10-15-2021, 02:45 AM
(10-14-2021, 11:26 PM)Dill Wrote: That was on the "Afghanistan" thread. And I answered--"Albania" (163). And when you said I "stopped" at Albania I added another, Bosnia Herzegovina (#218). Anyone checking the thread will see substantive responses subsequent to the issue (#217, 223, 250). Yet you claim I "ran" from question answered in depth, with at least five posts. E.g.,ere's what I told you in post #218:
The issue between us is not whether there are some Muslim groups who practice religiously inflected violence/oppression.
The issue is whether this should be used to characterize all or most practicing Muslims in the world, while you block social-scientific analogies between the US groups and authoritarian regimes like the Taliban or Nazis on the claim such comparison is "inherently inflammatory." And at at time when general lack of knowledge about such societies is hindering public assessment of "what went wrong" in Afghanistan.
If you believe, as I do not, 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," then what is the goal of such deliberate linkage between "radical" and "moderate" groups in YOUR arguments?
"Valid criticism" doesn't address its targets as "human scum" and always has some goal beyond naming and blaming. So yes, your criticisms of "radical Islam" are indeed "viscious attack." They show no effort to go beyond selective media representations of Islam to understand the social, economic and historical determinants of current Islamic politics, let alone the differing demographic and religious composition of Muslim majority countries, comically assumed to be constant in their "oppression" of various groups, an oppression grounded in religion.
http://thebengalsboard.com/Thread-Afghanistan?page=11&highlight=albania
It hardly makes sense to dodge substantive responses to your posts and then claim I'm the one who ran.
One thing interesting here is that I support my claims about what you say with actual quotations and links to source.
I am all for defining threats to democracy, provided there is some means of defining the threats and assessing risk systematically and rationally based on the kind of evidence which can pass muster in social science and legal venues. Just as I am against scapegoating minorities--which is NOT what the post OpEd was doing.
What I "decry" in your claim that Islam is an ideology and a threat to Western Civilization is your attempt to generalize from the actions of a few (e.g. ISIS) to the whole, a billion plus Muslims. I am saying yours is an inaccurate representation of Islam, and that the vast majority of Muslims are NOT a threat to Western Civilization because of their religion. Taking your claim seriously has led both to silliness, like anti-sharia laws in Oklahoma and PA, and to tragedy, like Mosque shootings.
When I endorse an OpEd describing how the GOP is currently passing legislation to throw challenged elections to state legislatures, I am not generalizing the actions of a few to a whole; I am criticizing activities undertaken by many party operatives in a number of states, in a party-wide, coordinated strategy with MASS VOTER SUPPORT. The risk to democracy here is real. And the point of making such critiques is not to blame Republicans for just being bad. It is to raise public awareness and devise some means of practically countering the threat. Such counters will not likely lead to legislation banning "Christian" law or church shootings because they don't follow the logic of scapegoating false threats.
To conclude from this that I'm saying its bad to "decry" Muslims but ok to "decry" Republicans is crude and superficial reduction which completely misses how risk and whole are assessed in each case.
So there is no contradiction on my part; but there is on yours if you are still hyping a non-existent Muslim threat to Western Civ, in full knowledge of how that creates risks for the millions of law abiding Muslims who pose no such threat, while warning of a highly unlikely "preemptive" strike against people who are actually working against democracy in US statehouses, with the endorsement of masses of voters.
Really quick, first off, are you asserting that scapegoating is fine as long as the targets are not "minorities?" Because you're poorly worded post certainly seems to intimate that.
Resuming, ISIS and the Taliban are "a few"? They're easily tens of millions of people. Are you really asserting that there are far more GOP "radicals" then there are Muslim "extremists"?
The answer, I'm sure, will be as entertaining as it is evasive. Feel free to take four or five stabs at it before finally leaving a post up, btw.
