cant.
> 
> Zero philosophical or even political value.
> 
> J
> 
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 4:17 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> >
> > http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2015/05/why-the-left-will-not-admit-the-threat-of-radical-islam-revised-and-expanded.html
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> 
> 
> 
> 

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