Afghanistan

[Dill]

(08-27-2021, 12:55 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Yes, much like comparisons to Nazis they serve no valid purpose other than to tie the equated groups together.

Yeah, for the exact same reason.  Duh. 

Yes, I'm sure left wingers would have zero issue being compared to Stalin, Pol Pot of Mao Zedong.  I'm sure there would be zero complaints and they'd all say, "it's a valid academic exercise frequently engaged in by social scientists."  Seriously, how's the view from that ivory tower?

No, your long winded pontifications coupled with your refusal to address points that you know damage your position is what bores me. 

LOL you don't know much about "the Ivory tower." Plenty of leftists include Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong in analysis of authoritarian regimes, though they might sort right wing propganda from their research. Websites like marxism.org have even compiled non-academic bibliographies of such. Leftists that don't are, like you, engaged in something quite other than social science research, the pursuit of knowedge. 

And I tried to address your alleged "points that [I] know damage my positon." Even though that was a side issue.

You said I tried to refute "excesses of Islam."

I asked you to cite at least one of these refutations.

You said that's not possible because I never address them at all.

Then I asked you which is it--do I refute the excesses or Islam or never address them at all?

You told me to "reread" that either/or, as if that revealed some secret you could not directly state, and still without
you having substantiated your "refutation" claim with a single citation.

That's not much different than saying comparisons "refute themselves" or repeating conclusions as reasons. 

You simply keep re-positioning yourself so you don't have to make any substative response to points I have made.

Even when I call your "refusal-to-address-points-that-damage-my-position" bluff the ruse continues. 

And you still have not addressed my response to the terms of debate you set yourself: If an international community of social scientists and historians thinks the value in researching authoritarian regimes is in application of  lessons learned to contemporary democracies, and they don't think comparisons are "always inflammatory" or "tie equated groups," why do YOU think that? Why are YOU right and they are wrong?   

I'll put forward a hypothesis: you don't understand the ethos, methods, and goals of social science. You convert all political discussion to demogoguery, angling and positioning to condemn or to avoid condemnation. That's why terms like "human scum" seem useful to you whereas they don't to social scientists. When confronted with the fact that political scientists and journalists DO use authoritarian comparisons productively, you can only repeat "comparisons to Nazis they serve no valid purpose other than to tie the equated groups together." You actually can't see the value of public discussion of authoritarian tendencies as a means of curbing them. And perhaps you cannot recognize the authoritarian tendencies as authoritarian. If you could, why wouldn't a caller-outer like yourself want to call them out?