Here are some possible conclusions you have failed to imagine: 1) it is in fact not the purpose of this forum to discuss Islamofascism
But Islamofascism is a memeplex, and a particularly nasty one at that. It would seem to be solidly within the list purview to discuss it.
Yes it is within the purview, but we have no *obligation* to discuss it.
The fact that we haven't been discussing what you think we should in no way implies that we are sympathetic to terrorists. I don't understand your "logic" at all. Do you apply the same reasoning to the memetics list? Are they all closet islamofascists too?
As I have previously stated, I believe that the owner of that list, a university professor residing in Great Britain, with their population and laws, could very well harbor eminently justifiable fears concerning his academic position, as well as for his very life and the lives of his family members.
But you still haven't made clear *why* people might feel disinclined *here* to critically analyze the Islamofascist memeset, when they take great delight in doing so vis-a-vis Christian memeplexes. They ARE both patriarchal monotheisms, are they not? And are they (and Judaism, too) not historically related? Soooo....what's the hang-up? I still have yet to see a more feasible theory put forth than the disinclination to criticize other (though not fellow) enemies-of-Bush...
Re:Why Intelligent Design Is Going to Win
« Reply #32 on: 2005-11-01 14:13:33 »
Any arguments regarding Christianity are equally valid against Islam. The two religions are really not that different. And both are a serious threat to the future of humantity. Christianity is more germain to this thread because they are the ones trying to teach myth as science in America.
But you still haven't made clear *why* people might feel disinclined *here* to critically analyze the Islamofascist memeset, when they take great delight in doing so vis-a-vis Christian memeplexes. They ARE both patriarchal monotheisms, are they not? And are they (and Judaism, too) not historically related? Soooo....what's the hang-up? I still have yet to see a more feasible theory put forth than the disinclination to criticize other (though not fellow) enemies-of-Bush...
All four of the theories I put forth are more plausible than our alleged sympathy for Islamofascism. You still have yet to point to a single instance of anyone here defending terrorists. Obviously you can't because we never have. I have no idea what I can say to convince you of the truth here so I won't put much effort into it, but our audience can see for themselves.
I have to conclude that it is due to the anti-US - and specifically, anti-Bush - stance of a solid majority of the list members.
Sir, I take acception to your conclusion that the majority of the members of this board are anti-US. That is a highly inflamatory and incorrect statement.
Mentor: Not anti-US so much as anti-Bush, and thus anti-anything-Bush-tries-to-do, include pursue a war on Islamofascist terror, or at least 'if Bush is trying to do it, he must be trying to do it the wrong way, or it must be the wrong thing to try to do, or both'. If the contention is that it's the wrong thing to try to do, then, considering 9/11, among many other things, WHY is it the wrong thing to try to do? If the contention is that he is trying to do it the wrong way, how so, and, considering that Clinton's way failed (the 9/11 terror flyers were recruited, trained financed, inserved into the US, and given their mission during his administration), what would be the right way to do it?
Lucifer: I convincingly answered your four 'reasons' earlier in this thread:
1) it is in fact not the purpose of this forum to discuss Islamofascism
But Islamofascism is a memeplex, and a particularly nasty one at that. It would seem to be solidly within the list purview to discuss it.
2) maybe no one has the time or interest to do so
Maybe; although one wonders why, considering that the critical analysis of memeplexes is one of this list's reasons for being, and one that is so contemporarily threatening would seem to be crying and stamping its feet for list attention.
3) maybe those who do are discussing it in a more relevant forum
And that would be...?
4) perhaps those that would like to discuss it are scared away by the flame wars that typically arise
Flames DO seem to be directed at those who attempt to initiate such studies, true...but perhaps we could all rise above such pettiness...and perhaps not. We won't know until we give it a good committed try...
Re:Why Intelligent Design Is Going to Win
« Reply #36 on: 2005-11-02 11:39:47 »
Thank you, Salamantis
A discussion about Islam as a dangerous memeset is acceptable to me. Its dangers are obvious. Still, we must not consider this an excuse to let our attention laps from the Neo-Christian memeset which is IMO even more dangerous.
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
To Mentor and Fox: I take issue with the 'mote and beam' characterization of my position because I view the contemporary Islamofascist memeset as currently more dangerous than the Fundamentalist Christian one, for a number of reasons.
1) Recent History The lion's share of mass-killing terrorist attacks in the past quarter-century have been perpetrated by these people, and not Fundy Christians (although they, too, are on my "Danger, Will Robinson!" list). 9/11, London, Beslan, Bali, Madrid, the USS Cole, the Khobar Towers...the list could go on and on.
2) Fundamentalist Literalism Christians believe that the Bible was written by human beings, under Holy inspiration, while the official position of Islam is that the Qu'ran (literally, the Recitation) was dictated to Muhammed by the Archangel Gabriel, and is word-for-word accurate and correct for all time. Thus, while there is a reasonable split between Fundamentalist Christians, who take the Bible literally, and the rest of Christians, who see parable, poetry metaphor, simile, era-linked prejudices, contradictions and inaccuracies in the Bible, no such split is officially possible within Islam. All Muslims are expected to submit to the literalist stance; in fact, Islam translates as Submission.
3) More Violent Character While there are a half-dozen or so peace-and-tolerance passages contained within the Qu'ran, there are also more than a hundred vicious and violent passages to be found there. People say, well, the Old Testament is indeed itself to a significant degree a 'testament' to divinely sanctioned brutality, and this is true. However, most of that brutality was superseded by the more peaceful and tolerant New Testament, while the Qu'ran is divided into the Meccan and the Medinan sections. The Meccan section, which came first, when Muhammed was militarily weak and was forced to placate his enemies, contains all of the peace-and-tolerance passages, while the Medinan section, which contains many (although not all) of the brutal and violent passages, was written later, and supercedes the more moderate Meccan section. It is as if, in the Bible, the Old Testament came later and superceded the New; if this were so, Christianity would be (even) much more brutal and intolerant than it is now.
4) The Examples of the Respective Primary Protagonists Jesus only got violent once in the Bible, when he whipped the money-changers. Mainly, he preached faith, love of one's neighbors, and nonviolence. When one of his disciples raised a sword against and cut the ear off of one of the people sent to arrest him, he supposedly put it back on. Muhammed, on the other hand, was historically a warrior and guerilla fighter. His life was circumscribed by military conquest. The hadiths, which are records of occurrences in and commentaries on the life of Muhammed, are nearly as important as the Qu'ran itself to them.
5) The Confrontation with Modernity Christianity began to behaviorally moderate and domesticate itself around 500 years ago, due to the effects that the Reformation and the Enlightenment had upon it. Islam has yet to go through this confrontation; it is only now just beginning for them. However, in the present era, with the advent of global anonymous communications and travel, and with easy access available to both the materials needed to construct WMD's and the knowledge needed to properly employ these materials, this is a particularly dangerous time for fanatics to lash out from the growing pains. Giordano Bruno conceived of relativity 350 years before Einstein and was burned as a heretic for it, and rockets (fireworks) were already known to Europe by then, due to Marco Polo's sojourn in China; think of what it would have been like if the medieval world had had the option of ballistic thermonuclear conflagration (not to mention genetically engineered plagues and mass-produceable deadly chemical compounds). There is the added factor that one of the Muslim death-penalty heresies translates as 'innovation' (Islamists are quite willing to appropriate death-dealing technology while rejecting the science behind it - a Pakistani 'scientist' actually wrote a paper that advocated solving his country's energy problems by harnessing djinn (genie) power!); thus it can be dangerous for Muslims to publicly embrace novel concepts - and this will only make it more difficult for Muslim adaptation of include accommodation to other perspectives rather than to simply be comprised solely of the Borgian assimilation, subjugation or elimination of all of their vectors.
6) The Evolution of Universality and Intolerance in Totalizing Memeplexes Mind viruses are unlike the viruses that plague our bodies. If a physically infectious disease kills its host too quickly, that host cannot serve as an infection vector (which is why AIDS is so much more of a global threat than the Ebola virus - the long, symptom-free yet contagious incubation period). This is also why deadly diseases demonstrate the historical propensity to become slower killers as time goes on. However, a different survival strategy presents itself for totalizing mind-viruses, which MUST be cognitively rather than physically communicated, and thus, if they are elaborate and/or involve significant behavioral changes, difficult to contract under the radar of one's attention: to kill and/or enslave all those who RECOGNIZE the attempted dissemination (proselytizing) and REFUSE to be infected (part of these memesets is invariably the inculcation of the desire and/or duty to infect others - this is how they propagate). This eliminates competition for cognitive residence from alternative memeplexes (the dead cannot communicate their competing vectors). Unlike physical diseases, where people may be infected with multiple differing phages simultaneously (like measles AND the flu), a totalizing memeplex must have SOLE possession of its niche, or it cannot be said to possess it at all. And in fact, to reject conversion to Islam is considered by Islamofascists to be an insult and attack upon it, punishable by death.
Now, remembering that the historical function of tribal religion has been to enhance group cooperation and cohesion, thus giving religious tribes an advantage in warfare against tribes with less mutual commitment and more individualism (and most likely the pre-historical function, too - thus setting up a group selection which would tend to reproductively favor those who were increasingly susceptible to infection by religious memeplexes), let's take a quick look at the evolution of universality and intolerance in Patriarchal Monotheism.
The memeplex of Judaism originally involved a divine gift of a particular parcel of land to a particular chosen people - Israel for the Jews (although, lately, converts to Judaism, although not sought, are accepted from every racial and ethnic classification). Thus the parameters for the growth of the Jewish memeplex were set by the nature of the memeplex itself - only within ethnic Jews, who were only promised dominion over historical Israel (most Zionists still think this way).
However, with the evolution of Christianity from Judaism, the ethnic imperative and the geographical rootedness were pruned off, and all one had to do was to accept the memeplex. This allowed Christianity to spread to all sorts of ethnicities, and for them to take control of previously non-Christian lands, as their demographics grew to majority within them. It also had the advantage of spreading the genetic sacrifice idea beyond a tribe, so that multiple tribes sharing the same memeplex could band together and both protect each other and cooperate in the confrontation of common enemies (a feature that the Roman Empire put to conscous use when they adopted Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire). However, Christianity was written so it could be disseminated via persuasion - the Great Charter, which comprises the Christian memeplex's infection module, reads "Go ye therefore and TEACH all nations". Of course, the construction of this module implies the conviction that the vector is offering a gift of knowledge to the ignorant, and for this reason many have been historically forced to adopt Christianity 'for their own good', even when they were too (willfully or otherwise) ignorant to recognize what their own good was, and sometimes at the cost of their mortal bodies, if in the process their immortal souls were saved.
Still the language of Christianity's proselytization module is persuasional rather than coercive, and this left room for the development of tolerance for other faiths, even while missionaries continue to be perpetually funded to 'spread the Good Word'.
This is a weakness that the evolution into Islam has exploited. The Muslim memeplex explicitly substitutes coercion for persuasion. It is quite precise in what may and may not be done: all 'People of the Book' - that is, Jews and Christians (and I suppose Zoroastrians - they have a single holy book called the Zend Avestra of Zarathustra)- have the option to a) convert to Islam, b) be put to death, or c) live in Dhimmitude, a serfic, subservient state somewhere between slavery and second-class citizenship, characterized by less civil rights, the fact that any Muslim's word will always be legally favored over theirs in courts of Shari'a law, and the payment of perpetual monetary tribute known as the jizya. For all the rest - Buddhist, Taoists, Hindus, Pagans and Atheists - the options are only two: convert or die.
Islam officially divides the globe into two camps; Dar-el-Islam (the World of Islam) and Dar-el-Harb (the World of War). This stance entails the conviction that the only means by which final global peace may be attained is the total elimination of the Dar el Harb, and the establishment of a Global Muslim Caliphate ruled by Shari'a law. Those who choose to embark upon Jihad (actually, it is described in the Qu'ran as a duty rather than as a choice just like Christian witnessing is in the Bible) and are killed (martyred) while engaging in it, are Qu'ranically assured of a Paradise in which they may perpetually and guiltlessly enjoy practically all of the pleasures that are religiously forbidden to living Muslims; those who live are Qu'ranically permitted to take possession of the spoils of war, be they the property or the women of the conquered and/or slain infidels. This stance is, of course, patently hegemonistic and militantly imperialistic, and becomes even more appealing to poor male Muslim youth, when they see their chances of having their own (appealing) wife as negligible (since the more wealthy Muslims are religiously free to marry as many as four of them each - as long as they can financially support them all). When one takes a look at the historical spread of Islam, primarily by coercion and conflict, from its inception in the Arabian Peninsula some 1300 years ago to its reach from Spain to the Philippines today, and one discovers that, of the forty-five military conflicts extant in the world today, Muslims are fighting on one or both sides of them all, it would appear that this particular module possesses great expansionistic efficacy.
Supporting this memetic module are some others, such as the doctrine that all humans are naturally born as Muslims, and that those who profess other beliefs have fallen into apostasy (and thus must be rescued from their error or suffer the dire consequences), and the dictum that people are free to convert TO Islam - in fact, as we have seen, the 'inducements' are quite formidable - but that to convert FROM Islam to anything else (or, in the case of atheists and agnostics, to nothing) is a religious crime for which the punishment of death is prescribed. It is also better for one's assimilational purposes if one's infidel target is kept in the dark. Thus, Muslims are religiously free to both deceive infidels as to their intentions regarding them (taqiyya) and to misdirect their attention from those intentions (kitman), in the interests if the greater good - that is, in the interests of the expansion of the Ummah (the fellowship of the true believers).
Now, I'm not saying that all Muslims, or even a majority of them, are inexorably drawn from live-and-let-live tolerance to Mujaheddin Jihadism in the service of the annihilation of the Dar el Harb and the establishment of the Global Caliphate (Daniel Pipes estimates the number at around 15%), but the vast majority those who are not so drawn are very quiet, because the message contained in the memeplex of Islam supports not them, but the militants, and they are quite reasonably frightened of suffering the Righteous Retribution of the Violent Faithful should they dare to attempt to speak out in dissent (Some exceptions are Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, Taslima Naslim, and Ibn Warraq, these brave souls continue to suffer for their courage and integrity, and many of their outspoken brethren have been killed).
Now, briefly, let us look at the particular strain which is presently so globally troubling.
Imaam Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab was born in and lived in eighteenth century Arabia (1703-1792), and promulgated the idea that Islam had fallen away from its seventh century roots, the Edenic era when Muhammed and the Four Great Caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali) succeeded each other, and needed to return to them. This involved a Puritanical purging of all non-Muslim influences, the return of draconian enforcement of religious edicts against infidels, and the toughening of restrictions upon women. Wahhabism subsequently spread throughout most of the Arabian Peninsula and gained significant footholds beyond, but concentrated itself primarily upon the peninsula itself, as the defender of the purity of the faith in Muhammed's birth land, the Land of the Two Mosques. In the early 20th century, the House of Saud brokered a deal with the Wahhabists, and Saudi Arabia was born.
Sayyid Qutb was a Wahhabist born in Egypt (1906-1966). He traveled to the US, and sojourned there between 1948 and 1950. This experience shocked and disgusted him. He was horrified by the presence of uppity and voting women, freedom of religion and thought, widespread substance use and rampant sexual licentiousness. He then put forth the idea that the US was the fount of Jahiliyya (a word roughly translatable as pre-Musim Paganism), and, as such, was a danger to Islam and must be forcibly subjected to Shari'a rule. He did not view the US as a military threat, since he believed that life in such a dissipative culture had weakened and softened its citizenry, but rather contended that its various freedoms and vices were slatternly temptations that could seduce the faithful away from the true path. Thus, for the good of both the faith and of all humankind, the US as it was must be destroyed, and Muslim piousness enforced there. He later generalized this view to include, first European, and later all non-Muslim societies.
Notice that, without Qutb, Wahhabism would have remained directed inwards, and without Wahhabism, Qutb would not have had a pious and puritanical Islam with which to compare and contrast the US culture which he encountered. Together, their contributions combine to create the present Al Qaedan stance that the entire globe must be subjugated to a religious regimen that consciously holds itself in the seventh century. Interestingly enough, the head of Al Qaeda, Usama Bin Laden, came from Saudi Arabia (like Wahhab), while Al Qaeda's chief ideologue, Zawahiri, came from Egypt (like Qutb).
Considering all of these points taken together, I must respectfully disagree with your contention that, in the present age, Fundamentalist Christianity is more of a threat than Radical Islamism.
How do we deal with this virulent memeplex? I believe that we're already on the path to doing so, and this is why:
The primordial form of government, one that long predated the advent of the written word, is monarchial, composed of royal masters, typically from a single family lineage that served as a simulacrum of the genetic heritage of the tribe, and ruled slaves, who owed the masters familial bonds of fealty. However, this form of government often entailed power struggles and intrigues by the royal relatives to either lay claim to or to seize the reins of succession during the authority change when the king, czar, pharoah or emperor would die, and this was not conducive to smooth and orderly transition and the smooth continuation of order.
Spoken religious myths had most likely been invoked to legitimize royal rule for as long as humans spoke and gathered in tribes. However, with the creation of written language, it was possible to create a form of leadership that would not change or die like rulers did; blueprints - that is, sets of ideas - that could codify the regal rule as divinely sanctioned, serve as abstract monarchs with which to supplement the concrete yet generationally changing kings, provide a common glue which smoothed transitions and soothed the populace while transition happened, and, via the inclusion of explicit tribal history, the encoding of symbolic abstractions of important past tribal decisions within the religious myth, or the insertion of purportedly divinely communicated rules, provide both guidance as to how such transitions should be effectuated, and within what parameters a particular king should circumscribe his decisional alternatives. These blueprints are the holy texts of written religions.
As time passed, certain written religions spread across several kingdoms each, and the kings themselves became in their turn ruled by their ecclesiastical authorities, who held sway over multiple kingdoms; as religion mattered more, royalty mattered less. In such a manner, genetic monarchies gradually evolved into, or were superseded and supplanted by, ideological monarchies, whose rulers were chosen from within the membership of the religion itself, the successor being decided, whenever a ruler died, via the consensus of the most influential members remaining.
Where religious government was itself supposedly superseded, in most cases, its supercession was apparent rather than real. Thus with communism and fascism, the god of matter and labor, and the god of the spirit (geist) of the people and its will to power, replaced the transcendent god of heaven, mind and prayer. Still, however, the master and the slave remained; the divinely granted or prescriptively composed sets of ideas and rules were the acknowledged rulers, but the actual rulers were those who mandated to the general populaces what those rules meant. Hegel was the philosopher who first explicitly described this structure.
The Hegelian master-slave dialectic was composed of Masters (who were willing to risk death in order to rule) and Slaves (who were not willing to risk death in order to not be ruled), and Hegel did not present any manner by which governmental form could evolve past this basic inequity. However, in the past couple of hundred years, a synthetic new level has emerged, that of Free and Independent Individuals, who refuse to rule others, but who are willing to kill and die in order not to be ruled by others - that is, they are willing to, in fact, even desirous of, letting others rule themselves, and will even take pains to free enslaved others, but in return they insist upon the right to rule themselves also, via representatives who are neither divinely chosen nor doctrinally imposed by exclusive vote from within an ideological apparatus, be they priests or commissars, but are instead popularly elected by the populace at large, in accordance with a constitution that, in addition to codifying those ethical precepts contained within both holy and secular precursors which are genuinely ethical, mandates the existence, frequency, and structure of such a process. In a way, the principle of ecclesiastical or commissar vote was generalized to encompass the entire citizenry (just as, in prior times, the Gutenberg printing press wrested the holy texts away from their elite cadres and made them available for perusal and judgment to all literate citizens), and a new memeplex has thus evolved; the constitutional democracy memeplex
In fact, evolution is an explicit module of this memeplex; whereas holy texts were forever frozen in their revealed forms, constitutions could be amended or modified by elected representatives responding to popular consensus in the face of changing circumstances, like species evolve in response to natural selection acting via changing environments. This capacity for evolution from within relieves pressure for revolution, as popular changes can be made to the established order without the need to overthrow that order in its entirety. However, so that the rights of minority citizens are protected from any oppressive 'tyranny of the majority', basic guaranteed civil and political rights for all are also included as a submodule qualification of the popular evolution module. This submodule grants and guarantees all of the memeplex's citizens equal rights and freedoms to individually pursue their own personal and economic well-being. The interpreters of this constitution (the written and codified template of this memeplex) are appointed by the popularly elected representatives of the citizens, and those who amend it via legislation are separated from those who execute its enforcement and from those who interpret its meaning, as a barrier against groups of representatives collaborating in order to create and implement mutually self-serving rather than citizenry-benefitting changes, or issuing and enforcing self-serving interpretations, and to prevent the executors from authoring self-serving provisions which they then may enforce to their own benefit, or from interpreting existing provisions in self-serving ways. Of course, the concrete personal and political reality of a citizenry as codified in their constitution can never completely catch up to their abstract ideal, as this ideal is itself a moving target, in constant evolution in response to evolving and expanding potential rights, responsibilities, opportunities and choices, but, as noted before, their constitution can be continuously modified to progressively approach it.
Competition between the governments and peoples of countries that embrace this principle, that is, competition between constitutional democracies, is removed from the politico-military sphere (democracies generally do not war with one another - it's counterproductive) and relocated in the economic sphere, comprised of international trade and the competition between producers for consumers via the manufacture of better and/or less expensive products. This competition of course financially and materially benefits the consuming citizenry, at the same time that it furnishes them with gainful productive employment by means of which they may self-support (self-support and self-responsibility being a necessary corollary of freedom and self-rule). Thus, the constitutional democracy memeplex is likely to appeal to a significant percentage of those who presently suffer political and personal oppression and economic privation under theocratic and totalitarian systems, and are prevented by such systems from having an electoral voice in their government's conduct, making personally benefitting economic decisions, exercising personal choice, or changing (or even advocating the changing of) the nature or rules of the system in order to permit themselves to do these things. This appeal renders it likely that the constitutional democracy memeplex can, by offering people the opportunity to achieve concrete and actual this-world economic benefits, expanded ranges of personal choice, and genuine political empowerment, successfully compete for their cognitive memespace with the abstract and hypothetical next-world paradisiacal promises and infernal threats proferred to them by the Wahhab/Qutb memeplex. The hope for the future of secular and tolerant civilization could well lie in this constitutional-democratic memeplex synthesis proliferating through the populations of the globe, siphoning a large enough percentage of their potential members away from the enslaving embrace of the Wahhab/Qutb memeplex that they are unable, after membership attrition via natural and jihad-related causes, to increase or maintain their acolyte population, and finally ridding the world, via democratic revolution (assisted where possible and necessary), of the remaining totalitarian and theocratic enclaves which continue to employ the oppressive master-slave dialectic, and maintain their citizenries in its stifling thrall.
PS: Do not think that this is a racist stance which I am taking; I am expressing dismay at the propagation of a violent, virulent memeset that may cognitively infect any racial or ethnic classification, and trying to figure out what can be said and/or done to persuade Muslims to refuse to embrace it. In fact, there are quite a few non-Muslim Arabs, and the majority of Muslims are themselves not Arabs - the most populous Muslim nations are Malaysia and Indonesia, and their populations are East Asian, not Arab). Likewise, I am not criticizing Islam alone or in its entirety; the problem we face and the task set before us is to gain enough understanding of the workings of the Islamofascist memeplex to be able to memetically counter the propensity, a propensity particularly inherent in the Islamic memeplex but also present in the memeplexes of the other Patriarchal Monotheisms, to facilitate the spawning of intolerant and murderous mutational variants, such as, in the case of Islam, the Wahhab/Qutb Al Qaedan strain.
I think your treatise on Islam is not wholly inaccurate. Although the Bush administration has alienated fully half the American population and a majority of the free world with what may be branded "Christofascism", it is hardly an excuse to ignore the threat posed by "Islamofascists". I think many here would contribute to a thread dedicated to that subject.
Islam is indeed a particularly virulent strain of religion. Power in the hands of any religion based on myth, no matter how benevolent, is a very dangerous thing.
Lucifer: I convincingly answered your four 'reasons' earlier in this thread:
I see your point. The most plausible explanation for the lack of interest here in engaging you on the topic of Islamofascism is that the majority of Virians are in fact Islamofascists. Thank you for opening my eyes. I will report us to the appropriate authorities.
No, they just intensely dislike the Bush administration, and perhaps are concerned (enough to refuse to put in all the time, effort and committment such a task would require) that anything of value that resulted from such a critical analysis might evenually be successfully used by that administration, which could (horrors!) end up reflecting favorably upon them in public opinion. It's kind of a cut-off-one's-face-to-spite-one's-nose stance.
However, this task is more important than a single US administration or a single US party. It is irrational (because it is self-and-society-endangering) to refuse to undertake this important task - one which could conceivably, if it is done right and if what it produces is used properly, result in a significant decrease in the willingness of the overwhelmingly most prevalent present perpetrators to engage in terror attacks worldwide for an extended period of time - simply because, if it is successful, the positive results might via osmosis temporarily benefit the fortunes of a particular US administration or political party.
Just a little anecdote: once I joined a meta-organization (it was a pagan alliance) the avowed purpose of which was to serve as a networking resource, consensus facilitator and liason venue for a number of other like-minded organizations in our area. However, once we sat down, wrote a constitution, and voted to approve it, the president of this organization didn't initiate, or delegate for any of the members to proceed to effectuate, any consensus-facilitating, liasing or network-enabling tasks. No meetings of representatives of the various groups were ever set, nor were the groups even called to ascertain what place and time might be collectively convenient for them; the only people who ever attended our meetings - or were even invited to them - were our members. In fact, meetings that would include the representatives of the various organizations which we were born for the purpose of interconnecting were not even - ever - placed on our planning docket by our president. Instead he suggested that we first had to raise money by throwing carwashes, and increase our visibility by selling t-shirts; these things were supposed to help us raise the funds with which to throw a party for the purpose of impressing influential members of the various organizations. But, other than that, he had no suggestions as far as anything else for us to do went, nor would he entertain suggestions from any of the rest of us (including the vice-president - myself), until we completed the car-wash/t-shirt sales/party-planning thing, and met our treasury's fund-collection goal. Quite simply, under his 'leadership', we were attempting to fabricate and highlight peaks before we built, or even planned to build, any foundations; we were endeavoring to engage in publicity and public relations in the absence of any viable product or service - even, and especially, the interconnecting service which had been our stated purpose. We were supposed to be there to help these groups get together and cooperate, but it seemed to be, as far as he was concerned, never about them, and always and only about us. We didn't need a bunch of money to perform our stated function; all we needed was an available room (and I could reserve one of those at my local alma mater for just about any time, day or night, weekday or weekend), and to contact the various organizations to get them to delegate their representatives and put the question to their members concerning what the cooperative tasks were in which they might be willing to collectively engage, find out what date and time would be convenient for representatives of the greatest number of them to meet, and make copies of a compiled list of topics to be distributed to each of the organizations before any meeting occurred, so each group would have the opportunity, prior to the meeting, to discuss the ideas of the other groups with their own representatives, and tentatively decide what their stance regarding each proposal might be, and if they had any suggestions to offer or questions to ask concerning them. But this never happened - not even once. Needless to say, few members of any of the organizations in question ever attended our carwashes or bought our t-shirts, and our quite useless organization stagnantly dragged on, propelled by nothing other than sheer bureaucratic momentum, until it eventually died a gradual, unannounced and well-deserved death. I now suspect that the president's actual intent was to supplant existing organizations by tossing a procedural umbrella over them and gathering them in under a general inter-organizational control mechanism - a power grab. But that would have required the alliance to be more favorably received by the organizations that it was supposed to be allying together than it was, because such cats can only be herded willingly, and they would only become willing if they were presented with some tangible benefit to them- and they quite correctly discerned no such benefit whatsoever issuing from the alliance.
Organizations are what they do. If they don't do anything, eventually they aren't. That's another good reason for the Church of Virus to begin engaging in a little religio-viral critical analysis and counter-engineering.
Re:Why Intelligent Design Is Going to Win
« Reply #42 on: 2005-11-04 11:51:00 »
Religious fundamentalism in the form of evangelicals and american baptists uniting behind the republican party is the real threat to America. Islam is a convinient distraction from their overt power grab. The goal of islamic fundamentalism may be to destroy the infidel. But realistically they have little power to damage us. Rather, the islamists are unwittingly duped into being a tool for christian fundamentalism's crusaid for world domination. Every time the right wing power grab is questioned by the public, they simply rattle the Islamists cage.
Religious fundamentalism in the form of evangelicals and american baptists uniting behind the republican party is the real threat to America. Islam is a convinient distraction from their overt power grab. The goal of islamic fundamentalism may be to destroy the infidel. But realistically they have little power to damage us. Rather, the islamists are unwittingly duped into being a tool for christian fundamentalism's crusaid for world domination. Every time the right wing power grab is questioned by the public, they simply rattle the Islamists cage.
This is very close to how I see it. I wouldn't however call the Islamic Jihadists the dupe in this equation. We provide them with a powerful, yet compliant enemy, and a theme for recruitment. One might feel tempted to say that the Bush administration was the duped one, however as individual people they seemed to have managed to personally enrich themselves even while selling out basic American interests and security in a global sense. Meanwhile security in the homeland looks ominous as well since the administration seems incapable of planning or competantly responding to even the most basic and predictable of natural disasters not to mention man-made ones. Somebody is certainly the chump here, and I think it is us, the US citizenry who are being played willingly or not.
Re:Why Intelligent Design Is Going to Win
« Reply #44 on: 2005-11-04 12:49:57 »
That is interesting. Essentially, enlightened thought is loosing out to fundamentalism as the arguement is couched in terms of Christian vs. Muslim. Us or them. Pick your side.