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 | Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 19:32:17 mst
Comment ID: #1 (link)
Name: Francisco Gutierrez
E-mail: francisco(at)alumni.caltech.edu
URL: http://franciscogutierrez.blogspot.com
Diana,
Your post got me thinking about the why of that fallacy, and I think it has to do with assuming a normal distribution. When you have a single variable that can be moved in both directions by a large number of independent factors, the probability distribution ends up looking like a gaussian, with most of the results in the "moderate" center, and a few "extremes" in the tails. However, a philosophy, culture, religion, and sense of life are influenced by many factors that are NOT independent, so the normal distribution assumption is wrong. In this case we have an unstable center, where people fall to either one side or the other, so the distribution is bimodal. I think that in matters of "right" vs. "left" you can still model the factors as somewhat independent because the ideologies are not internally consistent, and people pick and choose between issues, so the assumption of a large "moderate" center tends to work when looked at in terms of left and right. However, in the matter of egoism vs. altruism, or reason vs. faith, both philosophical outlooks are internally self-consistent, so the factors are not independent, and the more you move in one direction the more likely you are to be exposed to ideas that move you further in that direction. |
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| Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 19:45:12 mst
Comment ID: #2 (link)
Name: Myrhaf
URL: http://myrhaf.blogspot.com
I have brief comments on this post at:
http://myrhaf.blogspot.com/2006/02/religious-consistency.html |
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| Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 20:07:48 mst
Comment ID: #3 (link)
Name: JR
Whether the majority of Muslims in the Middle East are "fundamentalists," I don't pretend to know. HOwever, the purest of Islamic regimes (Saudia Arabia) is friendly to the US. Also, Pakistan is buddies with us. Even a few years ago Iran was making friendly gestures toward the US.
So, in spite of our one-sided support for socialist Israel and our invasion of Iraq, we still have quite a few friends.
It seems to me that the one big mistake the US could make is acting agressively against Iran or Syria. |
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| Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 20:18:31 mst
Comment ID: #4 (link)
Name: JR
Incidentally, the claim that Cyril or even Christian monks were responsible for Hypatia's death is rather debatable --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia |
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| Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 20:43:43 mst
Comment ID: #5 (link)
Name: Zev
E-mail: shekfu(at)hotmail.com
Yes, I've been thinking lately that the idea of a "moderate" muslim could not have been brought up by Muslims. It is interesting to think that a word that is used by so many people so often actually does not refer to anything in reality. It could not be a concept induced from observation. It is a stolen concept. Moderation exists, and it refers to some people, but some make the mistake of applying it to all people. |
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| Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 21:14:03 mst
Comment ID: #6 (link)
Name: Adam
JR, could you be more delusional? "We still have quite a few friends." By friends you mean Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran(?!). Let me take Iran. In the preamble to their constituion, the Islamic revolutionaries wrote: "In establishing and equipping the defence forces of the country, it shall be taken into consideration that faith and ideology are the basis and criterion.Therefore, the Army of the Islamic Republic and the Revolutionary Guard Corps will be formed in conformity with the above objective, and will be responsible not only for protecting and safeguarding the frontiers but also for the ideological mission, that is, Jihad(20) For God's sake and struggle for promoting the rule of God's law in the world [And prepare ye against them what force and companies of horse ye can, to make the enemies of God, your enemies, and others besides them, in dread thereof.(21)]" They also wrote that their constitution was formed "in the hope that this century may witness the world Government of the oppressed people and the defeat of their oppressors." This is why Iran is the most dangerous country in the world right now. Their stated mission is to form a world Islamic state and to destroy all others. Iran is the hope for all muslims in the Middle East. It is the only country with the means and the ideological ammunition to acheive the goal of 99% of the imams in 99% of the mosques in the world. This war cannot be about counting on supposed friends (such as the monarchy in Saudi Arabia or a dictator in Pakistan). Nor can it be about the differences between Gaussian, normal, and bi-modal probabilty curves. (!) Moderate Muslims have no say in this war. We must not waste time, resources, and American lives trying to show these savages the benefits of freedom. |
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| Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 22:55:28 mst
Comment ID: #7 (link)
Name: JR
Adam,
This is what I said about Iran: "Even a few years ago Iran was making friendly gestures toward the US." Obviously I think the situation has changed.
And Saudi Arabi and Pakistan are our allies, although I wish the former wasn't spreading militant Islam around the world.
But if we start using nukes against Iran as some Objectivists suggest, the entire Moslem world will hate us. |
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| Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 23:13:37 mst
Comment ID: #8 (link)
Name: RT
Francisco,
The reason any ideological middle-ground is inherently unstable has more to do with Aristotle's law of excluded middle. Contradictory ideas are always inherently unstable, whether in a person or in a culture. It's possible for many people to have muddled, contradictory, mixed-up views on complex political/philosophical subjects. But such people are the intellectual ballast, not the prime movers, in a culture. The 'extremists' are the prime movers, the ones who consistently push for the logical, consistent conclusions of the elements of their ideology that are shared (implicitly or explicitly) by the 'middle'.
Right now there are three 'extremes' (i.e. fully consistent ideologies) in American culture: socialism, theocratic fascism, and Objectivism. Each one of these advocates elements that reverberate positively with the American public--which holds a contradictory muddle of all three (with Objectivism representing the 'common sense'(i.e. rational)/pro-liberty/pro-this-world element in the American spirit). Each of these 'extremes' is calling on the American public to focus on that part of their muddled beliefs that they share with that 'extreme', and to jettison their (muddled) contradictory ideas, to become fully consistent. Eventually, only one side will win. |
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| Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 23:18:46 mst
Comment ID: #9 (link)
Name: RT
JR: "But if we start using nukes against Iran as some Objectivists suggest, the entire Moslem world will hate us."
Oh my God no!! That would be so radically different from the current situation...
(And isn't that the most important issue here, to worry about whether the Moslems 'like' us or not?) |
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| Saturday, February 11, 2006 at 23:28:08 mst
Comment ID: #10 (link)
Name: Adam
Amen RT. JR, you wrote: "And Saudi Arabi and Pakistan are our allies, although I wish the former wasn't spreading militant Islam around the world." Do you realize the contradiction in that statement? True friends don't try to kill each other.
Why are you so worried about whether a culture of barbarians likes you? Your altruism will get us all killed. Do you not realize that we arenot dealing with rational, reason oriented people? Your very existence is an affront to Allah and must be silenced. What you must eventually come to understand is that these people will only like you when you become a Muslim or are murdered by them. |
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| Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 0:37:01 mst
Comment ID: #11 (link)
Name: JR
Unlike most people in the blogosphere, I don't pretend to have any great knowledge of Islam. However, there are "moderate Muslims." Take the nation of Bangladesh for example.
I could care less whether Moslems like us, as long as they don't attack us. And the surest way to radicalize Moslems is to nuke Iran. Hitler was not a rational person, but Rand (I gather) opposed US involvment in WW II.
A foreign policy of non-interventionism (which I support) isn't based on altruism. It's called minding your own business. |
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| Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 1:00:29 mst
Comment ID: #12 (link)
Name: RT
JR: "I could care less whether Moslems like us, as long as they don't attack us."
Exactly. And a nuke on Iran (if it's determined that is militarily the best option) would be the best possible lesson to the Muslim world of what will happen to anyone who attacks us. (And if they don't learn on the first lesson, it might take 2 or 3 additional lessons, but soon enough they will learn.) |
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| Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 3:32:15 mst
Comment ID: #13 (link)
Name: Tom Rexton
E-mail: tjrexton(at)hotmail.com
JR,
"I could care less whether Moslems like us, as long as they don't attack us. And the surest way to radicalize Moslems is to nuke Iran."
Oh no! Don't provoke them into attacking us! You're buying into the fallacy that the Islamofascists attack us because the US provoked them by intervening in their affairs, and that therefore they would leave us alone if we left them alone. The terrorists are quite open about their motivations and reasons for attacking America and the West in general. Their speeches, manifestos and actions are higly explicit. Why presume that they have ulterior motives contrary to their open envy and hatred of Western civilization? |
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| Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 3:35:49 mst
Comment ID: #14 (link)
Name: James Hancock
E-mail: james(at)darwinconsulting.com
< 40% of the oil the US uses comes from the Middle East any longer. Do deals with Russia and Canada (i.e. don't piss us off with softwood lumber terrifs), cut your subsidies for coal and oil fired power stations and wind and solar become equal in cost per Kilowatt hour.
Pull out of the middle east entirely. With a message:
You're free to do whatever you want. But if you kill us, we will revisit it on your 1000 fold. (All these worlds are yours, except Europa... God I'm a geek!)
And then wait.
It won't take long before you have a reason to drop the nuke. And you'll be justified too. These people live off of violence. If you take away their reason for violence, they'll do it anyhow and not even the most "culturally sensitive and accepting" person will be able to defend them. (and who the hell cares anyhow if they do)
The Muslim "extermists" can't help themselves. They can't leave the West alone. They can't stand greatness (comparitively) and thus want to destroy it. It has nothing to do with anything other than jealousy. And if we screw off and let them go back to being nomads because we don't need their oil anymore, the only thing that could possibly prevent them from attacking us again is that they won't be able to find a plane to fly them to the United States. |
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| Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 4:00:28 mst
Comment ID: #15 (link)
Name: Robert Speirs
E-mail: robspe(at)myway.com
URL: http://conundrum.blogspot.com
An important post. There is no "clash of civilizations". Islam is the opposite of a civilization, it is the institution of barbarism. It institutionalizes tyranny and absolute subjectivism. There could be nothing less civilized. As is being proven in Iraq, the only solution to the mixture of Islam with political power is military force implementing the separation of religion and the state. Ataturk used the same force to give Turkey its relatively free government. I'm not depressed. I'm glad that at least some people are now seeing the true face of the death cult that is Islam. |
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| Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 4:23:21 mst
Comment ID: #16 (link)
Name: Spoudaios
E-mail: spoudaios(at)spoudaios.com
URL: http://www.spoudaios.com
"And the surest way to radicalize Moslems is to nuke Iran."
The primary reason violence is being used is because they believe they will succeed. They believe they can beat the U.S. and achieve their goals through violence.
Massive retaliatory force by our country would destroy the illusion that they could ever be successful that way.
By the way, it's the same as for the danish cartoons. If everyone ignored, condemned or retaliated for the violence I don't think it would happen. Instead, our country is encouraging them by showing that we only listen to groups that use violence. |
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| Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 6:37:36 mst
Comment ID: #17 (link)
Name: RadCap
Rampant emotionalism is what we are seeing in the Moslems. This was made explicitly apparent in a threat voiced to the Japanese:
" Attacks like the ones on the Danish embassies in Syria and Lebanon last weekend could take place in Japan if the media here insult Muslims by reprinting cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, Egyptian Ambassador to Japan Hisham Badr warned Friday.
“This is not a question of freedom of expression... This is a question of blaspheme of religion,” Badr said in an interview with The Japan Times. “It touches a very raw nerve” with Muslims worldwide.
Badr praised both Tokyo for urging media not to reprint the cartoons and news organizations for complying.
...“Reprinting (the images) is a provocation,” the ambassador said. “It is as if they are saying ‘we don’t care about your feelings.’”"
--
And that is exactly right. We dont give a damm about your feelings. Nor should we. Your emotions are not our concern. We deal with reason and reality - not your whims. |
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| Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 6:53:25 mst
Comment ID: #18 (link)
Name: RadCap
Oh - and to do my part in 'radicalizing' the Islamists (LOL), here is a wonderful link via LGF. As he says:
"Like the hamster dance, but with 100% more blasphemy" :)
http://tinyurl.com/d9rxm |
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| Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 8:55:52 mst
Comment ID: #19 (link)
Name: Kurt Colville
Adam: "We must not waste time, resources, and American lives trying to show these savages the benefits of freedom."
A-friggin'-men! |
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| Monday, February 13, 2006 at 0:16:20 mst
Comment ID: #20 (link)
Name: Orson Olson
E-mail: ullr20021(at)yahoo.com
Yaron Brook (above) states: "President Bush has staked America's security on his policy of spreading 'democracy'--i.e., unlimited majority rule--throughout the Middle East. But the democratic victory by the terrorist group Hamas is further proof that the President's strategy is suicidal." The enemy is the Islamist extremists, who simply must be defeated, he says.
Would that it were all so simple. It is not. First, as Martin Kramer, Robert Spencer, and others observe, the convenient distinction between Muslim extremists and "moderates" is a myth. There is no way to distinguish one from the other except by what they do; doctrinally, there is no difference. (See Kamer here <http://dems.tribe.net/thread/b3f231ec-616d-4ef8-98e4-b21f5705610f>) And second, today’s moderate can morph into tomorrow’s extremist and vice versa. Thus, if a simple-minded policy of “defeating the enemy” isn’t possible, is one of democracy promotion really so abject as to be unreservedly “suicidal?” Hardly.
Consider the logical implications of Brook’s letter. It leads to advocating genocide: simply wipe out the one billion Muslims, otherwise destined to become two billion during this century. The West could do this, of course - we have the power. But how is this moral? How can such “self-defense” be rationalized? Simply declaring them all guilty by association as our enemies is mere sophistry, not justice. Thus, by a process of elimination, we arrive at what can actually be done about Islam’s Jihadist problem, and that’s nudge their cultural and political evolution along.
The fact is that only Muslims can reform Islam. This requires patience. After all, the “existential threat” many neocons call Islamist extremism is not tantamount to the one facing civilization in WWI. Islam has no industrial power-base like Germany, Italy, or Imperial Japan had then. Nor will Islam have one in our lifetimes. Historically, their borrowings from the West or East (eg, the Zero was an Indian invention) have always been selective and limited to applied military arts. There is no reason to believe this symbiosis will change in the future. Thus, what is asymmetric warfare today with Islam will remain asymmetric tomorrow, and therefore the threat of terrorism will continue unchanged - unless something is done.
I'm far from thinking Bush's policy is “suicidal.” The problem is that it is too gradualist for American democracy to sustain. But our dilemma is that there is no live alternative to gradualism. Hence, we are in for a very long long war against terror.
Now I'm alternately frustrated and depressed! |
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| Monday, February 13, 2006 at 0:27:05 mst
Comment ID: #21 (link)
Name: The Man
1. The election of Hamas put to rest any notion I had about a silent, "moderate" Muslim majority. Any Muslim who does not speak up against the protests, the election, and the violence is complicit in it, just as Germans were under the Nazi regime. The burden is now (and, in retrospect, always should have been) on the Muslim community to convince the rest of the world that it does not support terrorism.
2. The blatant contradiction of attacking free speech while implicitly counting on it offends me to the core, demonstrates the total rejection of reason, and further confirms the hypothesis that that part of the world is not ready for freedom.
3. Observe the insistence that any idea, no matter how irrational, silly, demeaning, or evil, is to be respected. The Danish incident is a case in point. If the cartoonist mocks the idea of legions of virgins awaiting dead terrorists, the western press and governments step up to defend the religion. In other words, the irrational is defended at the expense of the rational (an open, public discussion over the fear of Islamic retributions). It also relates to my second point: while the Muslims use free speech to attack free speech it, the west is shutting down the press without protest.
On the intellectual front, the Muslims are winning without having to fire a shot. We need to find the courage to stand up for western civilization as proper, right, and moral... if it isn't already too late. |
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| Monday, February 13, 2006 at 0:40:58 mst
Comment ID: #22 (link)
Name: Adam
Orson, you wrote that defeating the enemy is "advocating genocide." This is a false statement. "Genocide" is defined as "the systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group." If we think of Nazi Germany as an example of genocide then what Yaron is advocating is nothing like that. The Nazi _systematically_ exterminated Jews because they were Jews. The end was not the security of Germany but the wiping out of Jews. Yaron is advocating the defense of America and freedom and has come to the conclusion that the governments that are trying to kill Americans should be destroyed. I could not agree more.
You also wrote: "by a process of elimination, we arrive at what can actually be done about Islam’s Jihadist problem, and that’s nudge their cultural and political evolution along." So, your plan of action is just to stand by and watch Iran make a nuclear weapon and explode it in Israel, and then in Europe, and then in America? (Isn't that suicidal?) There is no "cultural and political evolution" happening! The political structures in the Middle East (except for Israel :) ) will never become what the West is by the simple fact that Islam won't allow it. There will never be an Aquinas coming out of Meccah.
It's no wonder why you're frustrated and depressed. |
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| Saturday, February 18, 2006 at 2:33:50 mst
Comment ID: #23 (link)
Name: Seerak
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
There could be such a creature as the moderate Muslim. They could even be the majority. But it wouldn't matter; the "extremists" are the ideological core of the movement.
Christianity was not tamed by its "moderates", but by an opposing philosophical force outside of itself: the secular Enlightenment. I have every reason to believe that it is the specter of that phenomenon which Islam fearsthe most from the West, for what was done to Christianity could be done to them too. But, as every year passes, they are becoming more brazen. They are beginning to discover that those particular battlements are largely unmanned.
Of course, one has to expect that the Christians have been noticing that too.
All this makes me wonder: Is Objectivism moving fast enough? |
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