Muslim diversity

I hope this won't be interpreted as condescension on my part, showcasing the "good" Muslims or some such. I don't mean to judge on people's "goodness" or "badness", be it in regard to morals, religion or anything else. But it occurred to me that my own somewhat varied experience of Muslims may not be the norm everywhere. Rather than talk about the people in my life (even if they cared for such a thing), I'll give examples of what kind of Muslim one can run into, anywhere and everywhere.

Which, unsurprisingly, but sorry if this is a spoiler, is any and every kind.

Let's notice Muslims other than extremists. Let's notice them doing something other than praying.

Actually, yes, I find it completely condescending. I'm going to opt not to sign up for 'Muslim 101'.

I'm going to opt not to give a fuck for such uncalled-for nastiness. Who the hell are you and why do you think I should care?

Oh, wait, the person who smirked about "political correctness" when we were discussing representation in children's books... or was it the transgender?

Heh, always rub 'em the wrong way...

General notice: Right up there in >1 LolaWalser:, the very first words: "I hope this won't be interpreted as condescension on my part...". I'll reinforce it: I am very sorry if any person of good will (those of bad don't count anyway) feels I'm condescending to anyone, because this is expressly something I don't want to do. This thread is NOT meant to be "Muslim 101". But, I can neither help malicious misinterpretations of my motives, nor do I care to waste any time countering them.

I WILL deliberately and consistently post news about Muslims that are not connected to terrorism, war and religion, because such items are missing on this forum and quite likely from more than one person's life.

Sincere apologies to those my lack of finesse misleads to see this thread in a bad light.

"Up yours and die, scum" to those who are bothered to see anything positive posted about Muslims.

Apparently, this isn't "Muslim 101" so much as it is, "Passive/Aggressive 101."

>9 nathanielcampbell:

Only because you posted!

My worst enemies recognise there's nothing passive about my aggressiveness. :)

>11 LolaWalser: In a grad seminar I once read a 12th-century treatise by Richard of St. Victor titled, "On the Four Degrees of Violent Charity." Seems an apt description of our epic, passionate run-ins here on LT.

ETA: Turns out you can find a copy online: https://www.academia.edu/1563989/Richard_of_St._Victor_On_the_Four_Degrees_of_Vi...

Don't, you'll make me blush! Darts of love and whatnot! :)

Thanks for the link, looks very interesting.

Do you read French?

I have not heard before of this philosopher, Abdennour Bidar, but apparently he's an exponent of "Islamic existentialism":

Lettre ouverte au monde musulman

A call for reform from within Islam.

>13 LolaWalser: I stumble my way, slowly and painfully, constantly flipping the pages of a dictionary -- but in that sense, yeah, I "read" French! :-)

My facebook feed has actually had a steady stream of stuff on such "calls for an Islam Reformation," though this particular philosopher's name hadn't popped up yet.

I'm constantly faced with that academic disease of feeling the fraud every time I prepare for the one week my syllabus has room for to explain the roots and rise of Islam -- I know that I have only the most basic comprehension of those roots, and none whatsoever of the complex, post-medieval tree they gave rise to. Sadly, my barely-a-layman's knowledge of Islam is still infinitely greater than what my students come into college with, so it suffices.

>13 LolaWalser: Thanks for posting that link.

It's interesting and slightly encouraging to read so passionate a call written by an Islamic philosopher. And, of course, much of what he writes can be equally said of other faiths and other believers. I think, for example, of the appalling community in which Leelah Alcorn grew up.

>14 nathanielcampbell:

It's a terrific hodge-podge. I'm not sure any other major religion is currently displaying such sectarianism.

>15 librorumamans:

It must take a lot of courage for a believing Muslim to put the emphasis on religion as the source of the problem--an approach to religion, perhaps, but nevertheless, to attempt to pull religion in the first plan of reform.

I've asked @lorannen to change the title of this thread to "Muslims in the news" but I have not heard from her so far. If anyone knows who else I should ask (I don't think it's Tim's job), please let me know.

Lola, thanks for the thread. It is not Islam 101, but I hope it will be Islam 102. For as many years as I have studied world history, as many thousands of pages I have read that involved Islam, I need still a refresher course to sort the complexities. And though even my intermediate level knowledge comes in handy (I had to tell someone today that Saladdin, sorry for the newer spelling was a Kurd, so Kurds must not be Christians as he had thought--he a very intelligent man overall), even our resident expert Spalding knows less than he thinks I suspect.

My contribution to your opening strategy is a brief bit on Muslims I have known as well. There have been many, but I think most striking are the Muslims of Chennai, who have an historic district and where the Muslims live as they would have in Trieste, Socotra of a thousand five hundred years ago, wherever trade was a means of living well enough and religion was a strictly private matter. I heard today that Bosnia is a recruiting ground for current wars. I don't think ANYONE from Chennai is going off to Syria.

Another Mulsim. A skinny college kid from Bangladesh. He condemned Rushdie's book out of hand, would not discuss it with me. But, well off and well educated, today he is living in the US and has a good enough job and his knee-jerk conservatism is akin to what we see from some of the well-off on this thread. He isn't going to war and neither will his children go.

Farid Esack and many other South African Muslims

The late Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and many other Sudanese Muslims

46 examples of Muslim outrage about Paris shooting that Fox News can’t seem to find (Raw Story)

Egypt's president calls for 'religious revolution' (CNN):

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has called for a "religious revolution," asking Muslim leaders to help in the fight against extremism.

In a speech celebrating the birthday of the Prophet Muḥammad, which coincided with New Year's Day, he said they had no time to lose.

"I say and repeat, again, that we are in need of a religious revolution. You imams are responsible before Allah. The entire world is waiting on you. The entire world is waiting for your word ... because the Islamic world is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost. And it is being lost by our own hands," el-Sisi said.

"We need a revolution of the self, a revolution of consciousness and ethics to rebuild the Egyptian person -- a person that our country will need in the near future," the President said.
(...)
"It's inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible that this thinking -- and I am not saying the religion -- I am saying this thinking," el-Sisi said.

He continued: "This is antagonizing the entire world. It's antagonizing the entire world! Does this mean that 1.6 billion people (Muslims) should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants -- that is 7 billion -- so that they themselves may live? Impossible!​"

While el-Sisi's speech included some powerful language, H.A. Hellyer, a nonresident fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and research associate at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said the President has made similar statements in the past.

"There is little to suggest (el-Sisi) is interested in some sort of Lutheran reformation of Islam. By all accounts, he's quite comfortable with the prevailing leadership of the Azhari establishment.

"If anything, he wants to empower it further in order to push forward a counternarrative against radical Islamism. The real question is: How credible can such a state-empowered counternarrative be?" Hellyer said.

>20 nathanielcampbell:

The Egyptian military government is, of course, already fighting its own conflict against this strain of Islam (i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood etc). But this strain must be reasonably popular in Egypt more generally, given the reason why there is a military government is that the Muslim Brotherhood (and worse) won the popular elections.

It should also be noted Islamic condemnations of these kind of attacks have only relatively recently started to be issued without riders, regarding the political goals shared by more moderate Muslims, as it has dawned that even if you have valid political points just after a terrorist attack is not the right time to share.

Complaints from Muslim organisations about having to issue these statements after every attack have also dropped away, as again it has dawned that everyone just wants the pro-forma statement for comfort, so it is better just to issue them.

Someone once told me it is counter productive to point out the negative things in people. They just get defensive. Instead find out what they are doing right and make a federal case out of it. (Meaning, cheer them on.)

That was kind of the theme of my sermon this morning.

So, I enjoyed this thread. Let's hold up positive examples. This mayor needs no rewarding, for I am pretty sure he sees an intrinsic award in doing what he does.

So, my two cents...More.

This article has nice photos of Indira Kaljo, a Bosnian-American basketball player, in regular and Islamic sports costume, and gives detail on the rules regarding sportswear and how they affect some religious dress:

Basketball pro Indira Kaljo ready to fight FIBA over hijab

FIBA announced last September they would manage a two-year preview of headgear use, before bringing a final decision about the ban. Victory for Kaljo and other Muslim players who may want to wear a hijab on the courts.

>22 Arctic-Stranger:

I can't remember ever seeing a politician re-elected with such result!

Not sure whether anybody has mentioned yet the Muslim policeman who was killed trying to defend the people in Charlie Hebdo, his brother who spoke so well afterwards, and a Muslim employee at the supermarket siege who hid a number of the hostages and kept them safe. Of course in one sense it is irrelevant that they are Muslims - they were just ordinary people doing what they could - but in the context of this thread it helps to puncture the narrative that Islam equals extremism.

And it shouldn't be forgotten that a Muslim has just won the Nobel Prize, for promoting girls' education.

>25 John5918: I mentioned Ahmed Merabet in the other Charlie Hebdo thread, but I was informed that it was inappropriate to assume that Merabet was in any way representative of his Islamic faith on the day he died.

Gee, it sure is surprising that not all the one billion Muslims in the world are terrorists! Some are quite accomplished! Who would have thought?

On a similar note, not all Americans are marines dropping bombs from drones on innocent people in Yemen and Pakistan, or working for the CIA. Marcy Smith, of Nowhereville, Ohio, raises six foster children and gives to many charities. See? There are good Americans, too!

Shall we just rename this thread the 'some of my best friends are Muslim' thread?

>26 nathanielcampbell: I was informed that it was inappropriate to assume that Merabet was in any way representative of his Islamic faith on the day he died.

The people in Charlie Hebdo died for your right to editorialize!

> 1

Some of the nicest people I have ever met in my life were christians.

So?

(Also, some of the most horrible people I have ever met in my life were avowed atheists.
Again - so?)

This thread is as useless as teats on a bull.

I am proud to be a part of it.

Here's the text of Malek Merabet's eulogy for his brother, Ahmed (source: http://www.vox.com/2015/1/11/7527697/ahmed-malek-merabet-eulogy-charlie-hebdo ):

Good morning all,

My brother was French, Algerian, and of the Muslim religion. He was very proud of the name Ahmed Merabet, proud to represent the French police, and to defend the values of the Republic: liberty, equality and fraternity.

Through his determination, he had just received his judicial police diploma and was shortly due to leave for work in the field. His colleagues describe him as a man of action who was passionate about his job.

""Madness has neither color nor religion""

Ahmed, a man of commitment, had the will to take care of his mother and his relatives following the death of his father 20 years ago. A pillar of the family, his responsibilities did not prevent him from being a caring son, a teasing brother, a generous uncle, and a loving companion.

Devastated by this barbaric act, we associate ourselves with the pain of the families of the victims.

I address myself now to all the racists, Islamophobes, and anti-Semites:

One must not confuse extremists with Muslims. Madness has neither color nor religion. I want to make another point: stop painting everybody with the same brush, stop burning mosques or synagogues. You are attacking people. It won't bring back our dead, and it won't appease our families.

Thank you.

Many Muslims were in the WTC towers on 9/11/01 and were victims of murder also.

So - your point, nat?

No one has averred that ALL followers of Islam are murders or promoters of murder.

You STILL attacking THAT straw man?

Give it up. You bore normal people.

Laughing in the face of danger: the state of satire in the Muslim world (Guardian)

Cartoons depicting Muhammad are unthinkable in Muslim countries. But there are plenty of homegrown satirists poking fun at reactionaries, autocrats and jihadis. Our writers in Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon and Iraq explain where the line is drawn...

So much for trying to have ONE thread about Muslims that would not centre on war, terrorism and religion...

I Am Charlie, but I Am Baga Too - On Nigeria's Forgotten Massacre (allAfrica)

Je Suis Nigeria (allAfrica)

A Nigerian Archbishop Wants Solidarity Shown for France Replicated against Boko Haram (Catholic News Agency for Africa)

Boko Haram crisis: Nigerian archbishop accuses West (BBC)

I Am Charlie, but I Am Baga Too - On Nigeria's Forgotten Massacre (allAfrica)

Je Suis Nigeria (allAfrica)

A Nigerian Archbishop Wants Solidarity Shown for France Replicated against Boko Haram (Catholic News Agency for Africa)

Boko Haram crisis: Nigerian archbishop accuses West (BBC)

Does anyone know offhand where there is a majority concentration of Sufis?

eta: region, not nation

>36 RickHarsch: I was going to say Sudan, where the dominant form of Islam is Sufi, but then saw your edit about region not nation.

No, nation is fine, I just didn't thing there was one. I did not now that Sudan was one. I am guessing the political elite is not Sufi, am I right?

>38 RickHarsch: Correct. In Sudan they speak of a centuries-old tension between the "lawyers" and the "holy men". The "lawyers", now known as Islamists or fundamentalists, currently hold political power, but the majority of the population is Sufi and the "holy men" still have a lot of influence amongst them.

I recall that Sufis were suppressed in fits and starts in Turkey, I believe because their appearance often gave rise to a sort of ecstatic and loyal following that likely made those in power suspect it could spread to unimaginable numbers of people. Oddly, there is probably a great deal of connection between a sufic meditational trance and the true believer trance (that which is common to both the Islamic fundamentalist and the Texas rifle wielding anti-abortion baptist).

>40 RickHarsch: The trance is not uncommon in Sudanese Sufism. The most famous manifestation is the "whirling dervishes", who spin rapidly round and round. But a more sedate exercise, in which I have participated myself, involves the congregation forming a circle and doing a sort of shuffling dance, with a slow rhythmic drumbeat. When it's late in the evening and you haven't eaten for most of the day, it's remarkably easy to become a bit trance-like.

Pelosi to name first Muslim lawmaker to House intelligence committee

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/andre-carson-muslim-intelligence-committee...

> 42

Just the thing to give old republican farts each a brain hemorrhage.

My congrats to Sen. Pelosi.

Egypt seems to be winning its own war against the free press.

In fact, they have effectively ended free press. I really don't know why the US (what do they have to lose) doesn't very loudly/publicly pressure them to release the al Jazeera journalists. Surely they have an undelivered bomber to use for leverage.

>26 nathanielcampbell:

I mentioned Ahmed Merabet in the other Charlie Hebdo thread, but I was informed that it was inappropriate to assume that Merabet was in any way representative of his Islamic faith on the day he died.

This is a flat-out lie. And YOU dare talk about "passive-aggressive"! How many times have you done this in the past, distorted, misrepresented, exaggerated, flat-out lied about others' arguments?

I pointed out the obvious: that you knew NOTHING about Ahmed Merabet's opinions and how he regarded his faith, or the context others gave it, or ANYTHING; that you profiled him on the basis of his name and nothing more; and then you continued to instrumentalise him, by talking--no invention, paraphrase or description this, literal quotation of your words--about "his symbolic worth".

And you really have no idea how repellent this is, nor do you seem to have grasped the significance of the point I was making! Treat Muslims as you would any other people.

I haven't noticed you mention by a single word another Muslim victim of that day, Mustapha Ourrad. How come? Did you not hear about him? Or does the fact that he was employed at Charlie Hedbo--as a corrector--throw a wrench into your "noble Muslim martyrs to French iniquity" narrative?

Mustapha Ourrad, journalist, originally from Algeria, father of two children with his companion (oh la la, maybe not even married!) Armelle Michelet.

Jeannette Bourgade--I posted a link about her interview, but you didn't find any "symbolic worth" to her either, did you?

Not appropriate.

>46 LolaWalser: "I pointed out the obvious: that you knew NOTHING about Ahmed Merabet's opinions and how he regarded his faith, or the context others gave it, or ANYTHING; that you profiled him on the basis of his name and nothing more;"

Except that I didn't profile him on the basis of his name and nothing more. Rather, I linked directly to news reports discussing his identity, and I read his brother's remarks about him. I gave direct and extensive evidence for his identity as a Muslim.

"How many times have you done this in the past, distorted, misrepresented, exaggerated, flat-out lied about others' arguments?" Indeed. This whole "profiling" misrepresentation is entirely your invention.

> 47

No nat. Even people on this forum who do not particularly like each other at all can easily agree about one thing - and that is that nathanielcampbell continually distorts, misrepresents, exaggerates and flat-out lies about others' arguments.

That seems to be a clear and unambiguous fact about you. You even occasionally condescend to apologize for a special incident of your mendacity - but then you utterly fail to learn, grow or otherwise change and promptly go on to new and original ways of doing the same damn thing, over and over again.

At least you are not rrp. Words failed me in the past when I cared enough to try and categorize the particular world that he lives in.

But is beating out rrp in the inanity challenge good enough? Why the living hell don't you try to do better, nat? Is it just an impossibility for you? Is your particular character set for life? Are we to suffer from now on, without ceasing, your almost religious devotion to distortions, misrepresentations, exaggerations and flat-out lies about the arguments of others?

You can challenge me to put you on ignore - or even double secret probation - in order to solve my problem with you. OK. But, then, what about the others here on LT forums? They may never figure out that the ignore option is the only way to avoid your filthy web of decent and distortion that is slowing eating away at their brains when they persist in reading and arguing with your inane, moribund and mendacity-soaked posts.

It is my fellow man - and woman - that I am concerned with here, not you nat. If not ME then will you consider having "christian" mercy on THEM? Or will the mental pain you perpetrate on others never cease until your fingers go cold and stiff with death one fine glorious day?

Jesus Christ on a Stick.

But back to the OP: I can only emphasize - one more time - what I averred in my post #29. Also my post #31.

Everyone please have a nice day.

>47 nathanielcampbell:

No, as I already pointed out none of your links gave any info about his personal opinions on anything.

What's fucking ridiculous is that you don't even see how you continue to do it, by not acknowledging what is and ISN'T in the very links YOU posted! It's like you fucking literally DON'T SEE that in all the links all there is, is the mention of Merabet's Muslim identity! NOTHING ELSE!

You wrote:

Here's some links to stories about Ahmed Merabet, the police officer, loyal Frenchman, and Muslim who was executed in the street outside the Charlie building (I highly recommend the first one, from the Atlantic):
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/01/Ahmed-Merabet-police-of....
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-first-man-killed-in-charlie-h....
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2901681/Hero-police-officer-executed-str....

Go ahead, point out a single detail that gives you any inkling of an "opinion" or licence to put words into the dead man's mouth.

Get this: Ahmed Merabet didn't go to his job that day with the aim to prove there are "good Muslims". He is not a martyr. The assassins didn't target him because he was a Muslim, but because he was standing in their way. He may or he may not have cared for "Je Suis Ahmed"; he may or may not have cared for "Je Suis Charlie"--the dead man will never make his OWN decision on this, never give his own opinion on anything. By the way, did you ignore all the MUSLIMS in the French manifestations carrying "Je suis Charlie" signs, or are they too, like Ourrad and Bourgade for example, inconvenient for your stupid, immoral blatherings?

It is doubtful Mr Merabet even knew who the attackers were or their aims when he initially encountered them. It is not helpful to traffic in the contrived "good Muslim/loyal Frenchman" versus "bad Muslim" cliché in a situation that doesn't require it.

Sheesh ... all I did was share one Facebook meme that I found particularly interesting, and now I'm some racist buffoon!

I keep forgetting that whenever we post something on LT, we are assumed to be its sole author and entirely responsible for its content.

>51 nathanielcampbell:

Actually, my post, #116, in the other thread:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/186167#4997737

Quoting from it and bolding: "Where do you get the sheer GALL to ascribe these words to the dead man? (Yeah, I know--Facebook memes.)"

Point being, I did not there nor did I here call you "a racist buffoon". But if you're pushing for an assessment you can milk for hurt and insults, I'll say this: going by your posts in the Ferguson thread (that I redexed eventually because I couldn't stand the sheer ugly stupidity of it anymore), you're less sensitive than you probably imagine yourself to be.

I won't say another word about race in America to you, but I will point out that regarding the situation of Muslims in France, you're woefully uninformed, if the existence of Ahmed Merabet, a cop, a Muslim cop, a Muslim cop who died on his job at the hand of Muslim terrorists, astonishes you so. That Facebook meme turned his existence into some gigantic "GOTCHA!", when it was evidently, goes-without-saying, a fact of French life, multicultural for centuries, beset by various problems, but within which hundreds of thousands of Muslims have found a place, jobs of every kind, on every level.

Guess which European country shows highest percentage of favourable views of Muslims?

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/15/5-facts-about-the-muslim-populat...

Yes, FRANCE. (72%--compare to next highest, Britain, 64%, and lowest, Italy, 28%)

Guess which country showed the highest "Islamophobia", as indexed by overestimation of Muslim population in its midst? x-axis: actual percent of Muslim population; y-axis: times overestimation of Muslim population:



Yes, UNITED STATES.

You want to weep crocodile tears over the fate of Muslims, look to your own invasion-launching home first.

Edited: to add a link to the article with the above chart, which credits for it IPSOS-MORI 2014:

Surestimation du nombre de musulmans en France : le décryptage de Michèle Tribalat

While I'm at it, a side link on the Pew article:

French have positive views of both Jews, Muslims

A Pew Research Center survey conducted last year shows that the French held more favorable views of both Jews and Muslims than many other Europeans. Indeed, 89% of French adults held favorable views of Jews, while 72% felt similarly about Muslims.

French public's views on Jews AND views on Muslims are the most favourable of all (polled, Eastern Europe wasn't included, but I think it's safe to say they wouldn't have jeopardised France's numbers.)

Not a bad result for a bunch of anti-immigrant antisemites and racists.

>50 theoria: Surely the point is simply that the majority of Muslims, just like the majority of Christians, atheists, Jews and everybody else (ie the majority of human beings) are just normal citizens like everybody else, going about their business like everybody else. Of course it shouldn't be necessary to make that point, but in the face of apparent or potential Islamophobia and in the context of this particular thread, it does sometimes seem useful to remind ourselves of that fact.

> 54

Nice try but no cigar, john boy. That dog won't hunt. Run that crap up the flagpole one more time and we STILL won't salute it. Etc.

I.e., like nat you keep trying to set up the straw man that someone, somewhere has accused ALL muslims of being murderers or supporting murder. Why don't you stop that? We have been on to you for some time now. You are the voice of unreason a'crying in the wildness. A goddam hog's ear is NOT a goddamn silk purse. For the love of JEBUS please quit preaching that it is.

The chart you have been shown on this forum reveals conclusively that there is a decided difference between muslims and other religionists in today's world. Maybe there was no such difference five centuries ago but that was then and this is now.

As long as a sizable and easily measurable plurality (sometimes majority) of muslims worldwide support murder then THERE IS NO MORAL EQUIVALENCE between muslims and other religionists, e.g., christians. Muslims are decidedly sucking hind teat, as a religion.

In essence you are apologizing for religious-based murder. That itself is quite beyond the moral pale. Please STOP before you endanger your immortal soul (metaphorically-speaking).

I don't even suspect you of disingenuousness at this point - though others might. I deduce that you sincerely believe the bullshit that you have apparently self-hypnotized yourself into believing. That is surely very sad.

But "facts is facts". Go over the worldwide pew polls again. Try to grok the obvious facts and then join the rest of us in the real world.

Islamophobia? Literally, yes. Any sensible person should be wary of any group of religionists wherein 30 or 40 or even 70 per cent of them are perfectly willing to publically admit they are in favor of murder in the name of their religion and fully support the minority of murderers in their mists - instead of denouncing them as any decent person would be expected to do.

>55 JGL53: I.e., like nat you keep trying to set up the straw man that someone, somewhere has accused ALL muslims of being murderers or supporting murder.

Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's son and president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, comes close:

In 2002, Graham said terrorism is part of "mainstream" Islam and claimed the Quran, Islam's revealed text, "preaches violence."

In 2001, Graham stood by remarks he made about Islam at the dedication of a chapel in North Carolina. At that event, he said: "We're not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He's not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It's a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion."

from http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cair-franklin-graham-repeats-attack-on-i....

Franklin was apparently behind Duke University backing down from it's decision to allow a muslim prayer call from it's chapel tower.

Franklin Graham, BFF of Vlad Putin, is still causing mischief:

"(RNS) Officials at Duke University abruptly dropped plans to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer from the iconic bell tower of Duke Chapel after online protests led by evangelist Franklin Graham and unspecified security threats." http://www.religionnews.com/2015/01/16/duke-cancels-muslims-friday-call-prayer-f...

"DURHAM, N.C. (RNS) In the end, the Muslim call to prayer was broadcast from a small black speaker perched on the steps of the Duke Chapel Friday (Jan. 16), as hundreds of students, some Muslim but mostly non-Muslim, gathered in solidarity for the right of all students to pray publicly...
While Duke officials denied it, some suspected the real cause for the cancellation was the loud and forceful criticism voiced by the Rev. Franklin Graham, of Boone, N.C., who called on Duke alumni to withhold donations until the call to prayer was suspended. On Friday, Graham called the change “the right decision.”

Graham, who leads his father’s Billy Graham Evangelistic Association from the other end of the state, in Charlotte, said the call to prayer was the very one shouted by Islamist militants during last week’s deadly terrorist attacks across Paris.

“As Christianity is being excluded from the public square and followers of Islam are raping, butchering, and beheading Christians, Jews, and anyone who doesn’t submit to their Sharia Islamic law, Duke is promoting this in the name of religious pluralism,” he said on his Facebook page." http://www.religionnews.com/2015/01/16/hundreds-duke-students-rally-muslims-frid...

> 56, 57

I was referring only to posters here at LT forums.

I am well aware of both Graham crackers, demonic father and satanic spawn son, just as I am thoroughly familiar with all the more popular right-wing theo-lunatics of the last five decades. E.g., back in the '50s, probably before either of you were born, I was listening to Carl McIntire's radio rants and reading literature produced by the likes of Gerald L.K. Smith, Billy James Hargis, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell and, of course, Billy Graham. Also I got a good dose of Klan literature and the Thunderbolt magazine by J.B. Stoner, but those were somewhat more racist with the fundie religion more so an afterthought. I was too young for Father Coughlin, though I'm sure my mother would never have let me listen to a goddam catholic priest. Lol.

Billy Graham was, and still is, a piece of work as bad as his son. We have him on recently released Nixon White House tapes ranting about the Jews with his buddy Dick. Billy made a career of ranting about only those with the same view of Jesus and god and the bible and christianity in general would make it to heaven upon death and that everyone else (apparently 99 per cent of humans) were destined to burn in a literal hell for eternity.

Of course, in our new world order of nutbag religionists, the teabaggers and fundie/literal christian types claim to love Jews now, as they are an important part of the end times scenario and Jesus apparently wants them treated nicely now in a rather ahistorical way, as most of them are expected to convert at the last trump.

BTW, on the specific issue of the muslim call to prayer from the Duke chapel - I looked it up and Duke is a private institution. Sure, they would jeopardize any governmental funds they may receive if they discriminate amongst religions, but if they are free from such funding then I guess they are free to do what they want - i.e., do that for which their donors, alumni, teachers, and students lobby - e.g., like the late J. Falwell's Liberty University in Virginia.

I was referring only to posters here at LT forums.

But why should John be limited to only talking about what the posters here are saying. Lola's latest rants seem to be mostly about what is being said elsewhere in the cyberverse.

> 59

Because those here on LT forums are arguing each individual's opinion against the others that are expressed here, not all the opinions in the whole wide world. I don't see how we can rationally drag everyone on earth into the argument.

The point is no one HERE on LT forums regarding religion has argued that all muslims are murders. In any case I don't recall any. Do you? If so give us a reference. If not then please refrain from attempting to just score debating points and leave the rest of us to attempt a rational discussion of the issues.

>59 jjwilson61:

What "rants" are you referring to? And why are you discussing me in the first place?

Surely we, or all moral, decent, right-thinking people, can agree on five things -- or at least on four:

(1) "Actually existing" Islam, Islam as it is actually practiced around the world today, is a kind, enlightened, modern, tolerant religion. Members of other religions living in Islamic-majority countries are completely free to practice their religion, and have absolutely no reason to fear persecution. In those countries where Muslims are a majority, and where their actions and public opinions are not subject to the sanctions and pressures of a non-Muslim majority and non-Muslim laws, adherents of other faiths practice their religion without constraints and in complete freedom, with no fear of violence.

(2) The huge, overwhelming majority of Muslims are totally committed to toleration, believe in free speech, and completely and totally reject any idea of attempting to suppress criticism of their religion either legally or extra-legally. When incidents that might be interpreted by the (biased, racist, capitalist) media as attempts at suppression occur, they are only the acts of a tiny, tiny totally unrepresentative minority, probably controlled by Mossad, and are completely and totally and harshly condemned by 99.99 % of all Musllims everywhere, including, especially, their religious leaders.

(3) A young Muslim who becomes deeply interested in his religion, and turns to the Koran for guidance, (remembering that it is the literal infallible word of God) will not find there one shred of justification for treating members of other religions with anything but total kindness and respect. "There is no compulsion in religion." It's a book of Peace, for a Religion of Peace.

(4) The REAL problem is not the very, very rare isolated unfortunate incidents occuring in Europe and in the Middle East, and in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, highly exaggerated by a vicious rightwing press, probably not even done by Muslims, but ... ISLAMOPHOBIA! There is where we must focus our concern and our attention.

The fifth thing, I'm not so sure we can get agreement on, but I'll put it up for discussion anyway:

(5) As mankind learns how the universe really works, and loses its belief in gods, spirits, demons, djinns, angels etc.... one aspect of religious belief lingers on: the willingness to believe factually-absurd things, and to equate profession of belief in these absurd thngs, contrary to all evidence, with morality.

> 62

Are you being facetious - about the first four points? If not then take off those rose-tinted glasses before you go completely blind to reality.

The answer is "no" to the first four asseverations and "yes" to the fifth.

I've become severely tired now of the "debate" and will merely refer you to timspalding and his handy bar graph.

Well, Doug is back! (Hi, missed arguing with you.)

LT geezers know the man. JGL, meet your spiritual grand-dad (or something).

The ideological trajectories are different but the conversation could get livelier.

Well, Krolik, if it were just thee and me and kindred souls of the Left and Right, crossing swords, it would be fun and probably educational for all of us.

But there seems to be a Gresham's Law of Personality Types which begins operating on these forums, and they turn into therapy for certain poor souls ... their harmless equivalent of doing a Charlie Hebdo on their perceived enemies ...

But if we could have a grown-up argument, I think the only thing really worth a serious discussion are these sorts of questions:

Can Islam evolve the way its Jewish and Christian cousins have evolved, into a modern religion which will serve as a cultural and emotional security-blanket for its adherents without being taken really seriously no crushing of the infidels and heretics, as the species moves slowly into a rational worldview, or not?

What can we do to help this happen?

Is mass immigration of Muslims into more advanced and civilized cultures at this time a good thing, or not? (At one point, we all believed that they would just assimilate to the indigenous culture, as many have ... but clearly we were over-optimistic about the extent and speed of this. It's particularly worrying that it's not the older Muslims who are rushing off to behead people, but young ones who have been born in their host countries. What went wrong?)

We know that most Muslim countries are inhabited by people whose ancestors sustained a high level of civilization at one time, ahead of the Europeans in fact ... what happened to keep them from advancing? Why no successors to Ibn Khaldun?

We know that some Muslim countries are relatively (emphasis on 'relatively') tolerant ... what causes the rest to behave like savages? (The Muslims in the former Yugoslavia seem to have been the only non-savages there, for example. Was it only because they were a minority and didn't have the opportunity for committing nationalist/tribal genocide that the Serbs and Croats had?)

It would be interesting to have a serious discussion of these issues here, but I wouldn't bet that it will happen.

RE Muslims in Bosnia. When the Austro-Hungs invaded, it was the Serbian nationalists who famously 'exploded'. Perhaps this is because the Bosnians closest ally was their former overlords, the Ottomans, while the Serbs were groping for a boundaryless mythical past space.

Islam likely had nothing to do with it.

I think Doug was referring to the recent Yugoslavian ugliness, not WWI.

Yes, I guess so, but if the point is Islam, my view is that it has nothing to do with it. An account of Bosnian fighting in the 1990s would find groups of shanghaiying (try figuring that one out) madmen of more than two faiths going door to door to find men to turn into fighter and then fighters whose atrocities could not match those of the more populous and better armed enemies (including Croats, who, in the south, Hercegovina, tend to hate their Muslim brothers).
In between, there was WWII, which, when I read about it, seems to devolve into a dark comedy in the Balkans as group slaughtered group to a stalemate at which point they all turned on the Muslims (this being early on).

Currently, the Bosnians in Slovenia are victims of nothing more than shabby and false remarks behind their backs. Unfortunately this is largely because so many Albanians are here and are near universally despised (is seems sometimes).

Well, here's the big challenge facing the species this century: we started out as a small band in Africa about a hundred millennia ago. Some of us moved out, and over time, genetic and cultural drift created hundreds of tribes, looking different (and perhaps even subject to somewhat different complexes of biologically-rooted behavior patterns and cognitive capacities), with different languages and cultures and organized superstitions.

These tribes did a lot of waging war against each other, with the more successful building empires on the backs of the less successful, and slowly moving up the scale of civilization as we learned how to master nature.

Then, a few hundred years, the tribes on that little peninsula of Asia we call 'Europe' developed a way of running their societies and making a living which proved remarkably successful, and enabled them to dominate most of the world. This way of running their societies also seemed to build in, and accelerate, economic and social progress.

The dominated ones began to catch up, and a few decades ago, broke free from direct domination.

But ... the upward path, even during the modern period, has proved very slow, jerky, uneven and prone to serious backward slips, as witness the natural leaders of Europe, the Germans, who fell off the path in 1933.

It would be nice if, when the different tribes began to share the same geography, they shed their tribal loyalties in a generation or two and intermarried and all became of one modern culture, as has happened with the fragments of the European tribes who settled in the newly-conquered continents of the Americas and Australia, Irishmen marrying Italians and marrying Jews and so on.

It would also be nice if the lessons of the 20th Century, especially 1914, were learned by the rising powers -- how it's better not to make our interactions a zero-sum game, and so on. (Hey, China and Japan: turn those ridiculous islands over to UNESCO or something. Make iPhones, not war!)

We all want the world to move forward.

But this doesn't seem to be happening, at least not at the pace that some of us thought it would. And this should be cause for anxiety among those who wish our species, wicked as it is, well.

I hope we can, despite all the carnage, still say, And yet ... it moves.

Are most victims of terrorism Muslim? (BBC)

The answer appears to be a resounding "Yes", with the comment that, "Most terrorist attacks are rooted in geopolitics... Religion is certainly a part of them, but it is not the only part."

Religion IS part of 'geopolitics'.

I would argue that all of the numerous 'religious' conflicts of the past and present, one sect butchering another, were not 'caused' by writings in ancient books, but were rooted in 'politics' ... the struggle for power by various factions in society. When 'God' commanded the Israelites to practice genocide on the people whose land they were seizing, this was just an after-the-fact rationalization for good old-fashioned murder and rape.

It's unfortunate that the ancient writings of Islam have more than their share of 'subjugate the infidels' passages in them, compared to other superstitions, but the Christians -- whose authoritative text is practically a command to pacifism -- have shown us you don't need God's word to behave with total frightfulness. And for several hundred years, the Muslims were better than the Christians, when it came to how they treated religious minorities. (See the letter from Abelard to Héloïse complaining about persecution from the Church authorities, and saying that if this kept up, he was going to cross over to the Muslim world where he could pay the jizya and have intellectual freedom.)

Fortunately, they've got over that, pretty much -- where they still murder their rivals, it's usually other varieties of Christian (Protestants and Catholics in N. Ireland, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats in Yugoslavia), and it's really just rival tribes, with nothing to do with transubstantiation or whatever.

So the question we've got to deal with is: when and how will the Muslims get over it and join the modern world, and what should we be doing to encourage this? (Yes, many of them have, but no one who looks objectively at Muslim-majority countries will think that this is the great majority.)

>71 Doug1943:

'So the question we've got to deal with is: when and how will the Muslims get over it and join the modern world, and what should we be doing to encourage this? (Yes, many of them have, but no one who looks objectively at Muslim-majority countries will think that this is the great majority.)'

A good start would be to cleanse yourself of structural condescension, and factor into your simplistic narrative the effects of great power manipulations on the countrise you include. I would also suggest taking a look at countries you do not include, one in particular that does not exist--Kurdistan--and others such as Burma, DRC, Thailand, Venezuela, Bolivia, Mexico...

> 72

No, Rick, Doug has a point. When large pluralities or overwhelming majorities of muslims in a dozen and a half majority muslim countries endorse gross violence, including murder, as acceptable retaliation against verbal or pictorial "insults" against their prophet, god and/or religion, then we all have a problem - a specific problem - with islam - in TODAY'S WORLD. Not with christianity. Not with buddhism. Not with hinduism. Not even Zionism. With islam - SPECIFICALLY.

And that is the problem. And you can't wish it away or talk it away or bury it under your fancy-smancy phraseology, e.g., "structural condescension".

> 70

(Good old "never say die" jtf.)

If most of the victims of muslim terrorism (i.e., murder) are fellow muslims then why the hell do we not see an all-out effort by this vast innocent mild-manner moderate majority to crush this tiny portion of muslim murderers who have allegedly utterly misinterpreted the religion of islam? Huh?

(Ready with a shitload of ad hoc apology? Well, knock yourself out. Spin us all around the merry-go-round one more fucking time.)

Rick: I apologize for the long reply. Feel free to retaliate.

(1) What is 'structural condescension'? (I know what 'condescension' is, and of course people who are lucky enough to have been born in advanced countries -- a sheer accident -- are subject to the temptation to be condescending towards those unlucky enough to have been born in the more backward. The best way to expiate this sin is to try to help them overcome their backwardness. 'Structural' condescension, though ... what is that?)

Of course, the backward countries today are simply images of what the advanced countries were once like during earlier historical periods. Why some peoples advance and others do not, why some nations build spaceships while others can only build mud huts, is an interesting question. I think it's due to the accidents of varying material circumstances, and certainly not some 'essentialist' virtue on the part of the advanced, or Original Sin on the part of the backward, but it's a complex issue. And it's probably not necessary to resolve it, in order to help everyone move forward.

(2) Of course, the 'Great Powers' (and the Middle Powers, and the Little-Bitty Ones too, where they can) often try to influence events in other countries, always with their own self-interests in mind. Thus the Pakistanis play a malevolent role in Afghanistan, the insane American drug laws help keep Mexico a horrible place, etc. And we can recite plenty of episodes where Uncle Sam has blood on his hands: the American intervention against Mossadegh, against Arbenz, against Allende, in Indonesia, etc etc etc etc. (Often the situation was more complex than the usual finger-wagging Lefty narrative admits -- for instance, Allende would have been overthrown no matter what the Americans did -- but we can agree on the main factual points of these narratives with respect to the American role.)

But ... sometimes the role of 'Great Powers' has positive aspects (not because they want this, though -- as a good first approximation, it's safe to assume that all serious social formations, including states, are motivated by self-interest).

This explains Marx's attitude to the British in India: yes, they were blood-soaked hypocrites, merciless in their putting down of the Sepoy rebellion. But Marx saw that their role in destroying backward Indian society, forcibly dragging it into the modern world, as a positive one. And he was right, whether or not he over-estimated the extent to which foreign imperialism would serve as the pioneer of capitalism in the countries it subjugated, and whether or not India, without the British intervention, would have moved forward on its own.

(Interesting reading for both Lefties and Righties, if you can get hold of it: Bill Warren's IMPERIALISM, THE PIONEER OF CAPITALISM (now somewhat dated). Righties won't like the fact that Warren was a Marxist, Lefties will be startled by the fact that he just doesn't just jump up and down and shriek about the horrible imperialists.)

Now to your final point: looking at other countries.

I think your point here is this: the not-quite-a-country of Kurdistan is Muslim, but relatively free of the particular features that mark Islamic backwardness. This is certainly true (although of course the two main Kurdish parties are, neither of them, really committed to liberal democracy and the rule of law, so the Kurds have a ways to go yet).

Let's hope this Kurdish exceptionalism continues, although we should also notice that a Muslim county or quasi-country can appear, on the surface, to be relatively free of Islamic influence, and then go backwards: the Palestinians were once the most secular of the Arabs, but now have slipped deep into the Islamist mire (the role of the Zionists in deliberately, or otherwise, facilitating this, is another topic). If you look at photos of the graduating classes of Cairo University in the 1950s, almost no women are wearing headscarves -- not so today. Turkey is another cause for worry. So we have to be dialectical here: things change, and not always for the better, in the short term.

And, yes, there are plenty of non-Muslim backward countries, and you've named some. It's a broad generalization, but I think these countries -- well, maybe not the DRC -- are, slowly and painfully, making their way into the modern world. At any rate, their elites are not officially opposed on life-or-death theological grounds to the emancipation of women and democratic accountability.

As their educated middle classes grow, the demand for the range of Good Things that modernity is associated with will also grow. (Interestingly, I think this is also true in the Iranian theocracy, where the role of Shia Islam has been somewhat different from the role that Sunni Islam is now playing. I'm thinking about things like the education of women, the (limited) rule of law, etc. Put it another way: Shiran Ebadi is the wave of the future there. Or so I hope. The only question is whether this will happen relatively peaceably or not.)

Yes, in fact, as opposed to official theory, we can find a lot wrong with each of these countries. Most of them have got a long way to go even to get to the far-from-perfect state that, say, Denmark occupies. They have powerful domestic elites whose power would be challenged by democratic accountability and who therefore resist even the very weak, formal accountability of the sort of elections and free press we in the West enjoy. But we eventually solved this problem in Europe via civil wars or the threat of them, and the elites who were smart enough to yield to the inevitable ended up keep their heads and most of their property.

In others -- Bolivia among your examples springs to mind -- the main problem is, in my opinion, the internal culture, often expressed in laws, which prevents capitalism from really getting into operation there. (A good book on this particularly Latin American problem is THE OTHER PATH by the Peruvian Hernando de Soto -- you can read about it and him, along with criticisms from various directions, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_Polar )

To sum up: I think people of good will from both Left and Right can agree that it's a good thing that everyone should be able to read, that everyone should be able to write a book without fear of being imprisoned or murdered, that women should not be discriminated against in the legal system, that everyone should have access to modern medicine and all of the other technical developments which have prolonged, and eased, and made more interesting, our lives. We no doubt differ on how to get there, and on what role the advanced countries have played in causing, or alleviating, or both, backwardness.

But surely we can all agree that economic and social backwardness are bad things and we should be committed to combating them.

>74 Doug1943: I love the irony of that first section. Well done!

Hmm.... well, I wasn't really trying to be ironic. I don't want to insult Rick, even subtly, but to have a serious discussion with him (and with others). It's the most important question in the world, at the moment, next to avoiding a big war among the major powers. And it's one where Pro's and Con's might find some common ground.

>76 Doug1943: Well, if you're intent is for a serious discussion, starting it out with sarcasm in your first post was a mistake. People rarely react positively when sarcasm is employed against them.

>74 Doug1943: Thanks. That post is worth thinking about.

And here's Yemen...

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/22/6827383/the-crisis-in-yemen-explained

I remember when this all blew up a few years ago and the compromise meetings that were supposed to find a workable consensus, but I had no idea that things had gone so badly.

JJWilson: True, and they also rarely react positively when accused of condescension, even of the mysterious 'structural' sort. But here we're all able to parry a mild annoyance with a mildly ironic retort, and get down to arguing about serious things. Or so I hope.

Ridgeway girl: I know nothing about Yemen, except that I wouldn't want to go salmon fishing there, but I suspect that the real problem in that country is the usual horrible intractable one of tribal differences, where, as in most such conflicts, all sides are squalid. A quick glance at the Wiki page on the place confirms this.

Now in the long term, what one could hope to see is that economic development (otherwise known as brutal capitalism) will turn tribesmen into factory workers and bookkeepers and schoolteachers, that the kids will start playing games on the internet, that the teenagers will start watching racy movies and wishing that they could be like the European and Oriental and Indian kids ... in short, that the place will be dragged by the pitiless multinational corporations looking for cheap labor and resources to exploit with it, kicking and screaming into the 20th Century, tribal differences will be homogenized as the tribesmen are ground up by capitalism into a more or less homogeneous exploited proletariat....

I say "hope" because I have a feeling that this process, or its equivalent, although it will happen, is going to take a lot longer than it might have looked like a couple of decades ago. It didn't happen in Northern Ireland and it didn't happen in Tito's socialist Yugoslavia (where they really really tried to get past this stuff), so we have no reason to be short-term optimists re. the Yemen.

>Doug, JJ, friends, neighbors, apes, if there be difference: Let's remind ourselves that this is mere posting from the hip.

I'll take your sarcasm and call your condescension as I see it. What I meant by structural condescension was that it was inherent to your schematic, not an accusation of personal condescension.

Doug, It was nice of you to apologize for writing at such length, though of course then I felt it would be impolite of me not to read it.
My essential response on a night when I am tired is: perhaps you make to much of where the advanced have gone. I think Gandhi's view of a proper Indian economy was the better way: a nation of self-sustaining villages, for the most part.
And you know that India under various governance was a vibrant trading and production center that was decimated by the British. Indians were trading with Africa and Arabia for a millenium and more before Vasco da Gama onslaughtered his way into history.

>81 RickHarsch:

While Britain certainly devastated and exploited India economically. Vasco da Gama was Portuguese.

I suspect Gandhi's grasp of economics was no better than mine.

I wish that some British attempts to change Indian culture had been more successful. There are still occasional cases of sutee.

Rick. I appreciate the difficulty of posting from the hip.

But your message re. 'where the advanced have gone' is the kind of discussion we ought to have.

Yes, I think it's just an historical accident that Europe 'got there first'. Why it did so, I don't know.

Certainly other cultures have been in advance of 'Western' cultures at one time or another. (Had I been around in 600 BC, my money for the people who would pioneer the next stage of civilization would have been on the Persians, not the quarrelsome little tribes of Helenes scattered along the edge of the Med and Black Sea. And yet ... these little tribes had fire from heaven descend on them, and they sat down and invented Western (and, really, much of world) civilization, where the Persians went to sleep. Why? Beats hell out of me, all I know is that we cannot have an educated conversation about ... mathematics or philosophy or biology or democracy or anarchy or any number of important topics, without speaking Greek.

But, for whatever reason, the Europeans managed to come up with a 'killer app': the rule of law, science, individualism, democratic accountability, a lightly-regulated free market... Of course, not without spilling tons of each other's and others' blood. (And, yes, I'm quite willing to believe that British imperialism snuffed out a growing Indian economy (which would NOT, by the way, have been one of self-sustaining little villages)... I don't know enough about this to have an opinion, but it seems a plausible hypotheses.

And of course many 'European' intellectual and technical advances were in fact first discovered elsewhere. There are plenty of smart people all over the planet. But it was the Europeans who somehow came up with a system that allowed these to be knit together and incorporated into a system, one that is, thank goodness, conquering the world. There's nothing inherently 'European' about this system, anymore than the Pythagorean Theorem is inherently Greek. Probably the next stage of humanity's advance will see the peoples of the East in the lead.

'Self-sustaining villages' sounds nice. I grew up in the American South, where there was a lot of nostalgia for a supposed rural Arcadia, lost to Yankee economic expansion, urbanization, etc. But the people in little villages don't invent the internet, discover the vaccine for polio, put spaceships on the moon, work out how to create agricultural abundance. Nor do they develop the ideology of equal rights for women, dalits, etc.

It wasn't from the culture of isolated little villages that the leadership of the Indian independence movement came, but from the urban, British educated intelligentsia. (Gandhi was a London-educated lawyer, from a well-off merchant family.)

If you want your average longevity to head north of 70, your children to learn to read and write, your farmers to grow so much food that food gluts become a problem where once famine was, etc etc etc ... then you imitate -- and, why not, improve upon! -- the Europeans, who somehow stumbled upon the way to make the benefits of civilization available to the masses, not just the governing elites.

I think that's a good thing, and I'll bet you do too.

> Simon, please. The point about what the Brits did was already made. I added that their economy was old and flourishing. The reference to da Gama ought not require explanation. Maybe most people don't automatically think of the decline of Venice, but they ought to think of his paving the way for the Brits. Most people also have no idea of the carnage he and his people visited upon the Indians (many Muslim, many Hindu) on his second trip.

Doug...tomorrow...

Rick: okay. I don't expect instant 5000 word replies to my x000 word postings. (Or any reply at all, actually. But I appreciate them when they happen.)

And note that we agree that expansionism and foreign conquest, whether Western or Roman or Ottoman or Incan or Mughal or Chinese or Japanese or Tsarist or Tartar or etc etc etc etc, is always a nasty and bloody business, never really motivated by a desire to do good to the conquered, often attended by lethal, even genocidal effects on the losers. (It's also universally human, sadly. We're not bovines.)

>83 Doug1943:

There's nothing inherently 'European' about this system, anymore than the Pythagorean Theorem is inherently Greek.

A small but important quibble:

The 3:4:5 ratio of the sides of right triangle is not inherently Greek, but the Pythagorean theorem itself is precisely quintessentially Greek.

Hmmm... please explain further.

Do you mean that although Pythagorean triples were known to earlier peoples, it was the Greeks who formalized the idea of proof? If so, no quarrel there, although I don't know about 'quintessentially Greek'. (To be honest, I have always wondered why it was that the Greeks invented so many of the ideas of civilization. What was special about them, or about them at that point in time?)

But surely the abstract proposition -- which would have been discovered at some point, by someone, had the Greeks never existed -- is not 'inherently' associated with any particular tribe.

I've no patience for taking on systematically outright bullshit and idiotically vapid generalizations of an avowed racist. His formless twaddle is nearly impossible to address, while it's very comfy to produce in unlimited amounts. Surf the headlines of five rightwing sites and you'll get this "capitalism cures everything! Imperialism and colonialism were GREAT for the colonised! West is best!" garbage in spades.

India: far be it from me to tackle--to imagine I can tackle--the history of the subcontinent with fluxing thousands of states and languages, even if we concentrated on the relatively few centuries of British rule and aftermath.

But to sheer twaddle I can confront at least some points for consideration.

Let's look at the capitalist "miracle" in India.

Amartya Sen has written several books and untold articles that throw a different light on India's 20th century "success" story.

Amartya Sen: India's dirty fighter

His new book, An Uncertain Glory, co-written with his long-time colleague Jean Drèze, is a quietly excoriating critique of India's boom.

It's the 50% figure which – shockingly – keeps recurring. Fifty per cent of children are stunted, the vast majority due to undernourishment. Fifty per cent of women have anaemia for the same reason. In one survey, there was no evidence of any teaching activity in 50% of schools in seven big northern states, which explains terrible academic underachievement.

Despite considerable economic growth and increasing self-confidence as a major global player, modern India is a disaster zone in which millions of lives are wrecked by hunger and by pitiable investment in health and education services. Pockets of California amid sub-Saharan Africa, sum up Sen and Drèze.

Of course, "pockets of California amid sub-Saharan Africa" isn't a bad metaphor for how neoliberals picture an ideal social arrangement on any scale, country to planet-wide. They'll always have "Californias"; the have-nots "sub-Saharan Africa". YOU CAN'T HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER.

Comparisons of India and China are everywhere.

How the Asian superpowers compare on various measures of development

A child's odds of surviving past their fifth birthday are as bad in India today as they were in China in the 1970s.

That longevity, that "heads north" when you adopt capitalist consumerist faith? In China, it is 75 years; in India, 66. Funny thing is, India has been on the right-thinking capitalist path much longer than China--and yet the last time China's longevity rate was as low as India's was... thirty-six years ago.

Another funny thing is, remember when Russians went capitalist twenty-five years ago? Life expectancy, health indicators (to say nothing of employment) all went, not "north", but decidedly "south"--and stayed that way. Russian men die on average ten years younger than they did in the USSR, and combined with decline in fertility, the total population has fallen under the 1980 levels.

Then there's the moral argument. Probably quaint a theme to bring up among such hard-nosed thinkers (who quote Marx in their support no less), but if we are to wave away the untold misery Britain brought India, because of some putative "profit" centuries later, what exactly prevents us from giving the same credit to Mao? After all, China was no less a "despotic" and "backward" place, largely agrarian, largely illiterate. Mao changed all that--directed China "northward".

Ironically, if China is succeeding so well today, playing at capitalism, if it's succeeding at it BETTER than India--a democracy and USA's dear baby--it's due to the social infrastructure put in place by the communists; and political as well, down to the control exerted over the market.

So why the hell should more credit go to East India Company than to Mao? Human sacrifices, loss of millennial ways of life, sustainable industry and culture, to say nothing of material loss in sheer daylight robbery, are nothing when placed in the right perspective. But it's gotta be RIGHT, no?

And if capitalism is the cure-all, how come one of the top Indian states (and in some years THE top) is Kerala, which for decades had elected Communist government, and is generally one of the "leftiest" places on the planet?

In sum, it's hilarious. We get India trotted out as a shining example of a country that profited through imperialist-colonialist centenary torture and imposition of capitalism, only to discover that as a whole, the country's doing not so hot in comparison to the last "red" giant, and that, moreover, within the country the state with decidedly least sympathy for capitalism is the highest developed, with highest literacy and life expectancy rates, media access and exposure, female employment, least crime etc.

Bring me another "capitalist" success story. This bullshit won't wash. In fact, it's getting worse:

For whom the Berlin Wall fell?

Branko Milanovic is a colleague and co-author on several articles with Thomas Piketty (never a Marxist, Piketty!), analysing the growing income gap and ensuing crises in capitalist systems.

Anyone here been unemployed for years? Anyone here been laid off in a mass layoff, counting tens of thousands of people? Well, you know what to do: BE MORE CAPITALIST! GO AND CONQUER A FOREIGN LAND! Don't be bovine, raping and pillaging is only human.

Oh dear.

The comprehensive failure of socialism ... surviving only in little pockets like North Korea ... has claimed another victim.

>89 Doug1943:

That's beautiful. Short--so short--but SO ELOQUENT!

Meanwhile, on topic, a Twitter hashtag:

#JewsAndArabsRefusetoBeEnemies

FWIW India's appalling heath has more to do with the lack of sanitation than lack of food. It is this that leads to malnourishment.

>87 Doug1943: Other cultures and civilizations — the Egyptians, for example — knew how to make builder's squares and surveying instruments using lengths of 3, 4, and 5 units (or 5, 12, and 13). In the West, at least, it was the Greeks who figured out how to abstract this to a general rule that applies to all plane right triangles.

Your comment that someone else would have done it if the Greeks hadn't is just weird in the context

>88 LolaWalser: Not often I agree with Lola, but here I broadly agree. Thanks, Lola.

Doug, with all due respect I think you're making rather shallow arguments (or even rather simplistic, as >72 RickHarsch: calls it) which sit well with a right wing narrative but have little substance in reality.

John: That's a hard criticism to rebut. What would be an example of a 'deep' argument? I'm afraid I'm not going to start having hysterics and flinging cursewords around, cruelly amusing as that is to read when others do it.

Lola: Be patient. More to come.

Librorumamans: I think I don't understand your argument. If Homer (or the Homer-collective) had not composed The Iliad, no one else, certainly no other culture, would have composed it.

But the laws of nature -- or the laws of meta-nature or whatever we call the laws of mathematics -- are 'out there', to be discovered. The Greeks just got there first, with respect to a lot of these laws. (Okay, I know that I'm taking a position on the nature of mathematics which is contested.) Why they got there first is an interesting question -- I don't have a clue. Something about material conditions, I suppose, but more than that I cannot say. Why do any peoples have 'Golden Ages'? Beats me.

Are you actually arguing that, had the Greeks not existed, the human race would never have discovered (or 'invented' for those of the other persuasion) the Pythagorean Theorem?

>95 Doug1943: Thanks, Doug, and I'm not sure whether I put my thoughts into words well. I think what I'm trying to say is that what you are presenting is a particular interpretation of facts/history (ie a narrative), but I think some of your recent posts have tried to define the conversation purely in terms of your narrative and suggested that other narratives are not helpful to the conversation, if that makes sense.

Eg >62 Doug1943:, Surely we, or all moral, decent, right-thinking people, can agree on five things

I know there is sarcasm there, but clearly we don't all agree, not just with the sarcastic words themselves but with the intent behind them.

Or >65 Doug1943: But if we could have a grown-up argument, I think the only thing really worth a serious discussion are these sorts of questions

Well, clearly many people think that there are other sorts of questions which need to be addressed as part of a serious grown-up discussion. These would include viewing history through other lenses, I would think.

In her own way, LolaWalser summed up much of what I believe.

I will speak only of India for now. First, I am tired of being told what everyone here ought to know--for example, that Gandhi was educated as a lawyer in England. Certainly the Congress Party was filled with elites. How as anyone else to get educated?

Simon, those filthy Indians who create their own misery were put on the US list of pariah economies in 1990 because their insurance industry catered to a socialized medicine society. The US simply would not have it. At that time, all Indians had health care. Of course, there were too many problems left from British rapine for India to become a healthy society, but a humane system that still eludes the US WAS in place. A doctor friend, and Indian woman who practices in the Dallas area at this point, has told me that since I was last in India, a few years ago, many changes have taken place in the pharmaceutical arena, all of which in one way or another hurt the poor. For example, I can no longer go down to the corner and buy generic clonazepam--I need to go to a doctor and get a prescription for a name brand. I hope I don't need to elaborate. This is at the insistence of the Western medical community, which is, as we all know, directly influenced by giant pharmaceutical companies.

For anyone who cares to study the issue, Nehru was his entire time in office under enormous pressure from, especially, the United States, and he was unable to walk a fine line that would deliver the world an industrialized, wealthy, and egalitarian India. Of course, problems not attributable to external pressure were also there, but the question needs to be asked: why can't the US, that creative miracle of modernity, find ways to trade with countries on terms that take into account the nature and desires of those countries. (For a moment, I leave India: was it really necessary to treat Cuba as a rebel colony when they said enough of 80% of our wealth goes to the US?)

For the record, reading #88 I see no reason to consider the author a socialist. She makes a good comparitive argument using Mao to good effect, but otherwise I would surmise that she is an egalitarianist. I can speak for myself, though, and admit that, yes, capitalism has knocked the shit out of attempted socialisms, but I am myself socialist because of my belief that inequality, particularly economic is the root of bloody conflict, and that the primacy of capitalism degrades the human species.

Anyone here out of work? I taught and worked on EU projects 7 years at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Maritime and Transport. I was allowed to leave at the end of my final contract because the English department was cut from 4.5 positions to 1.5. I worked at the attached high school for three years and was again allowed to leave at the end of my contract after three years, when austerity economics determined that classes should grow and teachers evacuate the premises in whatever numbers possible. I am surrounded by people in similar straits. Yesterday one of my finest colleagues from the high school called to tell me he had been fired two months ago. Now I work half time for a social organization, a youth center, teaching English, sports, nature...I am still publishing novels in Slovene (two in February come out together) but one does not make money publishing in translation only. We, my family, live on as close to 1,000 a month as we can come (last year we probably averaged close to 800 per month), which is buttressed by state aid for children under 18, about 200 euros. Our rent is 450 plus expenses, so averages nearly 600. This year my be better, but we will not know until the municipality passes a budget--currently they are broke, so cannot. Meantime, I am again unemployed and receive unemployment compensation at 80% of last year's pay. Every day I have dealings with people in worse circumstances.

John: Point taken. Probably I should have started a new thread. Just ignore anything I say if you think it's not relevant.

But .... I personally think that it's more interesting to have serious arguments than to trade cheap insults. (Expensive, subtle insults from time to time, yes.)

And it's actually, at this point in history, really important for us to try to get a deep understanding of the world and where it's going, and how we can influence it to go in a good direction. This must involve people from different points on the political compass arguing with each other.

I know this sounds very Goody Two-Shoes but we might actually learn things from each other. No one knows everything, and each of us is necessarily limited in the experiences we have, and influenced by our particular geographic and social location.

At various points in the past, we have had some pretty sharp cookies posting on this site, often from sharply differing political viewpoints. I always enjoyed reading those posts and think I learned something from them. I believe this was the intent of the (progressive) fellow who started this Group, and it's an admirable one.

>97 RickHarsch: an egalitarianist... I am myself socialist because of my belief that inequality, particularly economic is the root of bloody conflict, and that the primacy of capitalism degrades the human species.

Well said.

>98 Doug1943: we might actually learn things from each other

And there I agree with you. Even if I disagree with your narrative, let me not dismiss it out of hand but rather engage with it. And vice versa. But when one looks more broadly and deeply into the situation, eg some of the information cited by others, your narrative does not seem to me to be the most plausible and seems to be based on selective facts rather than the bigger picture.

>97 RickHarsch: Simon, those filthy Indians who create their own misery were put on the US list of pariah economies in 1990 because their insurance industry catered to a socialized medicine society.

And so was all of Europe. And what does it actually mean to be on a list of pariah economies? Do you have anything to back this up?

>100 jjwilson61: Yeah, buster, my enormous muscles. Or, go to a fucking library and check, if you don't believe me. Or, I was in India at the time and published an article in the La Crosse Tribune that I sent from there about the issue. Go to La Crosse and check the late Spring issues on microfilm. Or, spend some time on Google and find this article: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2209&dat=19900331&id=6YVKAAAAIBAJ&..., which does not tell the story in details, for at the time it happened India was the one country on the hit list.

>95 Doug1943: I said ( in >93 librorumamans: ) that your comment was weird because:

You spent >83 Doug1943: setting out an account of human development that in places read to me like solipsistic European triumphalism and included

all I know is that we cannot have an educated conversation about ... mathematics or philosophy or biology or democracy or anarchy or any number of important topics, without speaking Greek.

In >87 Doug1943: you then shrug off the elucidation of the Pythagorean theorem (which is really being used as a token for all of Euclid as well as Archimedes, Apollonius, and others) as something that some other culture would eventually have come up with at some time.

This is, of course, a completely untestable notion and some kind of speculative alternate history.

Put together, ## 83 and 87 strike me as weirdly non-sequitur and contradictory.

>97 RickHarsch: Shrug, Open defecation and the resulting disease is the major cause of malnutrition and stunted growth in India. It is basicly a problem of lack of infrastructure, compounded with sexism. "filthy Indians" have no choice.

Rick: the Greeks GOT THERE FIRST. All honor to them. But there was a 'there' to get to. They didn't 'invent' the 'there'.

Formalizing mathematics by developing the idea of proof, trying to generalize about natural history, systematically elaborating the forms of government .... this is what the human animal does, eventually, given the right circumstances. There are examples from half a dozen other cultures of the beginnings of serious intellectual development, some of them a thousand years before the Greeks. But at that time, this sort of development was very slow and uneven and unsystematic ... it didn't really 'take root' in a permanent way for another two thousand years, where -- as I see it, anyway -- it got entwined with an economic/social system which was congenial to the systematic study of the natural world.

So ... are you literally claiming that had the Greeks not existed ... say, had the Persians overrun them and dispersed them as slaves throughout their empire, or had a plague wiped them all out ... that today, the Pythagorean Theorem would be undiscovered? If that's not what you're claiming, please elaborate on what you are claiming. I'm obviously missing something here, because I can't believe that you think that, literally, no Greeks, no modern mathematics.

>101 RickHarsch: If you make a claim and you want anyone to believe you then don't expect them to google the proof. From that article, the trade dispute with India was over "restrictions ... imposed on foreign investment and the closure of its insurance market to foreign investors."

You said "...those filthy Indians who create their own misery were put on the US list of pariah economies in 1990 because their insurance industry catered to a socialized medicine society." I'm trying to connect the dots here and I'm just not getting there. The article mentions that India's insurance market is closed to foreign investors which seems like a reasonable issue in foreign trade. It doesn't mention medical insurance in particular and if India has socialized medicine I don't see why medical insurance would be that important. Maybe you're right but if so it must be based on your knowledge of the Indian economy and the international medical insurance market that I don't know about.

>104 Doug1943: Uh, Doug, that was librorumamans, not Rick.

I'll suppose that >104 Doug1943: is actually directed at me.

Wow, this is like trying to eat jelly with a knife. I don't think I have the time or the energy.

In >86 librorumamans: I made a small and specific adjustment; now I find myself arguing whether 'there' is, was, or eternally must be 'there'.

Whatever there there is or could be there, the Greeks in particular chose to go there; their expression was theirs. There's no point thinking about what the Elements would look like without Euclid. Euclid came up with the Postulates; they're the basis for the whole project. Without the fifth postulate (and there's one that's unprovable), there's no Book I and no Proposition 47.

And there's an end to it as far as I'm concerned. I'm off to take th' air.

Edited for the hell of it.

Rick/Librorumamans: Sorry for confusing your names. I probably chose the one easier to spell from memory.

So, Librorumanans: I think you're saying, yes, the theorems of mathematics would have been discovered by someone else, had the Greeks not existed, but not, of course, in that particular form.

It seems obvious to me that the Pythagorean theorem, and the idea of proofs, would have been discovered pretty much in the way that the Greeks did it.

It's a more interesting question, could the truths of Euclidean geometry, have been discovered in some substantially different form. I don't know the answer to that, but as I recall, you've got to have the first five postulates, to deduce all the theorems, even though it looks like the Fifth ought to be deducable from the first four, and/or the basic definitions.

I've often thought about Newton's Laws of Motion, and whether it would have been possible to expound the same ideas, in a different way ... perhaps in a context where the concept of energy had been discovered and developed at the same time. I suppose the philosophers of science have had something to say about this.

>105 jjwilson61: There is a difference between 'making a claim' and speaking about something I am very familiar with. I don't EXPECT anything from anyone other than some degree of proportion, fairness, honesty. I certainly don't expect to be disbelieved about something like what happened in 1990 between the US and India when I was THERE, reading the papers, the US accusations, the Indian responses.

As for the article I posted it was the first I found mentioning that business, though it was not specific to the date and severity of the US condemnation. And if you think coming from the US a call for open markets is benign then you've missed a lot of very serious and dark history of US foreign policy.

Simon, go back to #84 and begin crawling from 1509 to the present. Until then i openly defecate on your malnourished posts.

>108 Doug1943: In honesty I have rarely thought of Newton's laws of motion, though maybe I should. Though the tone is getting pissy about particulars, the Pro and Con barroom arguments have become richer and more interesting in this thread. I've been an interested voyeur of the various posts. A few thoughts:

Don't we have two main strands here? One: a version of the ancient world and an interpretation of how that might connect with us now. Two: the grip and slog of geopolitics over the last century or so.

I find the second one more interesting.

Doug, you've been at pains to avoid essentialist descriptions re "One" and that has perhaps been underappreciated, but it does seem to me that you are going to considerable lengths to connect "One" and "Two" for the sake of a grand narrative.

Is this some kind of conceptual hangover from your communist days, which has carried over into your more recent convictions? (The connection between these two modes of thinking intrigues me...)

Sure, I'd love it if someone could propose a satisfying over-arcing political explanation of all of human history. That would save me a lot of trouble in my current state of confusion.

But, for me (and I hope it doesn't sound like anti-intellectual defeatism), this grand narrative thing (though I'm sure we could all benefit from knowing more about the ancient world, Greeks and "others"), risks distracting from the urgency of now.

In my little world, if I'm trying to figure out what to do or think about Iran or China or Charlie Hebdo or the Bakken pipeline which in the name of capitalism wants to allow a private company from Texas to declare eminent domain in Iowa across my brother's rural home and seize his property without consulting his approval or the town's, the county's or even that of the state legislature (instead, a four-person board appointed by pals of the bought-off governor, will decide)...well, though these concerns might sound more parochial, historically and geographically, this and these are the "hypotenuse" that I'm trying to grapple with, politically.

Just so no one takes Simon for an expert on India: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/India%27s+no.1+killer:+Heart+disease/1/92422....

>109 RickHarsch: And we're just supposed to accept that you're an expert in all things Indian and not question anything you say? And even if what you say is true from an Indian perspective that doesn't make it the truth. It wouldn't be the first time a gov't has tried to blame all its problems on another gov't.

>112 jjwilson61: Actually, almost yes. If you've no reason not to believe me. If you happen to be from Mission Viejo and some political occurence there is of interest and you share it, I doubt anyone would question your version of events if they were not overly interpretive.
And I am not an expert in all things Indian, though very much an expert in all things I have been involved in and others have not.
My perspective, by the way, is my own. I happen to know the Indian perspective of a certain number of Indians.
Your third sentence has it all backwards. The Indians were going about their own business and it was not to the liking of the US insurance industry. Surely you can grasp all this and realize you've mistakenly made something out of nothing.

Krolik: Well, yes. The alarm bells are ringing now, and any time exploring, say, the Asiatic Mode of Production detracts from responding to current events. But this has been true for most of this century. And of course things that urgently impinge on us or our loved ones personally necessarily loom much larger in our own political vision than, say, the political evolution of Burma.

Anyway, I guess the issues you are raising are two:

(1) IS there any 'grand narrative' of human history? Or is it all just a random walk? I think there is, and although I'm no longer a Marxist in the sense of wanting to see a planned economy in which all the serious forces of production are in the hands of the state, I do think Marx got it basically right when it came to understanding the direction of human history and the underlying forces. This doesn't really say very much -- I don't see how anyone can deny that over the millenia, our species has advanced in learning how the world really works, and in imposing our will on it for our own benefit.

(2) More importantly, can this understanding inform our political activity today? I think it can, and should. So I believe that anyone who is 'pro-human', should want to see the global advance of liberal democracy -- which includes an essentially free market, lightly regulated, the rule of law, an accountable government -- around the world. This seems like ABC to me. I want to encourage this view of the world, if I can. (We can quarrel about how much of a role the state should play in all this -- I don't think there is universally-applicable answer good for all times and places. But that economic growth, and the sort of social evolution we have seen in the advanced countries, is a Good Thing ... how can anyone deny this?)

But whether or not this is true, I think it is necessary to try to place current events in the longer-term context. It's a way of trying to immunize yourself against short-term impressionism, and, in the current situation, despair.

So, for example, in trying to understand what's happening re. radical Islam, there are a number of radically-wrong responses, which stem, at least in part, from not having the long view of history and not paying attention to underlying forces.

Without going into any detail, we have the Politically-Correct Islam-is-beautiful-and-what-about-the-Crusades view of the idiot Left, the It's-because-of-the-Koran,-they're-all-savages view of the idiot Right (abetted by the extreme Zionists for their own reasons, although these people ought to know better). (Most of the Left and most of the Right are brain-dead, but not all of either side are. Unfortunately, both Right and Left have very active Thought-police, shameless demagogues who work very hard to make some ideas too dangerous to even discuss.)

We've got to have a clear-eyed view of what's happening in the world, and have a long-term strategy to deal with it. And it's not even the most important question we face, in my opinion (I think the danger of war between two or more of the big powers is even more threatening.)

Anyway, in part I'm just thinking out loud, seeing what people here have to say in response.

JJWilson: Every government in the world tries to advance the interests of the powerful elements of its own population, and is generally not overly-squeamish about how it does it.

Why is it so hard to think that the Americans don't do this too?

Of course American businesses, and their employees, want access to foreign markets, on the one hand, and of course they don't like foreigners competing with them inside the US, on the other. The American government has to respond to all these contradictory vectors and work out a resultant that it can sell to the world. (Anyway, pushing for access to the Indian market is pretty tame compared to, say, destroying another country's democratically-elected government.)

The real argument, I think, is: are India's problems simply, or primarily, a result of British (and American) imperialism, which appears to be Rick's view.

I think this is a mistaken view, but its attractiveness is understandable as a reaction to people who believe that the role of the US and Britain (and the other imperialist countries) in the world has been consistently and wholly benign, and moreover is the result of some in-built, organic, natural moral and intellectual superiority. It's really the We're-So-Perfect view turned inside-out.

>115 Doug1943: My view more accurately stated is that India was fucked badly by the British, impoverished by the British, ALTERED by the British. Since independence they have been hounded by the US, but the US has had a much lesser deleterious effect than the British. The US has not helped India, of course, but it has created a landscape that India must exist within and battle from a rather hopelessly weak position.
I do not agree that my view is as you state in your last sentence, rather that it is almost always necessary to keep in mind in discussing contemporary world politics--just about anywhere in the world--that the US is the most expansionistic country in world history and seeks to continue expanding. That ought to be combined with the very obvious and shameful hypocrisy of the United States, which speaks much of right and wrong--even evil--yet remains above international law and strongly supports the most consistently extra-legal nation in the history of the world in Israel. The cost of many successes you and others have denoted has consistently included dead civilians in vast numbers as well as consistent violations of the sovereignty of a great many nations.

>115 Doug1943: Why is it so hard to think that the Americans don't do this too?

Now you're putting words in my mouth. I never said they don't.

Krolik: One more thing that I think is of great value in the Marxist tradition, including particularly in 20th Century revolutionary Marxism: Marxists did not just see history as 'on their side', they sought actively to intervene in it.

And because of this stance, they always looked at current reality as not static, not fixed, but fluid, in motion, subject to hidden forces that would eventually reveal themselves (the 'Old Mole' of history); whenever they viewed nations, social groups, they looked for internal contradictions, which might be manipulated for good ends.

It's all to easy to see, for instance, a country like Iran as one reactionary mass, or China as an unstoppable growing superpower which will never be democratic, or Russia as irretrievably sunk in paranoid nationalism and the desire for a Strong Leader.

Someone who has gone to school with Marx and Lenin instinctively looks at those countries and seeks their internal contradictions, possibly growing tensions between their ruling elite and their populations, economic and social changes that will alter the current balance of forces, and if possible seeks to intervene in the processes he discovers to try to tip the balance in a favorable direction.

It's an attitude that anyone committed to a better world should have.

Rick: We could (although perhaps not in this thread) have a good discussion/argument about some of the things you've asserted. Some of them are true, for sure, but they need to put into the context of world history, and above all, the motor force of human affairs -- economics -- needs to be looked at. Put another way, why and how have 'expansionist' nations been so, and has their 'expansion' always been uniformly bad for the expanded-on. What are the different modes of expansion: Is the desire to buy things from another nation, and sell them the things your nation has, expansion? -- if so, is it the same as simply occupying the other country? (Thus: are the Chinese expanding today? Is India's desire to hold on to Kashmir, 'expansion'? Was its military intervention into East Pakistan 'expansionist'?) But maybe in another thread, at a later date.

>109 RickHarsch: There is a difference between 'making a claim' and speaking about something I am very familiar with

Rick, my sympathy - I often get the same feeling in threads where I post something about Sudan and South Sudan, where I have now lived and worked for the best part of 32 years, and somebody triumphantly googles something out of context which is supposed to surprise me and prove me wrong but which is actually well known to those who study the Sudans and which can be explained within the broader narrative. Alternatively they google and can't find anything on the issue so I also must be wrong because hey, if it's not on the internet it can't be true. The curse of the random googler.

>114 Doug1943: I believe that anyone who is 'pro-human', should want to see the global advance of liberal democracy -- which includes an essentially free market, lightly regulated, the rule of law, an accountable government -- around the world.

It's a seductive view with a lot to recommend it - but in practice it's not working globally. So either you can try to impose it on the rest of the world, or...

We've got to have a clear-eyed view of what's happening in the world, and have a long-term strategy to deal with it.

I think being clear-eyed and having a strategy should not mean having a utopian model of a liberal democracy free-market capitalism and imposing it on everybody. To me it means looking at the reality in the world, the multiplicity of different and often competing models, and trying to find out practically where they can come together and create a new and different model...

Which in some ways I think you are saying in >118 Doug1943:, but it appears to me to contradict some of your earlier positions.

>117 jjwilson61: That's true.

Here's some world history put in context. A known story, yes, but a good, vivid summary helps to keep it in mind--and, like the Holocaust, it cannot be taken back.

http://pocho.com/bananas-how-uncle-sam-raped-latin-america-for-cheap-fruit-video...

>97 RickHarsch:

For the record, reading #88 I see no reason to consider the author a socialist. She makes a good comparitive argument using Mao to good effect, but otherwise I would surmise that she is an egalitarianist. I can speak for myself, though, and admit that, yes, capitalism has knocked the shit out of attempted socialisms, but I am myself socialist because of my belief that inequality, particularly economic is the root of bloody conflict, and that the primacy of capitalism degrades the human species.

I don't understand how "capitalism knocked the shit out of attempted socialisms" (which, btw, I consider to be nothing but a tendentious interpretation, not factual history of socialism) connects to anything in my post. Is it just a rhetorical gesture introducing your declaration? Not trying to be funny or snippy, I'm just not following the thought here and suspect I might be latching onto something completely marginal.

Also, I don't know what is an "egalitarianist" or why my politics matter to the argument at all (for the record, I call myself a socialist too. But, in general, I'm not fussed about the labels, especially among Americans, who come from a different planet, until they are used to bludgeon me.) I might add I HATE arguing via and about labels. "You are X, you are therefore saying Y!" "You are saying Z, that makes you W!"--cue 200 posts about "W"...

I think there's been some short-circuit between you and Simon (Simon, I think sometimes it's difficult to tell whether you're agreeing or disagreeing)--the point Simon is making about lacking infrastructure is exactly the point Sen has made in the article I posted. And the reason the infrastructure has been neglected--also discussed in the article--goes to the heart of YOUR argument, Rick, about capitalist exploitation putting profit ahead of people. I don't understand what you two think you're disagreeing about.

>102 librorumamans:, >107 librorumamans:

Wow, this is like trying to eat jelly with a knife. I don't think I have the time or the energy.

I hear you...

Look at this tripe:

We've got to have a clear-eyed view of what's happening in the world, and have a long-term strategy to deal with it.

Glad to see it's being diverted into its own thread.

I think I undertand, lolaWalser, but you must consider that i am responding to those who respond to you--there is bound to be some warpage.

What I mean by capitalism knocked the shit out of attempted socialisms...suffice it to mention Nicaragua, oft invaded, finally the US sloughed off, then the US doing bizarre things to defeat the Sandinistas.

Your politics only matter, I suppose, when you write what you write and someone dismisses it as this or that. I enter the fray to say it is not necessarily that or this. I then categorize what I read as I and only I would categorize it. I called it egalitarianist. That should only be taken as what a single reader--me-- calls it.

RE: me and Simon, yes, probably some disconnect. You know, I often bristle.

Right, these topics certainly affect one and for you I expect it's as close to home as possible, it's understandable.

A real assessment of socialism -- real socialism -- is well worth undertaking, but in its own thread.

I would suggest separating out at least two (related but not identical) issues:

(1) The feasibility of socialism, implemented under ideal conditions, i.e. NOT in an impoverished, backward country, beset by hostile capitalist powers which blockade it, invade it, etc. In a sense, socialism has never been given a 'fair chance': Marx saw it as succeeding capitalism, not as taking over pre-capitalist and/or economically-underdeveloped countries.

The relevant issues here are the 'Socialist Calculation Debate' (can rational, non-wasteful production take place in the absence of market signals about the actual cost of producing goods), and the 'Human Nature Debate' (to what extent does socialism require people to act mainly NOT out of immediate material self-interest -- ie. to be Che's "Socialist Man" -- , and, is this a realistic expectation).

There has been a lot written on this, by very able people on both sides. (I've been putting together a pretty good collection of public-domain material on the Socialist Calculation Debate, if anyone's interested in doing further reading. And I'd be keen to swap titles, if not actual documents, if anyone has good material that I don't know about.)

(2) What were the effects (failures and achievements), economically and socially, of the actually-existing socialist regimes in the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, and elsewhere? Given that there WERE real achievements (if you believe in things like universal literacy, access to health care, increase in longevity), to what extent were these the results of the regime, and to what extent is it reasonable to say they would have occurred anyway? In particular, to what extent were they the result of the socialism of the regime, as opposed to being just the results of an effective national government that actually cared, even in its own way and for its own reasons, about the physical welfare of its population?

Of course, in both of these areas, there is a huge amount of material of very mixed quality, both pro and con, generated by people who are essentially just propagandists. It's hard not to 'fall in love', or 'fall in hate' when dealing with this issue. But even if strong emotions are inevitable here, they get in the way of understanding.

Rick: a question.

You say "the US is the most expansionistic country in world history". Could you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "expansionistic"?

>127 Doug1943: §2

Yes, there certainly were advances in the USSR and China such as you mention. I don't know, however, what sort of calculation suitably measures those advances against the planned famines and the gulags in both regimes.

I'm not contradicting you, but the human cost of those advances can scarcely be numbered. We will likely never know just how many died.

>128 Doug1943: Territory.

Thanks, Rick. That's nice and succinct. ("Go and do thou likewise," I hear a chorus say. Hush. Making up for lost time.)

And by 'territory' I take it you mean the actual physical occupation and absorption of the territory? In the US case, the Louisiana Purchase, the robbery-by-violence of half of Mexico, the purchase of Alaska (not from the native inhabitants but from the people who conquered them, as with Mexico and the Louisiana Purchase, too), the acquisition by skullduggery of Hawaii ... and if we use the word 'absorption' loosely, we can throw in Guantanamo ... and also Puerto Rico? and various islands in the Pacific? Have I missed anywhere?

Librorumamans: No, it's an impossible calculation, as you say. You have to do 'alternative history', which is pretty fruitless.

For instance, had Lenin been detained in Switzerland for a few months -- say, jailed, for his unpaid overdue library book fines, -- there would have been no Bolshevik revolution. But ... what would there have been instead? Would Russia have ended up disintegrating into its national component parts, each ruled by some gangster-warlord? Or would they have been able to make a rough-and-ready parliamentary democracy, and renew the rather high rate of growth (fueled by foreign capital) that they had before WWI? Who knows?

You can ask similar questions about China. Or you can get even more detailed and ask, what course might the Chinese Revolution taken, had Mao died in 1950? I don't see the Communists giving up power, but maybe the madness of the 'Great Leap Forward' and the 'Cultural Revolution' could have been avoided. Those events do seem to have been a personal thing of Mao himself, and Mao's authority within the Party was so great that no one dared challenge him openly.

This is not to say that we cannot know anything about, say, the 'Great Leap Forward', although in fact, it's actually impossible, in my opinion, to be very precise in our knowledge of the details, given that almost everyone has an axe to grind in analyzing it, that all figures from that time and place are incomplete, suspect in various ways, etc.

What we can be pretty sure of, I think, are some generalities.

One of them is: total nationalization of the means of production and a centralized plan for the whole economy is not a good idea. A state monopoly on the means of expression, where no one can criticize the government's decisions openly, is not a good idea.

On the other hand, extensive state involvement in economic and social affairs, especially in backward countries which want to make up in only a few decades, what took the West centuries to achieve, is inevitable and probably necessary.

Then the argument becomes how much state intervention and what kind, and whether what is necessary to be done is compatible with the degree of democratic freedoms we now enjoy in the West.

And for us here in the West, the relevant argument is: what should we be pressuring our governments to do, or not to do, to help the advance of economic and social development in the less-developed countries?

>131 Doug1943: I would incude any country with a political status created extra-legally (silly concept, legal) with the help of the US that proceeds to run its economy in such a way that the US profits enormously. Congo would be a good place to start.

Rick: ... yes, 'legal' means ... what? I would argue that all states, without exception, are the creations of force and violence, usually against indigenous peoples who were exterminated, assimilated or pushed to the geographic margins by their more powerful conquerors. (And a close look at those indigenous peoples will also reveal plenty of blood on their hands, against weaker neighbors.) And even where the masses of people are of the same tribe as the dominant elite, a close look at their history will show plenty of bloody repression against their own people. To modify a famous observation, the history of mankind is the history of tribal and class struggle. Always. Everywhere. We're not bovines.

Congo might well be a good place to start. I don't know a lot about the place, although I remember when the Americans helped get rid of (i.e. helped murder) the leftist independence leader Lumumba in the early 60s, and as I recall, it was the Belgians who really raped the place before that -- the infamous limb-severing penalty for not delivering enough rubber. And after Lumumba was overthrown, the Americans were very happy to support a dictator named Mobutu who was horrible even by African standards. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and, or so I thought, the Americans lost interest. All you hear from the Congo now is one stomach-churning horror story after another ... despite (or because of?) the place being extremely wealthy in natural resources.

Reading (skimming) the Wiki article on the Congo, I had the thought that here is a place that would actually benefit from rule by ISIS, if they didn't make the mistake of being too liberal in administering their system of justice.

But you say it's really controlled by the US? Could you elaborate, or give me some links to further details?

>134 Doug1943: DRC=minerals, especially tantalum, which is necessary for cell phones etc.

Mobutu was the US's guy. He made billions, so did the US. Right now, the war is largely a spillover from the Tutsi/Hutu debacle.

Okay. In general, I think there is a trap people fall into in trying to analyze the Third World.

The Right wing error goes like this: "Those people. We try to help them, but they're just too savage/backward/corrupt to benefit." And from that view, two (opposing) views can follow:
(1) Since they're going to be ruled by a nasty dictator anyway, let's make sure he's OUR dictator. (I think FDR (or was it Truman) famously said something like this about Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.
or (2) Since these places are hopeless quagmires, let's mind our own business, especially now that the Soviet Threat has gone. Let's be a Republic, not an Empire. Not our business. Let them kill each other.

The Left wing error goes like this: "These poor, innocent people. Living in peace (or developing at a nice pace), until the nasty white imperialists came along, to destroy their lovely Arcadia. All their problems are due to the white man."

In the extreme, this view even repudiates the idea of social progress, since 'all cultures are equal' and who are we to suggest that aspects of our culture (literacy, the rule of law, equality before the law) is superior to anyone else's. I suppose that's the Left wing equivalent of Right wing isolationism, or non-interventionism.

The Left wing equivalent of Right wing 'interventionism' is to give uncritical support to whatever ostensibly anti-imperialist movement is going in each Third World country, without inquiring too closely as to what that movement really aims at. This was much more common in the 70s and 80s, and led to some terrible conclusions among some people on the Left, such as support for Khomeini in Iran.

Of course, my summaries of both Left and Right are over-simplifications. But I think in essence they catch the truth.

I suppose it's more honorable to be an enemy of your own government, and not to succumb to flag-waving nationalism, than to simply endorse whatever crimes one's own government commits. But I don't think it's an adequate basis for trying to understand what's happening in the world, and the Third World in particular.

I've got a different approach, which I think (ironically, since my political reflexes are pretty conservative) is actually the one Karl Marx had. However, I won't elaborate on it here.

>137 Doug1943: or was it Truman

Or was it Cordell Hull? Or was it Somoza?

Hmmm... according to the Wikipedia article on Somoza ... it was ... nobody!

"Although Somoza was reckoned as a ruthless dictator, the United States continued to support his regime as a non-communist stronghold in Nicaragua. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) supposedly remarked in 1939 that "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch. According to historian David Schmitz, however, researchers and archivists who have searched the archives of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library have found no evidence that Roosevelt ever made this statement. The statement first appeared in the November 15, 1948 issue of Time magazine and was later mentioned in a March 17, 1960 broadcast of CBS Reports called "Trujillo: Portrait of a Dictator". In this broadcast, however, it was asserted that FDR made the statement in reference to Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. It should be further noted that this statement has been attributed to a variety of United States presidential administrations in regard to foreign dictators. Thus the statement remains apocryphal at this point, though Roosevelt and future presidents certainly supported the Somoza family and their rule over Nicaragua. Andrew Crawley claims that the Roosevelt statement is a myth created by Somoza himself. "

I must have been thinking of the liberal attitude towards Al Sharpton.

>137 Doug1943: 'The Left wing error goes like this: "These poor, innocent people. Living in peace (or developing at a nice pace), until the nasty white imperialists came along, to destroy their lovely Arcadia. All their problems are due to the white man."'

I have never met a leftist, or left winger, who believes anything of the kind; in fact it's a particularly grotesque caricature of a right wing imagination of a left wing characterization.

'Of course, my summaries of both Left and Right are over-simplifications. But I think in essence they catch the truth.' Not even close.

Doug writes long. I will quote long apropos of much of the conversation here. This is an LT review by meditationesmartini:

'You don't need great writing or even great depth of insight if you've got a single great idea, and this essay has it. It is so great that every attempt I made to summarize it below just got tangled up in caveats and yesbuts, so instead I'll just pointform it quoted direct from the essay itself and affirm that despite all the obvious simplifications and omissions, this feels truer to my actual lived experience and understanding of the world than anything else in the efflorescence of Marxist writing since the financial crisis or so. If it feels true to you too, read the whole thing at http://www.weareplanc.org/we-are-all-very-anxious#.VMV0TsYVLdk.

"1. Each phase of capitalism has its own dominant reactive affect. The prevalence of a particular dominant affect is sustainable only until strategies of resistance able to break down this particular affect and /or its social sources are formulated. Hence, capitalism constantly comes into crisis and recomposes around newly dominant affects."

"2. One aspect of every phase’s dominant affect is that it is a public secret, something that everyone knows, but nobody admits, or talks about. Public secrets are typically personalised. The problem is only visible at an individual, psychological level; the social causes of the problem are concealed. Each phase blames the system’s victims for the suffering that the system causes."

"3. In the modern era (until the post-war settlement), the dominant affect was misery. The public secret of this narrative was the misery of the working class. Tactics such as strikes, wage struggles, political organisation, mutual aid, co-operatives and strike funds were effective ways to defeat the power of misery by ensuring a certain social minimum."

"4. When misery stopped working as a control strategy, capitalism switched to boredom. In the mid twentieth century, the dominant public narrative was that the standard of living – which widened access to consumption, healthcare and education – was rising. Everyone in the rich countries was happy, and the poor countries were on their way to development. The public secret was that everyone was bored."

"5. Contemporary resistance is born of the 1960s wave, in response to the dominant affect of boredom. Most tactics of this era were/are ways to escape the work-consume-die cycle. We are the tail end of this wave."

"6. Capitalism has largely absorbed the struggle against boredom. Precarity is used to force people back to work within an expanded field of labour now including the whole of the social factory. Consumer society now provides a wider range of niche products and constant distraction which is not determined by mass tastes to the same degree as before."

"7. In contemporary capitalism, the dominant reactive affect is anxiety. One major part of the social underpinning of anxiety is the multi-faceted omnipresent web of surveillance. But this obvious web is only the outer carapace. We need to think about how people’s deliberate and ostensibly voluntary self-exposure, through social media, visible consumption and choice of positions within the field of opinions, also assumes a performance in the field of the perpetual gaze of virtual others. Outsides to the field of mediatised surveillance are increasingly closed off, as public space is bureaucratised and privatised, and a widening range of human activity is criminalised on the grounds of risk, security, nuisance, quality of life, or anti-social behaviour. Precarity leads to generalised hopelessness; a constant bodily excitation without release."

"8. Excessive anxiety and stress are a public secret. When discussed at all, they are understood as individual psychological problems, often blamed on faulty thought patterns or poor adaptation. Indeed, the dominant public narrative suggests that we need more stress, so as to keep us “safe” (through securitisation) and “competitive” (through performance management)."

"9. We need new tactics and theories to combat anxiety. During periods of mobilisation and effective social change, people feel a sense of empowerment, the ability to express themselves, a sense of authenticity and de-repression or dis-alienation which can act as an effective treatment for depression and psychological problems; a kind of peak experience. It is what sustains political activity. Such experiences have become far rarer in recent years. If the first wave provided a machine for fighting misery, and the second wave a machine for fighting boredom, what we now need is a machine for fighting anxiety – and this is something we do not yet have. Today’s main forms of resistance still arise from the struggle against boredom, and, since boredom’s replacement by anxiety, have ceased to be effective."

"10. A new style of precarity-focused consciousness raising is needed."

They don't really know how to build such a machine, but I'm sure heartened by their commitment to starting the conversation. ( 4.5 stars )'''

Rick: If that's not your view, then great. All I can say is that much of the Leftist material that I read, and I read a fair amount (for a right-winger), seems to me to assume this. But I would be very happy to be wrong here, since I believe that the view of 'Third World innocence' gets in the way of effective action to address the world's problems.

I had a quick read of the article you linked to. When I began to read it, I thought to myself, 'This language reminds me of the Situationists' (with whom I had some personal dealings in the early 70s -- I even took part in one of their actions, trying to discombobulate the late Steve Gaskin at one of his Monday Night Classes) ... and I was pleased to see that my guess was not wrong. I couldn't understand them then and I don't understand them, or their successors now, which precludes a long response by me ... you will be relieved to hear.

>140 RickHarsch: I have never met a leftist, or left winger, who believes anything of the kind; in fact it's a particularly grotesque caricature of a right wing imagination of a left wing characterization.

Ditto.

What one can say with certainty, I think, is that one or more centuries of colonial exploitation followed by a further period as relatively powerless pawns in other global dynamics has significantly and systematically contributed to the current underdevelopment and dysfunctionality of many African states. That is not the same as saying, "All their problems are due to the white man" or positing some pre-colonial utopia.

One obvious book is King Leopold's Ghost; how could DRC ever be expected to develop "normally" just a few decades after that experience?

I'm currently reading South Sudan’s slow liberation by Edward Thomas. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to the general reader, as it's technical and specialised and very heavy going, but Eddie looks at how Sudan has evolved since it first began to interact with global systems in the form of the Ottoman Empire around 1820.

I don't disagree with that at all.

My model for how to think about, and react to, the imperialist involvement in backward countries is Karl Marx.

"Socialism" requires a "liberal" interpretation...

>146 LolaWalser: Is it worth considering that the shooter was a self-described "anti-theist progressive"?

(What if he were a Christian fundamentalist? Would the answer to the first question be different then?)

When I posted a link to that story in a different thread, it was still very new and not much information was available. The press seemed to make the connection between the religion of the victims and the anti-religious content on the shooter's facebook page.

Subsequently it has been announced that the people were shot over a parking space, so it is worth asking if the issue we should focus on here is religion, or guns and the ultra-short temper of the white American male.

ETA: I should add that UNC-Chapel Hill is a very diverse and humanistic community. I've got close connections with many people in the area and I can attest that the entire community is horrified and mourning.

>147 nathanielcampbell:

His atheism is relevant in exactly the measure it motivated him. I do find it telling that he took his rage out on Muslims and not white Christians. And if there's any truth to the statements that he had some sort of feud going with them, that obviously made a contribution. It seems pretty clear that he's a violent freak.

But let me play naive Johnny now.

What if we had some examples of Muslim terrorists killing in the name of religion? Would it be worth considering that these are just "bad Muslims", in no way indicative of the ethics of the group?

I'd think that someone who interprets the Crusades as a "historical oddity" with no relevance to what Christianity really is about, would command the logical wherewithal not to extrapolate from one atheist murderer to atheism.

Not least because I distinctly remember we covered this before: atheism doesn't prescribe ethics.

Your religion does. If the murderer had been a Christian fundamentalist, I'm sure we'd be hearing about what a "bad Christian" he was.

ETA: x-post with 148; basically same point

One may "shoot those who shoot you" but otherwise "murder" is unacceptable eh...

>149 LolaWalser: "I'd think that someone who interprets the Crusades as a "historical oddity" with no relevance to what Christianity really is about,"

You do understand that my comment about the Crusades as an "historical oddity" was ironic, right? I was aping the attitudes expressed by other posters in the "Depicting the Prophet Muhammad" thread, an attitude I expressly countered.

>148 southernbooklady: "Subsequently it has been announced that the people were shot over a parking space, so it is worth asking if the issue we should focus on here is religion, or guns and the ultra-short temper of the white American male."

An art-historian friend who lives in Turkey and studies Islamic art posted this on facebook today: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/02/chapel-hill-shooting-western-me...

Western media outlets will likely frame the most recent perpetrator of what some speculate is an anti-Muslim crime in the same way they frame most anti-Muslim criminals - as crazed, misguided bigots who acted alone. If past coverage is any indication, there will likely be very little suggestion that the killer acted on the basis of an ideology or as part of any larger pattern or system.

But what if acts of anti-Muslim violence are consistent with at least some strands of current western ideology? What if Islamophobia has become so commonplace, so accepted, that it now represents a hegemonic system of thought, at least for relatively large pockets of people in some regions of the West?...

...When Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims are killed by Muslims, Islam is identified as playing a direct role. When Muslims are killed by Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims, however, the religious identity of the violent perpetrators is downplayed or ignored.

>151 nathanielcampbell: The religious identity of the perpetrator in this case seems to be that he didn't have one. Which was Lola's point. His cultural identity seems to have been gun-toting disaffected white male, although his apparent support for gay rights might get him kicked out of the redneck club.

But it is not the first time that the possibility of "Islamaphobia" has reared its head in the area. After the shooting at Charlie Hebdo, Duke University planned to have the Muslim call to prayer broadcast from its bell tower as a symbol of support for religious tolerance and inclusion. Then they abruptly cancelled the plan, in large part because strong objections from Franklin Graham raised security concerns (according to Duke). So thanks to the Christian, the symbol of support and inclusion turned into a symbol of fear and divisiveness.

*edited to correct: it was the bell tower, not the church tower.

>152 southernbooklady: I actually agree with you that the shooter's "gun culture" is likely one of the most important factors in this particular case.

But I don't think it's out of place to question whether the police investigation is simply ignoring the possibility of an anti-religious motive, based on this idea that, "The religious identity of the perpetrator in this case seems to be that he didn't have one." That is: the assumption seems to be that people that don't have a religious identity are ipso facto incapable of having motives tied to religion; and I think that's an unfounded assumption.

If the shooter had fundamentalist Christian ties on his facebook page, then some of these tweets would have gone viral, e.g. "Three American Muslim students shot dead near University of North Carolina by Christian terrorist." (Disclaimer: I don't agree with the rest of the sentiments posed in the opinion piece I just linked to.)

So if simply being a vocal Christian would be sufficient for his religion to have been considered a motive in killing Muslims, then why wouldn't being a vocal "anti-theist" also be so considered?

And if Lola's point is to be taken here (which I actually think it should -- i.e. I don't think this guy's atheism is the reason he shot three people who happen to be Muslim), then shouldn't that also apply to Lola's assumptions about violence committed by Christians and Muslims? That is: if anti-theism isn't an assumed motive for violence, then why would theism be one?

Edited to add: What I think is particularly striking about this case is that, as an "anti-theist progressive" who seemed quite supportive of liberal causes and quite critical of "conservative" movements like the Tea Party, the shooter is out-of-stereotype for this situation. He should be "cool" with people, hanging out and mellow, rather than violent, at least as the stereotype goes. It's the Tea Party idiots who are supposed to wave their guns in the faces of people who don't belong in 'Murica, not the other side, right?

>153 nathanielcampbell: I sometimes have trouble following your logic to a conclusion. Or I can't tell where you are drawing a conclusion and where you are positing a hypothetical. For example, this statement:

But I don't think it's out of place to question whether the police investigation is simply ignoring the possibility of an anti-religious motive, based on this idea that, "The religious identity of the perpetrator in this case seems to be that he didn't have one."

seems to contradict this one:

And if Lola's point is to be taken here (which I actually think it should -- i.e. I don't think this guy's atheism is the reason he shot three people who happen to be Muslim)

I can't tell if you are faulting the police investigation for concentrating on the parking space motive, or in agreement with them that this was not a hate crime against Muslims.

I also think this statement is based on faulty logic:

"The religious identity of the perpetrator in this case seems to be that he didn't have one." That is: the assumption seems to be that people that don't have a religious identity are ipso facto incapable of having motives tied to religion; and I think that's an unfounded assumption.

Ei, I don't think the statement "The religious identity of the perpetrator in this case seems to be that he didn't have one." does assume or predict anything about his motives or whether or not he's capable of violence, beyond the fact that his motives would not be those of the Christian fundamentalist who murders a doctor at a women's health clinic, or an Islamic fundamentalist who shoots all the people in a magazine office.

As for this question:

That is: if anti-theism isn't an assumed motive for violence, then why would theism be one?

There is, in fact, an uncomfortable but obvious answer. Religious violence is often committed in the name of the religion. Loudly and unambiguously. If a terrorist says they are acting in the name of religion, then it is a form of religious violence. You can say they get the religion wrong, but it's not wrong according to them.

And as for this observation:

the shooter is out-of-stereotype for this situation. He should be "cool" with people, hanging out and mellow, rather than violent, at least as the stereotype goes. It's the Tea Party idiots who are supposed to wave their guns in the faces of people who don't belong in 'Murica, not the other side, right?

I don't really get your tone, which sounds hostile. You might be going for ironic and hypothetical here but it hard to tell. You surely know that people are not stereotypes, but are, instead, real people with real and complex motives. Thus, their inability to conform to a stereotype is meaningless as an argument or evidence for anybody's position. What is meaningful is what they do, and why they say they did it. So we are back to a man who is anti-religion, who shot three people who were visibly Muslim, and who supposedly did it over a parking space dispute.

I don't think anyone can disentangle that from a distance. And asking "what if the victims were Jehovah's Witnesses?" or "What if he was a Christian fundamentalist?" or "What if he was Muslim and they were not?" or any other "what if" scenario seems to me to be a fairly callous response that erases the real victims in a real tragedy.

>154 southernbooklady: "I don't really get your tone, which sounds hostile. You might be going for ironic and hypothetical here"

Yeah, I was going for ironic with the reference to 'Murica and all.

I guess my point was lost somewhere along the line. Allow me to try to make it more clear. Lola has made it quite clear that she perceives religion as an inherently violent and coercive cancer upon society, and that violence committed in the name of religion is inherently more sinister than other violence.

Yet, she dismissed out of hand the idea that "anti-theism" could be a motivation for violence just as sinister.

Now, in this case, I think the evidence is showing that, however much a priori mistrust the shooter had of religious people in general, because of their basic orientation as religious, his "anti-theism" views were not a major factor in the crime.

But it seems to me that if the shooter had been a fundamentalist Christian, we'd be a lot more concerned about his possible religious motivation; we wouldn't have been so quick to dismiss it out-of-hand. There seems to be an asymmetry of expectations: of course fundamentalist Christians or radical Muslims should be religiously suspect if they commit violence against people of other faiths. But a vocal "anti-theist"? Of course he couldn't be committing violence because of religious hatred! (Again, my tone here is slightly hyperbolic.)

Why? If a religious person can commit violence in the name of their religion, then can't an atheist commit violence against religion in a similar fashion?

>155 nathanielcampbell: Yet, she dismissed out of hand the idea that "anti-theism" could be a motivation for violence just as sinister..

Well, the problem here is that the position of the atheist is not anti-belief but simply non-belief. And non-belief is not a scaffolding on which to build an ethical system. It is simply a null position. In that sense, atheists who are anti-religion are reactionary--they (and I'll include myself in the group) are reacting to the provocation of religion and whatever bad things they see it perpetrating. So once again, this is a form of religious violence, since without religion, the provocation, and the reason for hostility, wouldn't exist.

You like analogies, so here's a less politicized analogy for you: I'm not into football. I don't play it, don't follow it, don't think about it. Don't mind when I see people playing pick up games in the lot across the street, but don't want to play and don't want to be forced to play. But when I see a university spend more money on its football program than its academic one, when I see it sacrifice academic standards in order to keep star players and cultivate revenue, when I see it adopt a policy that ignores when those players commit crimes, covers it up when they sexually assault other students, protects the perpetrators in the name of making it to the Rose Bowl...well I get pissed off.

Does my hostility come from my lack of interest in the game of football? No. It comes from my outrage at how crimes are tolerated in the name of the game. Does this make me hostile towards university football programs? It does, because I've concluded those programs are corrupting academic life and dismissive of the humanistic goals that go along with those standards. If I had my way, football would stay on the football field and out of the academic and administrative halls of the campus.

But...football is a money maker. It is popular. It engenders a fanatical devotion and following. It creates an immense amount of prestige -- all of which I think is misplaced. But my objection still isn't in the game itself. It's for the intrusive, expensive, demanding, and self-aggrandizing thing we've made of the game. It may not be the only corrupting influence in academics, but it is a highly visible one.

Lola has been arguing that religion is uniquely dangerous -- she and I differ slightly on that but it could be said that whether or not religion is uniquely, inherently, dangerous it is at least one of the most prevalent and highly visible dangers in the view of people who believe in the separation of church and state and think that religion should "stay on the football field."

>153 nathanielcampbell:

Why is it so difficult for you to stick to what people are actually saying?

And if Lola's point is to be taken here (which I actually think it should -- i.e. I don't think this guy's atheism is the reason he shot three people who happen to be Muslim)

I SAID, black on white, right up there: "His atheism is relevant in exactly the measure it motivated him." Why do you think I don't mean WHAT I SAID? Do you know the measure in which it was atheism that motivated him? I sure don't. Do you not think it's kinda interesting, i.e. suspicious, i.e. "telling", as I put it, that he chose to murder Muslims and not fundie Christians, of which I'm sure he could find a ton around him?

So, yeah, the man's on (self-supplied) record as an atheist. It's a fact. Was that alone what made him go and kill three young people sitting in their own home? Circumstantial evidence makes it unlikely--IMO, at least.

But I don't think it's out of place to question whether the police investigation is simply ignoring the possibility of an anti-religious motive,

No clue what you mean by this. Why do you think the police isn't investigating "anti-religious motive" (seems to me this is pretty evidently an Islamophobic hate crime, i.e. OBVIOUSLY the motive is anti-religious), and what do you think "investigating the anti-religious motive" would be like? What's it supposed to DO?

Do you want to proclaim atheism a hate crime, is that it? Start listing preventively all the atheists, especially armed ones? Do tell.

So if simply being a vocal Christian would be sufficient for his religion to have been considered a motive in killing Muslims, then why wouldn't being a vocal "anti-theist" also be so considered?

Did we skip something somewhere? Wtf? WHO said or even implied that "being a vocal Christian would be sufficient for his religion to have been considered a motive in killing Muslims"?!

shouldn't that also apply to Lola's assumptions about violence committed by Christians and Muslims? That is: if anti-theism isn't an assumed motive for violence, then why would theism be one?

I don't care whether you genuinely misunderstand, but this is such a distortion of my arguments I won't bother saying more. Really not worth it.

>155 nathanielcampbell:

Yet, she dismissed out of hand the idea that "anti-theism" could be a motivation for violence just as sinister.

I'll point out again this is a fucking lie.

>156 southernbooklady:

Lola has been arguing that religion is uniquely dangerous

No, I haven't. I have been arguing there are ways in which it is uniquely dangerous and pointed out the major factors that combine to make it so, factors that don't obtain regarding non-religious ideologies.

Religions engage billions of people at a level (psychological, historical etc.) that's inaccessible to mere opinions and political beliefs, and with a quite different significance. (There are some who adhere to politics with religious fervour, but, important as the individuals sometimes can be, they are a vanishingly small minority.) This vast body of the religious is the matrix of actual and latent conflict, throwing up extremism without any need for the whole to be fanatical.

That's the practical expression of the theoretical situation I wanted to explore in the "Divisions" thread. Religions divide as a matter of course, separating people into belongers and non-belongers, saved and unsaved, good and evil, I and not-I. This is a fact. And YES, of course separation and classification isn't only a feature of religion--this is a trivial thing to observe and why oh why am I constantly bugged to repeat it--but the specificities of religion as a mass phenomenon ARE something to be considered unique and understood on their own terms.

>159 LolaWalser: This vast body of the religious is the matrix of actual and latent conflict, throwing up extremism without any need for the whole to be fanatical.

That's the practical expression of the theoretical situation I wanted to explore in the "Divisions" thread. Religions divide as a matter of course, separating people into belongers and non-belongers, saved and unsaved, good and evil, I and not-I.

Okay, I think I understand you. You are saying that religion starts from an extremist position because it is founded in divisiveness, in us/them. The same way I think of patriarchy, I guess.

</i>

>160 southernbooklady:

You are saying that religion starts from an extremist position because it is founded in divisiveness, in us/them.

No, no I wouldn't call it an "extremist" position. The whole is not, NEED not be extremist at all. It need not start or end or situate itself in extremism at all (in fact, I doubt that it CAN. It's not easy to make billions of people into murderous terrorists.)

There's a general tendency to divisions of people (separation, classification--what Canetti I think calls "arranging and rearranging people") to breed, at a minimum, potential for conflict. And I think it's still Canetti who shows how this potential, this threat, in itself is hostile, a basic violence already committed. You mention patriarchy--yes, I think there's an analogy. Just as women exist under a perpetual threat in a patriarchal society, in a perpetual situation of an outsider, someone who's not "quite" a "citizen" and therefore open to attack.

And yes again (because someone is bound to mention this again), obviously this is not something ONLY religion does. Politics separate, class separates, race, admission tests--a million things.

What I'm insisting on is understanding that religion-imposed separations are different from grades on the SAT or who voted for whom on the local council, as they damn obviously are.

>159 LolaWalser: Lola has been arguing that religion is uniquely dangerous

No, I haven't. I have been arguing there are ways in which it is uniquely dangerous

But if there a ways in which it is uniquely dangerous then it *is* uniquely dangerous, because it doesn't sound as if you believe that other modes of thought, like politics, have any ways in which they are uniquely dangerous.

>161 LolaWalser: And yes again (because someone is bound to mention this again), obviously this is not something ONLY religion does. Politics separate, class separates, race, admission tests--a million things.

I guess I'm that someone. The thing is that you say this when pressed, but it's always religion that you're railing against.

>157 LolaWalser: Do you want to proclaim atheism a hate crime, is that it?

Suing a bakery for refusing, on religious grounds, to take a cake order for a "gay wedding" is a hate crime ... Suing a photographer for refusing to take the business of a couple for their "gay wedding" is definitely a hate crime ...

>162 jjwilson61: No, I've read many posts from her that "rail" against sexism or the US's cultural hegemony. I'm sure there are other things as well. Lola's not on some sort of atheistic vendetta, as far as her posts here indicate. There are some very defensive posters, however, who see an attack on Christianity in pretty much any event. That strikes me as more harmful to religion in general and Christianity in particular - the need to feel persecuted. It makes a mockery of actual suffering.

As for Craig Steven Hicks -- I'm with southernbooklady on this one; just another angry white guy with a gun. Which, of course, means that he can't be representative of a group. White guys are individuals with complex motivations.

>162 jjwilson61:

Please don't bother.

>163 theoria:

Oh, are we getting a pattern here?

>165 LolaWalser: Not just a pattern, a tsunami.

>164 RidgewayGirl:

Thanks!

Speaking of angry white men with guns, have you seen their enthusiastic responses to "American Sniper"?

Of course, it must be madness to suppose decades of wars and accompanying propaganda about the Middle East could be more important in fuelling those people than "atheism".

The jingoism surrounding American Sniper is really nauseating. Can we please choose someone else to deify? This is a guy who bragged about shooting people in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. That's the lie he chose to tell, because it plays well to the fears of those Mike Huckabee so insultingly calls "Bubbas."

I hadn't heard of that (I've been avoiding reading about the movie and the guy, but I couldn't avoid the screencaps on social media of jerks thumping their chests and making threatening noises about bagging "ragheads" and "sandniggers".)

Way to intensify the psychosis, just what the doctor ordered.

>168 RidgewayGirl: & >169 LolaWalser:

A few weeks ago the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee was compelled to ask Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper to intervene in the wake of the rise of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim threats. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2015/01/28/civil-rights-group-...

>170 theoria:

Appalling. I was hoping against hope someone laboured to put together ten twats a-twittering, but, obviously, no.

Add guns and watch the mixture explode.

>164 RidgewayGirl: As for Craig Steven Hicks -- I'm with southernbooklady on this one; just another angry white guy with a gun. Which, of course, means that he can't be representative of a group. White guys are individuals with complex motivations.

snorts

I missed most of the ads for American Sniper. My father told me it was directed by Clint Eastwood, and I said No it isn't, becasue the little I had read or heard suggested an anti-war flick. He quickly found out he was right, but I didn't think it through, watched the film--partly, too, because i had confused Bladley Cooper's basic movie persona with the actor--and was amazed first by the buildings hit, Brad goes to Fallujah bizarre plot trail, and then slowly, slowly realizing this was hardly a hagiograpic of a classic US propagandized soldier.

I think owe everyone here (and especially Lola) an apology for overreaching. In particular, my interpretation of Lola's attitudes and views (as in >155 nathanielcampbell:) was uncharitable and certainly lacking in the nuance and complexity that surely characterize her worldview. Indeed, the very existence of this thread indicates that she does carefully distinguish between what she sees as the problematic systemic structures of religion and the reality of particular religious believers of goodwill (even if that distinction is often unclear to those of us who see the world "from the inside" of those structures of religion, as it were).

>173 RickHarsch: It will be interesting to see whether American Sniper beats Fifty Shades of Grey at the box office this weekend.

>172 SimonW11: #notallmen

>175 theoria: Violence vs. Sex?

>176 RidgewayGirl: Yes, but I supposed there is some sexualized violence in Fifty Shades of Grey. But no wanton killing.

Theoria/Ridgeway: I just can't see why they are two different films.

I understand that the Islamic State is making just such a film, but without any professional actors. All the "wanton violence" (real "wanton violence", which makes the targetted killing in a war zone look very tame by comparison), sadism, rape of the infidel slave-women, that certain movie audiences might want.

Plus an invitation to come join the fun!

ISIS/IS makes uh "slasher films" I understand?...

Whatever ISIS does is no excuse for "American Sniper". They are correctly seen as both sides' propaganda, with similar or identical goals: glorification of "our" side and intimidation of the other.

The US may use Hollywood, but it does not follow that the carnage it imposed on Iraq and wider is "make believe". We just don't get shown what the real, unedited action looks like.

Congratulate yourself on making a point of hiding your crimes all you want. I prefer the beasts out in the open, and frankly, those with fewer bombers, drones, rockets and other machinery for "clean" killing. The more "barbaric" the weapons, the better the chances of, at least, equal fight.

I want ISIS to have swords and rocks, and I want the Kurds and the other enemies of ISIS to have well-trained snipers with precision sniper rifles, bombers, drones, and rockets.

You see, revolution is not a tea party.

What revolution? Whose revolution? Whose snipers? Who's going after ISIS, you? What's your plan, drown them in yammer? The US is skeddadling out of the frying pan as fast as it can, having fucked up as nobody fucked up in the region since 1953. It'll keep selling arms to the beggars who have nowhere to go, until the IS consolidates and becomes a "respectable" talking partner--like every other disgusting tyrant pet of yours ever.

You do business with Saudi Arabia--you'll do business with ISIS just fine.

But, Lola, Doug wants to purify Islam.

I listened to an interesting discussion about the rise of ISIS and it was pointed out in a compelling way, that the US's imposed government in Iraq was so corrupt and out of touch that ISIS seemed a better alternative. Sure they're fundamentalists who will enact an authoritarian government, but at least they aren't venal and open to whatever the highest bidder wants. They are also not going to do whatever foreign corporations and governments want.

Which is no defense of what they are, but it helps to understand that, in theory at least, they sounded like a better alternative than the government in place.

>185 RidgewayGirl:

I have heard it was more the Shia sectarianism of the Iraqi government which encouraged the Sunni tribes to side with the Sunni IS. These being the same Sunni tribes which joined forces with the US under the Awakening movement during the period of US direct involvement.

This Shia sectarianism was in fact a result of the government democratically elected by the Iraqi people, who are 60% Shia, rather than US influence (which tried reasonably hard to get them to be more inclusive of the Sunni and Kurdish populations).

The key US mistake in the withdrawal was perhaps not pushing for partition into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish States, but that of course would have its own problems (like the Sunni State being very poor without access to oil, the Shia State becoming an Iranian client, and the Kurdish State being opposed by all its neighbours with their own Kurdish minority issues).

We could also have done more to shape their constitution to one that better protected minority rights. Something that guaranteed a proportional number of cabinet posts and army leadership positions to Sunni's and Kurds, for example.

Wasn't it also partly the US decision to dismiss the entire Iraqi army and officials who had been part of the Ba'athist party?

Partly? No, entirely.

>188 John5918:

Yeah, that's the point the general US public (apologies to exceptions--I know they exist) just isn't equipped to follow--it's not just that they know nothing about Arab socialism, the whole mentality is so warped by doctrinaire anti-"Red" bias they short-circuit at the very notion of good done by a socialist party.

The Arabs already had a revolution (several, in several countries) and a renaissance, post-colonial--and this happened most effectively under the aegis of ideological socialists. Nasser, Assad and Saddam Hussein were Arab modernists; Egypt, Syria and Iraq were countries in many ways better (in precisely the ways Westerners think are good--social freedoms, egalitarianism, tolerance--relative and imperfect, yes, but authentic and constantly striving to more) than Islamist prisons Western interventions DELIBERATELY sow in their wake.

I don't give a fig about how "monstrous" Saddam or the Assads were--THEIR Iraq and Syria were better, and better off. If they were "evil", they were a lesser evil. They counterbalanced and kept in check the Islamists the West is so good at exciting.

The truth is that radical Islam is no problem for the US at all. Oh--a nuisance now and then, like when they manage a doodoo on American soil! but not a real problem. The US doesn't give a flying fuck about the conditions of life in the Middle East--all it cares is about getting the oil, and who cares who sells the stuff, as long as they'll sell it to you? So there's no point and nothing to gain from going after ISIS because they cut throats on camera and gang rape (who doesn't?), or freezing out a shithole like Saudi Arabia, or poking for a "revolution" in Pakistan, and even less for REALLY "bringing the better tomorrow" to a nothing-place like Afghanistan.

There are cultural reasons that impede engagement too--letting fundamentalist religionists rule a country isn't ODD to Americans, it's NORMAL. That Syria falls apart into extremist fiefdoms isn't WORSE than a socialist Syria. There IS no worse fate, to the average American, than being socialist. This is why Syria and Iraq were destroyed. Capitalism can tolerate any barbarity, but not a system that structurally opposes it.

So bring on the mullahs, and the more medieval the better for business!

>190 LolaWalser: Makes me think of Latin America & the Caribbean — can't imagine why, though.

>191 librorumamans:

:)

And on topic--I admit I've pretty much written the thread off, but this is too good to pass up... The Islamic centre in Houston that's been the target of arson teaches a few lessons in tolerance:

>190 LolaWalser:

The truth is that radical Islam is no problem for the US at all. Oh--a nuisance now and then, like when they manage a doodoo on American soil! but not a real problem.

Nice way to frame mass murder.

There are cultural reasons that impede engagement too--letting fundamentalist religionists rule a country isn't ODD to Americans, it's NORMAL. That Syria falls apart into extremist fiefdoms isn't WORSE than a socialist Syria. There IS no worse fate, to the average American, than being socialist. This is why Syria and Iraq were destroyed. Capitalism can tolerate any barbarity, but not a system that structurally opposes it.

Accept the average Americans clearly understands that the current mess is worse than the prior situation. Even the average American republican. This is just bigoted.

>187 jjwilson61:

Agreed.

>193 hf22: Mass murder? One? I think that's the point. The US kills in vast numbers--even in the little action in Panama nearly as many were killed as were in New York. And the US does these things as a matter of regular, consistent, and carnivorous policy.

'Accept the average Americans clearly understands that the current mess is worse than the prior situation. Even the average American republican. This is just bigoted.'
Here you answer a lot with very little, nothing of substance, much less clarity.

>195 RickHarsch:

Mass murder? One?

I object to any intentional mass murder being referred to as a "doodoo". That does not constitute a defence of any US actions.

Here you answer a lot with very little, nothing of substance, much less clarity.

Sigh. US public opinion has to be one of the most polled on the planet. We know there is no significant US public view that Syria before the uprising was worse than Syria now under IS.

Which is why, for example, the West is now bombing IS and not Syrian government forces (as there was previously pressure to do).

>196 hf22: Are then any statistics on whether US public opinion thinks that Afghanistan and Iraq are better or worse off now than they were before the US invaded them?

Here's the problem: as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, "everything solid melts into air".

Invading Irag and Afghanistan to try to "nation-build" in the latter, and install a democracy in the former, may have been a bad idea, even in the most perfect execution.

It worked in Germany. It worked in Italy. It worked in Japan (talk about carnivorous mass murder -- what would our Leftist/pacifists have done at the beginning of WWII???).

It worked in Korea (compare capitalist, American-dominated South Korea to independent socialist North Korea!) Under the close tutelage of the US, Taiwan finally became a prosperous democracy.

But it probably hasn't worked in Afghanistan, and it didn't work in Iraq. (What role Obama's withdrawal of American troops from Iraq played in this debacle remains to be determined. But let's grant for the sake of argument that the outcome would have been the same.)

You see, nothing stands still. The fallacy of "it was better before", in addition to whitewashing the crimes of the regimes in power then, assumes that all would have remained the same. But it wouldn't have.

The uprisings in Libya and Syria were not the result of American intervention. What would have happened in Afghanistan is anybody's guess, but anyone who thinks that Iraq today would be a haven of totalitarian peace and secularism and equal rights for women, is delusional.

All that is solid, melts into air.

So what should the US do about all this?

I don't have a clue, beyond saying "support the democratic and secular forces with guns and money" if there are any, and "support the struggle of suppressed national or quasi-national groups for self-determination, if this can be done without simultaneously suppressing the national rights of yet another minority (which in the patchwork quilt of the Middle East is probably impossible).

The outraged Left, living in comfort and safety in Europe and North America, think that the US can just stand aside from the world, and all will be fine. They'll be able to watch their flat-screen TVs and post on their Apples to LibraryThing in comfort, while the rest of the world burns.

Sorry, ain't gonna happen.

>197 John5918:

Of course - here from 2014 (http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29784195). Like I said, most polled public opinion on the planet. Pretending we have to guess what they are thinking is silly.

The US poll found that 34% thought Afghanistan was "better off", with 20% saying it was "worse off" and 43% saying there was no real difference.

>198 Doug1943: anyone who thinks that Iraq today would be a haven of totalitarian peace and secularism and equal rights for women, is delusional.

Do you think anybody is saying that? But, leaving aside the hyperbole, some people are saying that leaving Iraq alone might have been a better option, given the way things have turned out in Iraq itself and the subsequent knock-on effect in the region and the world. Or it might not; we'll never know "what if". Whichever, it certainly can't be claimed that invading Iraq for spurious reasons was a smart move.

>196 hf22: Point is you didn't address the issue.

>198 Doug1943: 'The outraged Left, living in comfort and safety in Europe and North America, think that the US can just stand aside from the world, and all will be fine. They'll be able to watch their flat-screen TVs and post on their Apples to LibraryThing in comfort, while the rest of the world burns.'

What a lot of lame bullshit. First, anyone I know who believes the US should stand aside believes so because of the damage inflicted on innocents nations and people when the US should have stood aside. The rest is trite and cheap with a bizarre bit of melodrama: the world burns! We live where we live, some in comfort and safety, some with Apples and flatscreens, smoking cigars, drinking scotch, typing with one hand, barking 'Har har' as we type, taking potshots at our lap dogs with our mausers, eating French TV dinners...You're such a self-satisfied, condescending ass. Do you take it as a point of honor that you refuse to buy a flatscreen?

>198 Doug1943: The outraged Left, living in comfort and safety in Europe and North America

Rick's post has prompted me to add that most of the "outraged" are not the "Left", nor do they live in Europe and north America; they are just people living in some of the countries which have been affected directly or indirectly by US military adventurism.

the US can just stand aside from the world, and all will be fine

Again, is anybody saying that? I take it for granted that the richest and most powerful country in the world should play a leading role in assisting the rest of the world. The question is how to do it, and whether it is done unilaterally or as part of an international consensus.

>201 RickHarsch:

Point is you didn't address the issue.

What issue didn't I address? I called out an obvious falsehood.

>202 John5918:

or as part of an international consensus.

Except we all know requiring such a consensus would mean nothing would get done. For example major powers like Russia and China are more than happy to allow genocides to proceed in the name of national sovereignty.

On most issues that matter, there is no international consensus, so it is useless to appeal to it.

>201 RickHarsch: You forgot the monocle. And the organic cashmere sweater hand-knit by the Dalai Lama's grandmother with the picture of Che Guevara dashingly rendered in Socialist Red. Us outraged braying Leftists have standards, you know.

All right, RG, I get your point, yes I do own and sometimes wear a beret. (It says Basque right on top so I know it's authentic.)

>203 hf22: 'For example major powers like Russia and China are more than happy to allow genocides to proceed in the name of national sovereignty.'
I don't know when a massacre becomes a genocide these days, but actions in Congo and Indonesia, to name two that don't come up often, may be considered US sponsored mass killings. I consider illegal drone strikes (not that there are legal ones, but I refer to those in countries the US is not at war with, so particularly Pakistan and Yemen) acts on a par with genocide, for they presume a superiority of one tribe over another, and that other is subhuman, as it must be for the superior tribe to unilaterally bomb the subhuman tribe--an re-definition would be necessitated if the superior tribe would acknowledge what it is doing and provide a rationale, implying that they NEED a rationale in order to carry out such slow genocidal acts.

>203 hf22: Except we all know requiring such a consensus would mean nothing would get done

Well actually quite a lot gets done in the world as a result of negotiations and consensus-building. Military force is less easy to build consensus over, but nevertheless there are many UN peace-keeping forces as well as regional ones under, say, the AU, which do operate with a consensus. However when either the USA or Russia decides to invade a country it's unlikely to get an international consensus.

Yes, it might have been better to leave Iraq alone. I certainly thought so at the beginning, although I was called on this by an Iraqi student of mine, who angrily told me, "You're our only hope."

So, can we take it for granted that everyone here agrees that there could be circumstances in which the US should use military force, either directly, or via allies? When, where, how ... that's a matter of tactical judgement. But I'm comforted by the evident agreement, even by our extreme Leftists, that there could come a time in the future when the US might have to kill people.

I'm glad to see agreement here.

>205 RickHarsch:

I don't think any of those qualify as genocides under the common definition (noting academics often use a much broader definition of the term, if only for the headlines it lets their work create). However the killing of communists in Indonesia, which is the mass killing I assume you are talking about in that country, I do know a little about and seems to have been pretty massive.

Though I do think the US influence on it can be overstated. It was more a, we are happy you are fighting communists, and we will not question the methods. Still, undoubtedly a western supported crime on a large scale.

>206 John5918:

Well, if we are talking of the idea of a "responsibility to protect" in cases of international genocides etc, it is clear a consensus to provide effective outside military help is almost impossible to reach. And so any requirement for an international consensus before such help is provided is going to ensure that another Rwanda will happen in time.

And all concerned after Rwanda said never again. Accordingly there must be scope for smaller groupings to act, outside of international consensus, where useful aid can not otherwise be effectively provided.

>208 hf22: Do you think that academics are more careless of their use of the word genocide than are members of the media, or people with a particular point to make? I find that a curious conviction.

But, on a more serious note, that we (as in the international community) can't get our act together in order to stop terrible acts, is something to be ashamed of. We all seem fine with the actions of Boko Haram, for example.

>209 RidgewayGirl: We all seem fine with the actions of Boko Haram, for example.

I call bullshit. The issue isn't general agreement that Boko Haram are a disaster, but what to do about it. After Iraq and Afghanistan it's clear that we don't know how to intervene without making things worst.

Actually Iraq and Afghanistan merely suggest that where there is no reason for US involvement, US involvement is a humanitarian disaster.

Boko Haram is already a humanitarian disaster. But in a very confusing place and with mystifying origins and operating on a relatively small scale. There is currently no international means of dealing with a group like Boko Haram. A UN force with strong regional backing and composition and a mandate is all I can think of that might work.

>196 hf22:

I object to any intentional mass murder being referred to as a "doodoo". That does not constitute a defence of any US actions.

oh ffs... No room for a dictionary on that high horse of yours? Look up "sarcasm". And, before you produce more twattery on the subject of my tone (what kind of ass would assume someone would in all seriousness use a word like "doodoo" "as a synonym for a massacre"?!), on 9/11/01 I was a New Yorker, for the fifth year running living and working in Manhattan, and my feelings and thoughts on that event are rather more personal and complex than I care to describe to random hostile nitwits on the internet.

>209 RidgewayGirl:

The UN needs approval and protocol for intervention and Nigeria (who in the past criticised other interventions in Africa and has many shady reasons to avoid foreign meddling) not only isn't helping with this, it doesn't look like it wants it. But if the fighting spreads outside Nigeria, as it looks it may, Western intervention is practically certain.

It's definitely alarming that a country as big and rich as Nigeria has allowed the insurgency to last and spread so much, but at this point there's still a chance that it and neighbours can defeat it on their own.

>209 RidgewayGirl:

Oh, I would not say careless. I have some friends in Peace and Conflict Studies, and playing with the differences in the academic and popular definitions of genocide in press releases is a great way to get some cheap headlines, which helps with head counting funding formulas (i.e. each mention in the mainstream press helps to meet targets needs to get more funding).

The popular definition is, after all, something along the lines of "what the Nazi's did to the Jewish people" But the Nazis are outliers in almost all things (hence Godwin's Law), and thus calling almost anything else akin to them is generally misleading.

But gaming performance management systems is hardly exclusive to academics - Lots of people are engaged in that all the time. Not a hanging offence.

>212 LolaWalser:

And I had friends in the second tower, who had come out to Australia to play Rugby Union.

The sarcasm seems misplaced.

208> in Rwanda it was precisely a smaller international group that acted rather than waiting for a world wide consensus to form. Smaller grouping regularly form to combat regional problems. It is the mark of a super power that it acts in more than one region at a time.

>211 RickHarsch: Humanitarian disaster? Boko Haram is a political disaster. Just as earthquakes are geological disasters. what it needs to save it is a people with a justified faith in their politicians. That starts with the politicians.

>214 hf22:

The sarcasm seems misplaced.

Does it? I guess I find a lot in life to be sarcastic about, including the smarmy pieties of those who have no problem "placing" people like me in subordination, second-class citizenship and hell but object to the "placement" of sarcasm. Treat words like sacraments, and people like shit.

If my tone bugs you, you know what you can do.

More than 1,000 Muslims form 'peace ring' around Oslo synagogue

REUTERS - More than 1,000 Muslims formed a human shield around Oslo's synagogue on Saturday, offering symbolic protection for the city's Jewish community and condemning an attack on a synagogue in neighboring Denmark last weekend.

Chanting "No to anti-Semitism, no to Islamophobia," Norway's Muslims formed what they called a ring of peace a week after Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, a Danish-born son of Palestinian immigrants, killed two people at a synagogue and an event promoting free speech in Copenhagen last weekend.

>217 LolaWalser:

who have no problem "placing" people like me in subordination, second-class citizenship and hell but object to the "placement" of sarcasm.

WTF? Who here is placing you in subordination or second-class citizenship? Who here would want to?

>218 LolaWalser: I'd like to see such a ring of Israelis around a revamped, free and tax-supported Gaza.

>220 RickHarsch: I did hear an interview on BBC radio the other day with an imam in the east end of London. Local Jews had long ago set up their own volunteer security to keep an eye on their synagogues and schools, and with the increase of Islamophobia following recent events, they offered to keep an eye on the mosques as well, an offer which the imams gratefully accepted.

>220 RickHarsch:

Last time I checked, that was not an outcome actually supported by the people of Gaza, or at least their Hamas government. It was the, um, ring of Israelis they want removed and their own borders to expand to include present day Israel.

Hence why the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza did not lead to any reduction of hostilities - It is not the war aim. Which is of course why the conflict is so difficult to resolve - Two sets of people claiming the one piece of dirt. It is not ultimately about how each population is treated by the other, despite the fact deplorable treatment is currently the norm.

>221 John5918:

The long standing, and again increasing, need for Jews to provide their own security in Western countries around synagogues and schools is really quite a blight. We should be doing more to ensure their security.

The best thing the west could do for Jewish security is to bring Israel to heel.

hf22, I apologize for speaking in what you must hear as 'tongues', that is to say figuratively. You are absolutely right that one war aim is to take some of today's Israel and rightly so, for it includes a great deal of land seized in 1967. Another war aim is a real acknowledgement of the nightmares of the Nakba. Another is freedom, which is largely what I was implying in my enigma-like coded language.

>224 RickHarsch:

Ah, OK. Missed the context.

Fair enough, and thanks for clarifying.

Why are we questioning the loyalty of British Muslims? We never ask anyone else (Guardian)

For the same reason that Muslims in Muslim countries would question the loyalty of their Jewish citizens (if they had any).

>227 Doug1943: Good sound bite at a UKIP rally, maybe, but far too simplistic.

Yes... the reality in both cases is more complex. But in both cases, the suspicion is not entirely made up out of whole cloth. That's what makes it complex.

>229 Doug1943: Yes, and apologies if my remark was a bit flippant. But I think the difference is that Britain is a pluralistic democracy, not single-religion nor a single-culture nor single-identity country. The Muslim Briton is as British as I am (perhaps more so as I have emigrated away from those hallowed shores). If he or she commits (or conspires to commit) a crime then of course s/he will face the courts, just as I would, but the very fact that s/he is a Muslim is no more reason to question her or his loyalty than if s/he is an Essex boy/girl or a Geordie or a Methodist or Sikh or black or of Irish extraction. We actually went through the latter during the Troubles - Irishmen were being picked up by the police for no reason other than that they were Irish. It wasn't right and it didn't work when we faced terrorism by Irish extremists and it isn't right and it won't work when we face terrorism by Muslim extremists.

>227 Doug1943: "I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party Muslim faith...."

Right, because Joseph McCarthy should be our model for good citizenship!

So, I think the argument is: a British citizen is just as likely to blow up buses and subways, or travel to Syria to behead aid workers, if he or she is a Methodist, or a Muslim. Hmmm... that doesn't seem right to me, somehow.

Nathaniel: You seem to be putting words in my mouth. On the other hand, there actually were several hundred Americans, mainly members of the Communist Party, who actually were Soviet spies. What McCarthy did was to blur the line between Communists who were spies, Communists who were not spies, Communist sympathyzers, and liberals. And, by the way, I could give you a good argument in defense of the spies, who thought they were spying to create a better world. And what they did was the logical outcome of their political beliefs.

But as for Muslims. the argument here seems to be that our choice is
.... EITHER to treat every Muslim as if he or she were a jihadi-in-waiting,
..... OR to pretend that the people trying to blow up civilian airliners, assassinate Jews and irreverent cartoonists, behead heretics and aid workers, are just a random collection of Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, Buddhists, Jews, Taoists, Unitarians, Greek Orthodox, Yasizidis, and, oh, one or two other obscure religions that I can't remember the names of.

The first approach is wrong on many levels. I do know of a few peoople who come close to having that view, but there aren't many.

The second is laughably absurd. You don't believe it yourself -- no one does.

There are strains of Islam, just as there are strains of liberalism, conservatism Protestantism, even of Communism.

We have to distinguish among the strains, the types, of Islam, and support certain strains and oppose others. ABC.

>232 Doug1943: So, I think the argument is: a British citizen is just as likely to blow up buses and subways, or travel to Syria to behead aid workers, if he or she is a Methodist, or a Muslim. Hmmm... that doesn't seem right to me, somehow.

No, the argument is that if you take a random Muslim UK citizen and a random English UK citizen the Muslim is .000000001% more likely to blow up buses etc. Therefore, it makes little sense to question the Muslim's loyalty without some other indication that they might be radical.

>226 John5918:

The premise is flawed. We DO question the loyalty of various groups at various times, such as when we are basically at war with groups whom with they may have an attachment. There are, basically, various ideals claiming the loyalty of Muslims in the west. Not all are choosing their country of residence.

>233 jjwilson61:

Sadly, support for various Islamic extremists in western countries in Muslim populations is not that small, though not all of that support translates directly into violence. The problem can be overstated, but it is real.

Therefore it should be put in proper perspective - We are not talking about the great majority of Western Muslims. But in a country like Australia, where about 200 people have gone to Syria / Iraq to fight for the Islamic state, we have to be talking looser levels of support in the low tens of thousands maybe? That is a material, if minority, percentage.

Define looser levels of support. If they aren't going to blow themselves up or actually join ISIS what does it matter if they have some level of sympathy with that cause? Jumping from a couple hundred to tens of thousands is an outlandish leap.

>235 jjwilson61:

Looser levels of supporter would be sympathy, and form the population from which killers going to come from and be supported by (i.e. with money, with preaching, with educational environments etc). And support for what IS does is a real problem.

In terms of numbers, 200 is already 0.04% of our Muslim population (of about 500,000 mostly Sunni), which is more than your estimate. When we add those who have been prevented from travelling (about another 100 I think), those who have announced support on social media (another couple of hundred), those who have attended protests supporting like causes (low thousands) and those not dumb enough to announce to our domestic spy agencies that they should be followed, a factor of 50 from those actually out killing people today (to say 10,000) does not seem unreasonable for those with sympathy.

Which makes an estimated percentage of about 2%, which all other things considered still seems reasonable. Which is, in perspective, a small but material minority of the Muslim population.

Now, many go over board based on these kind of best guess numbers. But 2% of a minority group cheering people who have demanded their supporters go out and kill random members of the public - That is materially different to any other minority group we have in Australia.

Accordingly, to suggest a differing response is not required, seems unsupportable.

Needless to say I agree with jjwilson61 in the last few posts. A tiny minority of Irish people still support the 'Real IRA', 'Continuity IRA' and other fringe Irish groups which continue to use violence, so presumably we should continue to be suspicious of all Irish people, just as we were during the Troubles.

>236 hf22: 2% of a minority group cheering people who have demanded their supporters go out and kill random members of the public

Seems to me that a lot more than 2% of the majority group in the USA is cheering people who go out and kill random members of the public using drone strikes.

Random members of the public? Is that whom Obama is killing? News to me. Who elected this insane bloodthirsty monster? And why is he killing random members of the public?

What with everything else that's going on, Britain has another problem: the revival of anti-Semitism among its Christian population!

>238 Doug1943: I think they call it "collateral damage".

>237 John5918:

A tiny minority of Irish people still support the 'Real IRA', 'Continuity IRA' and other fringe Irish groups which continue to use violence

It would seem to require some special measures, not applied to random British Buddhists, yes.

Seems to me that a lot more than 2% of the majority group in the USA is cheering people who go out and kill random members of the public using drone strikes.

And when did President Obama demand those who respect his authority to specifically attack civilian targets qua civilian targets, as did the self declared Caliph? Oh wait, never happened, so not morally equivalent.

But putting that aside, I am sure those who are the target of the drone strike realise they have an American problem, needing a response not applicable to random Buddhists. The same applies in reverse.

Of course, people fail to realize that Muslims are not all of Middle Eastern descent.

But if we want to profile people based on broad groupings, a strong argument could be made for keeping a close eye on white men. They're the ones who traditionally go on shooting rampages or kill their families after all. Maybe a database, with some sort of surveillance? And if they post an article perceived as hostile on Facebook or make comments at work, they should be put on lists and regularly questioned?

Random killings of members of the public (by drone strike). Indeed. If that is news to Doug 'I don't Hate Muslims They Just Fascinate the Dark Side of Me' 1943, he needs to fill a glaring gap in his knowledge of current affairs if he is to be taken seriously (and even then, I certainly couldn't).

RG, as a white male who has never killed someone I take offense at your insinuation that the exception does not prove the rule.

>242 RidgewayGirl:

Of course, people fail to realize that Muslims are not all of Middle Eastern descent.

Perhaps less than might be thought. Chinese Muslim Wiegers get a fair run on the news down here, and some sympathy, in relation to their repression by Chinese authorities.

Also the recent news regarding Mid-East Christians reminds many that Arab does not equal Muslim. We also have reasonably large populations of Mid-East Christian migrants, from Lebanon and Egypt, of which many people are aware.

But if we want to profile people based on broad groupings, a strong argument could be made for keeping a close eye on white men. They're the ones who traditionally go on shooting rampages or kill their families after all. Maybe a database, with some sort of surveillance? And if they post an article perceived as hostile on Facebook or make comments at work, they should be put on lists and regularly questioned?

To be honest, we are more suspicious of men (including whites) in certain contexts. I mean, I am a white man, but given recent history I would never leave my daughter alone with one, whereas I likely would with a woman all other things being equal. I also keep a close eye on white men for potential domestic violence (which has turned out to be justified in at least one case), whereas I don't for women.

Because men are more likely to commit both these crimes, even if most don't, and women can if more rarely.

>244 hf22: To be honest, we are more suspicious of men (including whites) in certain contexts.

Once you adopt group profiling as official policy you have abandoned the principle that people are equal under the law. And you now live in a state where you are guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around. That's the cost you pay for the doubtful security profiling offers you.

>245 southernbooklady:

Does not follow. We base our law enforcement on all types of risk weightings, based on various bits of information. Without it, we would require vastly greater resources to achieve the same results.

For example, I work in tax law (for taxpayers). The Government authorities, for example, treat high net wealth individuals as more likely to push the laws beyond breaking point. That is, not just as more material if they do break the law, but more likely to risk breaking the law# (which, as a matter of fact, they are). And therefore when they allocate their compliance resources, they take this into account.

This does not result in rich people being less equal before the law, nor them being guilty until proven innocent. It just means resources are focused where illegality is most likely to occur - Where the Government gets more bang for its buck.

I see no defence of freedom in bothering Buddhists about their potential terrorism against western targets, nor in conducting tax audits on middle class wage earners.

# Even in quite crude ways, like just lying or omitting to disclose income, rather just with complex schemes cooked up by high-paid lawyers.

It most certainly does follow.

People can be as prejudiced as they like on their own. But the state has to uphold a strict standard of fairness or it fails all of its citizens.

>247 southernbooklady:

Again, why is risk weighting unfair? We should bother more Buddhists about their potential terrorism against western targets, and conduct more tax audits on middle class wage earners, because it would be fair?

That seems patently unfair to me.

Your article indeed supports this - " A black motorist in Ferguson was twice as likely to be searched, according to the report, even though searches of whites turned up drugs and other contraband more often.

The Justice Department’s analysis found that these disparities could not be explained even when correcting for crime rates and demographics. “These disparities occur, at least in part, because Ferguson law enforcement practices are directly shaped and perpetuated by racial bias,” the Justice Department concluded."

That is, their approach was not based on a proper assessment of risk, but a false one built on prejudiced assumptions. Which is admittedly something which needs to be managed with any targeted approach, but I don't think it is unmanageable if it is evidence based.

>248 hf22: I don't think it is unmanageable if it is evidence based

Whether or not it is "evidence based" in Australian tax law I couldn't say, but in many parts of the world it is used disproportionately against minorities with no evidence, as the part of Nicki's link which you quote demonstrates. It hasn't worked nor been "evidence based" in the past, so I'm not sure why you are so confident that it will be manageably "evidence based" with Muslim minorities now, particularly in the current rather hysterical climate.

>248 hf22: Again, why is risk weighting unfair?

Because a civil government based on equality under the law should not sacrifice the rights of its citizens in the name of efficiency. Treating a person differently because they belong to a group is the definition of unequal and unfair.

And frankly, "evidence" (meaning, here, some kind of statistical evidence) doesn't come into it. As a police officer, you should stop a car because the driver is speeding, not because the driver is black. Or Muslim. It doesn't matter how many black/Muslim drivers you've stopped in the past and found trunks full of drugs. Each person deserves to be treated as a person, not a part of a statistic.

Wiegers? Are you German?

And governments are made up of people. And groups of people working together form their own culture, especially in jobs that are given to "us vs. them" thinking. It's also human nature to see people who look like ourselves as individuals and people who don't look like us as representative of a group. It's wrong, and we should all work to mitigate this in our dealings with others, but in any situation, like the Ferguson police force, it's easy to fall prey to this thinking.

So we remember the ethnic heritage or accent of the guy who was rude or committed some crime much more vividly than the dozens of people who looked like us who committed the same, or worse, transgressions. If there was some sort of way that profiling could be done in complete absence of human error, then perhaps a weak argument could be made in its defense, but that's certainly not what's going on. Which is why it is the obligation of a government that pays any lip service toward the equality of its citizens to not do this.

hf22, listen to conversations around you. The ethnicity, religious affiliation or cultural heritage of a person is not mentioned unless it is different from your own. I've never had someone complain about the guy who rear-ended them where they mentioned skin color unless it was different from their own.

I keep getting rear-ended by Weegers.

Of course people are not treated as equal before the law. If that were true, we wouldn't have Affirmative Action.

If Rick Harsch decided to become an aid worker in an area where there was or had recently been ethnic violence, and was given the choice of Sri Lanka (Hindu Tamils and Buddhist Sinhalese), on the one hand, or Iraq/Syria/any-other-Muslim area on the other, which do you think he'd choose?

>254 Doug1943: Affirmative action is designed to try to alleviate the effects of endemic institutional discrimination. Its intention is to bring people back to being equal under the law after a long period when they weren't. To what extent it works is a different story.

As someone who has been an aid worker for much of my life, I would say you are putting forward an unfair and simplistic choice. Every conflict is different and one's reasons for choosing which area one can make the greatest contribution are varied. Me, I just went where I was asked to go, which is how I ended up in Idi Amin's Uganda and then in Islamist Sudan.

What a stupid and meaningless fucking question #254 asks. Rick Harsch, who speaks some Tamil and can read Tamil writing, and has had a lot of experience in Tamil Nadu, and has places to stay in Chennai and further down the coast, and has a friend who recently served at the US embassy in Colombo, would probably ask Where in Iraq/Syria/Turkey/Lebanon/Iran? If my work could coincide in the least to help Kurds advance their cause I would definitely go there. I would love to have the opportunity to write of the devastation initiated by US aggression, see it at first hand, and at the same time perhaps write about the Kurds from WWI or so on, it would be an easy choice.

If Doug1943 had a choice between, say, admitting to a bizarre and persistent need to publicly display his deep prejudice against Islam, and continuing to write inane posts on LT, which do you think he would choose?

No, Rick. It's a very good question. And you have answered it in the only way you could.

John the Fireman: 'collateral damage', yes. The way it is usually put, in reference to earlier events, is: 'The Jews brought it on themselves'.

Rick again: you sound like a well-travelled person, and one who is familiar with Islam. Could you tell me, what is the majority view of Islamic scholars with regard to the proper penalty for apostasy from Islam?

Doug, pal, you sound like an intellectual person who has had a traumatic experience that has resulted in an inability to maintain a single persona, could you tell me what, in your view, a Babtist should eat during Sunday pancake brunch?

Yes, you are not answering this time, because you know the answer.

For those who don't know the answer, I'll tell you: the majority of Islamic scholars believe that the proper penalty for apostasy from Islam is death.

Okay, another question: in your travels, Rick, you have probably been able to get a feel for the view of the average Muslim in the Indian sub-continent. Let's say, Bangladesh and Pakistan (from whence come the great majority of British Muslim immigrants).

In those countries, what do you reckon the percentage is, of Muslims who believe that sharia law should be the law of the land?

And among these people, what do you think the percentage opinion is, about whether stoning should be the penalty for adultery?

I say 'percentage opinion', but it would be silly to expect you or anyone else to give a percentage, so let's just pick among three options:

(1) It's the view of a small minority,
(2) It's the view of a substantial minority, or maybe fifty-fifty,
(3) It's the view of a majority.

What the hell, a fourth option:

(4) It's the view of an overwhelming majority.

Oh, and why not add another question.

Among that group, who want to make sharia the law of the land -- however large it may be -- what is the opinion regarding imposing death on anyone who converts from Islam? That is to say, conforming to the viewpoint of the majority of their scholars? Same choices as above.

Now I realize that it may be unfair to ask you these questions. One can certainly travel in a country, and not get a feel for the views of its citizens.

It's just that you seem to have strong opinions about Islam, so I figure you probably know a lot about it.

But if you have your opinions about Islam without knowing a lot about it, you are excused from answering.

Of course, other experts on Islam are welcome to answer too.

Oh, and let me just add this.

It's a real privilege to take part in debates on LibraryThing. We can all learn from each other.

Soon we'll all learn something, courtesy of me, of if not ignorant old me, of experts on Islam, about Muslim popular opinion.

And I have learned that President Obama launches drone strikes on innocent civilians. Whoa!

I knew I was a racist for not supporting him, because lots of good people on the Left told me I was.

Now I learn that even if I expiated my sin, and supported him, I would just transition from being a racist to being a supporter of cold-blooded mass murder (and murder of people of color at that!)

What's a guy to do???

>257 Doug1943: 'collateral damage', yes. The way it is usually put, in reference to earlier events, is: 'The Jews brought it on themselves'.

I'm really not sure what the Jews have to do with 'collateral damage' caused by US drone strikes in places like Pakistan, nor with any innocent civilians bringing it on themselves.

John : Apologies. I thought you were replying to my link to examples of the rise of anti-Semitism in Britain. You often hear apologists for this stuff saying, ' Well, it's because of Israel'.

Of course they're right.

"There are (differing) strains . . .even of
Communism." (232)

Yes. This began to be evident to Westerners
in the late fifties. That was when Maoist
Communism separated itself from the post-Stalin
Russian brand. We may owe to the
beginnings of this separation in the early fifties,
the fact that Russia stopped short of a
likely World War-fomenting action and
did not give ground support
to China/North Korea against South Korea
and the U. S.-Led (nominally UN) Western
coalition. Albania (which was the only
"Soviet satellite" nation that did not have
a common border with Russia) abruptly
became a nation diplomatically in the
Chinese, not the "Russian" (i.e. Soviet)
orbit, (while remaining unreconciled to
Stalinʻs arch-rival Tito of Yugoslavia.)

Doug1943, in my travels I have found that the vast majority of Moslems think you're an asshole.

So, please answer, since we are playing your game: If Doug1943 had a choice between, say, admitting to a bizarre and persistent need to publicly display his deep prejudice against Islam, and continuing to write inane posts on LT, which do you think he would choose?

>234 hf22:

The premise is flawed. We DO question the loyalty of various groups at various times, such as when we are basically at war with groups whom with they may have an attachment. There are, basically, various ideals claiming the loyalty of Muslims in the west. Not all are choosing their country of residence.

Precisely why we never should have let the papists invade America.

>249 John5918:

but in many parts of the world it is used disproportionately against minorities with no evidence, as the part of Nicki's link which you quote demonstrates.

Sure.

so I'm not sure why you are so confident that it will be manageably "evidence based" with Muslim minorities now, particularly in the current rather hysterical climate.

The evidence is pretty clear - There is no point targeting Buddhists with terrorism investigations. And I really don't see this hysteria. What I see is people getting killed, and everyone else being real careful to try and only target those responsible, as to not create new enemies.

>250 southernbooklady:

Treating a person differently because they belong to a group is the definition of unequal and unfair.

That is simply not true. In Australia, we provide additional Government assistance to indigenous people, because as a group they have been historically disadvantaged and therefore are more at risk. Is that somehow unfair?

As a police officer, you should stop a car because the driver is speeding, not because the driver is black. Or Muslim. It doesn't matter how many black/Muslim drivers you've stopped in the past and found trunks full of drugs. Each person deserves to be treated as a person, not a part of a statistic.

It is just not true. An effective policing strategy tries to target high risk areas. And so they pay more attention to younger drivers (prone to risker behaviours), drivers in hotted up cars (prone to risker behaviours), those at a time / place known for say street racing etc.

Rather than stopping old ladies on their way to bingo, because of some misguided idea of fairness.

>251 RickHarsch:

Australian. It is one of spellings used in the newspapers here for this group. Other spellings are also used.

>252 RidgewayGirl:

It's wrong, and we should all work to mitigate this in our dealings with others, but in any situation, like the Ferguson police force, it's easy to fall prey to this thinking.

I agree, it is an easy mistake to make.

So we remember the ethnic heritage or accent of the guy who was rude or committed some crime much more vividly than the dozens of people who looked like us who committed the same, or worse, transgressions. If there was some sort of way that profiling could be done in complete absence of human error, then perhaps a weak argument could be made in its defense, but that's certainly not what's going on. Which is why it is the obligation of a government that pays any lip service toward the equality of its citizens to not do this.

If it is being done on the basis of anecdote, sure. Or using some basis which can't have a direct link with behaviour (like skin colour or "race"). But we are perfectly able to target higher risk categories with more evidenced based sophistication than that - And all Western Governments do every day as they adopt "big data" methods.

hf22, listen to conversations around you. The ethnicity, religious affiliation or cultural heritage of a person is not mentioned unless it is different from your own. I've never had someone complain about the guy who rear-ended them where they mentioned skin color unless it was different from their own.

Try getting out more. My Asian friends constantly complain about what other Asians do qua being culturally Asian (or relevant subset thereof which is shared). And while Australian don't complain about each other as being white, they do as being Australian (i.e. the drunken bogan knowingly complaining about all the drunken bogans).

>255 John5918:

Affirmative action is designed to try to alleviate the effects of endemic institutional discrimination.

Yeah, it targets help to groups who are perceived to be at highest risk of poor outcomes. You know, precisely the same thing as we are talking about.

>265 Jesse_wiedinmyer:

Precisely why we never should have let the papists invade America.

Well yes, a very similar thing. As was the internment of Japanese and Germans in WWII.

Some of my ancestors were Catholic recusants in England. They happened to be very loyal to the English Crown, but they did have competing claims on their loyalty, and the question was a real one.

Was? I say is.

Okay, Rick doesn't know much about Islam, and two and two make four.

So let's educate him.

Some statistics.

Percentage of Muslims who believe in making Islamic law the law of their country:

Pakistan 84
Bangladesh 82
Palestinian territories 89

Among Muslims who believe in making sharia law the law of the land,
percentage who believe it should apply to non-Muslims:

Pakistan 39
Bangladesh 34
Palestinian territories 44
So you see ... the majority of Muslims in these countries are liberals....sort of.

Among Muslims who believe in making sharia law the law of the land, percentage who believe in stoning as a punishment for adultery:

Pakistan 89
Bangladesh 55
Palestinian territories 84

Among Muslims who believe in making sharia law the law of the land, percentage who believe in the death penalty for converts:

Pakistan 76
Bangladesh 44 Yay, Bangladesh! (But atheist bloggers, beware!)
Palestinian territories 66

Since many of these good folks also believe or say they believe that sharia should NOT apply to non-Muslims, it seems that 'being a Muslim' is not a question of belief, but of ... genes? In any case, you can't get away.

Among Muslims who believe in making sharia law the law of the land, percentage who believe in transgender/lesbian/bisexual/gay rights.....

Just kidding!

>266 hf22: What I see is people getting killed, and everyone else being real careful to try and only target those responsible

Well, surely that's the point. We're supposed to target criminals (ie "those responsible"), not just anyone who is the same race or religion as a known criminal.

RolandPerkins: Yes, the American understanding of Communism was of a monolithic, evil, conspiracy to take over the world.

It's interesting, however, to note that Americans on the spot in China during the 30s and 40s believed, on the whole, that Mao's communists were different. Sometimes this was expressed naively -- they were often called 'so-called communists' or 'agrarian liberals' in dispatches by these Americans, leading to the charge, in the 50s, that they were either naive 'dupes' at best, conscious agents of the Conspiracy at worst. A number of careers were ruined by this.

But the fact was, these Americans were on to something. In its own interests, the American ruling class should have had a very different approach to China. At a bare minimum, they should not have supported the Kuomintang after the war, should have recognized the Communists as the legitimate rulers (of the mainland anyway) after 1949, and should have offered them aid and support in rebuilding China.

It's impossible to say what the outcome of this would have been -- Korea is an important variable here, where the US approach was also self-defeating -- but I reckon that there is a good chance that this approach could have resulted in a much better outcome in China, both for the Chinese and the Americans.

As in our dealings with Islam and Islamism, ignorance is no help. We have to be alert to differences, and to our ability to influence these differences. Real change has to come from within, and may take decades.

>269 John5918:

Unfortunately, the world is not that simple, and that binary is not applicable.

While the great majority of Western Muslims are not potential terrorists (I think I estimated 98% would not be up thread), all of the potential terrorists in question are Muslims (though not of "Middle Eastern appearance" - White bread converts are I think possibly over represented in the ranks of Muslim extremists as compared to Muslims in general, though I have not seen any figures on this).

And because our law enforcement tactics, to allow them to work, are risk weighted and not random, that means we have to do things that single out Muslims in some ways. For example, what mosques are preaching, or how they are being funding, or with whom they are connected with etc becomes a topic of interest to police and security agencies, so that they can identify those which might be encouraging terrorism. What happens at Buddhist temples does not get the same attention.

These actions don't treat the 98% of Muslims as criminals, but they DO place a uneven burden on Muslim communities. They then start complaining about Islamophobia, and that gets uncritically echoed in places like this.

But these uneven burdens are justified, because we just don't have the ability to be much more precise, given we have less than perfect information to work with. So the cross over between your two categories is material, even if ideally we try to minimise it as much as possible.

>268 Doug1943: Citation needed.

>272 RidgewayGirl:

Looks to come from here (http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/).

>266 hf22: If it is being done on the basis of anecdote, sure. Or using some basis which can't have a direct link with behaviour (like skin colour, religion, gender or "race").

fixed that for you. But your phrase "direct link with behaviour" is disingenuous. Our behaviour is an expression of who we are, including the indelible and indivisible parts of us. That is what is respected, and honored, in a free and equal society. Once a government starts to associate "behaviors" with any of those things then it is no longer a free and equal society.

(Indeed, from my female perspective "free and equal" remains a theory, still far from a reality, precisely because of the expectations of behaviors that men have of women).

Really, there is no substantial difference between the government which profiles its Muslim citizens in the name of efficiency and security and a government that profiles its citizens based on IQ and treats them accordingly, narrows or expands their opportunities accordingly, focuses their resources accordingly.

They are both repressive, inegalitarian governments.

Ridgeway Girl: Sorry, I left that link out. HF22 has it right.

I believe the Pewforum polls are a good source of factual knowledge about opinions in various parts of the world. Of course, they are bound to be imperfect: in a place like Pakistan, you might have views which are at variance with Islamic orthodoxy which you wouldn't feel easy expressing to some poll-taker.

I think the Pew people are relatively sophisticated about this, but as with all polls, take the results with a certain number of grains of salt. That said, the general climate of opinion in these places is pretty (depressingly) clear.

However, things change. As Marx put it, the Old Mole of history is grubbing away below the surface. Globalization is going to turn these places upside down and inside out. The most important issue in all of these countries is economic development plus education. Minds are not going to change, much, but generations will. But ... waiting is.

Anyway, here is a cheerful, if improbable, piece of news to counter the depressing poll results above. It's about men campaigning for women's rights in Afghanistan.

Whoever these guys are, they are my nominees for Men of the Year.

hf22: re Wiegers. I just found it funny, but that's transliteration for you. I had never seen anything that didn't start with Uig before.

Doug 1943: Again: If Doug1943 had a choice between, say, admitting to a bizarre and persistent need to publicly display his deep prejudice against Islam, and continuing to write inane posts on LT, which do you think he would choose?

What to know about Islam according to the creepy, obsessive posts of Doug1943:

1. what percentage of its believers think their religion should be the law of their land
2. what percentage of its believers think one particular type of their religion's law should be the law of their land
3. what percentage of its believers think those who convert (which way I cannot be sure, but he probably means those who convert FROM Islam) shoud be killed.

This does not seem a good start for a syllabus for a class on a study of Islam.

Since I actually know something about Islam, and share my knowledge here, Rick gets all worked up.

Why, though, I don't know. He's never explained what he believess we should think of Islam-as-actually-practiced-in-the-world.

I would be interested in his response to the information I posted above.

Does he think it's not true?

Does he think it's true, and a good thing?

Or what?

Now I have a hypothesis, which I will admit from the beginning is probably wrong. Yet it would explain a good deal.

It's this: for several decades now, Lefty men have had to live with feminism, gay liberation, and all the rest of it.

Of course, they say all the correct, right-on things. And yet, there must be more than a few of them who, 'way down deep, are actually annoyed by 'them homos' as Al Sharpton put it, those 'feminists with hairy arms' as a Black rapper phrased it, who actually find transgendered people creepy.

They could never say so, and probably can't even admit it to themselves. On the primitive Right, men can openly express such feelings, at least among themselves.

Not so on the Left. They have to bottle it up.

And ... then along comes militant Islam. Women are put in their place, and some of them are gang-raped and sold into sexual slavery. Homosexuals are thrown from high places. Dissidents are beheaded.

Real Men rule.

You would think this is everything the Left is against. But ... what if you're a frustrated male Leftist, who actually, in his heart of hearts, loathes all this women's and gay lib stuff, and yearns for the old days where burly proletarians raised clenched fists to demand a Socialist future, without all this identity politics crap?

Hmmm... then you or your 'dark side' might, in a perverse sort of way, find militant Islam -- which is 'anti-imperialist' into the bargain! -- quite an attractive thing. All those thrilling snuff videos, with the promise of rape videos to come ....

As I said, it's just a hypothesis, and on the face of it seems too far out to be true.

For analyzing the behavior of large numbers of people, we need to look to material interests -- Marx not Freud -- but for individuals, maybe old Freud had a point when he pointed to people having motives of which they were not aware.

>271 hf22: that means we have to do things that single out Muslims in some ways.

I think we tried that with the Irish during the Troubles. It didn't work then. It did produce a lot of very unpleasant things like internment without trial, trials without juries, extrajudicial executions, torture, malpractice by the security services in the name of "security", etc. It also produced the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven and many other miscarriages of justice where not only were innocent people incarcerated for many years but the actual criminals escaped justice and quite possibly continued killing. We're already seeing some of those same things being tried by the USA - torture, extrajudicial execution by drone strikes with the attendant killing of innocent bystanders ("collateral damage"), detention without trial, etc. I wonder why they think it will work now?

>279 Doug1943: Islam-as-actually-practiced-in-the-world

Well, I spent the best part of 30 years living in Sudan, so I have some idea how Islam is practiced there. Most of the time it looks like a lot of ordinary people getting on with their lives just like anywhere else. The government is Islamist, but in no way represents the people, most of whom follow Sufi sects.

John: That's very interesting. The Pew poll, for some reason, did not cover Sudan.

I think on-the-ground experience in a culture is invaluable in learning about its realities, and thus I would be very interested in hearing your description of daily life there, and, in particular, how -- or if -- society is changing.

Are there young people using the internet, for example? What is the educational situation, especially for girls?

In particular, do you have any particular take on the famous teddy bear incident? (Warning: images of a teddy bear there.)

There seemed to be quite a lot of sentiment for this poor woman's execution. What's the real story?

>274 southernbooklady:

(like skin colour, religion, gender or "race") ... fixed that for you.

You can't conflate things like skin colour and religion. Skin colour means nothing and can not be changed - Which is why racism is so horrid. Religion however can however be changed and directly impacts on someones world view.

Really, there is no substantial difference between the government which profiles its Muslim citizens in the name of efficiency and security and a government that profiles its citizens based on IQ and treats them accordingly, narrows or expands their opportunities accordingly, focuses their resources accordingly.

We DO focus our resources based on tested IQs - Areas of and individuals at higher disadvantage get more resources. And that is neither repressive or inegalitarian.

>280 John5918:

I think we tried that with the Irish during the Troubles. It didn't work then. It did produce a lot of very unpleasant things like internment without trial, trials without juries, extrajudicial executions, torture, malpractice by the security services in the name of "security", etc. It also produced the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven and many other miscarriages of justice where not only were innocent people incarcerated for many years but the actual criminals escaped justice and quite possibly continued killing. We're already seeing some of those same things being tried by the USA - torture, extrajudicial execution by drone strikes with the attendant killing of innocent bystanders ("collateral damage"), detention without trial, etc. I wonder why they think it will work now?

I have not argued for any of that, nor do I think the practices I am arguing for will lead to that.

What I am saying is that any sane person would have investigated, during the Troubles, those most likely to be associated with the various armed groups. Not random Buddhists.

And while that, in some senses, this would place an uneven burden on Catholic and Protestant communities, it does not mean they would not have been equal before the law.

>276 RickHarsch:

Heh, "Wiegers" is a closer spelling to how we say it down here, compared to the "Uig#" versions.

I wonder how Comrade Mao, interrupting his busy work of building up the social infrastructure of China, would have dealt with Muslim separatists?

HF22: I think y'all down there done got it right:

"Uyghur is often pronounced /ˈwiːɡər/ by English speakers, though an acceptable English pronunciation closer to the Uyghur people's pronunciation of it would be /uː.iˈɡʊr/. Several alternate romanizations also appear: Uighur, Uygur, and Uigur. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region provincial government recommends that the generic ethnonym ʊjˈʁʊː, adopted in the early 20th century for this Turkic people, be transcribed as "
'Uyghur' " (From the very interesting Wikipedia article on the subject.)

>271 hf22:

I found some numbers to confirm my impression that "White bread converts are I think possibly over represented in the ranks of Muslim extremists as compared to Muslims in general".

Here (http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/feb/28/lure-caliphate-isis/#http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/feb/28/lure-caliphate-isis/) it indicates that:

In August 2013, it was estimated that 250 French citizens had joined jihadist groups there#, and as many as forty of them (between 15 and 20 percent) were thought to be converts to Islam, a highly disproportionate number given that only 1 percent of Muslims in France are converts.

# There is now estimated to be about 1,000 French nationals who have joined IS and related groups, accordingly to the same article.

>282 hf22: What I am saying is that any sane person would have investigated, during the Troubles, those most likely to be associated with the various armed groups.

Precisely. Those most likely to be associated with armed groups. Not random Irish people.

Not random Buddhists

For some reason this reminds me of the old joke about a chap walking down the street in Belfast who is suddenly dragged into an alleyway by a masked gunman. "Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?" he demands. Thinking quickly, the bloke answers, "I'm a Jew." The gunman responds, "I must be the luckiest Palestinian in Belfast tonight!"

in some senses, this would place an uneven burden on Catholic and Protestant communities, it does not mean they would not have been equal before the law.

Not sure that would be so obvious to those random Irish people who spent 17 years in jail for crimes they didn't commit, nor to the families of the victims who eventually realised that the police had failed to look for the real criminals because they were too busy profiling random Irish people.

JohnTheFireman: My version of that Irish joke:

The poor fellow stopped late at night on a lonely Belfast street, with a .38 barrel pointed at him from the car, is asked in that soft, menacing Northern Irish accent ... "Are ye a Protestant, or a Catholic?"

He thinks desperately of a way to avoid the fifty-fifty roll of the dice, then hits upon the brilliant solution of saying, "Actually, I'm an atheist!"

To which the reply is, "Sure, sure ... but are ye a Protestant atheist, or a Catholic atheist?"

>286 John5918:

Those most likely to be associated with armed groups. Not random Irish people.

Yes, but to catch a criminal, you have to consider a broader range of suspects than just the one you ultimately catch. Which means non-criminals are going to get caught up in the investigations, like they do in every investigation.

And because the armed groups were explicitly tied to certain communities, the individuals in those communities are going to get more of this than those not in them.

Not sure that would be so obvious to those random Irish people who spent 17 years in jail for crimes they didn't commit, nor to the families of the victims who eventually realised that the police had failed to look for the real criminals because they were too busy profiling random Irish people.

I am not suggesting we adopt lazy policing - I am suggesting we adopt (well, already use) smart and risk weighted policing. The risk weighting does not mean you can assume guilt, it just indicates where the best place to look for the guilty is.

Lazy police fitting people up for crimes has hardly limited to targeted ethnic groups after all - It was done to all kinds of relatively powerless people where the police "knew" they did it, but just could not be tossed finding the evidence.

Thought experiment: at a Black church meeting, sheet-wearing hooded gunmen appear and loose off several magazines of high-velocity ammo into the congregation, then leap into a car and flee, throwing their hoods and sheets out the window.

Soon they are in heavy traffic, mainly cars with Black people in them.

They approach a police roadblock, thrown up in response to the shootings. Most cars are being let through, but the occasional random car is stopped and searched.

A young rookie cop sees the car with the Klan members approaching the roadblock. They've hidden their weapons of course ... all there is to see is four sullen young white tatooed males.

"Hey sergeant ... that looks like it could be them! Shall I stop 'em?"

"Hell no, son. That would be racial profiling!. We can only stop every tenth car, and they're not the tenth."

A victory for liberal justice!

>287 Doug1943: Thanks, Doug. Yes, I've also heard that one. Like many of the best jokes, it has a basis in reality, in this case that in many conflicts which are lazily labelled "religious", religion is actually just one of a number of identity markers.

>289 Doug1943: A victory for liberal justice!

No, another victory for lazy policing. In the immediate aftermath of something so serious would they only be stopping every tenth car? Would they not consider that this could be a gang-related attack in which the perpetrators could be black regardless of what disguise they used?

Doug, I haven't forgotten >281 Doug1943:, but I just want to give myself time to do justice to your query.

Finally, back to humour, some of this conversation reminds me of the famous Constable Savage sketch.

>290 John5918:

Would they not consider that this could be a gang-related attack in which the perpetrators could be black regardless of what disguise they used?

They might consider it to be materially less likely, particularly if such disguises did not fit the normal MO of black gang violence, and thus a waste of limited resources in the immediate aftermath.

Because, for example, the police are unlikely to have the resources to search every car for weapons. And thus they need to prioritise.

The initial focus might end up being wrong, in which case you then have to circle back and consider less likely suspects. But a targeted approach, based on best available information, gives them the best chance of catching the right people. On average over time, it will ensure you catch more bad guys.

So why would they only be stopping every tenth car? Because very often you physically just can't stop every car - So you have to reduce the number somehow.

>291 hf22:

Let's test that against a real-life example. A bomb went off in a Birmingham pub and killed a lot of people. In a "targeted approach", the police arrested a group of random Irishmen, working class, with vague Republican sympathies, as they boarded a ferry to Ireland. The police tortured them into making confessions which were actually inconsistent and full of holes, produced some very dodgy forensic evidence, and the Birmingham Six were sent down for life. Seventeen years later, when they were finally cleared, the police had "to circle back and consider less likely suspects", by which time they hadn't a cat in hell's "chance of catching the right people". Far from being praised for making the best use of their "limited resources", the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad was eventually disbanded in disgrace.

If this were an isolated example, your approach might still be valid. Unfortunately it was far from a one-off.

Incidentally the SPG to which Constable Savage was posted was also disbanded, although I believe it has been replaced with something similar with a different name.

>292 John5918:

Sigh. That is not a real life example of a targeted approach#.

As a way of arguing, saying a proposal will not work because something clearly different did not work, is not persuasive.

A targeted approach is merely to assume in the first instance a Republican bomb would likely be set off by those with Republican sympathies, and start from there. Not to end at that point, as in your example.

And not start with, for example, Muslims. Or the French. Or Basque separatists. Or Methodists. Or Communists. Which is basically what your position would require us to do, and which is just nonsense.

I mean, it is just a failure to grasp probabilistic thinking. The fact that your bomb could have, conceivably, been set off by accident by a drunk Australian trying to play a practical joke (always possible), does not mean the mere possibility should be taken into account in the investigation (at least before other more likely options have been ruled out).

You start with the most likely options, which drives your investigative actions, and keep ruling them out until you hit pay dirt. Because otherwise, on average, you are going to waste a lot more time and money, interfere with a lot more innocent peoples lives, and let more criminals get away.

Because of "fair". Except it is not fair, its dumb. As the doctors say, when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras (or the reverse where Zebras are more common).

# It is a real life example of the problems of torture. People will admit to anything, creating a vicious cycle where the torturers end up convincing themselves their worst fantasies actually exist.

>293 hf22: I think you're arguing an ideal-case theoretical scenario. I'm pointing out how it is often interpreted in practice by run-of-the-mill security personnel, often not the sharpest pencils in the bunch, and all with their own prejudices mirroring the prejudices of the society in which they live as well as the institutional culture of their security service. Judges and juries seem to concur.

As I recall, George Orwell, in his Politics and the English Language, after giving us various rules to follow, ends up saying something like, "Better break all of these rules than end up saying anything outright barbarous." (Something like that.)

In other words, use common sense.

A lot of political ideology, including rightist ideology, is an attempt to override common sense.

You can usually silence (and I mean literally stun into silence, or at least into sputtering incoherence) Leftist ideologues, by giving them examples like the thought experiment above.

In another thread, I've invited comment on whether we should use secret police tactics (infiltrators, informants, phone taps, etc) on rightwing groups for whom there is good evidence that they are or will be breeding grounds for violent terrorists. It's interesting to see the Lefties' response, or, rather, inability to respond.

What interests me is: how do these people justify their incoherence to themselves? Don't they feel even a wee bit of discontent at not being able to mount a reasoned argument? Evidently not.

'O Judgment ! Thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason !'

>294 John5918:

You will find torture is not routinely used by run of the mill security personnel in modern Western countries. You will also find modern police services are perfectly able to use, and do use, quite sophisticated methods to deal with crime. Including risk weighting.

All while subject to a reasonably high level of review by various other authorities. It is all not foolproof by any means, particularly in areas which are more out of the way, or receive less funding (we in Australia mostly get these types of issues in more remote areas).

If you think the excesses of the British Police forces decades ago under the pressure of the troubles, or even the problems in overly localised US police forces are inevitable, you need to get out more.

Indeed, a data driven approach to targeting those at high risk of being offenders is precisely one of the best way to eliminate the problem you identify - It takes the matter out of the unthinking discretion of beat cops, where prejudice can so easily creep in, in favour of more objective metrics (not totally objective of course).

>295 Doug1943:

Incoherence has never bothered some of the posters here. Some of them even seem to think it a virtue! Consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds after all.

Yes, it's ironic isn't it?

During the Spanish Civil War, I it was one of the Fascist ideologues who shouted 'Death to Intelligence', ... and, while I think he exaggerated a good deal -- hadn't he read the Angelic Doctor? -- old Nietzsche charged the Christians with celebrating blind faith over reason .

Lenin supposedly said that to be a Bolshevik, you needed 'patience and a sense of irony', and I can see what he was getting at.

Doug, I find your need to put everyone into strictly defined categories troubling. I'm not sure what your exact definitions of "Leftists" and "Rightists" are, but they appear to lack nuance or any understanding of the complexity of an individual's politics, cultural references, religious beliefs, personal philosophy, ethical underpinnings or education. I know it allows you to "debate" fictional straw men, but it's unclear whether your use of these categories is hyperbole or just sloppy thinking. I'd argue for taking the time to look at issues as something more than gotcha moments waged against imaginary foes.

hf22, one does not need to go far back in history to find serious instances of groups who identify as Christians who commit terrible acts. The Lord's Resistance Army is perhaps the easiest example, and has the added bonus of having been defended by certain pundits as an example of Christians being spoken against by the President (Limbaugh being the loudest of these). The use of religion to excuse or enhance terrible acts is not unique to any one religion.

RidgewayGirl: I admit my guilt.

In mitgation, I want to point out that from time to time in my posts, I do take the time to note that there is actually a complex mix of political views on both the Left and the Right. But there doesn't seem to be an available vocabulary to make precise distinctions without going into a long qualifying statement every time. And I don't need to add even more words to my posts.

I happen to share a significant number of attitudes and even political positions with people to the Left of center, as I have indicated in various posts.

But ... for whatever reason, I do tend to argue with views that I characterize as 'hard Left' or 'far Left'. Even there, I would exempt certain varieties of thoughtful Marxists (some of whom are personal friends of decades standing).

Anyway, I absolutely understand and acknowledge that much of what I say doesn't apply to you, or to many other liberals.

Perhaps this is because liberalism, like conservatism, tends to be more an attitude, a personal disposition, than a set of worked-out propositions, whereas the hard Left have an Ideology -- a stupid and simplistic one, but it does have advantages in argument since the hard Lefitist has an instant, clear, simple response available --usually, this response is 'racistracistracistracistracist')

It's just that you folks tend to remain silent when the Far Left get going about how awful and evil the US is, how horrible capitalism is, how lovely and gentle Islam is, how totally racist the vicious police are, etc. So the discussion gets dominated, from your side of the barricades, by people you may have a lot of disagreements with.

I suppose the analogy would be if we had some hardline Zionists or Christian fundamentalists here. I would certainly feel peeved if you took them as spokesmen for the entire right-of-centre spectrum. But then I woudl make it clear that they were not.

The solution is for the thoughtful liberals to speak up if you disagree with the Hard Left.

>296 hf22: You will find torture is not routinely used by run of the mill security personnel in modern Western countries

You will find that torture was routinely used by the modern western run of the mill British security personnel during the Irish "Troubles", to say nothing of the anti-colonial struggles in places such as Kenya. You will find that it was routinely used by the modern western run of the mill South African security personnel until not much more than twenty years ago. You will find it was routinely used by many of the run of the mill security personnel in western-orientated regimes in Latin America and elsewhere supported and trained by the modern west until the end of the Cold War a little over 20 year ago. You will also find that it was used by modern western run of the mill US security personnel until very, very recently.

Yes, and it was routinely used by the Provos, by the Vietnamese communists, by the Black Panthers.

It's a mean old world.

>299 RidgewayGirl:

hf22, one does not need to go far back in history to find serious instances of groups who identify as Christians who commit terrible acts. The Lord's Resistance Army is perhaps the easiest example, and has the added bonus of having been defended by certain pundits as an example of Christians being spoken against by the President (Limbaugh being the loudest of these). The use of religion to excuse or enhance terrible acts is not unique to any one religion.

Huh? When did I say otherwise?

Indeed, I have just been discussing with John a situation when it was precisely Christians of various types doing the killing (i.e. the Irish troubles), and how my proposal would equally apply in those circumstances.

>299 RidgewayGirl:, >300 Doug1943:

I was going to try to make the same point, but I think RidgewayGirl has done it admirably, and Doug has responded graciously.

To be honest, Doug, I'm not sure that the "Hard Left" really exists any more; if it does, it has little influence on anyone. Most of the left-wing icons which I grew up with have passed on (although Tariq Ali's name popped up in the Grauniad the other day) and I don't see any obvious replacements in the anodyne government-by-opinion-poll circus of modern British politics. There is a much more nuanced socialist and green left-of-centre spectrum. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that the "Hard Right" does still exist and appears to have a lot of influence in the most powerful country in the world, whether it be talk show hosts, tea parties, fundamentalist Christians and Zionists, capitalists, militarists or whatever. Perhaps that's why it comes in for so much push-back. And that's not to deny that there are Islamist extremists, but I wouldn't describe them using the "left-right" model; they are certainly not left wing, and indeed I've heard them described as "fascist", which usually has right wing connotations.

>302 Doug1943: I don't think anyone denies that. So are we to hold our democratic western nations to the same standards as those we demonise as terrorists? Then we become as bad as them and they have won. Then it truly does become a mean old world.

And, to refer to the Provos, are we to torture random innocent Irishmen simply because the Provos have done so? "Hey, someone has done something bad and illegal to some innocent people! Let's respond by going out and doing some more bad and illegal things to some other innocent people!"

>300 Doug1943: You do often argue with great nuance, and have interesting things to say. But in an atmosphere in which the media and politicians are working hard to focus on the disagreements in order to create a country where we are clearly divided into us and them, it seems important to push back a little. And yes, while fringe people like Limbaugh, Palin, Maher and Huckabee have the most invested in that simplistic and harmful way of viewing the world (and Huckabee manages to insult everyone with his "bubbles" and "bubbas" characterization of the US), it does seem to be finding traction.

John: Yes, you're right in much of what you say. It's easy for people on the Right to get either hysterical or depressed about the progress of the 'Left', and it's useful to remember that, for example, the Democratic Party's actual economic program puts it to the right of British Conservatives, the strength of hardline Zionists, etc.

I think what gets us worked up is not the immediate situation, but our fear that our future intelligentsia is being corrupted, and that the 'old Liberalism' of, say, John F Kennedy or Harry Truman, has been or is being slowly replaced by something that is much worse.

I could go on at length here, but it's a topic for a different thread.

>301 John5918:

You will find that torture was routinely used by the modern western run of the mill British security personnel during the Irish "Troubles", to say nothing of the anti-colonial struggles in places such as Kenya.

Different times. The signs of times change - Do try to keep up.

You will find that it was routinely used by the modern western run of the mill South African security personnel until not much more than twenty years ago.

You mean the South Africa which was ostracised by the West? Could not even play international sport?

You will find it was routinely used by many of the run of the mill security personnel in western-orientated regimes in Latin America and elsewhere supported and trained by the modern west until the end of the Cold War a little over 20 year ago.

We use stuff overseas which we would never use at home. Still do, if the information which has come out about the way overseas terrorism suspects were treated by Intelligence Agencies. Horrid, but nothing to do with our domestic policing and how it works.

You will also find that it was used by modern western run of the mill US security personnel until very, very recently.

I do not have a detailed appreciation of the US historical record. I certainly know torture was not routine or widespread in Australian law enforcement, even decades ago when there were significant issues of various kinds, most of which have now been substantially (if not entirely) addressed.

Ultimately the point here, regardless of if you choose to recognise it, is that modern policing is generally much improved over the last 50 years. Even over the last 10 or 20 years, despite exceptions.

30 year old examples accordingly often don't help, because we have already added many extra safeguards to fix the issues. Like for example video taping many police actions, which are available to defence lawyers. You just can't get away with a lot of the stuff which used to happen - The level of professionalism and transparency is much increased.

hf22, I'm assuming your comments as to modern policing being professional and transparent as excluding the US?

>309 RidgewayGirl:

To some extent, they do, yes. The smaller local forces there seem, at least from afar, to often be lacking in professionalism (we have larger State based police services here, with no smaller local services).

They also seem to suffer from the same problem the US also has with locally funded school, being that the areas most needing extra funds and skilled staff are precisely the areas which don't get it.

But I am far from an expert in the detail of the US situation.

>281 Doug1943: Doug, you ask about Islam in Sudan, and it has taken me a while to respond because I spend so much of my time writing detailed reports and briefing papers (and indeed recently a book) on it that I find it very difficult to respond in brief. Also, just about anything I say really needs reams of background and contextual information to qualify it. There is no simple answer. But here are a few impressions which I give in all sincerity, not to try and make a point or to argue.

If I were to choose one word to characterise Sudan, it would be hospitality. I have never come across such genuine and generous hospitality anywhere else in the world.

Since 1989 Sudan has been governed by a military dictatorship using a form of Islam as its ideology. That makes it a very uncomfortable environment; it's a police state with all the problems of totalitarian regimes anywhere. But the majority of ordinary Sudanese Muslims with whom I rubbed shoulders, shared Christian and Muslim feasts, ate and drank together, travelled and worked together, follow a gentler and more tolerant brand of Sufi Islam. There has long been tension between the "lawyers" and the "holy men", which is how they describe the fundamentalists and the Sufi leaders. Sudan's rulers should not be assumed to be representative of its people.

One can't speak of Sudanese holy men without mentioning Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. He was the leader of a very progressive Muslim group called the Republican Brotherhood. He was executed in 1985 by a previous military dictator who had recently embraced fundamentalist Islam as his ideology in a desperate attempt to stay in power (having already worked his way through communism, socialism, the western world and the southern Sudanese). The regime fell through intifada (popular uprising) shortly after the execution.

Sudan has been wracked by civil wars for most of the time since it became independent in 1956, first and longest in its non-Muslim southern part (which became independent in 2011 as South Sudan and now faces its own new civil war), more recently in other (Muslim) parts of Sudan including Darfur, Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile and the east. The roots of the conflicts are complex, and many atrocities have been committed by all parties to the conflict, Arab and African, Muslim and non-Muslim, (northern) Sudanese and South Sudanese.

The situation of women in Sudan is also complex. Many girls do go to school, although not as many as boys, and there has been a women's university for longer than in many countries. Culture allows women a great deal more freedom than the ideological regime does, and more than in many Islamic states.

Young people in the cities now have access to the internet, but I'm not sure whether this is playing into a radicalisation dynamic or the opposite. University students used to be a prime target for the Muslim Brothers, the National Islamic Front and other fundamentalist groups, but the internet has also been a useful tool for opposing the regime. It gets shut down by the government during protests, and the security service has set up its own "Cyber Jihad" to try to disrupt, manipulate and destroy protest movements.

The Muhammad teddy bear thing was an aberration that took many people by surprise. It emphatically was not just about the name and the teddy bear. The school was a long-established private school founded by Anglican missionaries, and there was some sort of power struggle going on over it. I can't remember all the details now, but I think the incident was manufactured by people with vested interests. Once it happened it was easy to find a rent-a-mob to make dramatic headlines. The government was embarrassed and far from wanting to behead or imprison the naive young foreign woman they got her out of the country as soon as possible and the whole thing died a rapid death. I had completely forgotten about it until you mentioned it; it certainly doesn't feature as a significant event for those who try to analyse and understand Sudanese politics.

Hope that helps.

Mind you John, just watching the news about the recent arrests of Muslims in Russia over the killing of Boris Nemtsov, which pretty well comes under your prism here.

But modern Russia is a long way from the West in its police and justice systems.

>288 hf22: Yes, but to catch a criminal, you have to consider a broader range of suspects than just the one you ultimately catch. Which means non-criminals are going to get caught up in the investigations, like they do in every investigation.

In US there's a popular bumper sticker among a certain faction of people: "Kill 'em all and let God sort it out."

>308 hf22: Different times. The signs of times change - Do try to keep up.

My apologies. We are clearly using the word "modern" in different senses. You appear to mean "now", "today". I'm referring to events which have happened in the lifetimes of many of us who are part of this conversation, and mostly within my own lifetime. I know personally some of the people involved. And the US use of torture (or waterboarding, as they like to call it) is well known to be very recent, ie post-9/11 (although who knows for how long they were practising and honing its use in the School of the Americas and other overseas training programmes?)

You mean the South Africa which was ostracised by the West? Could not even play international sport?

The South Africa which was very reluctantly ostracised by the west but which remained part of the western side in the Cold War and in African anti-colonial struggles.

We use stuff overseas which we would never use at home

Is that supposed to make it more acceptable? I was not referring only to domestic policing. I was talking about the behaviour of run-of-the-mill modern western security personnel wherever they are.

>313 southernbooklady:

I have only heard it on the Simpsons.

>314 John5918:

We are clearly using the word "modern" in different senses.

I mean it as in relevant to current circumstances. Not no longer applicable circumstances, like colonial Kenya.

The South Africa which was very reluctantly ostracised by the west

We ostracised it and helped destroy the white government, but it does not count somehow?

I was not referring only to domestic policing.

Domestic policing and overseas black operations are very different. They are done by very different organisations, with different goals, different cultures, different expectations, different systems of oversight etc etc etc.

What the CIA does tells you nothing about how domestic police operate and vice versa. Confusing them is only confusing you.

>315 hf22: I've seen it on t-shirts. Worn in public. Usually with a camouflage type pattern and a jaunty weapon of some type on the front.

>316 hf22: What the CIA does tells you nothing about how domestic police operate and vice versa

That's a distinction which you are making which is irrelevant to the people actually being targeted, rightly or wrongly, whether domestically or overseas, by run of the mill modern western security personnel.

Incidentally the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad was in fact part of the domestic police force and had nothing to do with Britain's equivalent of the CIA.

Edited to add:

We ostracised it and helped destroy the white government, but it does not count somehow?

It's not about whether it "counts". You were speaking about the modern west and South Africa was part of the modern west, even if it was disapproved of. Much of the modern west disapproves of many things in the USA, or of Australia's immigration policies, but that doesn't mean they are not part of the modern west.

>316 hf22: It appears as though you are ring fencing and readjusting the parameters in order for your point to still be valid. So we can only consider the behavior of domestic police forces when evaluating the behaviors of groups/governments? How does ISIS fit into these parameters? Does the behaviors of governments/groups on foreign soil or against non-citizens just not count for everyone? Or only for specific groups/governments?

>315 hf22: I have only heard it on the Simpsons.

Sadly, it's a real thing. I could walk down to the local Army Surplus store and buy one.

>314 John5918: And the US use of torture (or waterboarding, as they like to call it) is well known to be very recent, ie post-9/11 (although who knows for how long they were practising and honing its use in the School of the Americas and other overseas training programmes?

And not just on our ill-defined "enemy combatants." Intimidation, kidnapping, armed invasions are all in the US police repertoire now ("now" meaning within the last couple years).

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/04/chicago-police-masked-raid-homan-...

"Swatting" is an actual term whereby a person can trick emergency services--(including SWAT teams and bomb squads) into invading a person's home based on a false report. It's a crime to do so, but the right of the police to act on such information is nearly absolute.

And @hf22 is correct that most of the egregious examples in the US news these days demonstrate the police's lack of "professionalism." Or what I would call their inability to defuse, rather than escalate, a volatile situation. But one of the reasons for that is they are dealing with an atmosphere where "keeping the peace" and "upholding the law" are now often considered in conflict. And they have no discretion or confidence when it comes to weighing the actual rights of citizens against the possibility of malfeasance.

In short, they feel it is better to presume guilt, rather than presume innocence, and act accordingly. But in doing so they betray the spirit of the law they are sworn to uphold.

The truth is, every culture has its biases and prejudices. And every enforcement agency, every legislature, is made up of people who naturally carry those biases and prejudices. That's why, if we value principles of individual liberty at all, we have to be fifty times as diligent in guarding against our own prejudices when we create and enforce the law. There is a reason we portray justice as blind.

>320 southernbooklady: Thanks, Nicki. There's been quite a lot in the Grauniad recently about that Homan Square place in Chicago - a domestic police force.

>318 John5918:, >319 RidgewayGirl:

No, I am not trying to defend modern Western Governments, or the various things they do wrong. And I never tried. It is you who are trying to move the goalposts by making that an issue.

I am trying to argue how policing can best be conducting, and pointing to actual existing domestic police forces to show they do have the capability and safeguards in place to make my proposal practical, such that the proposal itself can be shown to be practical.

Obviously, overseas spy agencies operating with much less safeguards are going to have material abuses, but it does not speak to if my proposal can be practically implemented in domestic police services without unacceptable levels of abuse.

All I need to show is that my proposal can be done in practice, with good outcomes. I don't need to show that every western Government agency is without fault.

Policing without proper safeguards results in abuses, regardless of the approach being adopted in theory. Surely that is common ground.

On a more general note, I've just remembered this (probably spoof) sign which appeared on the London Underground in 2005 after that poor South American chap had been killed by the (domestic) police because he made the mistake of running on the tube, wearing a big coat and looking a bit foreign. He wasn't even Muslim, Arab or Irish.

>318 John5918:

Being ostracised precisely makes it not part of the modern west. Neither Australia or the US have been ostracised, and so are not comparable.

>323 John5918: It was part of the west vis a vis the Cold War and the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, which were two of the dominant paradigms of that very recent era. But clearly you and I disagree on this so let's not further derail the thread with semantics.

>320 southernbooklady:

The number of guns in private hands in the US must play a big part in this. The perceived risks to their own lives has to make it harder.

In Australia, which much lower levels of gun ownership, police are nowhere near as intense.

>325 John5918:

Again, you are confusing things again. The anti-colonial struggles were all over by the time SA was ostracised, and plenty of non-western governments were on-side in the Cold War.

Being ostracised is precisely placing someone or something outside the group - It comes from how they voted for exile in Ancient Athens.

>327 hf22: The Namibian independence war lasted until 1988 and Namibia only became independent in 1990. South Africans were fighting in Angola, and were involved in the struggles in Mozambique and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, as well as attacking independent countries such as Botswana. These struggles which continued after independence can broadly be classed as continuations of the anti-colonial, or perhaps more accurately neo-colonial, conflict.

I suppose it depends on exactly when you define the beginning of "ostracisation". If you mean official implementation of divestment and sanctions, that's probably the 1980s, but the popular ostracisation goes back at least to the '70s and indeed earlier - the Sharpeville massacre, which was a spark, was in 1960.

John: Thanks very much for that run-down on Sudan, a country which is only in the news when something horrible is happening there.

It would also be interesting to know -- I'm not asking you to do this, I'm going to do it myself -- what the long-term trends are, in terms of economic growth (and consequent social development, including the trends in education).

I'm reminded of Pakistan, where there are plenty of awful things happening and no lack of awful people, but whose other side seldom comes out. Thus the series 'Homeland' portrayed Islamabad as a really frightening place, when it is in fact not. Here is a good link on that.

But much more informative about the important social realities below the surface events, is this article , which focuses on the things which really matter.

It would be an oversimplification to simply say that in much of the Third World, what is happening is the result of the advance of capitalism against feudal-style backwardness, and the reaction that provokes from privileged groups. But in essence, I think that's what's going on.

>329 Doug1943: Off the top of my head I can tell you a little about the economy. Oil is a major percentage of national revenue, and there's potential for gold and other minerals. They also export gum arabic, livestock (mainly to countries just across the Red Sea), and cotton, grain and sugar from large irrigated schemes in the Nile valley, although I think these agricultural schemes are doing less well these days. They also have a thriving little arms industry - see Military Industrial Corporation - but the ongoing civil wars are having a negative effect on the economy.

If you're going to do some research, I should warn you that just about all statistics on Sudan and South Sudan are complete fiction.

Doug 1943 writes: 'It's just that you folks tend to remain silent when the Far Left get going about how awful and evil the US is, how horrible capitalism is, how lovely and gentle Islam is, how totally racist the vicious police are, etc.'
I don't know anyone who holds all those view, much less so clumsily.

Yes. Every one of these views is wrong. They need not be expressed all together, although you can often find at least three out of four bundled up. And as for clumsy expression ... I think my phrasing of these views is about in the middle of crudity, that is, I have seen them expressed in a much more unnuanced way, and also more subtly. But this is just quibbling over vocabulary.

For instance, I think you believe that the US is the most expansionist nation in history, and that the mere locating of an American company in a third world nation is an act of aggression?

'And as for clumsy expression ... I think my phrasing of these views is about in the middle of crudity, that is, I have seen them expressed in a much more unnuanced way, and also more subtly. But this is just quibbling over vocabulary.'

Actually it is more than vocabulary, it has to do with meaning. As for your excuse for crude expression--I have seen monkeys shit in their hands and fling it at people, but I have never done it myself.

>332 Doug1943: you believe that the US is the most expansionist nation in history, and that the mere locating of an American company in a third world nation is an act of aggression?

"Expansionism" is an attribute of capitalism, isn't it?

'For instance, I think you believe that the US is the most expansionist nation in history, and that the mere locating of an American company in a third world nation is an act of aggression?'

The US is indeed the most expansionist nation in history (Braudel referred to Venice's "agile and dangerous capitalism", which applies there as well.)

The mere locating of an American company in a third world country as an act of aggression? No, though quite obviously most US companies in the third world are complicit in acts of aggression, knowing beneficiaries.

>328 John5918:

I would say ostracisation was a reality by say the mid 1970s, by which time the European colonial powers had withdrawn, as their direct colonial holdings in Africa all ended in the 50's and 60's. And the timeline is important, as ostracisation could not have happened if we were say still trying to retain Kenya as a colonial territory.

South African's own wars against say Namibia's independence from South Africa (or say the last gasps of Ian Smith's Rhodesia), can therefore be distinguished from fighting by say the British in Kenya, as the later were on their own behalf rather than a part of any broader western supported thing (which could be said about earlier conflicts).

>336 hf22: the European colonial powers had withdrawn, as their direct colonial holdings in Africa all ended in the 50's and 60's

The Portuguese colonies were still fighting for independence until Mozambique and Angola became independent in 1975. Zimbabwe's independence came only in 1980 after Britain had acquiesced in Smith's illegal takeover in 1964. And western governments, western commercial interests and west-east Cold War dynamics still played a huge role in the neo-colonial struggles which followed independence for much of Africa - DRC/Zaire would be a particularly good (or bad) example. I think you're splitting hairs here and failing to see the big picture.

>331 RickHarsch:

I tend to agree with Rick that these are caricatures of the actual views of "the Left", if such a monolith exists. I think all of us, whether left or right, should criticise abuses when we see them, whether in the USA or elsewhere.

Doug, the "how lovely and gentle Islam is" is not a fair representation of most people's views. Everybody recognises the violence and injustice in some manifestations of Islam; it's getting blanket wall-to-wall media coverage and there are any number of politicians and pressure groups making sure we don't forget. What some other people are doing, however, is just trying to point out that this is not representative of all manifestations of Islam, and that treating Islam as monolithic is neither fair nor helpful.

>334 southernbooklady:

I had also thought that expansionism was a basic attribute of capitalism.

>337 John5918:

Ah, I had forgotten the Portuguese hold outs. My bad.

Though I seem to remember we were on side with the struggle for majority rule in Zimbabwe? At least, I have heard people rueing their earlier support for the current President, given what later happened.

But ultimately, by the mid 1970's, we HAD pushed South Africa out of the "club" of western nations. So it is very hard to argue its norms, including in policing, would reflect that of the "club", because they are been pushed out precisely for transgressing those norms.

Not, of course, that Western policing norms were great in the mid 1970s. But at that date South Africa (and Rhodesia) have got to be considered their own thing.

>338 John5918:

Doug, the "how lovely and gentle Islam is" is not a fair representation of most people's views. Everybody recognises the violence and injustice in some manifestations of Islam; it's getting blanket wall-to-wall media coverage and there are any number of politicians and pressure groups making sure we don't forget. What some other people are doing, however, is just trying to point out that this is not representative of all manifestations of Islam, and that treating Islam as monolithic is neither fair nor helpful.

I think the public debate is somewhat more sophisticated then this discussion has allowed. The question being debated is not "all Muslims are evil" or "how lovely and gentle Islam is", but "what percentage of the Muslim population, at home and abroad, perceives us as an enemy to be eliminated" and "given that, what do we do".

To the first question the "right" suspects it is a higher percentage, and the "left" a lower, and the real answer remains unknown (but is important, as when you get chosen as an enemy, you can't get out of it by choosing not to make them an enemy). And to the second question there are many opinions.

I had also thought that expansionism was a basic attribute of capitalism.

I think there is some playing with definitions going here. Territorial expansionism, which seems to be suggested by the term, is not. Trade and economic expansion however is, and despite some cross over, that is a different thing.

Qui Bene Distinguit, Bene Docet.

John: I do have this powerful, regrettable tendency to be sarcastic and to compress what are always a variety of wrong (in my opinion) views into their least-defensible form. It's actually self-defeating, because it diverts serious discussion into quarrels about trivialities.

I think we ought to have a sober discussion of Islam, with people having lived in Muslim countries taking the lead.

Just for the record, I personally believe that Muslims in Muslim countries will evolve over several generations towards tolerance/indifference just as Christians have, and for the same reasons -- it's an inevitable product of modernity, and capitalism is bringing modernity -- but that it's not going to be easy to get there.

I also believe that the problem of Islam has several aspects, related but distinct: Muslim immigrants to non-Muslim nations, where we have to be vigilant but where normal social forces will operate over time (relevant article here (warning: link to Catholic/evangelical magazine); Muslims in Muslim nations; Al Queda/ISIS/other extremists.

Then of course there's the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. A two-state solution based on Israel's 1967 borders with some land-swaps, real compensation for the people whose property was stolen, a full Israel apology for what the Europeans forced them to do. I won't hold my breath for this but I think it's the only way.

I think special attention needs to be paid to Iran, for a lot of reasons which I won't elaborate on here. I am all in favor of President Obama's negotiations, and if I had any say in it, we would move to open full diplomatic relations as soon as possible, with as much economic and cultural intercourse as we could manage. Here is some relevant background. (Warning: link to a right-wing site.)

I think Muslims in most Muslim countries (most of them) are going to have to go through an 'Islamist' government phase, where this is not already the case. There is an enormous difference between 'Islamism' which tries to impose itself via something approaching democracy and the rule of law, and otherwise. Thus the overthrow of Morsi in Egypt was especially tragic, and the role of the US -- under Obama! -- in endorsing it was doubly so. (My gripe against Obama is not that he has a bad, liberal, foreign policy, but that he doesn't care about foreign policy.) Useful links here and
here and
here and
here . (Warning: all links to a right-wing former CIA agent.)

To strengthen the 'non-violent' Islamists, and secular Muslims, as opposed to the violent ones, we should voluntarily refrain from actions that just pointlessly and gratuitously insult the sacred symbols of their religion, which only strengthens the fundamentalists.

This is just a pragmatic view. Instead of publishing cartoons of Mohammed, publish illustrated elementary school readers in Arabic, Pushtun, etc. casually, among other illustrations, showing girls as chemists and doctors and airline pilots.

In other words ... while defending ourselves militarily where a military threat exists, press forward on the front of modernity. Support education, trade, cultural exchanges, and also, in Muslim (and all other) countries, keep trying to advance democracy, liberty of conscience, science, free enterprise, equal rights, the rule of law: the things which made the West grow strong.

Anyway, that's what I think. What do others think?

>340 Doug1943: Doug, you're starting to sound quite, er, left wing...

John: That, as Pravda used to say, is not accidental.

I spent many years as a communist activist, and in fact, everything I have written above is, or at least is compatible with, basic Marxism. (And in fact, my only real disagreement today with Marxism is the Marxist view that the next stage of social evolution is that all the means of production should be in the hands of the state, something I think that life itself has disproved. But I am sure that Marx himself would share that view, since he was no fool.)

But that's just me. Please note that every single link above is to a conservative source.

‘This is not who we are’ is American for: ‘This is sort of who we are’ (Guardian)

that may have been who we were, he seemed to be saying, but that’s not who we are...

this is a catchy way... to address the gap between American ideals and American realities. But used over and over again, in response to depressingly similar situations, it begins to sound merely self-exculpatory, if not completely delusional. It’s like handing over your CV at a job interview and saying: “This is not who I am, by the way.”

hf22?

>343 John5918:

Yes? Was there a question in that collection of musing?

I thought we had all already established and accepted that a material number of US police forces appear to have extremely undesirable cultures and operating practices.

Or is the question regarding the suggestions that Chicago police operated their own "CIA-style black sites"? Because if so, my answer is that I know nothing of the detail of those suggestions, but it does suggest a very broken system of governance which would allow domestic police to avoid normal oversight in that way.

The failures of oversight which occur with spy agencies are much more understandable - It is HARD to apply openness and transparency with them. No such excuses with domestic police - It is much easier and many modern police services are subject to extensive levels of openness and transparency which would make such things unthinkable.

Sounds like something out of Batman's Gotham City.

>344 hf22: I think my point was that you appeared to be suggesting that bad things may have happened in the past in the western world's domestic security services, but we have made corrections so that these things are now "unthinkable". It’s like handing over your CV at a job interview and saying: “This is not who I am, by the way.” This author suggests that it is not the case. As he says, there's a gap between ideals and reality, and I would suggest that that gap exists not only in the USA.

Incidentally, in one of your earlier posts you suggested that we tend to do bad things overseas but not domestically. It's worth remembering that Northern Ireland is part of the domestic United Kingdom, just as Chicago is part of the domestic USA.

>345 John5918:

I think my point was that you appeared to be suggesting that bad things may have happened in the past in the western world's domestic security services, but we have made corrections so that these things are now "unthinkable".

No. Just no.

My point is that there is evidence that we can run police services without these abuses. Not that every police service is run to that standard.

That is, where we put in place safeguards, the risks of these abuses can be largely eliminated. But where the safeguards are not applied or enforced, as seems to be the case in Chicago, abuses are precisely what we should expect.

It's worth remembering that Northern Ireland is part of the domestic United Kingdom, just as Chicago is part of the domestic USA.

Well, that was the question, wasn't it. If it was to be part of the UK or not. And thus it was a little more like the circumstances with spy agencies.

The failures in Chicago, if true, are extensive and horrid. But far from inevitable, if the tools we now have available are used.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Which is why you want a free press, pluralism, separation of powers, federalism, etc.

And anyone who thinks US, UK, or Australian policing is bad -- and I can recite personal horror stories from my own or friends' experience in all three countries -- should try putting it on a spectrum along with Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, Columbia, Cuba, Nigeria, etc etc.

>347 Doug1943: Doug, I don't think it'a got anything to do with being on a spectrum. Wrong is wrong, abuse is abuse; even if some wrong and some abuse is not as bad as other wrong and other abuse, it must still be named and challenged. "Our police don't torture innocent people half as badly as the police in Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, Columbia, Cuba, Nigeria, etc do..." doesn't really stand up to scrutiny.

I've lived under military dictators, including Idi Amin, and plenty of people I know have been tortured and killed, so I have some idea what "bad" can mean. But western countries tend to claim the high moral ground, they are supposed to be pluralistic democracies with a free press and separation of powers, they are not police states, so we expect better of them.

And, to go back to hf22's point that we used to be bad but now we have "extensive levels of openness and transparency which would make such things unthinkable", well, they're not unthinkable because they are still happening, or have happened so recently that it's too soon to tell whether "the tools we now have available" are actually being used and are sustainably successful.

Yes, I don't think we are arguing about anything substantial here. HF22 and I are probably more disinclined to trust state power than most other posters here.

I can't speak for him, but what gets me a teeny bit bothered, is when I see people who seem to focus only on the liberal democracies' failings. It's sort of like meeting people who say, 'Sure, the Nazis were bad, but, hey, there was anti-Semitism in the US too."

And -- the fact is, we have to have police powers.

>349 Doug1943: Thanks, Doug. Since I have spent much of the last 30-odd years focusing on the failings of an Islamist dictatorship, I think I can exclude myself from the list of those who only focus on the failings of the liberal democracies! But nevertheless I will not ignore their failings, particularly those of my own native country, the UK.

It seems to me that far from not trusting state power, hf22 is trusting it - "where we put in place safeguards, the risks of these abuses can be largely eliminated"; "extensive levels of openness and transparency which would make such things unthinkable"; "if the tools we now have available are used" - while at the same time admitting that "the safeguards are not applied or enforced" all the time. But no doubt he will set me right in due course.

>347 Doug1943: of course, that things are worse elsewhere is no excuse for tolerating abuses of power here.

The thing about law enforcement in the US, anyway, is that they are all by and large good people doing what they believe is the right thing. They don't see themselves as corrupt. they don't regard the increasingly extreme measures they adopt as an abuse of power, but rather as the necessary measures that must be adopted to keep the peace, to ensure public safety in an increasingly volatile and potentially violent society.

@hf22 suggests that the excesses of the Chicago PD are a result of not implementing proper safeguards against abuse of power. But the truth is the laws that set out the rights of citizens is the first and most important safeguard, and the only one we should fear to break. Because once we do, any act can be justified in the name of safety and security.

If that happens, all we've really done is conceded the safety and security of all citizens in favor of the safety and security of only some of them.

>348 John5918:

Doug, I don't think it'a got anything to do with being on a spectrum. Wrong is wrong, abuse is abuse; even if some wrong and some abuse is not as bad as other wrong and other abuse, it must still be named and challenged. "Our police don't torture innocent people half as badly as the police in Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, Columbia, Cuba, Nigeria, etc do..." doesn't really stand up to scrutiny.

No one here is pretending anyone is perfect. Therefore saying but but but there was an ABUSE, is like saying the sun rises in the morning. We know it, we don't dispute it, and we are not making apologies for it.

The west did not dominate the whole world by being morally perfect - It did and does lots of nasty things.

But western countries tend to claim the high moral ground, they are supposed to be pluralistic democracies with a free press and separation of powers, they are not police states, so we expect better of them.

And they are, relatively speaking, better in some regards. Which is the point, but that is not to say they are perfect. Just relatively better.

And, to go back to hf22's point that we used to be bad but now we have "extensive levels of openness and transparency which would make such things unthinkable", well, they're not unthinkable because they are still happening, or have happened so recently that it's too soon to tell whether "the tools we now have available" are actually being used and are sustainably successful.

Ok, this is how ridiculous your argument is.

I argue that, where new practices are implemented in example A, we see benefit B.

Your response is to point to examples C and D, where the new practices were not implemented, either because the example pre-exists the innovation (i.e. Kenya in the 1950s! or the Troubles in the 1970s) or has not adopted it (i.e. many US police departments). You then posit benefit B cannot possibly exist, because it is not seen in example C and D.

But that on basis, we could never conclude a new approach provides benefits, because the benefits don't exist where the new approach has not been tried. It is just nuts.

>349 Doug1943:

HF22 and I are probably more disinclined to trust state power than most other posters here.

Agreed.

>350 John5918:

It seems to me that far from not trusting state power, hf22 is trusting it

The lack of trust is why the extensive safeguards are required. And indeed why its activities need to be limited to only those which no other body can do satisfactorily.

Because it can't be trusted - It needs to be watched like a hawk.

But I can't see privatised police being a great idea, nor do I think setting state police up to fail is desirable. So what we do is put in place safeguards - Openness, transparency, independent review, professional cultures, good internal enforcement of policies and procedures, strong internal affairs unit, strong independent corruption bodies, strong judicial review, strong media attention, no trusting police to do the right thing etc etc etc.

And when they are in place, the evidence is we get better results, and the abuses we used to get are mostly eliminated. And where they are not in place, as you would expect, the abuses continue.

347 'Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'

Cliches inhibit thought, absolutely.

Yes, clearly that old dimwit Lord Acton needed to take lessons in political understanding from you.

In the latest volume (number four!) of his "epic" life of Lyndon Johnson, "The Passage of Power," Robert Caro notes that power is inevitable, i. e., SOMEONE (some "entity") HAS to have it, and the REAL "measure" is WHAT one DOES with power...