Orlando:Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d’autri (Page 3 of 4)

That goes after one part of the chain.  The start of the chain is the ideal of violent jihad.  Discredit the idea and the problem fades away.

I watched Ryan Mauro, principal of the Clarion Project, try to speak to a town council not far from where I live.  A mosque was requesting variances to expand.  Mauro wanted to speak--on the record--with the information that the mosque's principal was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 9/11 atrocity.  The schedule was manipulated to ensure that Mauro's statement could only be given on a 'to-be-continued' date when, with his full schedule, he could not attend.

Note that adults, with formed and secure world-views, are rarely indoctrinated.  The targets and victims are young people.  There are a lot of angles on this, including the idea that self-destruction expiates the sin of having enjoyed the forbidden pleasure being destroyed.

If we would regard ISIS and its sister organizations as states, even nascent and usurping states, we could take Newt Gingrich's recent suggestion that anyone who swears allegiance to such an entity has, by giving allegiance to a foreign power, forsaken his American citizenship.  (Note that Grant never addressed officers of the Confederacy by that name, because it would recognize that entity in law.  Letters demanding surrender were addressed to Commander of the Army now .....)

"Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom."

I think those are the same quote, from different versions.  If not, what is wisdom but a true understanding, of what can and should be done, as well as what is?  Practical wisdom is, after all, one of the four cardinal virtues, all of equal importance.

There are times to discuss the motives and purposes of your opponent in debate.  But the purpose should never be to cut off debate.  The proper way to close debate is to find stasis (with a short, hard 'a').  That's the place where you another your opponent can agree on the places where you disagree, and will not be convinced by debate.  If they are issues on which evidence might speak, so much the better.

Actually, I think you said white heterosexual male Protestant Americans is the problem, or was that someone to whose mind you have melded?

Matthew 6:6 within the first level of understanding means that followers of a minority faith should lie low and even be secretive, and if the God of that faith has any power to hear prayer, he will do so.  At a broader, second level understanding it means that faith does not require ostentation, and contrariwise puritans were sometimes rather showy about their lack of ostentation, so good at demonstrating their goodness, and the modern liberal, the social-justice warrior, has that annoying puritan inheritance.   Evangelism is different because of the proselytizing nature. Islam, requiring everyone in the world to be muslim, or die, or submit to lower status, is not evangelism but imperialism.

Harris is wrong in the furtherance of his analysis, and it is better, if not complete, to view islam as a political movement and not a religion. In this country which tolerates a multiplicity of religions and political beliefs up to the point of conduct limits, there is actually no difference on whether a non-muslim views islam as a religion or a political ideology except for the fact this country has a culture of super-tolerance for religious beliefs over political beliefs, and the constitutional tests for government-religion interaction are more lax than for government-politics interaction. Harris wants to minimize the Pearl Harbor parallel [there's Shinto complicity, of course] when it is almost an exact match even if the strategy for war must be different.

Moreover, Harris, Dawkins, [the late] Hitchens, are atheists who believe in a squishy anarcho-socialist, materialist, anti-causality/pro-determinism fantasy ideology.

We have the benefit of hindsight unlike writing on the Iraq War in 2003 but (1) historical determinism is false; Marxian historical determinism is false and dangerous; (2) The Iraq War was simple - we were already in a state of normal-sovereign-territory war with Hussein's Iraq (it was 100% international-law legal - unlike Afghanistan), and it was the best (and still best) battleground to fight jihadists. 

In order to respond to our present crisis, we must begin by realizing that both the "liberal" concept of national self-determination and the "conservative" one of Realpolitik are no longer adequate to the historical actuality that is unfolding before our eyes. And they are obsolete for the same reason: the epoch of history governed by the principle of classical sovereignty is in the process of dissolution.

is false and dangerous.  Again, a sort of move to global anarcho-socialism (Soros - Open Society) but (like MArx) needs a ruling super-sovereign to arrange it.

Interesting.  A day or two ago I was mulling Haidt and Moral Foundations Theory.

Now, I've got a pair of dots to introduce, and then to connect.

A brief summary, backwards:  Haidt is a modern, social sciences academic who pulled the rug out from under himself.  To verify his ideas, he and his students devised a questionnaire.  Its most famous question is (paraphrased) "Your beloved dog has been hit by a car.  One of your children suggests eating it.  Do you think this is a good idea?"  But wait, there's more ...

Haidt and his students gave the questionnaire to a large number of people, asking also if they were liberal or conservative.  After they filled it out, they were given a second, identical copy, with the instructions that if they were liberal, they should fill it out as they believed a conservative would, and if they were conservative, they should fill it out as though a liberal would.

So ... how did liberals and conservatives do in answering in each others' shoes?  The liberals did poorly, with answer ranges all over the map.  The conservatives did well--not perfectly, but well.

Haidt was testing an idea with this: That there is a set of moral principles more or less common to human nature, and that conservatives care about one subset, and liberals care about another.  But here's the kicker, and Haidt has the numbers to back it: Conservatives care about all six of the categories that Haidt identified, and modern liberals only care about two--and cannot recognize the other four, so that any balancing of interests between their two and the other four looks to them like moral abdication.

The six foundations are

• Caring vs. Harm

• Fairness vs. Cheating

• Liberty vs. Oppression

• Loyalty vs. Betrayal

• Authority vs. Subversion

• Sanctity vs. Degradation

This is a capsule summary, and omits detail.  For example, Haidt links kindness with caring, and respect with authority.  (Haidt's work, and conclusions, are described in his book The Righteous Mind.)

Here's dot one: The Wikipedia article lists the last three of these as 'group-forming'.

Dot two is 'virtue signalling', which is succinctly captured here.  The idea is that many of the things the Left calls for are not based on moral analysis, but on the need to prove that they are Left-pure of heart.  Yesterday's Oppressed is today's Oppressor, and yesterday's Victim is today's Victimizer.  Celebrities charter wide-body aircraft to take their entourages to global warming conferences.  Concerts are given to help the poor when the real fix is fixing laws that prevent people from earning a living.

Dot connection:  Here's the kicker--virtue signalling is a loyalty mechanism.  It's an instinctive (or, as Haidt would say, intuitive) reaction, stemming from the way human nature works.

Even as they reject the virtues they don't understand, they are adhering to them.

Thank you.

To answer the last paragraph: Because people, with the exception of a few nihilists, need to find and understand a moral order in the world.

As to Haidt and Moral Foundations Theory being the wrong approach: Is that because they are in error?  Or because they are incomplete in some way?  Do they lack predictive power?  Are their answers likely to mislead?

My exerience of Engineering School,  many years ago, taught me that a given situation may be described by multiple levels of theory, each one more complete but also more difficult than the one before.  If circuit theory will provide an accurate description, you don't need to invoke transmission line theory--and transmission line theory will make it harder to grasp the system's behavior intuitively than the simpler theory.

Anarchism, in the sense of deliberate lack of sovereign control, variously and usually ill-defined, is the worst of political delusions - you do know that Marxism is Anarchism? Islam is also Anarchism but by means of theocratic teaching of good people to do good things, so long as society gets rid of all those bad -- incorrigibly infidel -- people.

Re: The Shield of Achilles is a good example of: by remembering history, set out of context to the demands of the times, we condemn ourselves to try repeat it and fail. [see Mussolini]  Total War by nuclear weapons, for example, presents a moral issue not fathomable in Bronze-Age Ilium.

Marxism as preached by Marx may be true anarchism, but as a practical matter it cannot be implemented without rigid controls over individuals.  And also as a practical matter there are no shortage of people who enjoy inflicting such rigid control on individuals.  And so the nearest that it has ever been approached is in monastic communities where people are driven by and committed to a purpose beyond either themselves or their community.