JayB

That's absolutely untrue in recent history, say the last 30 years or so. The thing that shocks everyone about terrorism is that a small number of people with unsophisticated weaponry can have a big impact that our billions and billions of dollars worth of high tech military widgetry cannot stop. Not sure how this renders making moral distinctions between the parties impossible for rational people. The key criterion is whether the check on your capacity to deliberately slaughter as many civilians as possible is technical or moral. If you have the technical capacity to inflict unlimited casualties on civilian populations but moral constraints prevent you from doing so, this is quite different than operating in a moral framework in which your intention is to kill as many civilians as possible to achieve your ends but technical constraints prevent you from doing so.

Any discussion of the subsidies that fund different modes of transportation that doesn't normalize them by passenger mile is silly: http://www.bts.gov/programs/federal_subsidies_to_passenger_transportation/pdf/entire.pdf "On average, highway users paid $1.91 per thousand passenger-miles to the federal government over their highway allocated cost during 1990-2002(Figure 2). Whilenet federal subsidy per thousand passenger-miles for buses (including school, transit, and intercity buses) has been positive during 1990-2002, it has been negative for autos, pickups, and vans (Figure 4). Autos, pickups, and vans paid on average about $2.03 per thousand passenger-miles more each year than their allocated cost." "On average, passenger rail received the largest subsidy per thousand passenger miles,averaging $186.35 (in year 2000 chained dollars) per thousand passenger miles during 1990-2002 (Figure 2)." "On a per thousand passenger-miles basis, transit received the second highest net federal subsidy, second to passenger rail, averaging $118.26 in year 2000 chained dollars (Figure 2."

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. I fail to see how your answer addresses the fact that all culture/religions have used terror in the recent past, which points to your singling out Muslims as thinly veiled islamophobia. I clearly see how your "Hey - other people use explosives in ways that have killed people" demonstrates a massive incapacity to make elementary distinctions between physically equivalent acts. Let's suppose that there had been a plot by a cell of Ted Kacynski's disciples to fly airplanes into the WTC, the Pentagon, and Congress and in each and every case radical Islamists had fought their way into the cockpits and managed to get their hands on the flight controls at the last moment with the intention of steering the planes away from buildings holding thousands of civilians that they inadvertently flew the planes into. There would be no physical difference between this scenario and what actually happened on 9/11. But anyone - other than a relativist progressive - could clearly ascertain a massive moral difference between the actions of the radical Islamists that flew the planes into the buildings with the intention of slaughering as many civilians as possible, and the fictional Islamists who tried to steer the planes away from the buildings in an effort to spare as many civilians as possible. In virtually every conflict, the warring parties have recourse to the same weapons and make use of very similar tactics, but if one group is employing the said weapons and tactics with the intention of constructing a totalitarian slave-state that they can use as a launching pad for a global genocide campaign, and the other is using the same tactics to secure a liberal democratic order then it's quite possible to make moral distinctions between them. Do you find it impossible to pick sides in the US civil war? Even if your claim were true that all cultures and religions had employed violence and terror to further their aims in the recent past, it would still be possible to make moral distinctions between them based on the frequency, depravity, and magnitude of such actions and the ends which they were attempting to secure with them. Your other claims about "Judeo Christian" armies employing various tactics is another example of an incapacity to make elementary distinctions. An army fielded by a secular, democratic republic in which the majority of the citizens happen to be Christian and which hasn't been fielded to advance any particular religious enterprise is something entirely different from a group composed exclusively of of religious zealots that uses violent tactics in accordance with or in an effort to advance a particular religious end.

Massively negative ROI no matter what label is put on it. The revenues that these projects generate won't even come close to covering the costs of construction plus operating expenses at 0% interest. Not sure why using government as a mechanism to funnel money to private economic interests that will profit from constructing and operating an enterprise that will lose money year in and year out, and drain resources away from other social priorities is considered "progressive."

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.

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