Paris: Dozens Killed In Terrorist Attack

[Nexus]

What is cultural suicide?

It's when you throw away everything that makes your culture worthwhile as an overreaction to relatively minor threats due to fearmongering rhetoric.

No its more like what the native Americans did to themselves when they helped the pilgrims. For the opposite look at what the shogun of Japan did after they realized the European threat. They killed every converted Christian, threw every westerner out and didn't let a single one in for centuries. And the end result, Japan was never colonized.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

It's when you throw away everything that makes your culture worthwhile as an overreaction to relatively minor threats due to fearmongering rhetoric.

No its more like what the native Americans did to themselves when they helped the pilgrims.

Yes, the vast technological superiority of the Muslim hordes isn't something the defenceless Europeans can stand up against.

 

[Nexus]

No its more like what the native Americans did to themselves when they helped the pilgrims.

Yes, the vast technological superiority of the Muslim hordes isn't something the defenceless Europeans can stand up against.

I edited my post to mention Japan. But the Japanese were also vastly technological inferior than Europeans yet they defended themselves because they didn't just invite them in. Look at Roman history if you don't think barbarian hordes can over take a technologically superior empire.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Yes, the vast technological superiority of the Muslim hordes isn't something the defenceless Europeans can stand up against.

I edited my post to mention Japan. But the Japanese were also vastly technological inferior than Europeans yet they defended themselves because they didn't just invite them in. Look at Roman history if you don't think barbarian hordes can over take a technologically superior empire.

Is that sort of like how owning a shotgun can let you defend yourself against the US army?

 

[Nexus]

I edited my post to mention Japan. But the Japanese were also vastly technological inferior than Europeans yet they defended themselves because they didn't just invite them in. Look at Roman history if you don't think barbarian hordes can over take a technologically superior empire.

Is that sort of like how owning a shotgun can let you defend yourself against the US army?

Yes 20 million insurgents with shotguns could defend themselves against 500,000 military solders with better weapons. You're the one arguing with history that has repeated itself countless times for millenia. Every culture, tribe or empire in the past has been destroyed or fallen. The onus is on you to prove why this time for Europe it will be different.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Yes 20 million insurgents with shotguns could defend themselves against 500,000 military solders with better weapons.

No. They couldn't. Those 500,000 soliders might get strained backs from picking up so many bodies, but that's not actually a fight. It would have been back in the days of the Roman Empire, but not against a modern military.

You're the one arguing with history that has repeated itself countless times for millenia. Every culture, tribe or empire in the past has been destroyed or fallen. The onus is on you to prove why this time for Europe it will be different.

Yes, eventually Europe will be different than it is today, just as Europe today is unrecognizable compared to Europe of a few hundred years ago. These flesh-eating hordes of ravaging Muslims won't be a significant factor in that change, though.

 

[Nexus]

No. They couldn't. Those 500,000 soliders might get strained backs from picking up so many bodies, but that's not actually a fight.

Do you have any evidence or military scholarship to support this assertion?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

No. They couldn't. Those 500,000 soliders might get strained backs from picking up so many bodies, but that's not actually a fight.

Do you have any evidence or military scholarship to support this assertion?

They're called planes, drones, artillery, snipers and all the other elements of a modern military which a shotgun isn't useful against. Shotguns aren't useful weapons against an army.

 

[bilby]

The Western Front in WWI was a clear demonstration that millions of superbly trained and highly motivated men armed with rifles and machine guns are effectively helpless against a few tens of thousands of artillery pieces.

Shotguns are ineffective against an enemy force that can kill you from tens or even hundreds of miles away.

The shotgun army would be lucky to get close enough to fire a shot, even against an opponent armed only with modern rifles.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Your 20 million shotguns would be toast against a 500k strong modern army. They'd never get close enough to use them.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

No. They couldn't. Those 500,000 soliders might get strained backs from picking up so many bodies, but that's not actually a fight.

Do you have any evidence or military scholarship to support this assertion?

M4 range: effective 500 meters point target. (.33 miles) 3600 maximum. (2.2 miles)

This of course is just service rifle to shotgun, the military has air power, communications, armored divisions, etc.

 

[Horatio Parker]

No. They couldn't. Those 500,000 soliders might get strained backs from picking up so many bodies, but that's not actually a fight. It would have been back in the days of the Roman Empire, but not against a modern military.

Bulldozers.

They used them in Desert Storm. No bombs, shells or bullets. They just buried the Iraqis. Not pretty.

Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them firing their weapons from first world war-style trenches, had been buried by ploughs mounted on Abrams tanks. The tanks had flanked the lines so that tons of sand from the plough spoil had funnelled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, straddling the trench line, came Bradleys pumping machine-gun bullets into Iraqi troops.

"I came through right after the lead company," said Colonel Anthony Moreno. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/feb/14/iraq.features111

 

[maxparrish]

What is cultural suicide?

It's when you throw away everything that makes your culture worthwhile as an overreaction to relatively minor threats due to fearmongering rhetoric.

Cultural and Ethnic Suicide looks like this:

Old Dead and Dying French Culture:

 

[Nice Squirrel]

I'm not sure what you are saying. Culture changes that is a fact.

 

[Jayjay]

The two are not mutually exclusive. It's just that in this case, the objective assessment of what reasonably qualifies as Islam is so broad that both the moderate muslim and ISIS dude would be covered. If there was someone who said he didn't believe in Quran, and didn't think Mohammed was a prophet, yet thought that he was a muslim, then we might have grounds to question his self-identification.

Of course the two are not mutually exclusive. My point is that you earlier said:

Who are non-muslims to judge what's Islam or not anyway?

One of my points here is that you (a non-Muslim) are making a decision about who is a Muslim. Why not also make a decision about what Islam is?

It would be rather silly for me to come up with some theological reasoning based on a religion that I don't believe to be true or even remotely coherent. Besides, I am making a decision about what Islam is on very broad terms: it's a religion based on Quran and that Mohammed is God's prophet. I suppose I could list other identifiable universal features but in the end that would not be particularly useful.

2. Whether the moderate self-identified Muslim needs to convince you or other self-identified Muslims depends on what they're trying to accomplish.

Correct. And in former case, I can't think of a very good reason.

Well, he might be trying to convince other people (perhaps, not you personally) that the nutjobs of IS and their ilk are misconstruing Islam. Perhaps, he intends to reduce the negative image of Islam among some social groups. That may not be a good reason (it's better to just point out how bad Islam actually is, even if the moderate fails to see that), but from his perspective, it would make perfect sense to try to persuade people who are not Muslims.

Which is just rubbing his wn sense of self-righteousness rather than making a positive change in the world.

3. With regard to the epistemological high ground, I'm not sure how that works: why would a self-identified Sunni Muslim be in a better epistemological position than a self-identified former Muslim, or a self-identified atheist who has studied philosophy of religion, history of Islam and the Quran, to assess whether a Shia Muslim is a Muslim, or whether the Quran entails that thieves deserve to have a hand (or both) cut off, or some other thing you're thinking about?

Anyone who thinks that Quran has supernatural origins and trying to interpret it through that premise is already in realm of theology, and doesn't mean anything for anyone who doesn't accept the same premise.

But the question I was trying to ask is basically: why would the self-identified Muslim would have an epistemic high ground when it comes to ascertaining who's a Muslim and/or what Islam is and/or what the Quran entails?
Having an extra premise that is either false or not even false (namely, that the Quran has supernatural origins) does not the self-identified Muslim's epistemic position.
But now I see you've clarified your point. I will address your new point below.

Just to clarify, I wasn't saying that the self-identified muslims have the "epistemological high ground". It's the opposite: they lack the high ground because they view certain issues through glasses of divine revelation rather than any objective criteria.

Alright, that makes sense.
However, I don't understand your previous replies in light of that clarification, for the following reasons:

At first, you questioned non-Muslims position to judge what's Islam or not, when you said "Who are non-muslims to judge what's Islam or not anyway?"
That expression looked like a moral assessment to me, but I asked, and also raised a challenge in case my interpretation was correct.
I said:

Are you suggesting that only Muslims are morally permitted to say what Islam is?
But then, who judges who is a Muslim?

Your reply was:

It's not about who has the moral high ground to judge other person's belief, but who has the epistemological high ground. Muslim A who thinks muslim B is not really a muslim is usually just making a religious statement that is meaningless outside the context of Muslim A's belief system. But at the same time muslims B might just as strongly feel the opposite, again in context of his own belief system. What's a person outside those belief systems to do? At best, we can take their self-identification at face value and agree that they are both muslims because they think they are.

To put it another way, it's not me that the moderate muslim needs to convince about what Islam is or isn't. That's a theological dispute and to an atheist about as relevant as how many angels can dance on a head of a pin.

So, your claim was epistemic, not moral.
But then again, in the context of your challenge to non-Muslims (i.e., "Who are non-muslims to judge what's Islam or not anyway?"), an epistemic challenge only makes sense is your claim is that Muslims are in a better epistemic position to assess what Islam is. If you hold that people who view certain issues through the glass of [alleged] divine revelation lacl the epistemic high ground (and you're correct about that, all other things equal), then the epistemic challenge "Who are non-muslims to judge what's Islam or not anyway?" has the following answer:
"Non-Muslims are people whose capability to assess what Islam is has not been degraded by their false belief in Islamic divine revelation. Some non-Muslims also don't have that capability degraded by beliefs in any other divine revelation"

Well that was unnecessarily verbose response. All that I was getting at with what Islam is or isn't, was in terms of its utility to figure out who is a "real" muslim. When a muslim believer does that they are doing their reasoning based on what they think Islam is, and it might go something like this:

1) Islam says you shouldn't kill innocent people.
2) ISIS is killing innocent people.
3) Therefore, ISIS followers are not real muslims.

The entire first premise here is based on what they think Islam is, which can be whatever because it's a religious belief. That's just his personal opinion and not a solid grounds of determining the "trueness" of anyone's muslimhood. That's why it makes more sense to just ignore the reasoning, and just take their self-idenfication at face value regardless of what claptrap its based on. It's not about who is making the argument, it's about what we can know about the premises of said argument.

 

[Jayjay]

No, they were 7,000 Muslims who gathered together in order to burn copies of the Satanic Verses. They were very clear and straightforward about who they were and what they were doing.

Muslims from where? And burning books is ignorant but it isn't criminal.

On May 27, 1989, 15 - 20,000 Muslims gathered in Parliament Square and burned Rushdie in effigy while calling on the British government to ban the book. Again, the entire point of the protest was that they wanted everyone to know exactly who they were and exactly what they were doing and why.

So a peaceful protest in other words? Voicing displeasure with a book again may be ignorant but it isn't criminal or advocacy of criminal activity.

The point being made was that muslims seem to have no trouble organizing mass protests for their own ignorant bullshit, but have a hard time getting anyone to show up to protest Islamic terrorism.

 

[maxparrish]

New Replacement Culture:

Is this great or what?

 

[Jayjay]

I'd say that except in absurdly extreme cases which don't actually exist (ie - "I am a muslim because that's the best way to worship Vishnu"), anyone who self-identifies as a Muslim can be considered a Muslim.

Depends on the purpose for which you are considering or using those categories. For the purpose of holding people accountable and expecting certain reactions from them when others use that label for heinous actions, then it probably is reasonable to expect those who identify as Muslim and defend the group against injustice should either take responsibility for or decry the actions of others who claim that identity is served by heinous acts.


However, as a matter of trying to accurate capture the content of a persons's traits, beliefs, and values that are related to those of the major institutions and documents that founded and historically shaped and promoted that identity, then what people say they are should be considered skeptically and as unreliable, only slightly less so than a women should take the word of a man in a bar who claims to be a pilot.
If two people with directly opposing views and values claim to be a Muslim, then it must be the case that either one or both are wrong, or that the label Muslim has no relationship to the views and values in question. In the case of extremists and moderates, either one or both are wrong or the label is largely meaningless and just a string of letters arbitrarily slapped onto to things.

In fact, of all the things people claim they are, their claims about religion are the least likely to be accurate. People have massive motive to pretend they are something they are not with regard to religion, and they have every means to get away with such deceits since it is very hard to verify the actual contents of their beliefs.

BTW, as I have argued often on this issue, objectively the extremists and fundamentalists have the most valid claims to their respective religious labels as their views and values and actions are objectively far more in line with those who originated and historically shaped the religions and the terms.

You make an interesting argument, but I don't think that historical reasons are any more sensible. Historically, germans have been attacking other European countris and been total bastards. Now they aren't so much. It would be a bit unfair to tell that a German person isn't a "true German" because he's not invading other countries for lebensraum like a proper German should.

Religions and nationalities and things like that are really just constructs of people who identify with them. Sure we could make some external taxonomy of groups that is based on something other than self-identification, but in this case it's not so useful. If two people both say they are muslims for example, they probably have something in common that they don't with non-muslims, and that something gives them a way to influence one another in ways that the rest of us can't. The point is that if the moderate muslims are convinced that ISIS are not real muslims, they should be trying to persuade ISIS and not us.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Bulldozers.

They used them in Desert Storm. No bombs, shells or bullets. They just buried the Iraqis. Not pretty.

Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them firing their weapons from first world war-style trenches, had been buried by ploughs mounted on Abrams tanks. The tanks had flanked the lines so that tons of sand from the plough spoil had funnelled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, straddling the trench line, came Bradleys pumping machine-gun bullets into Iraqi troops.

"I came through right after the lead company," said Colonel Anthony Moreno. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/feb/14/iraq.features111

Ok, fair point. I rescind my assertion that the soldiers might strain their backs.

 

[Jayjay]

It's when you throw away everything that makes your culture worthwhile as an overreaction to relatively minor threats due to fearmongering rhetoric.

No its more like what the native Americans did to themselves when they helped the pilgrims. For the opposite look at what the shogun of Japan did after they realized the European threat. They killed every converted Christian, threw every westerner out and didn't let a single one in for centuries. And the end result, Japan was never colonized.

Can't argue with results.