Guess whose fault it is that Trump is running for president, and has some popular support? It’s not the mobs of bigoted known-nothings who cheer his every simplistic solutions. It’s not the right-wingers who have been feasting on a steady diet of Fox News. It’s not the beady-eyed monomaniacal fanatics who love their guns and god.
Nope. It’s all the fault of the leftists who oppose every single thing Trump stands for.
That’s the message of Douglas Murray, the right-wing neocon who recently had a long mutual grooming session with Sam Harris. He now explains why it’s all our fault.
Last night Donald Trump announced a new ‘policy’ idea which would be to stop any more Muslims going to America. He would even, it seems, prevent Muslim Americans who are currently out of the country on their holidays, from returning home. This is – it need hardly be said – a back of the envelope policy. And it has already had the desired effect. The social justice warriors who mistake Twitter for real life, have been busily signalling their utter outrage at Trump’s remarks. Journalists have seized the opportunity (which the New York Times and others have been trying all along) to insinuate that Trump is in fact the new Hitler. The reaction is as ill-tempered as the original comment. But we should know how we got here.
Pray tell, how? I think we can already guess from his lead-in that he’s going to blame the very people who reject Trumpisms. Try to follow the twisty logic here.
When the political left refuses to identify where Islamic terrorism comes from, what drives it or what it can even be called, it leaves the ground wholly open for anyone else to do or say anything they want. Far from being blunt tools or broad brushstrokes, referring to ‘Islamic extremism’ or ‘Islamism’ makes an obvious and conscious effort to put down a delineating line between non-extreme Muslims and the extremists from their faith. Yet many Muslim organisations, among others, reject this. Groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) expend all their energy berating anyone who makes this delineation and pretends that people exercising such care are in fact ‘tarring all Muslims’. What such Muslim groups seem not to realise is that this in turn makes people suspicious of all Muslims. ‘Why are these Muslim groups pretending that any and all critics of the jihadists are saying something they are not? Maybe all Muslims are in fact jihadists?’ is a conclusion some people will find themselves pushed to.
So…if someone objects to broad stereotyping of Muslims, people who disagree will think that the anti-stereotypers are hiding something, and therefore it is reasonable to equate “Muslim” with “Jihadist”? WHAT??
Donald Trump has not said he wants to prevent terrorists from entering the country — he wants to ban all Muslims, period. There is no nuance there at all. Murray is arguing that pointing out the raging bigotry of such statements will alienate the people who agree with anti-immigrant sentiment and force them to believe that all Muslims are Jihadists. Meanwhile, the guy with the reasonable tone of voice who thinks that we ought to carry out racial profiling, who believes that Ben Carson has a realistic foreign policy, who thinks it would be horrible to drop nuclear bombs on the Middle East, but we just might have to do that … that guy, why, he has nothing at all to do with mainstreaming reactionary right wing hatred.
He wants to claim that the real source of the problem is that those danged leftists are all making simplistic claims that Islam is perfectly harmless; that what we’ve done is cultivate an atmosphere where the public is expecting simple, stupid answers because social justice warriors think Islam is harmless, so they’ve turned to the loud idiot who says Islam is evil in reaction. And the neocons who’ve been delivering their simplistic explanation that the problem is Islam, full stop? They had nothing to do with it.
In Europe I have said for more than a decade that if political leaders kept saying ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ and similar untruths and half-truths then a day would come bearing an atrocity so bad that the mainstream politicians would not be listened to anymore. This prediction is currently being played out across the Channel in France. In the UK I am happy to say that the Prime Minister and those around him have been listening. They realise that a complex problem does not have easy answers. It does not have easy answers like pretending that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’. And it does not have easy answers like those of Donald Trump.
Sure. Yeah. The left is all about easy answers. That’s why Noam Chomsky urges us all to join hands and sing kumbaya to make the bad people go away, and why Sam Harris prefers the complex, subtle, difficult foreign policy expertise of Ben Carson.
Up is down, front is back, black is white in these people’s world. Noam Chomsky is simple. Ben Carson is complex. The Iraq War was a triumph. Bombs are peace (as long as they are American bombs). The people who kill people are the people who keep insisting we should do something other than killing people. Simple answers are bad, so accept the simple answer that Islam is the source of evil.
I’ve been on this funhouse ride for too many decades. Let me out, I’m gonna puke.
Wow, this is reminiscent of the “by taking away our ability to oppress others, you’re oppressing us!” sophistimacated moral nihilism you usually encounter when teaching philosophy to a 13 year-old.
Of course “it” is teh lefties’s fault! They aren’t in the rightwing nutters’s echo chamber. Ergo, them lefties can’t be correct.
yet, we who do not agree with the positions of trump, carson, cruz, and the hosts of reactionary talk radio are somehow labeled “regressive leftists” by sam harris and his followers.
That’s the tired new cliche we’re hearing all the time: the “regressive left”. They hate free speech and freedom of religion and guns!
Sam Harris is nothing but tool for ISIS. Instead of seeing what ISIS wants (us vs. them mentality), and counteracting it, he blindly lets his paranoia give ISIS exactly what it wants. Stupid thinking SH.
similarly: there is some concern about providing free publicity to the Troll (Trump) by mocking his bluster. (Most comics will apologize, in passing, for providing that inadvertent service to Troll.)
My bet is that Trollump chooses the worst possible things to say, in order to get the free publicity of incessant ridicule of his facefarts.
The school of , comes to mind.
Pseudo-intellectuals are running cover for the naked bigotry now, supporting the ideas from a safe distance, making it acceptable for “smart” bigots to follow along with the idiot movement. Blaming the opposition is a convenient distraction. This is all familiar.
The missing ingredient is the brown shirts. If Trump gets violent popular support that organizes and bullies, that’s when I panic. The open carriers could be pushed in that direction. If he starts appealing to them with calls to action, we have a big problem.
Well, no. I’m not suspicious of all Muslim people. Actually, I’m not suspicious of any Muslim person right now.
If they are stupid, unthinking bigots, sure.
I’m surrounded by a lot of white, conservative Christians, and at the moment, they scare me much more than any other group. And if they scare me, I imagine that the Muslim people who live here are close to being fucking terrified every time they step out of their door. But no one seems to much care about them being terrorized.
Gee, i wonder why anyone would object to “islamism” being used as a synonim for jihadism. “Islamism” makes no effort whatsoever, conscious or otherwise, to delineate fuck all. It equates muslim with terrorist extremist.
Pointing out this obvious problem makes this fucker think that all muslims might be terrorists? Fuck. Me.
Oh, look, stupidity disguissed as vague profecy…how impressive.
But these weren’t comments made on Twitter. He read a prepared statement (at a fucking podium) where he laid out his policy idea of banning Muslims.
gmacs @ 11:
It really doesn’t matter, because once again, we see a right-wing ass attempting to hammer home this idea that the internet isn’t really real, it’s just a playground, no one ever tells the truth on the ‘net, oh no, and of course there aren’t for real people behind all that crap, nope. Not a one.
Ryan Cunningham:
I remember all too well how people blamed (and continue to blame) Breivik’s massacre on “multiculturalists”.
Caine @12:
Then why do they care what “SJWs” say on the net? No, I’m kidding. I know it’s because they’re full of shit.
It’s the “she must have done something to provoke him” school of apologism.
Yeah, Cameron has the right ideas. That’s why in the UK youth are branded “extremists” for such horrible things like “opposing the government” and “mistrusting the media*”
*We know the mesia are always telling us the truth and always fack-check their claims. They’D never publish the photoshopped picture of a Sikh man as a Paris terrorist without checking, right?
Yes indeed, but personally, I’d expect the “Trumpshirts” to arrive after a Trump win, when he finds the President can’t (legally) do whatever he wants. And I think the risk of gangs of armed bullies enforcing religious right ideology is real if any of the likely Republican candidates becomes President.
On the wild speculation front I’ve been idly wondering about a vaguely Seven Days in May situation after a trum-prat win — a military-political cabal coup d’etat, albeit with the fascist in the White House rather than in the Pentagon (opposite of the original story / movie, which postulated the cause as a “commie” / John Birch nutters situation).
Some people (Salmon Rushdie apparently being one of them) have postulated teh trum-prat is a Manchurian Candidate, albeit I’m unaware of any real agreement on his “controllers”: Ms Clinton (or the Democrats in general); various Republicans (so they don’t look so frothingly insane (it this scenario, he abandons his campaign and endorses one of the other Kandidate Kar Klowns)); possibly even deluded extremists like the Koch brothers, Israeli government, or so on, in the delusional belief he’d do what they want after winning(no, I can’t see how that conspiracy theory works at all…).
Ryan Cunningham: “The missing ingredient is the brown shirts. If Trump gets violent popular support that organizes and bullies, that’s when I panic. The open carriers could be pushed in that direction. If he starts appealing to them with calls to action, we have a big problem.”
Let’s not forget some of his supporters have already beaten up a protester, to Trump’s apparent approval. I’d say his brownshirts are ready to go, and all it takes, as you refer, is for him to say, “go get ’em, boys!”
There will be no brownshirts.
They will be GOLD, and they will be very classy.
The brownshirts are wearing button-down white shirts under business suits, and they are already throwing people out of their houses, forbidding them to work, and blaming them for being hungry.
My moniker is a souvenir of eight months in a Muslim region. I grew up in the Christian heart of America. Right now, I’d prefer Muslims, because I am not hearing their raving stupidity every day, just the Christian crock.
Yet for some reason Cameron has decided that dropping more bombs is bound to help.
This is where I recall the data that shows that some people never reach the formal operational stage of cognitive development. It’s probably more likely that some people can’t use it in specific domains of knowledge due to lack of experience with the topic, or motivated reasoning from fear that leaves them with little else but emotional obfuscation and group psychology.
@#16:blf
I admit to wondering if (or perhaps “fantasizing” is a better verb) perhaps Trump is deliberately trying to ram the Republican Party into the ground, and after getting the nomination when it’s too late to put together a coherent campaign for anyone else, he’ll suddenly turn around and say “juuuuuuusssst kidding! Sorry, kiddies, but I resign!”
(Hey, I can dream, can’t I?)
The people who are really pushing it, though, are the ones who are claiming that if Trump gets the nomination, it will get Republicans to stay home and/or vote for a Democrat. Not happening; anyone stupid and/or vicious enough to be a Republican at this point is stupid and/or vicious enough to vote for any candidate the party belches out. Republican voters who claim to be alienated by Trump will rationalize a way to vote for him if he gets the nomination; if he suddenly started sacrificing babies to Satan on live national TV and then called for the establishment of communism, they would stop talking about religion and economics and focus obsessively on guns and immigrants.
(This is particularly true if Clinton is the Democratic nominee — Republicans will rise from their deathbeds, if necessary, to vote against her; have her supporters really forgotten how much she energizes the right-wing base?)
Minn. man charged in firebombing of Somali restaurant in Grand Forks
Plus ça change:
― P.G. Wodehouse, 1938
PZ @ 18:
Like this?
I think I’ll get out my browncoat.
Reginald @ 23:
Aw fuck.
Man accused of hate crime in arson at a mosque in Southern California.
The hate rhetoric needs to be stopped by everybody, including the right as it plays into the hands of ISIS. Yeah, like that will happen. Fear trumps rationality.
Nerd:
Which is exactly what Trump wants.
I know, commenting on the side-bar ads is so last year, but — this post is currently displaying an anti-Clinton attack ad from a conservative group, a Muslim dating site, and a banner for prescription schizophrenia medication.
On the fear / rationality axis, fear does not always win. This is cross-posted from Discuss: Moments of Political Madness:
No idea (yet) if the nazi’s share of the vote increased or decreased. They are still, very probably, a threat, just not in office (excepting the odd mayor and so on).
@#30, blf
Was this intentional? :)
Vicar@31, No le prat nazi maire could possibly be on even keel…
and Sihks are getting banned from stadiums (eggball) for simply wearing Turbins; which arouses fear of jihadism in all the other spectators.
, the arena is essentially saying.
[what Seth Meyers calls “sideBurn” (when Muslimism is the ‘burn’)
This not only saves them from three hours of sheer boredom, it also means they know when fruitcakes who would otherwise be threatening them are preoccupied.
</snark>and we are still 11 months away from the election!
on voter turn out I thought the idea was that a trump or a trumped republican candidacy would not repress the right wing vote . he is spouting all the dog whistles that have been used in the past to get out the right wing vote. No I think it more likely that this tack of the right wing will help to energize the democratic get out the vote which except for the major swing of Obama’s first election has been going down for years.
It has been the average centrist left leaning voters who have stayed home, while many of the “minority” voter never voted at all. It has been the disaffected who stayed home, those who saw little difference between the candidates nor the parties, those who saw that there vote made no difference.
Every one was always trying to appeal to everyone and verging on being mealy mouth in doing so it has been the ones who could really appear to stand up and be counted that were the most appealing like Reagen.
We do not like to vote for a wise leader we like to vote for a Zapp Brannigan
uncle frogy
it is still a long time to go
“Many a slip betwixt lip and the cup”
uncle frogy
Damn you Century 21!
The problem is allowing the conversation to be about Muslims instead of terrorists. So other religions get a free pass.
“Meanwhile, the guy with the reasonable tone of voice who thinks that we ought to carry out racial profiling, who believes that Ben Carson has a realistic foreign policy, who thinks it would be horrible to drop nuclear bombs on the Middle East, but we just might have to do that”
1). Harris never said that Carson has a realistic foreign policy. He said that Carson is a “dangerously deluded religious imbecile” who, nonetheless, has a more realistic foreign policy *specifically as it pertains to jihadists* than Noam Chomsky. See the difference?
2). You’ve misconstrued Harris’ point about nuclear deterrence. He is referring specifically to a situation in which (i) a regime led by people who are the psychological equivalent of the 19 hijackers (ii) has acquired long-range nuclear weapons, (iii) has stashed them in an unknown location, and (iv) where all attempts at a diplomatic solution have failed. Harris made all this clear in his recent 3 hour interview with Cenk Uygur. Tell me, in that *specific* situation, what would you do?
Harris’ broader point, which is clear when read in context in The End of Faith, is that certain specific beliefs about God and the afterlife are particularly dangerous because they make a mockery of the concept of nuclear deterrence. There’s no possibility of having a ‘Cold’ war with a suicidal regime. If, in the absolute worst case scenario, long-range nuclear weapons are acquired by people desperate to bring about the end of the world, it would be insane to take the option of a pre-emptive nuclear strike off the table. I mean, what’s the alternative? Just sit around and wait for them to obliterate us? Remember, we can’t scare them, bribe them, or capitulate to them because they actually *want* to die. Tell me, please, what should we do in that situation?
P.S. – Yes, I head Cenk’s “rebuttal” to this argument. It was utterly fatuous and completely missed the point.
Nope, still bigoted, lazy paranoid thinking.
who? who wants to die?
1 billion muslims?
no?
then WHO…
answer that question, and you will see just how fatuous, to use your own projection, your view of this situation really is.
@38
that constitutes a distinction without a difference
it makes little if any difference what the rhetoric is when the end results are indistinguishable
uncle frogy
Oh, christ. Not another one of those.
Mance Rayder, you can fuck right off. I’m just going to kick out all you tiresome, interchangeable, thick-skulled Sam Harris fans from now on.
I particularly love the idea that since you don’t know where these presumably viable weapons are, you have to nuke and nuke and nuke. Pretty much the entire planet because you don’t know where they are and hence whether or not you’ve destroyed them…
This applies just as much to the British or French “going rogue” as it does to N.Korea or Easter Island. Oh my FSM! They have nukes!! I’m too stupid to deal with the problem!!! So nuke, baby, NUKE!
Geesh.
says the person who obviously does not comprehend what word “oxymoron” means.
BWHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHH… Like, what the fuck!?
BWhahahahahahhahha -sigh-.
Is this guy that disconnected from reality, or just lying?
It’s a brave new world, full of people who think doublespeak is perfect clarity.
“The social justice warriors who mistake Twitter for real life…”
I found this amusing. I doubt Mr. Murray can produce two examples of persons who make the statements he decries together with evidence that they have mistaken Twitter for real life.
Must we say untrue and indefensible things about people who disagree with us on the internet?
politics as usual, I’d say.
Huh … I am truly interested which European political leaders have been saying this … Especially in the last ten years … you know, the ten years since the frigging Madrid and London bombings!
Also, the cynic in me sees that the main reason why many people are willing to listen to the brownshirt demagogues is not fear of radical Islam (or at least not until a month ago) but the fear that they might earn less / lose their job / get their social rights cut / taxes would go to a project they don’t agree with (the current refugee crisis a common one these days) /etc …
^^ yup. but fear is at the root of it.
fear, and how authoritarians love to use it to manipulate people.
Remember, we can’t scare them, bribe them, or capitulate to them because they actually *want* to die.
Yet, they obviously don’t want to die. Because if they wanted to die, they’d all die just fine, right now, using conventional weapons. They’d do plenty of damage dying that way, too. The 9/11 hijackers are one example; there are more.
But they don’t all rush to die. Why not? Because they don’t want to die. The entire “they want to die” argument is based on some rather absurd premises coupled with a complete incomprehension regarding 4th generation warfare.
Hey, Ichthyic.
How’s things?
hey chigau.
pretty much just floatin thru life.
I’m wondering what Twitter’s supposed to be? Virtual reality? A computer game? Twitter is real life. Twitter activism is actually activism. Twitter harassment is real harassment. I think what they hate about Twitter is that many “noobs” together can actually create publicity.
+++
I’m also wondering whether Harris et al think that our memories don’t actually go back to the cold war. The thing about the nuclear stand-off was that nobody could use the nukes because while you could totally nuke the USSR, your weapons would take a while to get there during which time they would send their own nukes to fry you. What would be different about, say, Pakistan?
+++
To me, the main difference between western politicians and jihadists seems to be that yes, jihadists are willing to die for their beliefs. Western politicians are just willing to kill for them. They while dying is done by other people, including their own.
Is it just me, or is he actually saying, “when the political left refuse to mindlessly agree with us that Islamic terrorism comes from all Muslims everywhere, and that Islam is inherently more of a threat to humanity on a scriptural level than all of the other more or less indistinguishable religions” here?
Maybe we could’ve avoided inventing Trump, if only we were unthinking reactionaries?
@Giliell, 54
Twitter is the gestalt dreamscape of the dark gods who slumber beneath our feet.
To the best of my knowledge, that’s only happened twice. Once the regime in question let loose all its nukes, continues to be in power and happy with the results of its WMD use, and most people in said country will happily justify the destruction. The second time the regime eventually backed away from the brink when faced with the possibility of an opponent that could hurt them back. So I suppose that criterion iv was not quite fulfilled, no thanks to the country that had the most long range nukes.
Really, this whole “what if they get nukes” thing is just such obvious projection.
@55 Athrywren
You are definitely not alone.
I’ll even submit evidence for your hypothesis:
” ‘Islamism’ makes an obvious and conscious effort to put down a delineating line between non-extreme Muslims and the extremists “.
I think it’s looking solid, maybe we can get a paper out of this.
Yeah, Twitter, or whatever platform is representative of Somewhere on the Internet. It’s totes not anything to do with real life, but we sure notice it an awful lot and bring it up repeatedly to mock it.
If we wanted an opinion or argument or reminder of the facts from the “person on the street”, we’ll send a fucking news crew to collect what we want and curate and gatekeep the hell out of it and present it as representative. Because TV and print are teh realz, they are top-down and passively consumed as we like things. Which is also how we like the political sphere.
You shut up you, you actual human beings. You’re not real!
to;dr: When confronted with anti-bigotry, bigots tend to double down and get even more bigoted.
He’s not wrong, you know.
In a way, this is true.
because unthinking reactionaries are inevitably authoritarian in nature, they feel threatened when everyone is not like themselves, and thus, if all were in conformity with their beliefs, they would indeed see no reason for a donald trump.
that of course, is the problem.
it will always BE the problem, until such time that humans in any given culture or society finally decide to recognize, and figure out how to make authoritarians less defensive without letting them have the reigns of power.
reins, even.
Trump supporters baffled by the criticism of his bigoted and probably unconstitutional Muslim plans. They don’t care if he is being a tool for ISIS. They hang onto the illusion he is trying to protect them. From what? is the real question, and it ignores the homegrown Xians and bigots trying foment problems.
This reminds me of Rick Santorum blaming “secular culture” for the pedophile priests: http://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=30
Yes, Douglas, we who think it’s important not to tar a billion+ people with the actions of ISIS sure are responsible for those who end up tarring those billion+ people, just like that “secular culture” which wouldn’t kowtow to the RCC’s cover up and thus are responsible for the pedophile priests. Makes perfect circular sense. How, oh how, will the SJWs on Twitter ever recover from such a damning critique? /faints
@63 Here’s a gem of a quote from that article:
The apex of bigotry isn’t something that very many people aspire to be, Mr. Hopper.