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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: | Here's the original poll those claims are based on:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/arabs/syriapoll.html
(No idea about the credibility or methodology of the poll itself, mind you - it's run by an American organisation called 'Terror Free Tomorrow' which is associated with figures like Bill Clinton and John McCain.)
The only particularly eyebrow-raising result in that poll is the 75% affirmative for the question "Do you support financial assistance for Iraqi fighters, the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Hizbullah?". This may sound alarming if you automatically translate this as "75% of Syrians support terrorism" (the soundbite Skids and his mates in the Barbarossa-sphere are licking their lips over), but the facts are not nearly so simple. The organisations listed play dual roles - both as fundamentalist aggressors and also as a perceived resistance force.
If you asked Australians in a nationwide poll tomorrow if they support terrorism, 99% would probably say no. Yet if we were being attacked by a foreign power, how many do you think would oppose, say, bombing military checkpoints if it were to prove strategically beneficial? Hell, if our flag-waving anti-Islamic patriots lived up to their personas, they'd be strapping bombs on themselves.
In 2007, Palestine and Iraq were actively at war and Lebanon, if I recall correctly, had just endured a massive bombing campaign and partial invasion from Israel. These groups were on the frontline of those respective conflicts. That's not a defence of any of these groups. All of them have targeted civilians, not just soldiers. But when they're your only functional resistance, or your close ally's only functional resistance, you're inclined to be at least somewhat favourably inclined towards them.
We wouldn't ever support such monsters, though, would we? Lol. Yeah right. Have a read through some recent threads on here to see how pious we feel about civilian casualties in a 'necessary' war. That doesn't mean that I actually think any of the posters here airily waving away victims of drone strikes would willingly pull out a kalashnikov and start murdering civilians themselves. Most people aren't like that. Likewise, I wonder how many people campaigning for refugee families to be barred from entering the country would be willing to stand at the threshold of a squalid, disease-ridden refugee camp and drag them back in. I guess there's a big difference between abstract support of bad things being done by other people and actually doing it yourself, isn't there? |
The problem with relativism, David, is that it makes everything possible. I think your argument is that, since Iraq was invaded by a foreign power, that makes killing occupying soldiers (but not civilians) ok. So if I read you correctly, you are actually in favour of anyone making a choice to kill (say) any Australian soldiers in Iraq because they are an occupying power ? Or if not in favour, then you apparently consider it unobjectionable ?
The trouble with this position is that, ultimately, it leads to a hell of nihilistic relativism. Are the aboriginals justified in killing white Australian military ? Were the Timorese entitled to start planting bombs on Australian streets after Australia acquiesced to the Indonesian invasion in 1975 ? Where does it end ?
Ultimately, values are irreducibly subjective, and you need to take sides. If you choose to take the side of those who wish to kill a young soldier of the liberal society that protects you and feeds you, when that young man is trying (at some stupid politician's behest) to impose order and democracy on a society that is collapsing into anarchy, then I think you are in a bad place.
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Yes, it makes *anything* possible. To somehow think possibility is a bad thing is actually the nihilism here: "We have a gut feeling that we're right and superior and we'll fight for it whatever the cost because there's no other choice!"
Complete nihilism of the sort which led fools to cheer on Afghanistan and Iraq, thereby worsening every menace imaginable for everyone. "Yes, but at least we weren't relativists with all their...possibility."
Taking up the discipline of clearing subjective absurdities off the table right from the outset ("a child of my kind is worth more than a child of their kind"; "terrorism is justified when we do it because our perspective is right"; "we're the superior humans here") forces us to identify and negotiate optimal outcomes.
This is not "relativism" at all; it's science and rationality. It draws on the common Homo sapiens within us and forces us to find a solution which the vast bulk of humans everywhere want (including many caught up in crazed environments through no real choice of their own). This always includes stability, employment, housing, economic opportunity, etc.
It is a mark of maturity and discipline to pursue possibility because it requires great determination and gratification delay to override cheap gut reactions. But to do so first means putting aside our inner exceptionalist fantasies and accepting the basic tautology that the average human is...average.
Oh, but the guilty pleasures of feeling above average and fighting the good fight against the forces of evil!
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
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think positive 
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| Morrigu wrote: | Hmmm IMHO some things are worse than dying.....................
Woman burnt alive by Islamic State ‘for refusing extreme sex act’
THE APPALING treatment of captured women and girls in Islamic State territory has been laid bare in a shocking testimony to the UN.
Zainab Bangura, the UN’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, recently toured refugee camps in the Middle East and returned with horror stories told by the victims of the terror group’s evil.
“They are institutionalising sexual violence,” she told the Middle East Eye. “The brutalisation of women and girls is central to their ideology.”
She told of how “pretty virgins” were captured by jihadists after they conquer new areas.
After attacking a village, IS fighters kill all men and boys over 14 and capture the youngest, prettiest virgins, which are sent to their stronghold, Raqqa.
“They often take three or four girls each and keep them for a month or so, until they grow tired of a girl, when she goes back to market.
“At slave auctions, buyers haggle fiercely, driving down prices by disparaging girls as flat-chested or unattractive.
“We heard about one girl who was traded 22 times, and another, who had escaped, told us that the sheik who had captured her wrote his name on the back of her hand to show that she was his ‘property’.”
It is estimated that between 3,000 and 5,000 women are enslaved by IS. Most of the slaves are women from the Yazidi minority, who are persecuted as “devil worshippers” by jihadists.
Bangura said “They commit rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and other acts of extreme brutality.
“We heard one case of a 20-year-old girl who was burned alive because she refused to perform an extreme sex act.”
http://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/woman-burnt-alive-by-islamic-state-for-refusing-extreme-sex-act/news-story/46e0b83f698a005ded63b0e8ebdb9a79 |
Gees, not one comment on this bloody awful article?
It's like the nazis but against women only. How the **** to they justify this? Sell it to their armies? In this day and age! Bloody barbarians. They all deserve to die, and they can have the ugly virgins in hell. May they all be big gay bastards
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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watt price tully 
Joined: 15 May 2007
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| think positive wrote: | | Morrigu wrote: | Hmmm IMHO some things are worse than dying.....................
Woman burnt alive by Islamic State ‘for refusing extreme sex act’
..... |
Gees, not one comment on this bloody awful article?
It's like the nazis but against women only. How the **** to they justify this? Sell it to their armies? In this day and age! Bloody barbarians. They all deserve to die, and they can have the ugly virgins in hell. May they all be big gay bastards |
I think it's because it's so damn appalling & disgusting that there is not much to say, I suspect we are all in agreement here.
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“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough†Kinky Friedman |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Quite so, WPT.
| Mugwump wrote: | The problem with relativism, David, is that it makes everything possible. I think your argument is that, since Iraq was invaded by a foreign power, that makes killing occupying soldiers (but not civilians) ok. So if I read you correctly, you are actually in favour of anyone making a choice to kill (say) any Australian soldiers in Iraq because they are an occupying power ? Or if not in favour, then you apparently consider it unobjectionable ?
The trouble with this position is that, ultimately, it leads to a hell of nihilistic relativism. Are the aboriginals justified in killing white Australian military ? Were the Timorese entitled to start planting bombs on Australian streets after Australia acquiesced to the Indonesian invasion in 1975 ? Where does it end ?
Ultimately, values are irreducibly subjective, and you need to take sides. If you choose to take the side of those who wish to kill a young soldier of the liberal society that protects you and feeds you, when that young man is trying (at some stupid politician's behest) to impose order and democracy on a society that is collapsing into anarchy, then I think you are in a bad place. |
Sorry Mugwump, but I do find it a little difficult to take this kind of overwrought patriotism seriously. Of course I don't think killing soldiers is okay! Do I strike you as being the militaristic type? Like most people, I reluctantly accept that war is sometimes necessary and that war generally entails killing soldiers. But no, I don't have some uncontrollable spasm that leads me to consider the actions of my country's soldiers morally unimpeachable and those of its enemy's indefensible, because I'm not a 10-year-old boy raised on WW1-era propaganda and Biggles novels.
Let me turn the question back on you: do you think that North Vietnamese soldiers who shot at Australian soldiers were acting 'defensibly'? What about the Turks at Gallipoli? Is this really moral relativism or just following your position through to its logical conclusion?
| Skids wrote: | | David wrote: |
As for me being an apologist, I'll repeat what I said before: an apologist for what? Muslims? |
Puhleeze  criminals perhaps... in your eyes, with too many bleeding hearts posts to quote......... 'Legitimate' refugees... if they've got a blanket and a sob story that grips you.... just let ém all in...... Rock spiders are just victims who need a hug according to the great one
You can't see the forest for the trees mate.  |
If you pay enough attention, you'll see that I'm also an apologist for Islamophobes and racists. Let's just say I'm an apologist for 'people', then, and leave it at that. 
| pietillidie wrote: | | It is a mark of maturity and discipline to pursue possibility because it requires great determination and gratification delay to override cheap gut reactions. But to do so first means putting aside our inner exceptionalist fantasies and accepting the basic tautology that the average human is...average. |
Well said! And isn't this all we've been arguing these past few pages (and in other threads about Syrian refugees)? The question of whether masses of people on the other side of the world who happen to believe in a foreign faith are monsters, or dangerous types with a penchant for killing, or the 'dreaded Hun', or simply regular human beings with the same basic thoughts, habits and desires as any of 'us'. What an absurd, not to mention old-fashioned thing to be debating!
Yes, I see that the other side of the debate views this as something different. At its most sophisticated, the anti-Islam movement is arguing that adherence to Islam is a kind of pathology, even a psychosis, and that its sufferers require institutionalisation (in an open-air asylum known as 'the Middle East'). But a cursory examination of Muslim-dominated societies across the globe would reveal something much more familiar and functional. No matter how irrational a society's dominant ideologies may be - whether that be Christianity, Islam, Aztec human sacrifice, Maoism or even Naziism - the tendency of humans to be sane requires these ideologies to become somewhat neutralised at ground level and incorporated within a structure of rational behaviour. A collective of the truly insane (in behaviour as well as thought) requires a cult, and a group small and exclusive enough to stay effectively crazy. Islam, at least in its mainstream forms, is simply too big and diverse to fit that profile.
That's all theoretical discussion, though. What's missing in this argument (and this ties into the 'hierarchy of interest' thread) is any connection with Syrians as real human beings. We're really just discussing shadowy archetypes here. From such a distance, it becomes possible to say absurd things like "they might be dangerous" or "they might be crazy" when you're dealing with a bunch of barely-conceived cartoon characters in foreign garb. That would vanish in a second if we had fifty, ten, or even just one Syrian poster here, because you'd be forced to deal with a living, breathing, complex human being who can speak for themselves.
The worst crimes of the anti-Islam movement are not so much racism (though it comes from the same place) as disconnection from reality, lack of imagination and a fear that only permits them to see certain kinds of people as two-dimensional line drawings. On the scale of irrationality, I see this tendency as far more dangerous than a belief in an imaginary friend and odd rituals. That is the ideology that is truly incompatible with the modern world.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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It'd be ironic and quite predictable if this was automatically recast as a 'Muslim' issue. Of course the Republicans will be pleased; both a distraction from the fact that their gun laws have failed them again, and an opportunity to push their anti-refugee barrow.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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But it may well be a Muslim issue, we just don't know yet as there aren't enough facts.
There's potential ammunition for all different sides of the debates.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: |
Sorry Mugwump, but I do find it a little difficult to take this kind of overwrought patriotism seriously. Of course I don't think killing soldiers is okay! Do I strike you as being the militaristic type? Like most people, I reluctantly accept that war is sometimes necessary and that war generally entails killing soldiers. But no, I don't have some uncontrollable spasm that leads me to consider the actions of my country's soldiers morally unimpeachable and those of its enemy's indefensible, because I'm not a 10-year-old boy raised on WW1-era propaganda and Biggles novels.
Let me turn the question back on you: do you think that North Vietnamese soldiers who shot at Australian soldiers were acting 'defensibly'? What about the Turks at Gallipoli? Is this really moral relativism or just following your position through to its logical conclusion? |
You wrote that “In 2007, Palestine and Iraq were actively at war …. [and] These groups were on the frontline of those respective conflicts. That's not a defence of any of these groups. All of them have targeted civilians, not just soldiers. But when they're your only functional resistance, or your close ally's only functional resistance, you're inclined to be at least somewhat favourably inclined towards them".
When you wrote that you do not “defend these groups because they targeted civilians, not just soldiers”, I think the implication is clear that you regard a soldier in Iraq in 2007 as a legitimate target. I know that you would not pull the trigger, peaceable fellow that you are ; but your sympathies clearly seem to be with the person who would.
In any conflict, your enemy is likely to have a “resistance fighter” narrative : a grievance, a different view of history’s events, our sheer presence in his country, or whatever. This is not mathematics : there is no absolute truth, only a clash of conflicting views of right and history. Yet at such times, one has to make a choice: fight for Australia, fight for its enemies, or abstain, knowing that abstention aids the enemy. In practical terms, you have to take a view on whether it is acceptable to you for someone who considers themselves a resistance fighter in Iraq to kill an Australian soldier.
My position is that, as long as my country remains a liberal democracy and the actions of its armed forces are controlled by a properly-elected parliament and conducted in accordance with the Geneva Convention, it acts in the name of my values. I feel bound to observe the laws of my country as an expression of the will of parliament, and for the same reason I support any military cause it undertakes, confident that our liberal, secular and democratic values are historically right, even if they are occasionally pursued badly. It is possible that parliament would support something so egregiously stupid or wicked that I would have to demur, but I cannot see that being likely in the mid-term.
You use the interesting example of the North Vietnamese soldier. It is the historical fallacy, to debate choices made in one context via the hindsight of another, but here goes : today, I understand his position well, and respect his decision to fight against us as an expression of his values. But in the context of 1967, knowing that he was trying to kill my countrymen and our allies in South Vietnam, and believing that he was fighting for the totalitarian and murderous creed of Communism, I want him killed or captured. His cause is illegitimate because he is in arms against our democracy on behalf of a tyrannous ideology. In retrospect, the Vietnamese communists were not as threatening as they may have seemed, amid the charming communism that gave us the Cold War, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, North Korea. But I am glad that there were brave young Australians who did not free-ride, but did the ugly work of our national interest, as we saw it at that time.
I don’t think that is “overwrought patriotism” at all ; quite the opposite. Blind patriotism would hold that one’s nation can do no wrong. My patriotism holds that we should argue the rights and wrongs of different courses of action, and critique policy and action in the light of whatever facts are known at the time. That capacity is one of the glories and moral justifications of our civilisation. But once parliament has decided, I want nothing but victory for its cause and complete support for its soldiers as long as they act reasonably.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Mugwump wrote: | | My position is that, as long as my country remains a liberal democracy and the actions of its armed forces are controlled by a properly-elected parliament and conducted in accordance with the Geneva Convention, it acts in the name of my values. I feel bound to observe the laws of my country as an expression of the will of parliament, and for the same reason I support any military cause it undertakes, confident that our liberal, secular and democratic values are historically right, even if they are occasionally pursued badly. |
I honestly find your views on this astounding, but perhaps to be fair you feel the same about mine. For me, it would never even cross my mind to withhold any dissent I might otherwise feel was justified on the basis of such theoretical reasoning.
Of course, you're entitled to this position and I respect it, just as I'm entitled to offer my support for this country's foreign assignments on a (ideally, rigorously interrogated) case-by-case basis. But is it fair to say that one's duty or disposition as a citizen may not be wholly relevant in this discussion? We are, after all, talking about such universal topics as morality, which surely at their most elementary level require us to put ourselves in the shoes of the equally patriotic Iraqi, Syrian or Palestinian.
Personally, my 'sympathies' did not lie with the Iraqi who fires at an American soldier at a checkpoint. At worst, you could say that I saw it as being an equivalent tragedy with the reverse scenario. My opposition to warfare goes beyond merely not wanting to pull the trigger, you know.
You've misread my position on this pretty substantially – in fact, I don't think I could have much less sympathy for groups like Hezbollah! To say I understood the actions of the Iraqi resistance (and passive support for it amongst the community) is hardly the same thing as saying I was grimly applauding every time an Australian soldier was gunned down. I was simply trying to contextualise civilian support for these groups; not justifying it, and certainly not getting on board with it myself.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | | My position is that, as long as my country remains a liberal democracy and the actions of its armed forces are controlled by a properly-elected parliament and conducted in accordance with the Geneva Convention, it acts in the name of my values. I feel bound to observe the laws of my country as an expression of the will of parliament, and for the same reason I support any military cause it undertakes, confident that our liberal, secular and democratic values are historically right, even if they are occasionally pursued badly. |
I honestly find your views on this astounding, but perhaps to be fair you feel the same about mine. For me, it would never even cross my mind to withhold any dissent I might otherwise feel was justified on the basis of such theoretical reasoning.
Of course, you're entitled to this position and I respect it, just as I'm entitled to offer my support for this country's foreign assignments on a (ideally, rigorously interrogated) case-by-case basis. But is it fair to say that one's duty or disposition as a citizen may not be wholly relevant in this discussion? We are, after all, talking about such universal topics as morality, which surely at their most elementary level require us to put ourselves in the shoes of the equally patriotic Iraqi, Syrian or Palestinian.
Personally, my 'sympathies' did not lie with the Iraqi who fires at an American soldier at a checkpoint. At worst, you could say that I saw it as being an equivalent tragedy with the reverse scenario. My opposition to warfare goes beyond merely not wanting to pull the trigger, you know.
You've misread my position on this pretty substantially – in fact, I don't think I could have much less sympathy for groups like Hezbollah! To say I understood the actions of the Iraqi resistance (and passive support for it amongst the community) is hardly the same thing as saying I was grimly applauding every time an Australian soldier was gunned down. I was simply trying to contextualise civilian support for these groups; not justifying it, and certainly not getting on board with it myself. |
Thanks David, It's been an interesting discussion, and I admit that I am trying to work out, and explain my position to myself. I suspect we're talking at cross-purposes a fair bit, as I do not think you would sympathise with anyone being killed if it could be prevented ; though I am not sure your position is as simple, when interrogated deeply, as you make it sound.
What I am wrestling with is how, when one believes that one's country is in the wrong (as it will be sometimes, as we are often in the wrong as individuals), one can support its soldiers and not sympathise with an enemy that wishes to kill them. Also, how do you choose between things that have no objective truth when there is armed conflict ? These are deep questions.
On "dissent", I think much depends on what one means by it. Of course it is fine to dissent from policy in wartime - otherwise how can policy be changed ? But that has to be done in a way that does not undermine the military effort of people who are fighting and dying in the name of your values.
btw, the Viet Cong example was not a killer example, for me ; if you'd used the example of, say, the Zulu Wars, it's much more challenging ... one can only plead the historical fallacy, there. 
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Two more flags before I die! |
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Skids 
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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| HAL wrote: | | Tell me more about your thread WPT read the title 8 And if you don't like the facts that he or she provide links forhow do YOU determine their CREDIBILITY dear sir. |
Even Hal makes more sense than the apologists.
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Don't count the days, make the days count. |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| A little more. |
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Skids
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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| David wrote: | | It'd be ironic and quite predictable if this was automatically recast as a 'Muslim' issue. Of course the Republicans will be pleased; both a distraction from the fact that their gun laws have failed them again, and an opportunity to push their anti-refugee barrow. |
Ironic?
It's a fact these 2 swore allegiance to ISIS. Sorry to disappoint you.
And gun laws .... pfft. They stop innocent people having guns. Criminals will ALWAYS be able to get whatever they want. FMD, I'm no criminal, but I could have a handgun in my possession before you finish your muesli this morning.
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Don't count the days, make the days count. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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