All I can say is that when you choose to explain what you are trying to say instead of complaining that other people are misinterpreting what you are saying, you say things that make sense.
I mean, I read this:
And I see how if I had read it that way, then I totally would have known what you meant. But reading through that opus I put forward, the point wasn’t that I was right. The point was that I could say what I said without willfully misinterpreting anything, and that being accused of willful misinterpretation was exhausting. People interpret things in different ways, no willfulness about it. And I feel like so much of this conversation was cracking through that assumption of willful misinterpretation that I just got fed up with it and didn’t want to do it anymore. If I appear to get something you said wrong, it would help if you just told me what you actually thought rather than telling me I shouldn’t be getting it wrong.
Paternalistic Attitude to the Middle East
Anyway, you said a racist attitude towards the middle east is a reasonable inference from the idea of blaming terrorism entirely on the foreign policy of the west. I don’t think that’s a reasonable inference. First of all, I think that not understanding our own motivations is a human flaw, not a brown-skinned human flaw - we’ve got names for dozens of cognitive biases and argumentative fallacies because we are all shit at thinking. Second, the focus on western action is because as a person who lives in a western country and votes for a western government, that is my responsibility - just like in a personal situation where there was a problem I would ask what I can do to make it better, not what someone else can do to make it better, because I don’t get to decide what other people do.
All of that being said, if you asked me: “Hey, western people dismissing the espoused values of middle eastern people and thinking they know what the middle eastern people really think… doesn’t that sound crazy racist?” I’d say, “Yes it does!” And just because I think that people’s agency could largely be replaced by slime mold without much functional difference doesn’t mean that you’d find very many other people who would think that - your guess that people saying middle eastern terrorism is all about western influence are themselves being paternalistic would probably be right a lot of time.
Security as a predictor of terrorism vs. Ideology
I believe that lack security (this isn’t the right word, I mean whether people can expect to avoid suffering and death from day to day, so availability of food, shelter, employment, but also safety from violence - but I don’t mean “security forces” on every corner) and injustice are the best predictors of terrorism, but that doesn’t mean I think that individuals are hopelessly mind controlled into terrorism because they can’t find a job. When you look at a large group of people, though, you can predict outcomes with bell curves - even if you can’t pick out which individuals go where. There are lots of people, some of them are more ready to get on board with killing other people as a way of dealing with anger than others. The more angry people are, the more people will cross that threshold. The more content people are, the fewer people will cross that threshold.
And I think anger is a fair assessment of what motivates people to kill other people. It’s not like they say, “Well, the statistical value of human life is $9M, can I do $9M of good by making a suicide attack? Well, using this spreadsheet and the value weighting provided by my ideology, yes I can!” (Then again, who knows, maybe that’s why engineers turn up in terrorism)
I’m not sure you disagree with any of this, but (from your answer to my wildfire example) it seems more like you are saying that religious propaganda is also part of that environmental condition that pushes people to violent acts.
