JayB

which countries come to mind, and how was the transition instituted? turkey and indonesia come to mind Authoritarian technocrats? Oh wait....

For Kimmo: http://pewglobal.org/files/2010/12/Pew-Global-Attitudes-Muslim-Report-FINAL-December-2-2010.pdf Mixed bag for liberalism at the very best.

which countries come to mind, and how was the transition instituted? turkey and indonesia come to mind Well? Though not without its problems, Turkey is the model that most commentators optimistic about the potential for democratic reforms in Egypt point to. The post-colonial era is rife with examples of vibrant secular movements and broad based national coalitions that provided an alternative to Western dominated authoritarianism and pre-modern religious and tribal politics. Unfortunately, they were suffocated in the crib or encouraged to morph into dictatorships in the name of fighting the Commies. At any rate, the Cold War-turned-GWOT security order is unravelling and the US's policy of propping up autocrats is clearly untenable with regards to our money, our values, and most importantly, their people. The Egyptian uprising (whether it's a revolution remains to be seen) and the society itself have a number of qualities that suggest potentialities very different than Iran '79 or Hamas '06. The US should be building relationships and capacities among the secularists and moderates at the forefront of the uprising rather than continuing along the path to "containment" through military dictatorship. Not doing so will simply thrust potential allies into the arms of better organized, less savory actors, when they realize that Twitter and Facebook do not a revolution make. Mustafa Kemal Attaturk wasn't authoritarian?

Terror including bombing of peaceful crowds is a tactic that has been used throughout time, including today by judeo-christians. You should consider reading some history. There were multiple parties using explosives in, say, France that killed civilians from '40-45. Clearly there's no means by which one can differentiate the various actors based on the ends they were pursuing if they all used explosive weaponry to achieve them.

Not actually what I've been arguing at all - which is that not all religious beliefs are identical, these differences can and do have a profound influence on people's ethical, political, and cultural outlook, which translates into significant differences in how people behave under a given set of social conditions. I'm sure it wouldn't be impossible to construct a set of social conditions in which Quakers believe that it's their religious duty to use the deliberate slaughter of as many civilians as possible as part of a holy war to defend Christianity that's both sanctioned and inspired by the Bible these days - just that it would be rather more difficult to do so than it would for say, Wahhabis.

Actually - what I've been arguing is that that a lack of education and wealth are both negative predictors for participation in transnational Islamist terror plots. Neither these factors, nor political repression can account for the virtual absence of people who subscribe to other faiths or ideologies that exist in the Arab world engaging in these acts. I don't expect you to understand or make a meaningful response to any of the above, since that's clearly not what motivates very many of your responses here, but there we are...

I think your argument that the US military is the moral equivalent of Al Queda, etc is an interesting one that encapsulates quite a number of unspoken tropes that seem to prevail amongst a surprising number on the left, and I'm glad to see that you and others are finally articulating it in public. I'd like to invite you to expand on that idea at length. Take all of the time that you need.

The claim that all moral systems that ground some of their precepts in supernatural claims are equally likely to promote violence and repression is every bit as ridiculous as the claim that all political ideologies are equally likely to do so. No one in their right mind would blather on about the fundamental equivalence between fascism and pacifism, but there seems to be a surfeit of erstwhile progressives that are willing to indulge this kind of patent nonsense when it comes to religions. Their fundamental doctrines are not all the same, they promote vastly different ethical norms and behaviors, and these have an enormous impact on the way that people who subscribe to them behave. It's not ridiculous given the historical evidence. Take our own history. Our Christians were the strongest supporters of slavery. They continue to this day to be the strongest supporters of the repression of women, denigration of science, suppression of free expression, discrimination against gays...in general, the violation of our fundamental principle of the separation of church and state. They have been THE largest and most active enemy of the secular principles on our Constitution. That's true - but they were also the most numerous and ardent supporters for virtually all of the liberal reforms from the founding onwards. I'm not sure what percentage of the population atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers has been over time, but I'm quite confident that no social movement composed exclusively of atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers would have gone anywhere in the US, ever. It's quite clear that one can hold liberal political beliefs and firm religious convictions simultaneously. What's also clear is that that's far more common in some religious traditions and others because of the specific religious beliefs and ethical norms that prevail within those religious traditions. There's a reason why there were far more Quaker abolitionists than there were Baptist abolitionists, and there's an equally compelling set of reasons why Arab christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, etc seems far less disposed to detonate themselves inside a Belgian disco than their Muslim peers. There are certainly strains of Islamic theology and sets of moral and cultural traditions that are more congenial to the advancement of liberal ideas and less likely to manifest themselves in everything from stoning adulteresses to slaughtering European commuters to waging jihad against western cartoonists why breech Muslim religious taboos - but it's hard to discern any evidence that it's those strains which are becoming more politically or culturally influential over time.

When and if the day ever comes that the only outlet for Muslims who want to engage in holy war against the infidels is a participation in a uniformed military fielded by a liberal democratic republic that'll be an immensely happy day for all of mankind.

I wonder if the same could be said about our Christian Problem. I'll be a happy man if the total death toll from religious fanaticism in Muslim countries is 1-2 people per 300 million every 4-5 years, and they manage to institute an set of institutional safeguards for individual liberties that equals our own despite our "Christian Problem." The major unstated premise behind your comment is that all religions, and by extension, all sets of religious convictions are fundamentally the same, and thereby equally likely to arouse violent fanaticism in their adherents, and present equal obstacles to the advancement of liberal values. The logical correlate of this is that what people believe - their most fundamental and deeply held convictions - have absolutely no influence over how they understand the world and behave in response to what they experience in it. If you believe that, then I suppose you can believe that that a religion that has an extreme commitment to non-violence at it's core (let's take Harris's example of Jainism as an example), and a religion that has adopted the concept of holy-war in defense of the faith as a central duty of all believers are equally likely to produce suicide bombers. Crazy. As with every other debate we've had on this topic, you completely miss the point. Here it is: though all religions are not all the same, the Judeo-Christian tradition and Islam (and others) share bloodthirsty texts and an historical proclivity towards violent conversion and expansion. If one has "outgrown" (or more likely, temporarily set aside) those tendencies, it's question of what kind of socio-political and economic conditions developed that swept aside fundamentalism and religiously-derived political authority. The existence of widespread religious fundamentalism in the Middle East cannot be explained simply by appealing to violent passages in the Koran or pointing to medieval Islamic crusades or essentializing Islam or Muslims but rather by the very real historical conditions that are currently giving immediate political meaning to those texts. Yes, the texts exist, people act on them, but the underlying social conditions are what make those texts important to people, identify with, and act upon them at particular points in time. Sorry if that hasn't jived with US geostrategic interests and their need to preserve repressive client regimes to protect the flow of cheap oil, fight the Commies (within those countries and the USSR), and protect the Israeli Outpost. Yes - social conditions matter, but poverty and repression exist all over the globe but they don't accurately predict who perpetrates acts of the deliberate slaughter of as many civilians as possible very well at all anywhere, much less who commits those acts within predominantly Muslim societies. The fact that second generation Muslims who have spent the entirety of their lives in liberal Western democracies have been conspicuous participants in terror plots all over the world also negates this thesis. Ditto for western converts with no ancestral or cultural connection to the middle east whatsoever. Then there's the matter of the customs and practices that prevail within the religion itself. Is Western repression responsible for, say, for the existence of the punishment for apostasy? Is this something that was foisted on Sunni legal scholars back in the Middle Ages? Sorry, but religious beliefs are every bit as powerful, if not more powerful modulators of human behavior than political beliefs, they aren't all the same, and these differences result in widely variable propensities for violence and resistance to the advancement of liberal ideas.

i'm curious how this "violent" religion you speak of becomes so non-violent here in the US. could it be because it isn't simply about the religion? Non-violent compared to what? Quakerism? Seventh Day Adventism? Deism? Are you using a US population weighted index of terror plot participation? Are we comparing vs Arab-American christians, Jews, secularists, etc here? http://pewglobal.org/files/pdf/248.pdf

There's a link in the other thread or you can avail yourself of Teh Google...

Lots of it - but if simple repression was the answer we'd have seen a proportional number of Arab secularists, etc detonating themselves in Western discos. We haven't. We'd also be remarking upon the complete absence of suicide bombers originating from Muslim communities in liberal western democracies, but we aren't. We'd probably also see the propensity for engaging in acts of suicide bombing against civilians decreasing with wealth and education, but if anything, we're seeing vastly more doctors, engineers, and relatively privileged individuals than we are bedouin goatherds engaged in terrorism. Finally - we'd also see an equal propensity for such violence across all belief groups who have been subject to sustained political repression, and we aren't. If this was any other ideology - people wouldn't have such a difficult time connecting the dots.

The claim that all moral systems that ground some of their precepts in supernatural claims are equally likely to promote violence and repression is every bit as ridiculous as the claim that all political ideologies are equally likely to do so. No one in their right mind would blather on about the fundamental equivalence between fascism and pacifism, but there seems to be a surfeit of erstwhile progressives that are willing to indulge this kind of patent nonsense when it comes to religions. Their fundamental doctrines are not all the same, they promote vastly different ethical norms and behaviors, and these have an enormous impact on the way that people who subscribe to them behave.

Agreed. Also think it matters if the founder and prime exemplar of how to live in accordance with your faith is widely understood to be a bronze age hippy that got murdered for his politics or a conquering warlord.

How do you explain the statistical composition of suicide bombers? If it's all about the conditions that they live in, rather than the framework of beliefs that they interpret their experiences through, one would naturally expect Arab secularists, Christians, Jews, etc to be detonating themselves in cafe's in numbers that are precisely equal to their representation in the Arab population, no? To borrow from Harris again - why haven't we seen Tibetan buddists detonating themselves in Shanghai shopping malls?

-It's not a canard at all if it still exerts a clear and meaningful influence over the manner in which people understand the world and behave within it, and there's a body of tradition and law that actively reinforces it. Exhibit A is the penalty for apostasy. There are many others. The fact that there are barbaric passages in a given religion's holy text matters quite a bit less than the cultural norms, interpretations, and secular institutions that have evolved to moderate their influence on people's beliefs and behavior. But again - your argument seems to be a restatement of the belief that all religions are equally likely to stoke violence and barbarism, and present equally robust obstacles to the emergence and preservation of a liberal order. That's no less ludicrous than the idea that all political ideologies are equally likely to do so. -To paraphrase Harris, there's a reason why it makes more sense to use polling data to gauge popular opinion in the Middle East than it does to send a New York Times reporter out to get a vibe. Even if Harris made it a point to ask every single person he met point blank whether or not they supported suicide, his answer would be orders of magnitude less useful than the polling data.

Depends on the observer, but worth cracking a couple of brews and watching if you've got an hour or two to kill.

don't think the good brother fancies himself much of a true marxist as he's also rather jesus-ey - seems pretty easy to read the Big Book as critical of capitalism after all? There are no true Marxists in any Western University anywhere. If there had been, they would have skipped town for Mao's China, the USSR, Pol Pot's Cambodia, etc long ago. There are legions of pretentious pampered douches that enjoy indulging in Marxist make-believe on the taxpayer's dime.

When tenured leftists of all colors can spout the same tendentious tripe about Marxism true equality is finally upon us.

With moderation provided by j_b [video:youtube] [video:youtube]

I hope it stays that way. Really. There were lots of leftists, secularists, etc out on the street in '79 but in the end they were routed by the most effectively organized, ideologically committed, and ruthless contingent amongst them. Think the same was true in 1919, 1789, etc. Hopefully they're an exception to the rule, but I'm not sure that the compass needle is pointing towards an Arab Netherlands emerging there in the wake of significant political reforms. I happens. Your patronizing view of Egyptians as mostly radical and violent muslims is that of a typical fuck head, however. What do you really know of Middle Eastern culture? Nothing, really. My view isn't that they are mostly radical and violent. It's that the most extensively organized, ideologically committed, and ruthless group amongst them happens to be composed of Muslims with radical sympathies who have a violent track record. Bolsheviks were far from a majority in Russia in 1917, but they carried the day nonetheless, with catastrophic results for the country and the world. The remainder of your comment is a weak ad-hominem of the kind used by Chris Hedges at al. Personal acquaintance with the Middle East and/or a handful of moderate Muslims doesn't trump data sets generate with massive polling inputs, the undeniable prevalence of Islamist violence and repression, much less the plain meaning of the passages in the Koran, the Hadith, or the precepts of Sharia. Still waiting to hear what it is that you personally find appealing about Wahabism, etc, and how consistent that is with the set of convictions that you claim to personally champion via your (seldom mentioned) association with the ACLU?

two questions: 1. on which would your money be? 2. why were you not equally pessimistic regarding iraq after the US invasion? (if pessimism is what i detect.) it certainly wasn't because one was a dictator and the other wasn't, right? 1. On '79, but that's a bet I'd be delighted to lose. 2. I'm not particularly optimistic about the prospects for a liberal order emerging Iraq, but I'm glad they've been afforded an opportunity to exert a more significant influence over their political system. If they want to weave the noose or fundamentalist Islamic repression around their own necks, so be it. After a decade, or several, of stagnation and decay perhaps they'll change their minds. The only place in the Muslim world that I'm remotely optimistic about in the long term is Iran. They've had a chance to live with the consequences of embracing an Islamic Theocracy as their political system, and my sense is that it's turned them into the most ardent secularists in the greater Middle East.

Nothing against Muslims, but I do loathe the set of ideas and ethical convictions that is at the heart of the strain of Islam that's been on the rise for the past 30-40 years. What is it that you like about fundamentalist Islam? How compatible is it - as it's understood and preached in Saudi funded Mosques, Pakistani Madrassas, Taliban encampments, and Hamas militia gatherings - with the institutional priorities of the ACLU?

I hope it stays that way. Really. There were lots of leftists, secularists, etc out on the street in '79 but in the end they were routed by the most effectively organized, ideologically committed, and ruthless contingent amongst them. Think the same was true in 1919, 1789, etc. Hopefully they're an exception to the rule, but I'm not sure that the compass needle is pointing towards an Arab Netherlands emerging there in the wake of significant political reforms.