03-20-2021, 12:27 PM
(03-19-2021, 06:36 PM)Dill Wrote: Something to fear at some level perhaps? State, city, neighborhood?
I don't know. To speak definitively on this I'd have to actually engage in studies to either prove or debunk the claim. Do you know the answer?
Quote:Yow! This looks like a very useful analogy. For both our records.
Hurah!
Quote:Tucker Carlson says that MSM journalists reporting on the beliefs and justifications given by the insurrectionists seek to brand all Trump supporters as rioters. The difficulty Trump and many Republican Senators and Representatives had denouncing them lends credence to such a view, but those reporters would still be crazy wrong to generalize from part to whole like that. I'm not aware of any MSM journalist who would actually make that claim. It's more a Fox thing; how people reason when they want something to be true.
OK, so let's completely concede your MSM point, which we obviously shouldn't do without being thorough, but still. Are you saying there are no politicians who have made this analogy? Are you saying none of the posters here have made this analogy?
Quote:So I reject the fallacy of composition here, when constructing wholes from statistical parts. Like good MSM journalists, I have always disaggregated Trump voters into groups (often overlapping) which may have very different interests and susceptibility to conspiracy theories and insurrection--the alt-right, Evangelicals, traditional Republicans, the military, police, Reagan Dems in the Rust Belt, and white people who own country clubs, casinos, and oil companies. QAnon supporters appear in all these groups as well. Some of these seem over-represented among the insurrectionists so far arrested, like the alt-right and QAnon supporters, if we are going by those with the most visibility so far, though the distribution is surprisingly broad.
Forgive me, but this seems to be a back door way of saying exactly what you're claiming no one is saying.
Quote:One more point to secure here, regarding your 2,000 number. It is thanks to the FBI and the Dept. of Homeland Security that we are inundated with warnings domestic terrorism threatened by white supremacy. The number of groups and hate incidents dramatically increased under Trump. 1/6 was the culmination of that growth so far. Their warnings are surely based upon a larger number--their concerns encompassing incidents like the attempt to capture and execute the governor of Michigan last year and the crowds of protestors who sought to disrupt the vote count in Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. A composite number of white supremacist group membership would be considerably higher than 2,000. High estimate of the Pro-Western Proud Boys is 6,000 according to Wikipedia, and the current Klan is between 3-5,000. If we include supporters, sympathizers and other marginals, I don't see why the number white supremacists couldn't approach 100,000, though not all would be inclined to violence.
OK, let's roll with the 100k comparison. If nothing else it makes for easy math.
Quote:So turning to the 100,000 ISIS members (all violent) part of the world's billion+ Muslims--what do they say about Islam? I have an idea how Tucker would answer this question, but I'd say--not much.
Tucker Carlson's opinion is not germane to our discussion, nor would I care what it is.
Quote:Not just because they have been denounced as un-Islamic by every Muslim-majority nation in the world. In the first place, their emergence was rather unique--created by the mismanaged and unnecessary war in Iraq, out of an ideology developed in another mismanaged war in Afghanistan decades earlier. Like our own white supremacist militants, the original group were individuals suffering from acute identity crises, a sense of diminished future. ISIS itself emerged in the cauldron of Sunni demotion and dispossession which followed the ousting of Saddam. Their outreach was to identity-stressed and dispossessed Muslims wherever they can find them. Only a trickle responded, though. The inter-organizational competitions intensified their extremism as did their initial success in acquiring territory in the power vacuum of two broken states, making them an international pariah beyond the pale even of North Korea.
How they were able to come into being is important, but it's not nearly as important as the number of people who flocked to join it afterwards. Interestingly enough, you appear to be laying the blame on the, admitted shit show, war and subsequent managing of Iraq. However, you don't mention the Syrian civil war that really spawned the movement. Unless your assertion is that Assad and his policies had nothing to do with ISIS coming into existence and everything would have been fine there if Saddam was still in power in Iraq.
Quote:I'd say most Muslims around the world interpreted their faith in Islam such that it prevented them joining or approving of ISIS, just as in the U.S. the Christian beliefs of many Republicans would prevent them from killing a Capitol cop or a governor, or breaking the law in general. Listening to an insurrectionist pray and thank God in the House of Representatives didn't raise my fear level of world-wide Christianity.
Most, absolutely. So we appear to be on the same page. That the Capitol rioters are no more representative of white people or conservatives in the US than ISIS is for Muslims.
Quote:So, hard to get to ISIS just from Islam; easy to get there, if one compares the phenomenon to other insurgencies arising from radical destruction of immediate social environment--e.g., the Tamil Tigers, Khmer Rouge, Shining Path, the Sierra Leone Civil War, Nauxalites in India. Nazi Germany might figure here too, though their seizure of power was not an insurgency. I am thinking of circumstances that produced both a particularly ruthless political machine and the opportunities it needed to assume control of a state (though that was not a necessary outcome).
Actually Islam is absolutely essential to ISIS's existence. While it may express a twisted and militant understanding of the religion, the religion itself is required for someone to interpret it in the first place. In addition there are widely followed, virulent sects, within it, such as Wahabism. As we have discussed on many instances Saudi Arabia provides a near perfect petri dish for radical interpretations of Islam, as decades worth of events have shown. Also, just like the Bible, there are passage in the Quran and the Hadith that absolutely lend themselves to the kind of aggressive militancy expressed, at it's most vile, by ISIS. So I don't think you can completely divorce Islam from the conduct of ISIS as readily as you would like.
The good thing here is that we both agree that throwing a label on a large group of people due to the actions of individuals is wrong.
