08-24-2021, 03:51 PM
(08-24-2021, 03:28 PM)Dill Wrote: 1. I "stopped" at Albania because you only asked me to list "a" country. And I still don't know what you mean by "types." The only countries where women and "homosexuals" are treated with near equality are the advanced industrial nations.
Since you have conceded you cannot name another Muslim majority country in which those two groups are not oppressed we'll move on.
Quote:Now you want me to "name a Muslim majority country in which you could publish a picture of Muhamed and not have to fear for your safety." Then compare that to "reactions to Maplethorpe." What I am "asking myself" is what is what point are you driving at. I am willing to grant that there are some Muslim groups who attack people for creating images of Mohammad. They do it in Western as well as "Muslim-majority" countries. I'm "uncomfortable" because I don't see any point in following this track beyond trying to use the actions of a small minority to accuse the entire religion. This just looks to me like more ethnocentric moral evaluation, with no attempt to understand why people behave the way they do--beyond blaming one religion. This doesn't refute my analogy to US groups who turn to religion to make sense of cultural challenges.
Of course you know the point, hence your doing everything you can to avoid actually addressing my questions. I blame Islam as it is currently practiced for this in the same way I blame Christianity as it was practiced when it was used to justify the slave trade and maltreatment of humans viewed as "lesser". The type of behavior and rules that I've asked about can only exist in those nations because there aren't a sufficient number of people standing up and saying "no, this is not right". Islam is used to justify this oppression, and violence in the case of drawing Muhammed, in the exact same way Christianity was used to justify the slave trade. So, as long as Islam is allowed to be used in this fashion by a sizeable percentage of those who follow it I will continue to rightfully criticize it. Your problem is you see valid criticism as a vicious attack. Probably because actually acknowledging the valid criticism would be very painful for you.
Quote:2. Of course "comparisons are fine." Because it matters very much "if some people share some facets of another ideology" and those facets happen to be values, behaviors, and policies critical to development of authoritarian control. Discussion of such is important to the maintenance of liberal democracy--especially now. And ruling out comparisons/analogies to authoritarian regimes as invalid in principle is a kind of censorship, an anxious censorship at that because of what such analogies might reveal. So that is why I defend in principle the right to make social scientific/historical comparisons between the 3rd Reich and current US adminstrations or another. Doing that is not just another way of calling people "Nazis"--at least for people operating social scientific discourse for social scientific purposes.
Exactly, you engage in Nazi comparisons and you've done so on several occasions.
Quote:It is the use of terms like "human scum" that is "inherently inflammatory, not perfectly "apt" comparisons between groups who react to cultural challenges by strengthening religious indentity.
Sorry, if you don't think Isis fighters were human scum then you've got far worse problems than can ever be addressed in this forum. Josef Mengele was human scum and a person who sets prisoners on fire and engages in wholesale rape is as well.
Quote:3. I don't recall whether you have apologized for the ISIS remark. But I'd rather that you just stop doing that sort of thing altogether. I am not a supporter of ANTIFA or MS-13 either. I "throw it back at you" when you accuse me of "painting people I dislike as analogous to the worst groups" etc. I.e. when you are accusing me of doing what you do, when that is what I never do. A cross-cultural comparison of reactions to modernity is not just another way of using the Taliban to transfer your "scum" lable to some group of Americans.
Odd then that you find the need to make the comparison at all. What you are apparently deliberately ignoring is that comparisons of any kind to such extreme groups always, I repeat always, has the effect of making the groups analogous, of linking them together. Whether you do this deliberately, as I strongly suspect, or out of extreme ignorance, the effect is the same.
Quote:Again, the question is whether you can distinguish between analysis offered in the social scientific mode, which doesn't assign lables like "scum" and "animals" to human beings, or political demogoguery which frequently does.
Quote:If you cannot make that distinction, then of course, analogies involving authoritarian political behaviors will just seem another kind of accusation--"inherently inflammatory."
It's literally amazing to me the knots you have to tie yourself into to accept this as "logic". You have an issue with labeling people as "scum" but have zero issue comparing Americans to the Taliban or Nazis. I suppose I should be grateful in a way, your counter arguments on this topic only reinforce my points.
