Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam
Andrew Field
andrewfield2002 at hotmail.co.uk
Wed Jan 13 06:58:28 CST 2016
Dear P-Listers, long time reader, very rare communicator:
Ironically the vective from the "leftists" here transcend anything from the "nutty rightists". Talk about name calling over and over again.
That "right wing" policies inevitably lead to genocide is absurd. What I do know is in Europe is that leftists policies have immeasurably increased the rate of murders and rapes in the western world since these policies have been introduced.
Whatever though. Both sides clearly talk past each other and massively misrepresent the other point of view.
Concerning though is how being a "leftist" is seen as a morally superior position" on this forum and is justification as license to sneer on others. The abuse that Kai has received from morally than thou "leftists" for disagreeing with such a worldview is appalling.
Another irony is that when "leftists" are labelled as full of hate they retort "I didnt know I was full of hate". The same is for those on the "right". Agreeing with "rightists" policies doesn't mean hating the Other, or being a neo-nazi towards other races or ethnicities. I, like so many others on the "right", are still kind and generous to the Other.
Thinking that being on the "right" means endorsing hate and genocide is an obvious straw man, Also, it is lazy to think that Nazi Germany happened due to "rightists" policies therefore it will happen again.
Supposedly, white man gave native Americans small pox when they first arrived in the country and produced an epidemic of the disease. This was a case of multiculturalism. If we apply the same thinking to modern day multiculturalism, as we do to the Nazi Germany argument, then we shouldn't have multiculturalism because some of the races will contact epidemics of disease.s. Obviously not the case.
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2016 09:12:56 +0100
Subject: Re: Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam
From: jstremmel at gmail.com
CC: pynchon-l at waste.org
Don't know if this is the right place to post this: http://newsletterversand.zeit.de/ov?mailing=1J95A4TG-1BJWV6D&m2u=1J9VWSGA-1J95A4TG-IE915XI
but anyway.
2016-01-13 8:26 GMT+01:00 David Casseres <david.casseres at gmail.com>:
"The denial of the reality of evil is perhaps the deepest error of the Left." That's the kernel, the nucleus, right there, innit?
How about: the obsession with the "reality" of evil is what drives the Right, inevitably, in the direction of genocide.
On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 1:38 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), 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:
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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? <
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
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