You didn’t think it was possible until I told you it happened, and then quoted myself back to you in bold so you’d actually read it when I told you it happened. (Let’s quibble about the difference between not thinking something is possible and not thinking something is enough of a possibility to warrant any investigation, it’s very important and it is super offensive to imply that someone felt one way when they really felt the other)
As for my “martyr act” (I never said that about myself, just like you never said that you would discount evidence that showed something you didn’t like - you are free to imply things about other people while no one can imply things about you), when you openly dismiss someone’s point without finding out what it is, that may be construed as a declaration that their thoughts are not worth your time. I understand that may offend you, since I thought you meant something that you know for a fact can’t be logically deduced from the what you said. Woe is you!
Good luck with that! Maybe you should quote yourself in the reply and bold the part you want him to read.
I know they’re not interchangeable terms (why do you think I do?), but both Islam and Capitalism are ideologies (one is a religious ideology, the other an economic one), and people seem to have problems talking about ideologies influencing behavior. If they just have problems about talking about religious ideologies and not any other kind of ideology, then I’d like to see an explanation as to why this distinction is justified (and I can’t think of a good reason aside from it being an emotional response).
God damn it. Just when I think we’ve found something we agree on, you instead go and hypothesize some people who would disagree.
You surely do buddy. Any way you can.
In the context of this discussion “salafist terrorism” still suffers from the same faults as “islamic terrorism”, but this discussion is boring the shit out of me and “salafist terrorism” is a good working term that I like because it doesn’t discriminate against 1.5 billion human beings.
It’s great that you bring up capitalism though. The problem with capitalist ideology is that it’s used as a justification (tax breaks for the rich will be great for the economy!) that masks the underlying reason (rich people don’t want to pay taxes) that motivates a course of action. Yeah man, we’re such hypocrites.
You think you’re clever, and we’re all just too dumb to see it. You think we’re misrepresenting your point of view, but that’s not it. The things that you say have implications that you haven’t fully thought through, and we’re all trying to point out those implications to you, and you’re trying to stand by what you said without standing by the things that are implied by what you said. But if you don’t want to stand by those implications, you’re going to have to back down from what you said in the first place.
Not that I’d expect you to agree with that. You strike me as the sort of person who argues not to learn or even to teach, but to validate your own ego. I’m sorry it’s not going how you’d like.
No, that’s not accurate either. I made a probabilistic decision to not fully read a very long post because from what I did actually read of it it didn’t seem likely to change my mind. I wasn’t discounting the possibility of that happening, just performing a cost/benefit analysis (a terrible one as it has turned out!).
ok, I accept this. but it was a very long post, this isn’t my job here!
look, this argument is getting tedious (my fault as much as yours, apologies to everyone unfortunate enough to be still reading!), can we put a pin in it until I actually read your original post?
Your response to 1, however, is problematic and needs clarification to make sure we’re on the same page. By ‘political aims and motives’ it is meant that political change is intended and that is what the terrorist act is for. We’ll get to individual motivations, but I consider your clarification unnecessarily confusing.
With the above correction, do you now agree with the definition of 1? There should be no need to mention ‘but Christian terrorists are X’ or ‘Buddhist terrorists are Y’. We’ll get to how non-special Islamic terrorism is in due course, but for the time being we need to stop defining terrorism as ‘only terrorism inflicted by followers of Islam’.
If you insist on that definition, please say so as well.
I’m still waiting by the way. You’d think you’d be more eager to be precise in your definitions given your stated concerns of being misunderstood in this conversation.
The post is just a restating, breakdown and elaboration of points that had already been made. If you don’t want to read the metaphysical principles behind an argument then you shouldn’t be so damned obtuse in the first place.
God damn it. Just when I think we’ve found something we agree on, you instead go and hypothesize some people who would disagree.
These aren’t mythical people, they are the very people that created my argument in the first place! My point is that there is no real distinction between saying Islamic Terrorism and Salafist Terrorism, if you have a problem with one, you should have a problem with the other.
In the context of this discussion “salafist terrorism” still suffers from the same faults as “islamic terrorism”, but this discussion is boring the shit out of me and “salafist terrorism” is a good working term that I like because it doesn’t discriminate against 1.5 billion human beings.
So, you actually did get my point?!?
The term Islamic Terrorism doesn’t discriminate against 1.5 billion human beings though.
It’s great that you bring up capitalism though. The problem with capitalist ideology is that it’s used as a justification (tax breaks for the rich will be great for the economy!) that masks the underlying reason (rich people don’t want to pay taxes) that motivates a course of action. Yeah man, we’re such hypocrites.
Maybe not surprisingly, I’d disagree with that as well!
You think you’re clever, and we’re all just too dumb to see it. You think we’re misrepresenting your point of view, but that’s not it. The things that you say have implications that you haven’t fully thought through, and we’re all trying to point out those implications to you, and you’re trying to stand by what you said without standing by the things that are implied by what you said. But if you don’t want to stand by those implications, you’re going to have to back down from what you said in the first place.
So what you’re saying is you’re really clever, and I’m too dumb to see it? classy.
I’m well aware what you think the implications are, I just don’t agree that they are the implications, in fact I think those implications are in many ways caused by denying the problem in the first place.
It was super long, and it certainly isn’t your job. You could have posted, “Wow, that’s super long, I think I’m not engaged enough in this conversation to really deal with that.” Instead you said that (1) you didn’t read it; and (2) I was wrong. That’s what a lot of people would call arrogance. You even put in an attempted jab at my feelings via a jab at my lack of argumentation skill:
(Or did I misread this? Maybe “sorry for you to have wasted all that time” was meant as a genuine apology?)
Even that implication - that my time was wasted - it all goes back to the same center for this whole conversation, as @doop said, it’s about your ego. That exceedingly long post I wrote is up to 13 Likes plus three responses of applause or amazement at my clarity/cogency. Let me be super clear: I am not saying that getting likes means I wrote something smart or good or that it validates what I said. What it does mean is that people other than you read that post and felt they got something out of it.
And that in turn means two other things: (1) even if I was writing it entirely for other people and not for myself it was not a waste even if you didn’t read it; and (2) your “cost/benefit analysis” of the worthwhileness of reading it apparently put an extremely low value on whether or not anyone else thought it was worth reading (whether consciously by noticing it and deciding that didn’t matter or unconsciously by not even examining that issue).
Well, this goes back to another thing you didn’t really bother to read even after I quoted from my post for your benefit. I said that I didn’t see any reason to further engage with you and that I didn’t think either of us would be worse for wear if we stopped. This “tedious” argument we’ve been having hasn’t been an attempt on my part to engage with you, to tell you anything or to learn anything from you.
Why am I doing what I am doing? Maybe it’s some religious ideology I have, who knows? I don’t know why I do what I do. You might say that my most basic point in the actual discussion (that people’s espoused reasons for things are usually thin veils over the real reasons for things and so ideology is kind of a red herring) is a projection from myself onto other people. But I might likewise say that your most basic point in the discussion, that people keep maliciously misinterpretting what you are saying and they are mean and dismissive might be a projection of yourself. That is the point you have made, over and over again, whether it was the point you hoped to make or not.
I agree in spirit but by the common definition if the State is a known actor then said terrorism as actually categorized as an act of war of war crime. I honestly kind of prefer your clarification to the common definition, so we’ll roll with it.
Possibly, but this is a bit overly semantic. Assad for example was a facilitator of terrorism in Iraq by providing papers and transport to allow al-Qaeda fighters access to the country. Do you want to call this a war crime or terrorism? If a state directly sponsors a terrorist attack and everyone finds out about it, then it would obviously be an act of war, but these things are often very hard to directly prove, so they end up being recognised as terrorist acts. In international relations this is commonly accepted as being “state sponsored terrorism”, and distinct from normal acts of war.
Your response to 1, however, is problematic and needs clarification to make sure we’re on the same page. By ‘political aims and motives’ it is meant that political change is intended and that is what the terrorist act is for. We’ll get to individual motivations, but I consider your clarification unnecessarily confusing.
With the above correction, do you now agree with the definition of 1? There should be no need to mention ‘but Christian terrorists are X’ or ‘Buddhist terrorists are Y’.
I mention it because Islam is the only religion at the moment where certain of its adherents are committing acts of terrorism for explicitly political ends. Islamism is the idea that the religion of Islam needs to be imposed politically over a given population. Christian terrorists who shoot abortion doctors are not currently trying to overthrow the US government to impose a Christian theocracy, though they certainly have this capability in theory.
We’ll get to how non-special Islamic terrorism is in due course, but for the time being we need to stop defining terrorism as ‘only terrorism inflicted by followers of Islam’.
I’ve never done that of course, if I was defining terrorism as such then I’d have no need for the Islamic prefix.
You’re repeatedly trying to make Islamic terrorism ‘special’ or ‘more important’ in a specific way then terrorism in general. I honestly find this very immature, but I’ll let it slide while moving on to the second point because it’s the same immaturity that leads to the second problem.
and
Adding the ‘Islamic’ prefix, while technically accurate, has proven repeatedly in this country (and others) to cause other individuals who do not understand how terrorism works to engage in phobic behaviors and even cause great harm to individuals just because they have been associated with ‘Terrorism’ because they are (or just ‘look’) ‘Islamic’
Meanwhile, calling terrorists radicalized, fundamentalist, and/or extremist is always an accurate approach and carries no risk of having other individuals confuse other people for threats.
So, with all that in mind … when do you think it’s important to be called ‘Islamic Terrorists’ (your starting point, let’s not let the goalposts get moved until we’ve moved past that step)…or do you agree that ‘Islamic Terrorism’ is just as well left off the public lexicon with the evidence of damage we have.
Or is it more important to you that we, or certain public figures or somesuch, use the term because you feel there’s some harm that’s being caused that’s greater than the harm being caused to innocents by Islamaphobia? (as well as the inevitable radicalization it creates…going back to the other root causes of radicalization)
So: In a nutshell. What do you want people to say. Who do you want to say it. And why is less confusing terminology not acceptable to you?
My main objection to the term ‘Islamic (or even Salafist) terrorist’ is that people can easily conflate the two. There are a number of points in Isis’ theology where they willingly ignore Islamic teachings and are happy to engage in merciless offensive warfare. They also actively play to Islamophobia and the West’s perception of them is a definite part of their strategy. If their goal was just to implement their religion, they would be more faithful to it. They would also require a more rigorous allegiance to it, rather than taking just about anyone willing to fight. They want to look like murderous religious fanatics; it’s not that their religion tells them to be that way.
On the other hand, it is important to look at their aims, methods and demands. What would satisfy them? The IRA wanted a united Ireland. The IRA wouldn’t have been happy if republicans got on better with loyalists, there was more political inclusion and more trade with the UK, as that would lead many republicans to abandon their support of terrorism due to the greater advantage of peaceful cooperation. A Catholic Northern Ireland that was still British wouldn’t have satisfied them either. Their targets were also very political, and could be seen to have the aim of removing the will of the British public and government to hold on to Northern Ireland. While religion was a part of their identity for important reasons, they weren’t really a religious organisation.
In contrast, Isis does many things that do not make a lot of sense from a political perspective. They want to incite violence against Muslims. Their goal is to polarise the debate and influence Muslims (not just Salafists, either) to join them or support them where they are. Their worldview is very much a religious one, and they see their actions as fulfilment of prophecy or support of their religion. They do attack more Muslims than other groups and they are hated and their theology is rejected by many Muslims, but they see themselves as enforcing true Islam.
Being more specific about their theological position can be helpful though, just as ‘dominionist terrorists’ gets to the point more than ‘Christian terrorists’. Many Christians would oppose violence against Planned Parenthood (even if they are dominionists), but dominionism provides the specific ideological basis for the action, where non-Christians are answerable to particular Christian views on morality and there’s a definite political, expansionist and authoritarian perspective on the Christian’s role in society. You can argue that dominionism is or isn’t a legitimate Christian theology, but the fact is that many Christians have a strong allegiance to their faith without holding to it.
This seems like a very good point to me. If the goal is to drive a wedge between Muslims non-Muslims, then it makes a lot of sense to ask, “To what end?” The IRA would have stopped the bombing if England just gave into their demands. I don’t even know what we could do that would make ISIS happy.
But I guess I wonder if they aren’t most like the IRA than you are suggesting. If the west basically said, “Alright, we’ll stop messing with the middle east, you guys have at it,” and they actually did conquer Iraq, would they continue attacks on the west, or would they have what they want from us?
I’m not saying that we should give them what they want. But I don’t really know what “what they want” is.
It’s one of those possible differences between Isis and Al-Quaeda; after the Madrid bombings, Spain withdrew from Iraq and there were no more attacks on Spain. It may not have been as simple as that, but they did seem to have somewhat clearer demands that could at least theoretically be met. It’s quite possible that the Paris attacks had the intention of provoking violence against Muslims and greater engagement by the West against Isis. Part of their goal is to summon the West into battle with them. I really don’t think they want peace, so there are no demands that you could phrase as “if you do this, then we will not attack you”. Like the IRA though, we should be able to have more success focusing on removing their support base by welcoming refugees while promoting a peaceful transition of power rather than worrying too much about making Isis happy.
I hope what I’m about to say doesn’t sound weird or anything but, thanks. I’ve thrown more than I should have down the argument-hole that is caze, I was feeling worn out and fed up but to see you go on tirelessly makes me feel happy again. Plenty of other good and interesting posters here but you’re on another level.
I’d buy you a beer if I could but I can’t so how about this: Name a charity you like and I will donate let’s say twenty bucks. It’s well earned.
They’re a local soup kitchen type dealy I know are pretty legit. I put in enough to get a month’s worth of hot meals to some lucky stiff. Hope that suits you.
