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| How many Syrian refugees should Australia take? |
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52% |
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| A few hundred |
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2% |
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| A few thousand |
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5% |
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| Over ten thousand |
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5% |
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| As many as possible |
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35% |
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| Total Votes : 40 |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Mugwump wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | | Why the Left, with such a proud record of feminism and secularism, should provide apologetics for gender repression on behalf of a desert religion from the 6th century, will always baffle me. |
I don't know about the Left, but the complexities of culture as a phenomenon have possibly been explained to you 1,367 times. Why haven't you done any study on it or asked further questions since it was last explained to you?
Just which aspect of the well-known parameters of the human cognitive-emotional-behavioural nexus which gives rise to human cultural variation baffles you? |
However hard, do try not to be patronising, PTID...especially when missing the point. One could swallow a library of books explaining the obvious fact that human beings are designed to love the culture in which they're raised. That explains well why people raised in a Muslim culture love Islam. It does not explain why people who believe in gender equality, the rights of the individual and humanism should be so assiduously making apologetics for an unreformed 6th century warlord religion that is largely associated with the opposite. |
Show me the content of these so-called apologetics. They're almost entirely a Hitchensian straw man. In fact, more than a straw man, the claims are all but a complete lie from what I can tell.
The recognition of the hard limits of the human reality in order to make sound decisions which improve rather than worsen the world is not a moral flaw. It's ethical due diligence.
The issue is not an aesthetic one: Do you like burqas? Do you enjoy a wife being subject to a husband's brutality? Do you applaud the arranged marriages of 12-year-olds?
No one from our culture likes that stuff. The very suggestion is childish and trivialises something far more serious.
The fact is, many people understand our species has zero capacity to abandon the relational settings of a culture in a very short period of time, regardless. Some people may not be able to articulate the mechanics of that, but, from what I can tell, that's what they're getting at.
The undesirable, even brutal settings of cultural systems are absolute, hard physical boundaries unless (a) they are exposed to evolutionary pressures such as economic incentive under conditions of alternative cultural solutions, (b) they undergo radical violent change, or (c) they are submitted to some combination of (a) and (b).
The problem with neoconservative intervention is that it is under the bloodlust fantasy that (b) is preferable to no change. That the Iraq mess is preferable to Iranian oppression. That's what it's basically claiming. But it's not preferable at any level; it's the equivalent of, say, taking the very worst of life in Iran for the most oppressed Iranian minority, and making it daily life for an *entire* population. But that's just not an improvement.
That nonsense is what any sane person who is bearing with the received culture is opposing. I have never heard anyone, ever, oppose the need for cultural evolution or the application of evolutionary pressures to instigate cultural change.
The enlightened *moral* solutions on offer, aside from Iraq chaos, extermination or the imposition of yet another dictator of our choice, include that old biblical favourite, gendercide, also a favoured approach of Stalin and apparently some on Nick's.
So, please make sure you truthfully state what people are *apologising* for. Because if people are recognising hard boundaries, and the realistic choices those hard boundaries impose as a matter of world fact, and are cutting through ignorance and propaganda to lay the matter clearly on the table free of hysteria, efforts to steal resources, and the desire to conquer and control through gendercide (itself an extremely violent form of sexual conquest), that's not apologetics; it's humanitarianism.
I would be extremely surprised if you wouldn't get full support from every sane progressive if you took those other options off the table which linger over this issue like a menacing black cloud, and replaced them with a form of evolutionary pressure, such as efforts to break down the authoritarian grip of the oil economy which sustains the power structure of much of Islam.
Domestically, all the information we have shows you don't have to do anything but grant immigrants rights, support and a fair go because by the third generation they have basically assimilated anyhow.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Morrigu 
Joined: 11 Aug 2001
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“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
Last edited by Morrigu on Fri Oct 09, 2015 12:40 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| Morrigu wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | | Domestically, all the information we have shows you don't have to do anything but grant immigrants rights, support and a fair go because by the third generation they have basically assimilated anyhow. |
That is the funniest thing I think I have ever read - 
.......... Unless you were serious  |
Yes, like the information from the London tube bombings - the bombers were second generation not third, but I'd call that contrary evidence.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Mugwump wrote: | | Morrigu wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | | Domestically, all the information we have shows you don't have to do anything but grant immigrants rights, support and a fair go because by the third generation they have basically assimilated anyhow. |
That is the funniest thing I think I have ever read -
.......... Unless you were serious |
Yes, like the information from the London tube bombings - the bombers were second generation not third, but I'd call that contrary evidence. |
Yeah, what's a generation here or or there in the life of an immigrant family?
When you get to year 10, we'll introduce you to Australian Bureau of Statistics. But don't worry yourselves about difficult things like that for now!
It really is sad to discover George W. Bush is missing both a daughter and a son!
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| pietillidie wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | | Why the Left, with such a proud record of feminism and secularism, should provide apologetics for gender repression on behalf of a desert religion from the 6th century, will always baffle me. |
I don't know about the Left, but the complexities of culture as a phenomenon have possibly been explained to you 1,367 times. Why haven't you done any study on it or asked further questions since it was last explained to you?
Just which aspect of the well-known parameters of the human cognitive-emotional-behavioural nexus which gives rise to human cultural variation baffles you? |
However hard, do try not to be patronising, PTID...especially when missing the point. One could swallow a library of books explaining the obvious fact that human beings are designed to love the culture in which they're raised. That explains well why people raised in a Muslim culture love Islam. It does not explain why people who believe in gender equality, the rights of the individual and humanism should be so assiduously making apologetics for an unreformed 6th century warlord religion that is largely associated with the opposite. |
Show me the content of these so-called apologetics. They're almost entirely a Hitchensian straw man. In fact, more than a straw man, the claims are all but a complete lie from what I can tell.
The recognition of the hard limits of the human reality in order to make sound decisions which improve rather than worsen the world is not a moral flaw. It's ethical due diligence.
The issue is not an aesthetic one: Do you like burqas? Do you enjoy a wife being subject to a husband's brutality? Do you applaud the arranged marriages of 12-year-olds?
No one from our culture likes that stuff. The very suggestion is childish and trivialises something far more serious.
The fact is, many people understand our species has zero capacity to abandon the relational settings of a culture in a very short period of time, regardless. Some people may not be able to articulate the mechanics of that, but, from what I can tell, that's what they're getting at.
The undesirable, even brutal settings of cultural systems are absolute, hard physical boundaries unless (a) they are exposed to evolutionary pressures such as economic incentive under conditions of alternative cultural solutions, (b) they undergo radical violent change, or (c) they are submitted to some combination of (a) and (b).
The problem with neoconservative intervention is that it is under the bloodlust fantasy that (b) is preferable to no change. That the Iraq mess is preferable to Iranian oppression. That's what it's basically claiming. But it's not preferable at any level; it's the equivalent of, say, taking the very worst of life in Iran for the most oppressed Iranian minority, and making it daily life for an *entire* population. But that's just not an improvement.
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I think neoconservative intervention is pretty much off the table, mercifully. The last ten years have proven that it tends to make a bad situation worse. The issue is not whether we say nice or nasty things about Islam as it is practised in "Islamic lands". It's how to deal with this imperialist religion, Islam, as it functions within Western societies - its fatwas against writers, its aggressive minorities supporting terrorism, its behaviour towards women in our community, and the ways in which this growing segment of our population is seeking - quite naturally, as you rightly indicate - to bring Islamic influence to bear on our laws.
As for apologetics, well, I think David's initial post suggested that there were many positive things to say about the role of women under Islam vs the status of women in the West. I admire David's generosity of thought greatly, but I think that's an apologetic. Far from a Hitchensian straw man, apologetics for Islam among the Western new left is widespread. See (as an example among thousands, and since you mentioned the great-if-flawed Christopher Hitchens) his destruction of Baroness Shirley Williams who - and I still find this incredible - claimed that Salman Rushdie should not have been knighted because he'd offended Islam. Available on Youtube.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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Okay, well fair enough. Perhaps I should reserve some wrath for David! It's always good to send some his way every now and then, regardless  
But when you say "widespread", it could easily be about as widespread as people who like vegemite and jam sandwiches, which is to say a few weirdos in Wuthering Heights -esque manors.
The rest are just struggling to articulate what some of us have spent a long time capturing and simplifying. Culture is bloody difficult to explain, and that has nothing to do with apologetics.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Morrigu
Joined: 11 Aug 2001
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“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
Last edited by Morrigu on Fri Oct 09, 2015 12:42 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| OK What should I have said? |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Morrigu wrote: | | I put you on ignore but it screws the posts and pages - DAMN |
Sucker
As if I don't like criticising things! But because culture is hardwired to such an extent, being basically modifiable in only a few costly ways as explained above (time or revolution or some combo of those), you're demanding unreasonable change for now.
Then, you're implying those who can't change their social relation system, conceptual and literal vocabulary, patterns of behaviour and relating, and entire value hierarchy on reading your World's Best Life Manual are <add unfortunate gendercidal adjectives I don't think you really mean here>.
You'll regret that in the future when you step back a bit; I don't judge you for it because of the sacrifice to your wellbeing I think you're making, but I'm not going to stop taking exception to it until you find a way to put me on ignore without messing up the page
Humans can't change to any major extent because you offer them a bowl of kibble, or even your physical and mental all.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Mugwump wrote: | | As for apologetics, well, I think David's initial post suggested that there were many positive things to say about the role of women under Islam vs the status of women in the West. I admire David's generosity of thought greatly, but I think that's an apologetic. Far from a Hitchensian straw man, apologetics for Islam among the Western new left is widespread. See (as an example among thousands, and since you mentioned the great-if-flawed Christopher Hitchens) his destruction of Baroness Shirley Williams who - and I still find this incredible - claimed that Salman Rushdie should not have been knighted because he'd offended Islam. Available on Youtube. |
Then you misunderstood my post. You should know my views well enough now to understand that I don't see sexual promiscuity - and, more importantly, the right to be sexually promiscuous - as a bad thing. I'd go to the barricades for that. My point was simply that it is perfectly likely that a great number of Muslim women look at the acceptance of sexual promiscuity in the West with a mixture of horror and revulsion.
I'm not saying that culture is relative therefore we should accept whatever the cultural norm is in Place X as good and proper. Obviously, if that were the case, then I would have to accept our society's own historic injustices as simply a reflection of the norms of the time. That, clearly, does great injustice to the reformers and free thinkers who historically fought for social change, just as a fully culturally relative view does the same to the secular progressives in the Muslim world today. Unfortunately, I do agree with you that some on the left seem to have great difficulty grasping that point. I find incidents like the Charlie Hebdo attack are a great litmus test for sorting out the genuine progressives from the apologists - I presume you can guess what position I took on that one.
But my fight is not just with identity politics obsessed leftists who are less likely to condemn a fatwa than a mildly sexist joke from an old white scientist. It is also with those on the right who, out of either ignorance, bloody-mindedness or sheer malice, cannot understand Islamic societies - in all of their diversity - as anything other than some cartoonish dystopia populated by evil barbarians and shackled women. I think we understand absolutely nothing about the subject until we recognise that the majority of Muslim women do not see themselves as victims of their societies, or of their religion; that many Muslim societies around the world, for all their ills and varying crises with murderous fundamentalists, are more or less functional societies and quite capable of progressing towards secular pluralism at their own pace. The vitriol heaped on these - again, startlingly diverse - nations and peoples by so many Westerners betrays a deep ignorance of our own history and of the way culture and social progress operate.
And while I wouldn't include you in that category, I think you could afford to stop talking about Islam as if it's been cryogenically frozen since the 6th century. The liberal Muslims of Albania, Turkey, Tunisia and everywhere else might like a word to you about that. And even in the most conservative countries, things are always changing. Certainly, nothing keeps the conservatives in power like an aggressive, interventionist West.
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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: | | As for apologetics, well, I think David's initial post suggested that there were many positive things to say about the role of women under Islam vs the status of women in the West. I admire David's generosity of thought greatly, but I think that's an apologetic. Far from a Hitchensian straw man, apologetics for Islam among the Western new left is widespread. See (as an example among thousands, and since you mentioned the great-if-flawed Christopher Hitchens) his destruction of Baroness Shirley Williams who - and I still find this incredible - claimed that Salman Rushdie should not have been knighted because he'd offended Islam. Available on Youtube. |
Then you misunderstood my post. You should know my views well enough now to understand that I don't see sexual promiscuity - and, more importantly, the right to be sexually promiscuous - as a bad thing. I'd go to the barricades for that. My point was simply that it is perfectly likely that a great number of Muslim women look at the acceptance of sexual promiscuity in the West with a mixture of horror and revulsion.
I'm not saying that culture is relative therefore we should accept whatever the cultural norm is in Place X as good and proper. Obviously, if that were the case, then I would have to accept our society's own historic injustices as simply a reflection of the norms of the time. That, clearly, does great injustice to the reformers and free thinkers who historically fought for social change, just as a fully culturally relative view does the same to the secular progressives in the Muslim world today. Unfortunately, I do agree with you that some on the left seem to have great difficulty grasping that point. I find incidents like the Charlie Hebdo attack are a great litmus test for sorting out the genuine progressives from the apologists - I presume you can guess what position I took on that one.
But my fight is not just with identity politics obsessed leftists who are less likely to condemn a fatwa than a mildly sexist joke from an old white scientist. It is also with those on the right who, out of either ignorance, bloody-mindedness or sheer malice, cannot understand Islamic societies - in all of their diversity - as anything other than some cartoonish dystopia populated by evil barbarians and shackled women. I think we understand absolutely nothing about the subject until we recognise that the majority of Muslim women do not see themselves as victims of their societies, or of their religion; that many Muslim societies around the world, for all their ills and varying crises with murderous fundamentalists, are more or less functional societies and quite capable of progressing towards secular pluralism at their own pace. The vitriol heaped on these - again, startlingly diverse - nations and peoples by so many Westerners betrays a deep ignorance of our own history and of the way culture and social progress operate.
And while I wouldn't include you in that category, I think you could afford to stop talking about Islam as if it's been cryogenically frozen since the 6th century. The liberal Muslims of Albania, Turkey, Tunisia and everywhere else might like a word to you about that. And even in the most conservative countries, things are always changing. Certainly, nothing keeps the conservatives in power like an aggressive, interventionist West. |
Nice post. Of course the point about Islam being a 6th century revelation to an Arab warlord is slightly polemical, however it reflects the fact that much of the Islamic world - and Muslims in the West - have undergone a regression to Salafist norms that are an attempt to recapture the "purity" of the 6th century. Pakistan in the 1960s was a society evolving toward an Islamic version of religious tolerance and liberalism, with a significant margin for intellectual freedom. That has been reversed by a large-scale movement within Islam, and it is playing out in our own society.
I have visited a number of Islamic societies of different stripes - Qatar, Egypt, UAE, Turkey and Indonesia - and of course they all provide functioning societies with a various, rich and often dignified culture. I think I said that above ; it's not our role to change another culture. It is the role of our politicians and citizens to critique the effects and claims of Islam in our own culture, however.
In that regard, the problem is that Islam today seems to be trekking away from progress (in Western terms) across much of the world, at a time that its influence (and aggression) in western societies is increasing. That's the issue that the Left should be concerned with. Is there an irreconcilable conflict between the values of the Western left and those of any realistic version of Islam ? I'd have thought so.
_________________
Two more flags before I die! |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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Wow wee gee. Golly me. This is getting spirited.
I really feel for the average Muslim living in, say point cook right now. (There is a lot of them) Those that are like me with Christianity. I don't go to church very often now the kids are not in a catholic school, but I still like to think He's looking out for me. I try to be Chrisian, as in treat others as you like to be treated. And yet certain people around me are getting right into an alternate Christianity, and telling everyone like me I'm not a true Christian because, well basically I'm not a bigot! And I don't condemn anyone a bit different from me.
That's what I really dislike about solid religion, it's like footy, your a Carlton supporter? Bloody scumbag. You left before the siren? Off with his head.
My gods a nicer God. As long as I try to do no harm to others, as long as I look out for my fellow man, (and living creatures) he lets me sleep at night.
I don't think my Fairy at the bottom of the garden is any more important than my neighbours fairy, he just dresses differently. (Unless he doesn't barrack for Collingwood!).
I strongly object to such, I'm politically correct terms such as "happy holiday", because I really can't see how the "merry Christmas" I grew up with, and love, and has such fond memories attached too (ok I'm not talking lunch with the whole clan here), is offensive to anyone else, any more than happy Hanukkah would bother me (it doesn't).
It's the return to using the good lords word, any lord, as a weapon to basically deprive a whole sex of human decency I can't abide by. Just as using the good lords word to attack gay people to me is bloody ridiculous. Live and let live. The more I hear about the horrendous treatment dished out to women in hard core Muslim States, OMG, and any man that might have the audacity to question THE WORD, it's madness. It's the way Hitler led his army, it's brain washing, and fear.
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| I live in California. Where do you live? |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| pietillidie wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | | Morrigu wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | | Domestically, all the information we have shows you don't have to do anything but grant immigrants rights, support and a fair go because by the third generation they have basically assimilated anyhow. |
That is the funniest thing I think I have ever read -
.......... Unless you were serious |
Yes, like the information from the London tube bombings - the bombers were second generation not third, but I'd call that contrary evidence. |
Yeah, what's a generation here or or there in the life of an immigrant family?
When you get to year 10, we'll introduce you to Australian Bureau of Statistics. But don't worry yourselves about difficult things like that for now!
It really is sad to discover George W. Bush is missing both a daughter and a son! |
Are you talking immigrants, such as my family, who passed all the tests before being granted passage, asylum seekers, or refugees?
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| HAL wrote: | | I live in California. Where do you live? |
Stay away from schools hal
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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