Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam

Tue Jan 12 11:32:26 CST 2016

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On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 12:31 PM, <msacha1121 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey foax, so at work recently I've been chucking out some dusty old tomes,
> and there are a coupla diamonds in the rough. Well, let's just say I think
> I blew this case wide open...
>
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> Sent from my iPhone
> > On Jan 12, 2016, at 11:17 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> On Jan 12, 2016, at 4:38 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Oooh, touched a nerve, huh?
> >>
> >> The last point, the one you quote, suffers from the fact that the
> second part of the Faust quote is left out which - look it up, if
> interested - is misleading and thus damages the argument. And of course I'm
> not American, I'm not fighting your political conflicts but ours here in
> Germany and Europe. Bill Vallicella's thoughts, however, helped me
> enormously to get to clear terms with Islam. Here in Germany where
> thanatoid leftists want to dissolve the nation into global
> multiculturalism, things are rarely formulated with such sober clarity. And
> yes, me I'm not a leftist anymore. Neither economically (the crude
> Keynesianism of Krugman and others appears absurd to me),
> > Krugman is much more of a capitalist reformer and, as you say a crude
> and absurd Keynesian, than a representative of the best of socialist
> economic thought.
> >> nor culturally. There are issues on my personal political agenda which
> could still be described as "left" - for example the legalization of
> cannabis -, but I would prefer the word "libertarian" here. The points
> three till nine of Vallicella's argument sound especially plausible to me:
> > The points below are a war of generalities, overstatements about "the
> left" with little relation to the actual range of ideas that exist along
> the political and human spectrum. This person wants to do battle with
> monsters but ends up conjuring straw men. To my mind the whole thing is an
> example of bad logic to endorse scapegoating. It poses as an attack on
> Islam but makes no direct arguments against Islamic teachings. It seeks to
> equate Islam with terrorism but does not engage in an across the board
> comparitive discussion of the religious roots for organized violence.
> >>> 3. Leftists typically deny that there is radical evil; the bad
> behavior of Muslims can be explained socially, politically, and
> economically.  The denial of the reality of evil is perhaps the deepest
> error of the Left.  And so the beheadings, crucifixions, and other
> atrocities committed by ISIS and other Muslim savages are not expressions
> of radical evil, but reflective of contingent and ameliorable states of
> affairs such as a lack of jobs.
> > 1)The denial of evil seems more about agnosticism/atheism/ humanism than
> leftism. The Nicaraguan revolutionaries were very catholic and believed in
> evil and there are many political leftists with a moral spiritual base for
> whom the concept of evil is acceptable. 2) there is no more validity to
> assume that the crimes of Isis are an expression of Islam than that the
> bombs inVietnam were an expression of Christianity.
> > That said, the kind of  invocation of radical evil the writer calls for
> has historically almost always produced its own evil. Bush’s writer , Frum,
> actually invoked the phrase war on evil as part of the justicicationfor the
> mass slaughter in Iraq. When Communism was the great evil it allowed many
> slaughters of political reformists. The Nazis made Jews, communism and
> homosexuality into great evils. Is this really a helpful concept?
> >>
> >> 4. Leftists tend to think any critique of Islam is an attack on Muslims
> and as such is sheer bigotry.  But this is pure confusion.  To point out
> the obvious, Islam is a religion, but no Muslim is a religion.  Muslims are
> people who adhere to the religion, Islam.  Capiche?
> > Many leftists detest all religions including Islam, and most leftists
> make this distinction between Muslims and Islam easily and clearly.
> Essential to democratic pluralism, and more popular on the left than  the
> right,  is tolerance for many faiths and political ideas expressed as
> freedom of expression and freedom of religion and thought.. Tolerance does
> not mean agreement or changing legal and ethical practices to accomodate
> religios difference. Tolerance has  to do with privatizing religion to
> avoid confusing religion and politics. The conservative-right in the US
> wannts to privatize everything but religion.
> >>
> >> When a leftist looks at a conservative he 'sees' a racist, a xenophobe,
> a nativist, a flag-waving, my-country-right-or-wrong jingoist, a rube who
> knows nothing of foreign cultures and who reflexively hates the Other
> simply as Other.  In a word, he 'sees' a bigot. So he thinks that any
> critique of Islam or Islamism -- if you care to distinguish them -- is
> motivated solely by bigotry directed at certain people.  In doing this,
> however, the leftist confuses the worldview with its adherents.  The target
> of conservative animus is the destructive political-religious ideology, not
> the people who have been brainwashed into accepting it and who know no
> better.
> > Absurd. this is simply crappy thinking. An excuse for the cultivation of
> hate. I am absolutely certain I am not alone in having known, loved and
> respected many conservatives. I believe there is inevitably a tension
> between the libertarian ideals of personal freedom and the social needs for
> good public decision making. Both sides of this tension need the balance of
> the other, and the culture war between left and right is a media spectacle
> that lends to xenophobia, demagoguery, fear and misunderstanding, and
> rarely allows fruitful dialogue concerning these inherent tensions.
> >>
> >> 5. Some leftists think that to criticize Islam is racist.  But this too
> is hopeless confusion.  Islam is a religion, not a race.  There is no race
> of Muslims. You might think that no liberal-leftist is so stupid as not to
> know that Islam is not a race.  You would be wrong.  See Richard Dawkins on
> Muslims.
> > Again, absurd and rather paranoid oversimplification. Dawkins is an
> asshole and no favorite of the left.  This confusion about race seems most
> prevalent on the right and is particularly visible here  with Trump,
> conservative Christians, and the less educated.
> >> 6. Many leftists succumb to the Obama Fallacy: Religion is good; Islam
> is a religion; ergo, Islam is good; ISIS is bad; ergo, ISIS -- the premier
> instantiation of Islamist terror at the moment -- is not Islamic.  See
> Obama: "ISIL is not Islamic.”
> > The question is not whether Isil has a connection to Islam but wheter it
> represents Islam as a whole. In the US and I suspect elsewhere American
> muslims  have the lowest rate of vilence and crime of any religion. Very
> few leftists believe that all religion is good.
> >>
> >> 7. Leftists tend to be cultural relativists.  This is part of what
> drives the Obama Fallacy.  If all cultures are equally good, then the same
> holds for religions: they are all equally good, and no religion can be said
> to be superior to any other either in terms of truth value or contribution
> to human flourishing.  Islam is not worse that Christianity or Buddhism; it
> is just different, and only a bigot thinks otherwise.
> > He doesn’t have the guts to actually argue how Islam is worse than
> Christianity or Buddhism( weird choice, Buddhism, are Buddhists involved in
> theis struggle?, why not Judaism where the holy text is rife with self
> righteous  ethnic cleansing.)
> >>
> >> But of course most leftists think that all religions are bad, equally
> bad.  But if so, then again one cannot maintain that one is superior or
> inferior to another.
> > This is comical. He was just saying leftists succumb to the Obama
> fallacy that all religion is good.
> >>
> >> 8. Leftists tend to be moral equivalentists.  And so we witness the
> amazing spectacle of leftists who maintain that Christianity is just as
> much, or a worse, source of terrorism as Islam. See Juan Cole, Terrorism,
> and Leftist Moral Equivalency.
> >>
> >> Leftists are also, many of them, moral relativists, though
> inconsistently so.  They think that it is morally wrong (absolutely!) to
> criticize or condemn the practices of another culture (stoning of
> adulterers, e.g.) because each culture has its own morality that is valid
> for it and thus only relatively valid.  The incoherence of this ought to be
> obvious.
> >
> >> If morality is relative, then we in our culture have all the
> justification we need and could have to condemn and indeed suppress and
> eliminate the barbaric practices of radical Muslims.
> > That is exactly what we theoretically do by applying our laws equally to
> all. Stoning for adultery is illegal and virtually unknown in western
> democracies and there is no move among leftists to allow stoning for
> cultural reasons. Where does he come up with this shit?
> >>
> >> 9. Leftists tend to deny reality.  The reality of terrorism and its
> source is there for all to see: not all Muslims are terrorists, but almost
> all terrorists at the present time are Muslims.  Deny that, and you deny
> reality.  But why do leftists deny reality?
> > This has far more to do with how you define terrorism and terrorist than
> some obvious statistical reality. In the US the most statistically obvious
> form of terrorism is abuse of people of color by armed authorities. If
> terrorism includes dropping bombs on foreign countries that did not attack
> or threaten you, then the US armed forces have Muslims beat by many miles.
> What about Drug cartels in Mexico? What about the Egyptian military. I
> could go on for pages.
> >>
> >> A good part of the answer is that they deny it because reality does not
> fit their scheme.  Leftists confuse the world with their view of the world.
> In their view of the world, people are all equal and religions are all
> equal --  equally good or equally bad depending on the stripe of the
> leftist.  They want it to be that way and so they fool themselves into
> thinking that it is that way.  Moral equivalency reigns.  If you point out
> that Muhammad Atta was an Islamic terrorist, they shoot back that Timothy
> McVeigh was a Christian terrorist -- willfully  ignoring the crucial
> difference that the murderous actions of the former derive from
> Islamic/Islamist doctrine whereas the actions of the latter do not derive
> from Christian doctrine.
> > There is no such thing as Christian Doctrine. The history of Chritian
> Doctrines are that many have endorsed terrorism, from the protestant
> chuches of Germany, to the inquisitions of the Catholics, to the exteme
> violence against native peoples of the new world.
> >>
> >> And then these leftists like Juan Cole compound their willful ignorance
> of reality by denouncing those who speak the truth as 'Islamophobes.' That
> would have been like hurling the epithet 'Naziphobe' at a person who, in
> 1938, warned of the National Socialist threat to civilized values.  "You,
> sir, are suffering from a phobia, an irrational fear; you need treatment,
> not refutation.”
> > Most of the Naziphobes who spoke out were historically from the left.
> The refutation and dismissal  of those who warned and fought against
> fascism in its early stages largely came from the right.
> >
> >>
> >> When a leftist hurls the 'Islamophobe!' epithet that is his way of
> evading rational discussion by reducing his interlocutor to someone
> subrational, someone suffering from cognitive dysfunction.  Now how liberal
> and tolerant and respectful of persons is that? <
> > This is dishonest. Most published commentary from the left that uses
> this term uses the form Islamaphobic and often refers to Islamaphobic
> rhetoric. Nevetheless the term including its possible psychological
> implications certainly applies to Donald Trump, and his insidious equation
> of Syrian refugees with Isil terrorists.
> >
> > Some people earn the name-calling they get and that includes socialists
> as well as conservative capitalists.
> >>
> >>
> >> And you should also look at this:
> >>
> >>
> http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2011/09/a-dog-named-muhammad.html
> >>
> >>
> >>> On 11.01.2016 20:18, Robert Mahnke 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
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
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