Just watch the escalation in this video: these Fox News people are rightly angry about the murder of a journalist by ISIS, and I entirely agree that that is a movement of destructive barbarians. ISIS is a huge problem, and something needs to be done about them (don’t ask me what…I don’t know), but at the same time, they’re symptomatic of the wreckage our adventures in the Middle East have been left behind. But the discussion evolves from outrage at specific actions by a political/religious movement, to a broad brush hatred of Islam, to an argument that the only way to deal with it is to kill them all.
If you study the history of Islam. Our ship captains were getting murdered. The French had to tip us off. I mean these were the days of Thomas Jefferson. They’ve been doing the same thing. This isn’t a surprise. You can’t solve it with a dialogue. You can’t solve it with a summit. You solve it with a bullet to the head. Its the only thing these people understand. And all we’ve heard from this president is a case to heap praise on this religion, as if to appease them.
Notice the shift? “These people”, “this religion”…and in response to a brutal execution, the proposed solution is more brutal executions.
Now that’s Islamophobia — raw naked tribalism in which the only resolution they can consider is genocide.
And if a christian does something horrible then it’s “No True Scotsman” time with a side of “Blame video games”.
I’ve never understood the people who propose ‘blowing up the Middle East’ as a response to problematic elements of Islamic culture. They’ll cite the treatment of women in these countries as a reason to nuke the whole place, which the pundits in this video mentioned. I’m sure Muslim women will be so much better off after they and their entire country have been blown up. /s
The truth is that these people don’t care about Muslim women with no rights. They don’t care about the local people who are victimized by terrorist groups. They pretend a little bit, but only because it makes a great excuse for feeding our country’s bloodthirsty tribalism.
Doesn’t even require islamaphobia, sadly, just a mentality that, sadly, I sometimes hear from my own older sibling and father, which places whole regions into the category of “ant hill”, and the solution as, “Do the equivalent of what we did way back when, where we poured gun powder all over the ground, watched the ants collect it all, and drag it into their nest, then pour some more, and light it off, with the big any killing boom.” The whole damn region of people become non-entities, to be squashed, instead of people, and its just somehow “assumed” that the nice ones will get out of the way first, or its their own fault for staying when the boom shows up. That reality is a lot bloody messier, well.. the same mentality exists in the mess with the cops right now. Anyone out past X time is a bad guy, or stupid, because they didn’t hide under their bed, while the bad guys got taken on. Only difference is the level of violence applied, and the intent to arrest, instead of exterminate (and, sadly, I think a lot of that BS stupid thinking comes from the fact that a) my father was military during WWII, and b) he, and my brother, both worked *as* law enforcement of some sort for a while. The total blind indifference to their own flawed vision of how escalation, purely for the purpose of stopping the bad guys, does not, and can not, translate into safer citizens, instead of more risks, corruption, aggressive superiority complexes, and misuse of power, just doesn’t quite compute with them. To them, the “good guys” are, by definition, “immune” to the problems, and even some of those that cross the line, while wrong, are “less of a problem” than, say, angry people, a small number of which want to break things because of it.
Basically, sure, the cop screwed up, and should probably lose his job, but all the damn rioters are over reacting, and anything that happens to them because of it, well.. that has nothing to do with the original event that triggered the protests. The disconnect it…. incomprehensible to me, and the presumed logic of how to deal with it, which is more cops, with more weapons, used with even less restraint, and sense, as well as greater paranoia (such as having a whole bloody platoon, practically, to arrest one unarmed guy)…
Okay, I have a question for some expert out there reading. Which is correct: ISIS, IS or ISIL. Anyone know?
yazikus
Probably depends on which week it is.
Yazikus: ISIS and ISIL are equivalent and stem from slightly different translations of their actual Arabic name– “Islamic State of Iraq and the [Shaam / Levant]”, where the Shaam and the Levant are names for the same region. (I gather ‘Shaam’ is a distinctly politically tinted name for the region, so the State Department prefers ISIL.)
IS is for “The Islamic State.” and is the latest edition of what they call themselves, having declared themselves the caliphate over all Muslims, everywhere. It’s arguably more correct since it is their own self-designation, but the… Grandeur… Of it has many observers going “cool story bro” and sticking to ISI[S/L].
Thanks Nentuaby. I had thought the second S stood for Syria (which is small than Levant, I think) so that is where my confusion was coming from.
So the Faux News resident fascists advocate responding to a brutal and sickening murder by fanatics with genocode?
Remind me which side are the bloodthirsty, fanatical barbarians again? Oh right – that would be both of them.
Dang it. I hate that I’m feeling more contempt for someone else in an ISIS related story.
Nentuaby @ 6;
I think it may be even better than that, since so far as I am aware IS belong to that strain of islamic fundamentalist who assert that everyone is born muslim, and that anyone who either practices a different religion than islam as they (very, very narrowly) define it, or is an agnostic or atheist is therefore an apostate, and under their interpretation of islamic law apostasy is punishable by death.
So they seem to be claiming authority over every human being on the planet, it is just that they plan on either forcing the non-muslims to convert or simply killing them out of hand.
They really are a right bunch of charmers, and they certainly do like their grandiose titles to go with their ludicrous dreams of global domination. Really, apart from the differing specifics of their religious traditions, they have so much in common with xian dominionists it almost odd that the two groups don’t get along better – they share so much common hatred of LGBTQ groups, women, and free thinkers of all stripes.
Shaam or al-Sham does just mean Syria, though of course only until recently would the meaning of the toponym have been constrained to the borders of the modern nation-state. “Syria” and variants have been used since antiquity to designate the entire Levant (basically the area south from far-Eastern Anatolia down to Gaza and North Sinai). It’s political in that Bilad al-Sham was the name given to the region by the first (Umayyad) Caliphate, which ruled from Damascus. As the IS fancies themselves a latter-day caliphate, they’re keen on it.
But what the heck are we going to do with extremists like this. I don’t really care what their religion is, this time it seems to be muslims but that’s irrelevant. We’re talking about people who want to return the world to the middle ages, does their reasons really matter? How do we reason with them? Can we even do that? I ‘d like to think so, but I fear it might not work. These are people who feel they have the right to massacre people, do you really think they’ll be swayed by words?
This isn’t a “war on terror”, it’s a fight for certain values.
Thanks, CJO. The more you know!
Not sure that’s quite right. But close enough: the entire world is divided into Dar al-Islam (“the House of Islam”, lit. “the House of Submission to God”) and Dar al-Harb (“the House of War”). I don’t think they believe that those resident in Dar al-Harb were born Muslim exactly, but they certainly believe they deserve to die if they don’t convert.
Hyman Rosen #15
Bullshit.
True only if you use a definition of “use of force” so general as to essentially equate with “application of energy”.
In short, so general as to be useless.
you must have failed Ecology 101 then.
here’s an example of another organizing principle:
Cooperation.
forgot the fun video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukiw4wYwqPg
Sound like two species are organizing in order to better project their use of force for their benifit….
So basically, we’re fated to be eternally enthralled to bullies with superior firepower, is that it? What’s next: that people who are unwilling to debase themselves into trying to become the next violent aristocrat of the sword should just submit to the existing Powers, accept their lot and pray for their overlords to enjoy playing the benevolent kings?
No, we coooperate with each other (and devise even better firepower) so that united we have a greater level of force than the bullies. Such is the history of humanity. This is why we have militias, nation-states, armed forces, police, and such a plethora of creative items designed to kill.
If you can’t overpower bullies, either alone or collectively, you will be a slave to them.
Hyman sez:
Opposition to genocide =/= Pacifism
War =/= Genocide
Opposition to war =/= Pacifism
Go fuck your strawmen in private, instead of masturbating to it in public.
Might makes right bullshit. Society isn’t JUST a bunch of people at gunpoint, you ignorant fuck.
This is hardly the evidence I was expecting one would use to support such a bold thesis that you made before. Force exists. So what? That doesn’t make it our only option. Much less does it make it the “only organizing principle of nature”.
“Use of force disrupts other organizing principles” =/= “Use of force is the only organizing principle”
Ever hear of peaceful protests? Prison? Boycotts? Hell, if you can’t change their mind, change the mind of everyone around them. No man is an island, and if you turn the Fencesitters on them, then they will have a much harder time of it.
you’re a sad little person.
I pity you.
this is how they eat. would you call farming using “force”?
don’t answer that. I can’t imagine how your response, based on your comment, would be enlightening.
CJO @ #11
According to The Hidden Origins of Islam (Ohlig & Puin), in the 7th century “Syria” included this area plus most of Saudi Arabia (especially Mecca/Medina) and the Persian Gulf, much of it nominally under Byzantine or Sassanian control. It’s also my understanding that it’s this notion of Syria that some of the people of the region were fighting for during WWI with T. E. Lawrence, but the English and French reneged on the agreement and partitioned the region into the various kingdom states we have today. I’m fairly sure that most of our notions of Syria and Arab are heavily influenced by the continuous shaping of public perceptions (i.e. propaganda).
Of course I would.
Farming is the ultimate use of force: we decimate an ecosystem, strip it bare, apply chemical warfare to any living thing living below ground who escaped the holocaust above. We then plant the barren landscape with organisms totally dependent on us which we have genetically modified over the centuries to better serve us. We milk those organisms for all they are worth and kill them as soon as they are no longer of use to us.
Humans excel at cooperating in order to apply force on a third party. That is why we rule the holocene with a genocidal fist. It is also why we may wind up doing ourselves in as well.
What silly twaddle. It’s silly on its face. It’s nothing more than an argument from ignorance, made on someone else’s behalf.
Not killing civilians, thereby not feeding into their narrative and not giving people a reason to support them, would be a good start. In general, systemic balances that remove incentives to disrupt are preferable to post hoc forced corrections, not least because the former tends to kill less people.
Now, will force be necessary? Perhaps; probably. Will the extent of force suggested by Fox be necessary? No, genocide will certainly not be necessary. Will war be necessary? Under the broadest possible definition (“armed conflict between groups”) it is likely, though the extent to which armed conflicted is necessary is likely minor compared to what your own ignorance leads you to believe.
right, just wanted to be clear that it wasn’t worth conversing with you.
it’s never worth conversing with someone who goalposts words.
How am I goalposting words?
Farming is organized violence, as is eels and gropers working together to kill.
Those who can best organize the most effective violence (or threat thereof) rule.
The goal of a democratic state is to make a single fictional entity the only legitimate wielder of violence, then subjugate that entity to majority rule. This is preferable to that entity being an actual human, or having that entity controlled by a small group of humans. Still, the organs of violence (police, prisons, military) can decide not to listen to whoever thinks they control them and become bullies themselves.
It is a delicate balance to have the threat of violence high enough to discourage violence without having the threat become a thing unto itself that causes more violence than it prevents.
PZ Myers:
NATO is more certain. Their certainty trumps your weakness. Get a backbone.
No to NATO: No new wars. Protest 30 August to 5 September. Demonstrate Sat 30 August, Newport, Wales (NATO leaders’ summit)
Anyone else going?
Islamism* will collapse in on itself eventually – much as the Soviet Union did, and much as the religious right appears to be doing – simply because it is not economically viable.
War only prolongs its existence – as it gives people a greater enemy than the corruption and incompetence inherent in their own state.
So what should we do about Islamism? Take global warming seriously, give tax breaks and funding to alternate energy sources, encourage the electric car and get the world off of oil.
Direct action does nothing. Removing the source of funds for the Islamic right meanwhile, reduces their power to win converts.
It also empowers the Muslim left – as it is a lot harder to blame other people for your country being a shithole when they aren’t blowing up your schools or threatening to do so.
But of course, that runs directly contrary to the rightwing’s need to make lives miserable in America too – after all, without that oil how are they going to roll coal on those bicyclists?
*Basically Islam’s religious right, which the American religious right largely agrees with on almost everything except they aren’t Americans so they’re the devil.
not so long as it is useful to the authoritarian power structures that have been established in the Middle East for hundreds of years now.
they rely on it, just like the authoritarians in the US rely on right wing Christians to support their hierarchies.
I think you are right, that eventually it will fold, or implode, but I can’t see it happening in my lifetime.
right now, it seems to be hard at work stabilizing itself again. I’ll believe Islamism will no longer be a threat when the Saudi Royals start leaving Saudi Arabi out of fear.
Is it just me, or were we to change a few nouns in the quoted speech in the OP would it be exactly what ISIS is saying themselves?
(I think he’s been banned by this point, but…)
Hyman Rosen @ 15:
This is true. To a (wanna-be) sociopath.
Fortunately, the rest of us have functioning empathy centers.
…and @ 21:
Yes, we occasionally have to use force on those people who don’t understand anything else. This is not most people, of course. We can assume it’s the norm, and build an entire society around the strong crushing the weak, or we can recognize it’s the exception and do something better. Both are possible. Both work in the real world. I’m always amazed at those who seek the former over the latter.
I’m just glad I’m not a part of your ‘based on force’ family structure.
I wonder if we could step back from some of the vitreol that’s been spewing around the comments so far, and see if we actually all share some common ground. There are probably many statements that both sides in the argument above would agree on. Here’s my suggestion: “The Western application of violent intervention in regional conflicts should only be used as an extreme last resort when our own interests are at stake. It has been overused in the past (most particularly in the original Iraq invasion), and of course it should always be used in a way to minimize civlilian casualties, since those strengthen our enemies. Nevertheless, in rare cases it may be necessary, and this MAY be one of those times.” If we could agree that force is sometimes, but only rarely, necessary, then we could move on to discuss whether this is one of those times, and if so how much force should be used.
Personally, I’ve begun to think that we’re going to have to go back in. A world in which, five years from now, the existence of an ISIL state is normalized is simply not going to be a pleasant world to be in. This is a regime that has begun its reign with massacres and a declaration of war on the rest of the world in general and us in particular — we can’t just ignore that.
@30:
Unfortunately, the very best way of targetting your use of force to kill enemy combatants but not civilians is to put actual boots on the ground. We’re reluctant to do that again; hence the air strikes, where civilian casualties are invevitable.
That would’ve been announced. Has he been in other threads, too?
In the short term? Exactly what’s being done right now.
In the long term? Remove the incentives people have to join. As usual, few people are so convinced by any ideology that they’ll fight for it no matter what alternatives they can see.
To answer my own question, Hyman Rosen is banned.
CJO @ 14;
I think you are right. You are definitely correct about Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. As far as I know opinion is divided within far right islamic religious circles about whether or not all humans should be considered muslim at birth. To the best of my recollection, some argue that everyone has to convert to match the notional will of allah without any implication that every non-muslim should be considered a ‘fallen’ muslim, but others claim that since they believe that the universe (as they define it, being rather smaller than science would recognise) was created by their god, then he created all humans to be of what they consider the true faith, and so anyone who isn’t muslim is defying the will of god by denying what they were supposedly created to believe.
Like many fundamentalist positions it is all a bit murky and not all that well founded in their own religious texts. Still, as you say, whatever the specifics of their scriptural excuse for it, they certainly seem to be heavily into the convert of die rhetoric. Also like yourself, I personally do not think that responding in kind with christo-fascist, ultra nationalist, or a Huntingdon-esque ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric is going to achieve anything but lead the world into yet more bloody, probably pointless and certainly illegal wars. Cutting off their sources of finance and support are the better option, even if it takes years for ISIS to finally wither on the vine. Direct confrontation seems likely to cause more death and suffering than it prevents.
Thanks for clarifying and amplifying my point.
If Muslims were Christians they just be the wrong kind of Christians and the hate would continue. Christianity’s history shows that well.
Just for the record, given that Hyman Rosen is banned:
Whenever a human being says that they believe in evolution but haven’t observed the gradual transition of fish to land-living, they are expressing their cognitive dissonance between their allegiance to evolution and their realization that reality can only have been created by god.
Naive and ignorant – as well as fascistic – nonsense. If this were so, not only humans but members of all other social species would be in a state of perpetual conflict, and those conflicts would always be a matter of a fight to the death. They are not, so this silly claim is empirically refuted. Moreover, mathematical and simulation modelling indicate that being too ready to resort to force (as well as being entirely unable or unwilling to do so) is usually poor strategy: the over-aggressive clash with and kill or injure each other, while those ready to cooperate, in many circumstances, survive to reproduce andor be imitated. Notice as well that in human societies, even those with a supposed “monopoly of force” actually have to enlist the support of their hired or indoctrinated bullies – and you can’t even hire bullies without having a functioning economy, or indoctrinate them without an ideology. No ideology that has had any real influence, even that of the Nazis, has ever regarded force as “the only organizing principle of nature”.
Who is this “we” of whom you speak? Are you planning to go to Iraq and personally fight IS?
Debatable. Their primary goal appears to be imposing sharia on their own people (or at least people on “their land”). I fail to see a plausible connection between our adventures in the Middle East and this group. They don’t appear to be primarily driven by Israel and Palestine.
At best, you can argue that the power vacuum in Iraq partially helped the group, but remember it initially was set off by the collapse of Syria, which IIRC we had very little to do with. In fact, it was Russia and China which blocked us from doing anything useful there.
And then if you want to put partial blame on the US for creating a power vacuum in Iraq, are you really saying that Saddam Hussein is preferable to ISIS? That’s exactly what his buddy in tyranny Bashir has argued – specifically that only his tyranny can prevent radical Muslims from taking over. I think we have pretty strong evidence that he was at least partially right.
So no, I don’t think it’s quite fair to put the blame on the US for ISIS. There are plenty of other things you can blame the US for. There’s no reason to add to the list when it wasn’t actually our fault.
PS: This is all as best as I can determine. I please welcome corrections and education on the topic.
EnlightenmentLiberal #46:
This is a narrow view of what “our adventures in the Middle East” might mean. The presence of US Air Force bases in Saudi Arabia, drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, et al, military campaigns generally running amok throughout the region for generations, evoking the adventurism of the Crusades (“ancient history” to us perhaps; extremely salient to many Muslims). These are drivers of radicalism.
That’s right Nick Gotts, @45. The last thing we want is people coming over here and rocking the boat on FTB’s established policy of firmly and decisively sitting on the fence as regards US military action in northern Iraq. I mean, good God! Don’t people like Brucegee1962 know there’s a war on? Do the words, “don’t ask me what…I don’t know” not carry a sufficiently clear message of insipid passivity in the face of the latest round of bombings, dronings, maimings, dismemberments by the US military for people to understand our need for our middling muddle?
Rather than descend from this inconvenient fence FTB has impaled itself on and make a decision, you are quite right to encourage us to just reach down with our toes and dip them tentatively in the quagmire of debate… to pedantically challenge the occasional pro-war advocate on their choice of vocabulary, and let the anti-war position remain in place as a blissful taboo that we don’t need to worry ourselves with. Perhaps we can fill in the time we lose by slagging off the Left (some of us anyway) and picking over ISIS’s occasional atrocities. Are we not all united in our gathering rage against ISIS anyway?
In the meantime, we’ll let the US Government make all the big boy decisions. Barack Obama is such a nice man, after all and so funny at dinner parties. Then hopefully with our secret (strictly unexpressed) relief that he is bombing the shit out of some ‘islamists’, this embarrassing conflict will be over before we get the chance to say Stop the War
@Hyman Rosen #21
Speaking for myself, I’d puncture the air canister of your airhorn. You can interpret that as a violent act if you like, but it would be considerably less disruptive and painful to people than your choice of action.
Really, what were you expecting? Moral absolutism?
If you add the threat of force you have maybe half the picture, the other being common values or interests. And there is the problem in this case, we do not seem to have any values or interests in common with these. In fact we seem to have quite conflicting interests, and no parties seems willing to yield.
no, they don’t. Regardless of your inane attempts at trying to attribute such.
Did you learn your debating technique from Fox News?
There was some guy or other than said something about walking softly, but carrying a big stick. The point was that you had the bloody stick **in case** you needed it. You are supposed to do every other bloody thing you can to solve the problem, first, before resorting to the stick. The whole entire bloody open-carry, conceal carry, pro-gun, etc. idiocy is predicated on the exact opposite – when confronted with the slightest possible provocation, you pull out the biggest damn stick the law allows, then beat the threat into a literal pulp, until it stops moving.
Needless to say, this is missing the damn point entirely.
The power vacuum is only a tiny fraction of the invasion’s consequences: the bald-faced lies of Junior’s administration, followed by the endless string of crimes and depredations committed in Iraq by the US government and its mercenary underlings fueled Al Qaeda’s recruitment drive in Iraq after March 2003, and the american complacency toward Al Maliki’s revanchist sectarian government led to the alienation of the Sunni population toward the iraqi state that ISIS exploited to dramatically increase its clout.
***
The Hezbollah is on the Assad dynasty’s payroll. Under its rule radical islamists were already part of the local nobility of the sword: claiming that Assad provided any protection against fundamentalism is like claiming that the GOP provides protection against fundie-christian-flavored white supremacism.
Enlightenment Liberal@46
I fail to see a plausible connection between our adventures in the Middle East and this group.
That’s because you’re ignorant.
No, it was not. It is a relabelled version of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which did not exist before the invasion of Iraq. Its forces entered Syria from western Iraq>, and it has clashed with other Islamists in Syria (including the group that is now Al Qaeda’s franchise there, the Al Nusra Front, in part because it was perceived as an outside force.
exi5tentialist@48,
Not everyone is quite as willing as you to write off ISIS’s victims as collateral damage in the cause of of anti-imperialist purity.
You remind me of the fools who insisted that the Khmer Rouge could not possibly be as bad as they were painted, that they were the victims of American propaganda, etc., etc. It’s callous numpties like you who give those who wish to slag off the left an easy target.
Never mind who I remind you of Nick Gotts @54, the profound workings of your consciousness that lead you to churn out personal insults in response to substantive arguments are yours to analyse, I haven’t got a clue what goes on in your mind. Maybe you haven’t either, I don’t know, I just wonder why you’re trying to make a connection between me opposing more US bombs in Iraq to me being an apologists for the Khmer Rouge. Still, it’s for you to explain, not me.
It hints of desperation, though. Anyway, let’s get back to the topic in question. I get that like most of FTB’s bloggers you’re against people who are against the new US war in the Middle East, but somehow you still don’t seem to be mad keen on expressing your reactionary support for the US action in explicit terms. This dithering has to stop. (It’s not dithering of course, it’s passive acceptance of the latest 50-100 US bombs in Iraq, not that I expect you, Myers or anyone else on FTB to admit it.)
those words… they don’t mean what you seem to think they mean.
exi5tentialist
Which FtB blogs do you read regularly?
@enlightenment liberal, #46:
right. It’s not like there are historical examples of, say, imperial powers sweeping into an ancient capital city in the Fertile Crescent with overwhelming military force and having the result be a movement toward “zeal for the [religious] law”, with believers blaming their own, and, crucially, their co-religionist neighbors’ insufficient dogmatism for the military defeat. And even if there were, it’s not like that movement for tyrannical religious unity ever gave birth to monomaniacal guerrilla movements bringing the hammer down on outsiders when circumstances and internal policing led to sufficient unity for a tactical pivot towards again opposing outsiders. Nor has there ever been an historical example of success such an endeavor to lead to repeat conquest, increasing fanaticism, suicidal zealotry, and yet more attacks against those both within and outside the community of coreligionists.
I mean, that shit’s just entirely “implausible”. So implausible it couldn’t possibly describe a 700 year dynamic famously recorded in a combination of scripture, the archives of the most celebrated of all Western empires, and celebrated archaeological finds so significant that they were the archaeological “find of the century” in more than one century.
I mean, seriously, that’s just laughable folks. At best.
@exi5tentialist:
bwuh????
chigau (違う)@57
The ones that don’t oppose this latest round of the US bombing Iraq – Myers, Brayton, Benson, Avicenna MD, Mousavi; others as they come up.
Name the ones that do oppose the US bombing, and I’ll take it all back.
See what I mean? Nobody can name a single FTB blogger who opposes the latest round of United States bombing. By being weak and indecisive, FTB has become just another pro-war website.