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Gary Patton

The Decline of Violence - Reason Magazine - 0 views

  • Neuroscientist Steven Pinker on the triumph of peace and prosperity over death and destruction
  • Why is ideology so deadly?
  • There are two features of a lot of ideologies that make them deadly. One of them is demonizing.
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  • The other is if your ideology promotes some utopia
  • radical religions, millennial religions, radical Islam, radical forms of Christianity, that say that there’s some irredeemably evil group standing between the world and perfection: the crusaders, the infidels, the Jews, the polytheists, the nonbelievers, and so on.
  • The age of ideology coined the term genocide. You’ve pointed out that just because we recently invented the term doesn’t mean it didn’t happen before.
  • What it means is we started caring about it.
  • What is the “rights revolution”?
  • The rights revolutions are the various social changes [that are] directed largely at violence on smaller scales.
  • against racial minorities
  • women’s rights
  • children’s rights
  • gay rights
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    This article by author, Steven Pinker, outlines data regarding human behaviour that offers some hope for the future of Third World countries, especially violent, Muslim-dominated ones like "the stans" in the Middle East and others in Africa. gfp (2012-01-14)
Gary Patton

It's not Islamophobia to call a jihadist, a jihadist - 0 views

  • There is no doubt that such prejudice exists. But there is no doubt, too, that cries of “Islamophobia” are issued to suffocate argument, to deflect or deter analysis of some behaviour that is factually related to Islam. There is no doubt either that some Muslims have acted as terrorists, either singly, or in association with various Islamist groups. To point this out is not a phobia, but a simple respect for reality.
  • It’s not Islamophobia to call a jihadist, a jihadist
  • there also have been calls suggesting that any reference to the Islamist terrorist connections of the killer would be a species of Islamophobia. This is pure nonsense and folly.
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  • It is not Islamophobic to note the motives and background of the murderer. In fact, it is a form of cowardice and evasion not to do so.
  • If one decries Islamophobia, then one must condemn bin Laden as its Nile source. Bin Laden, more than any other person, has besmirched the practice and understanding of Islam and engendered suspicion of some of its adherents.
  • Horrors perpetrated in the name of fundamentalist Islam, such as attacks on young girls going to school, the internecine slaughters of various sects, the cruel penalties exacted by the Taliban’s repressive creed — stonings, amputations and executions for apostasy — also feed the angry atmosphere, and they are not phantoms of a prejudiced imagination.
  • Bin Laden’s declared purpose, his “war” on the West, and his overt linkage of his cause with a fundamentalist version of Islam, are the primary drivers of our non-phobic — which is to say, very rational — fear of, and hostility to, manifestations of Islamic fanaticism.
  • in Madrid, London or Bali — it was not Islamophobia when some immediately assumed these were al Qaeda, or Islamist-inspired. It was just a natural first response, the acknowledgement of a pattern. In most cases, that first response proved correct.
  • The too-energetic effort to fall outside the shadow of prejudice has served to distort the response of investigators. Looking for everybody else except the most “likely” suspects first, wastes time and resources.
  • Our most urgently served impulse should be to make common cause with the victims of violence — in this case, Jews
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    Rex Murphy feels, and I agree that "...there is no doubt that [anti-Muslim] prejudice exists. But there is no doubt, too, that cries of "Islamophobia" are issued to suffocate argument, to deflect or deter analysis of some behaviour that is factually related to Islam." he states further and I also agree that: " There is no doubt either that some Muslims have acted as terrorists, either singly, or in association with various Islamist groups. To point this out is not a phobia, but a simple respect for reality." gfp (2012-03-12)
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