Ah, I see what you mean. I'll ask.

Yes that's pretty much it, or part of it at least.

One problem I see with that suggestion: if we take the more apocalyptic pronouncements seriously, it seems they might embrace global warming as part of the forthcoming apocalypse ordained by God.

I've been looking for the flagging thing. Where is it?

Hm, I don't think you've grasped what Maajid Nawaz is saying, and what I have also been arguing. I may try to explain it more clearly later. One part of it (the problem, that is) is the multiculuralist notion of ethnic group rights (although that's not so significant in assimilationist France).

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-group/#FeaImpConGroRig

One of my central points, one that I've made several times, is that the politically correct liberal and left appeasement of Islamic reactionaries is just the other side of the conservative, xenophobic coin. You and others seem only to see the latter as the problem, but I am saying that it is much deeper than that, that it's a fundamental problem with European culture across the political spectrum. Just because liberals are not aware and explicit that their position is often based on essentializing, borderline racist assumptions does not make it any less true or any less of a problem.

In pointing your finger at the Right, you're dismissing the gist of Maajid Nawaz's argument.

I'd like to leave a link to a more recent video of Maajid Nawaz. It would be interesting to see if anyone disagrees, and why.

http://bigthink.com/videos/maajid-nawaz-on-islamic-reform

It wasn't working at first because I had to enable it. I enabled it just for you.

There's a tension between your claim that there will never be a non-fundamentalist alternative to motivate young people and some of your other claims — Πετροκότσυφας

I don't see the tension. Most Muslims don't want to live under an ISIS regime, but many young Muslims, whether Europeans or not, are attracted to ISIS. And just for the record, I said there will never be a non-fundamentalist alternative to motivate young people unless people in the West stand up and fight for those values.

Distinctions should also be made here. — Πετροκότσυφας

I've been very careful to make the distinctions you go on to make. But it's tedious to have to constantly prove I'm not a neocon jingoist merely because my interlocutors insist on interpreting me that way.

They say they've fixed editing on mobile. I can't test it because I don't have access to a smartphone or tablet right now.

Yes they redeveloped the subscription system so that it actually sets up recurring payments through PayPal, and this has presumably nullified existing subscriptions. Not sure what I have to do about that yet.

@Baden, one part of the quotation from Rafael Behr that I thought was particular relevant was this bit:

as if Isis presented negotiable terms of secular grievance that can be settled at a peace conference; as if the rhetoric against “Zionist-Crusaders”, the genocide of Yazidis and the systematic enslavement of women were all logical extrapolations from a dodgy strategy cooked up in the Pentagon: extreme, yes, but explicable by cross-reference to prior western offences.

You had an exchange with discoii in which he said this:

ISIS is currently in the process of exerting their hegemony. In war time situations, in all societies, whether it be ISIS or France, they always suspend all these checks and balances.

He seems here to be saying that ISIS is a bit crazy at the moment, maybe a bit exuberant and showy (bless them), merely because of the war-torn context.

And you had said this:

But I don't see ISIS having any such checks and balances in place at all. — Baden

This is an odd thing to say, as if to suggest that ISIS is motivated by similar principles but just doesn't yet have the legal framework and state institutions in place to ensure they're adhered to. I doubt that's what you meant, but it's entailed by what you said, and the result is that you're far too soft on the useful idiots who appease Islamic fundamentalist militancy in their rush to condemn everything Western.

For those who don't know: ISIS isn't genocidal and reactionary because it's just a bit over-enthusiastic, or because its leaders are temporarily indulging the fanatics, or because it happens to be at war right now and peaceful coexistence will return if only the West gets out. It's like that because it's what they fervently believe, because it's the basis of their very existence. Their fundamentalism is fundamental.

These are the changes and new features:

• Localisation support. Plush can now work in any language.
• MailChimp integration. You can now send newsletters and email digests to your members.
• Q&A mode. Ideal for customer service or building a knowledge base.
• Option to email an Admin on each new discussion or applicant
• Content flagging, available to normal members with 20+ posts
• Recurring billing support for Paid Subscriptions
• New styling options, including round avatars and separate divider/border colours
• Automatically generate Category images
• Option to completely disable the reputation system
• MathJax integration, plus subscript and superscript tags
• One-tap photo uploading on mobile
• Optional DDoS protection for $25/mo, SSL for $15/mo
• A new searchable FAQ to answer your common questions
• Many more performance fixes and improvements

In addition, I don't believe in universal values any more. It's quite clearly a luxury only rich countries can afford - and that only in a limited and incomplete fashion. — Benkei

You seem to be misunderstanding what it means to say that values are universal. It does not mean that they are established everywhere or completely. It means they potentially apply to everyone; they are not inherently restricted to a people, a religion, an ethnicity or a geographical location constitutively predisposed to embrace them. It is as bad for a woman to be stoned to death for adultery in the United Arab Emirates as it would be in France. It is as bad for gay people to be thrown to their deaths off buildings in Syria as it would be in France. It is as bad for a particular religion to be enforced in Saudi Arabia as it would be in France.

I'm guessing you agree. You did, after all, say that you wished these values were universal (which is why I said your position was confused).

who here went out on the streets to protest Iraq and Afghanistan? — Benkei

I did, first in 1991.

@Baden: to quickly respond to your post about the Rafael Behr's article, I'm not going to get into the ins and outs of whether it's a fair attack on Corbyn, but even if it isn't, it does identify a very common way of responding to and analyzing jihadist terrorist attacks.

Light-bulbs were invented in a western country too. Does this mean they only operate exclusively in the domain of the west?

P.S: See C.L.R [James]'s 'The Black Jacobins' for an explanation of why the above idea might be bullshit in historical terms. — coolazice

Indeed. James also said, "I denounce European colonialism, but I respect the learning and profound discoveries of Western civilisation." Another opponent of European colonialism and racism was Frantz Fanon:

All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission that fell to them. — Frantz Fanon

But of course this does not mean that what has been achieved in Europe and elsewhere, on the way along that road to emancipation, is not worth fighting for.

Otherwise I'm going to quickly quote and run once again. I may come back to say something later. This is from the transcript of a TED Talk by Maajid Nawaz, an ex-Jihadist. It's from 2011 but he posted a link to it on Twitter yesterday saying it's still relevant, which I agree with.

One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. There is no equivalent of the Al-Qaeda, without the terrorism, for democracy across Muslim-majority societies. There are no ideas and narratives and leaders and symbols advocating the democratic culture on the ground. So that begs the next question. Why is it that extremist organizations, whether of the far-right or of the Islamist extremism -- Islamism meaning those who wish to impose one version of Islam over the rest of society -- why is it that they are succeeding in organizing in a globalized way, whereas those who aspire to democratic culture are falling behind? And I believe that's for four reasons. I believe, number one, it's complacency. Because those who aspire to democratic culture are in power, or have societies that are leading globalized, powerful societies, powerful countries. And that level of complacency means they don't feel the need to advocate for that culture.

The second, I believe, is political correctness. That we have a hesitation in espousing the universality of democratic culture because we are associating that -- we associate believing in the universality of our values -- with extremists. Yet actually, whenever we talk about human rights, we do say that human rights are universal. But actually going out to propagate that view is associated with either neoconservativism or with Islamist extremism. To go around saying that I believe democratic culture is the best that we've arrived at as a form of political organizing is associated with extremism. — Maajid Nawaz

His other reasons are worth looking at too, but the first two are most relevant to what I've been getting at (although I'm not quite sure what he means by saying that espousing democratic values is associated with extremism).

It would be nice if we could retain the formatting when quoting highlighted text. — Postmodern Beatnik

Good one, I've added it to the list.

That's just the ones you've started. The idea of a "my threads" feature is to show you the discussions you've participated in.

The number under your name is now the number of posts, by the way.

They've fixed the members list.

Ok thanks. I've reported the bugs to support.

What kind of phone are you using: iPhone, Android, etc.?

I wonder if we're going to see a lot more of these: (Y)

So the software is updated now and I've disabled the reputation system. As I expected, there's no option to retain likes for posts--it's all or nothing. I'm going to ask for that feature next time I send a list of feature requests.

If enough people who voted for option 3 (which is not possible) would prefer the all to the nothing, kick up a fuss about it here.

Haven't got much time, but I saw this in the Guardian and thought of you guys. It's mainly a criticism of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party but it's relevant here.

The charge sheet against western policy dating back a generation is easily drafted. It takes moments to weave a tale of counterproductive geopolitical vandalism, starting from US support for the mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, via the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq, pausing to condemn blind eyes turned and arms sold to Saudi Arabia, whence the theology of infidel-murder pullulates.

But to stop there is lazy. Worse, it takes an effort of analytical obtuseness to make aggressive western governments the initiating agent of all that is sinister, void of good intent or positive consequence, and thus explain jihadism as a symptom, with the CIA and Tony Blair as the virus. As if the Taliban should have been left to rule Afghanistan; as if the insurgency against allied forces in Iraq were a national liberation front akin to anti-colonial movements against the British Empire; as if Isis presented negotiable terms of secular grievance that can be settled at a peace conference; as if the rhetoric against “Zionist-Crusaders”, the genocide of Yazidis and the systematic enslavement of women were all logical extrapolations from a dodgy strategy cooked up in the Pentagon: extreme, yes, but explicable by cross-reference to prior western offences. — Rafael Behr

I just want to note that I'm not the one going on about "Western values". This is an interpretation--a revealing one--of my mention of "secular values, freedom for women, reason and the diversity of cultural heritage, democracy, dissent, and religious difference".

@Baden, some good points, though I still think you're missing what's going on here. I'll reply later.

Just want to add too that what unites us on this thread is far more important than what divides us. No doubt all of us would like to see the end of ISIS, and no doubt all of us appreciate the fact that we don't live in the nightmare they have created in the Middle East and the one they want to spread across the world. Sickening stuff keeps happening here and over there and I think that's thrown us all off kilter. I think the most useful approach now would be to put our heads together and ask the difficult question as to what really would work not only to defeat ISIS militarily but to remove the fuel that fires these types of movements (as you're touching on in your second paragraph above). Continuing to bang our heads against each other because of our different political views isn't going to get us very far. — Baden

I don't think this is true. I think the differences in evidence here are exactly what are important, for reasons I've explained in this thread. I cannot "put my head together" with people who think the history of Western imperialism entitles them to say that Western society is not superior to the society that ISIS is building.

Just to repeat, the reason this is important is that there will never be a non-fundamentalist, non-violent, democratic alternative to motivate the young people who are drawn to Islamism unless people in the West stand up and fight for those values.

It is a problem that European liberals are divided roughly along the lines apparent in this thread, and we do need unity, but we can't just pretend these differences don't exist.

I would make a slogan: "ISIS wants you to hate Muslims" — ssu

Quite possibly, and we should continually challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric and victimization. But I have another slogan that's consistent with it: "ISIS wants you to think it represents all Muslims". The appeasement of Islamism, the fear of taking sides against Muslim reactionaries, the worry that such a position is "Islamophobic", the idea that a cartoon of the Prophet is an offence to all Muslims that unfailingly triggers their rage or hurts their feelings, and the idea that Islamic fundamentalism is an understandable and predictable if not legitimate form of resistance; these are rife among left-wingers, liberals and political elites, and they are just the other side of the xenophobic coin. Both the right and the left treat Muslims as a monolithic group of essential otherness. In so doing, both take the terrorist bait and read from the ISIS script.

I don't really know why you're treating me as the foil for your lengthy criticisms of the War on Terror. Is it because I endorsed photo's proposals? I am unsure about what will work, and how far bombing can be used without making the situation worse, although it seems to me indispensable at the moment, if used carefully. In any case, Cavacava's proposal is pretty much in line with how I have always envisioned the defeat of ISIS.

As for the cause, I think it's a combination of things, and I wouldn't want to put the blame for the success of ISIS entirely on Benkei's shoulders. You're right that the Western intervention has been in many ways counterproductive, has eroded trust in the West among the people of the region, alienated many ordinary non-fundamentalist Muslims, and left a power vacuum that led to the rise of ISIS. But the question is why this sort of outcome. Why ISIS? Whence the international appeal of this kind of organization? And it's here that I think you have to look at the lack of alternatives, both the lack of secular alternatives in the Middle East--which discoii has already described--and the lack of strong liberal voices in the West arguing for values opposed to those of ISIS, i.e., the reluctance to stand up for the principles that used to be fundamental among liberals and the left. And this goes back to my post above about radicalization.

you have no qualms with Westerners bombing hospitals — discoii

Where do you get this from? Don't take my refusal to engage with your post as an endorsement of the American military's bombing of a hospital.

The General Question

Section 4

Is metaphysics possible at all?

If Hume was right, the answer to this is no. And there wasn't much evidence to the contrary, as Kant notes:

One can point to no single book, as for instance one presents a Euclid, and say: this is metaphysics, here you will find the highest aim of this science, knowledge of a supreme being and a future life, proven from principles of pure reason.

The crucial point of this section is toward the end. Although he cannot yet answer whether metaphysics as a science* is possible, he can say with confidence that synthetic a priori knowledge is at least possible in mathematics and physics. The basic laws of physics, as I discussed in my last post, are synthetic a priori because they are ampliative, necessary and universal, and not strictly determined by empirical discoveries.

*Again note that "science" in Kant's day meant a systematic body of knowledge and the practices that contribute to it.

Since metaphysics aims at informative knowledge established with the use of pure reason, it aims at synthetic a priori knowledge. And since synthetic a priori is possible, we need to find out how it is possible...

...in order to be able to derive, from the principle of the possibility of the given cognition, the possibility of all other synthetic cognition a priori.

Section 5

The heading of this section is How is cognition from pure reason possible? Kant calls this the popular version of the central question, How are synthetic propositions a priori possible?. ("Cognition", by the way, is the currently favoured translation of Erkenntnis, also sometimes translated as "knowledge". There are many cases where I suspect "knowledge" is a better translation, but that's mainly a gut feeling.)

He restates the main point:

...synthetic but pure rational cognition is actual; but we must nonetheless next investigate the ground of this possibility, and ask: how this cognition is possible, so that we put ourselves in a position to determine, from the principles of its possibility, the conditions of its use and the extent and boundaries of the same. Expressed with scholastic precision, the exact problem on which everything hinges is therefore:

How are synthetic propositions a priori possible?

Some other ways of putting the question:

In short, how can there be ampliative or informative judgments that are nevertheless necessarily true? This is the technical problem driving the critical philosophy — Jill Vance Buroker

When Kant asks the question “how are synthetic a priori judgements possible?” he is asking “how is it possible for thought to generate something new?” — Levi Bryant

Kant brings up the threat of Hume again to emphasize the importance of the question:

For how is it possible, asked the acute man, that when I am given one concept I can go beyond it and connect another one to it that is not contained in it, and can indeed do so, as though the latter necessarily belonged to the former? Only experience can provide us with such connections (so he concluded from this difficulty, which he took for an impossibility), and all of this supposed necessity – or, what is the same – this cognition taken for a priori, is nothing but a long-standing habit of finding something to be true and consequently of taking subjective necessity to be objective.

In my first post I wondered about the status of Kant's own critical philosophy with respect to metaphysics. Although he has described what he is doing as a new science, here in this section is the first explicit mention and description of transcendental philosophy:

It can be said that the whole of transcendental philosophy, which necessarily precedes all of metaphysics, is itself nothing other than simply the complete solution of the question presented here, but in systematic order and detail, and that until now there has therefore been no transcendental philosophy; for what goes under this name is really a part of metaphysics, but this science is to settle the possibility of metaphysics in the first place, and therefore must precede all metaphysics.

He thus reserves a very special place for his own philosophy. This is not just a competing theory of reality; it is an account of the very conditions of the possibility of philosophy and all other knowledge. In a letter to Marcus Herz he called it a “metaphysics of metaphysics”.

But hasn't he already said that before attempting metaphysics you have heed the doctrine of transcendental philosophy? So how could he have legitimately carried through a “metaphysics of metaphysics”? If transcendental philosophy is a kind of metaphysics, how can he guarantee that, being originally ignorant of what he finally discovered, he happened upon the right method and the right answers?

The answer is that most of the time he is talking about traditional ontology, which theorizes about the nature of reality as it is outside of the conditions under which human beings can know it. In contrast, his metaphysics is something very special, something nobody had attempted before. In transcendental philosophy one works back to uncover the conditions that must hold for knowledge to be possible:

I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a priori. A system of such concepts would be called transcendental philosophy.

This is of course an epistemological question, but this surely isn't just epistemology, because in answering it he does much more than describe how we access a given, assumed reality; rather, he assigns new, original status to reality, objects, space and time, and human consciousness.

Back to the central question, what he now begins to call the "main transcendental question". Since we know that synthetic a priori knowledge is possible in mathematics (setting aside objections for now) and physics, he is going to deal with those first before proceeding on to metaphysics. Thus he breaks down the question like this:

1. How is pure mathematics possible?
2. How is pure natural science possible?
3. How is metaphysics in general possible?
4. How is metaphysics as science possible?

But what exactly is "pure natural science"? If we read this in line with everything that's gone before, it must be the a priori component of physics, roughly corresponding with fundamental mathematical physics as opposed to experimental physics.

But I am still a bit confused about this. Is pure natural science to be identified with immanent metaphysics, i.e., the metaphysics of experience, or is that the legitimate separate discipline of metaphysics? Where does physics end and metaphysics begin? Is that the wrong question? Looking ahead to the section itself, he says the following:

pure natural science, which, a priori and with all of the necessity required for apodictic propositions, propounds laws to which nature is subject.

Perhaps we should remember that the rift between physics and philosophy was not then so wide as it is now, and the thought that physicists were engaging in metaphysics as part of their work was not unusual.

Next, things get tricky.

It might make the discussion less acrimonious if we look at the findings of anthropologist Scott Atran, who has investigated radicalization. Aside from all the stuff I vociferously disagree with in what you've said @Benkei, you did have some interesting things to say about radicalization. Scott Atran suggests three conditions necessary to prevent the radicalization of the young:

1. The first condition: Offer youth something that makes them dream of a life of significance through struggle and sacrifice in comradeship.

2. The second condition: Offer youth a positive personal dream, with a concrete chance of realization.

3. A third condition: Offer youth the chance to create their own local initiatives.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-atran/violent-extremism-social-science_b_7142604.html

ISIS is winning in this area because it has a supreme confidence and idealism that is currently lacking amongst the liberal defenders of cultural diversity, freedom of speech, democracy, equality for women and gay people. That lack of confidence, if not outright scepticism and equivocation, is very apparent in this thread.

But then you make there in between the accusation of the moral bankruptcy in the West of those who don't show solidarity to those "in the Middle East who are fighting them".

OK, show then your moral support and solidarity to Hezbollah and Iran and Shiite militias loyal to it, the Assad regime and the Al Nusra front for starters then. — ssu

When I criticized Western liberals for failing to show solidarity with those who are fighting ISIS, I had in mind not only those who are actually fighting them but also those who are too scared to fight them and those who are suffering at their hand. I had in mind the Muslims of Europe who struggle to challenge the Islamists in their midst; the Kurds, who have mostly been unsupported by the Western left (as an example take the UK National Union of Students voting against a motion to condemn ISIS and support the Kurds, because it would be "Islamophobic"); and the Sunnis of Iraq who refused to swear allegiance to ISIS or who have been forced to live under its regime; and especially now, the significantly pro-French people of Raqqa in Syria, where ISIS is being targeted by the French air strikes. Against the reports posted by the anti-ISIS campaigners of Raqqa, European leftists are eager to spread pro-ISIS fabrications about civilian deaths. I urge you to read the Twitter feed to get an idea of what's been going on in the territories where ISIS holds power.

Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently is a campaign launched by a group of non-violent activists in Raqqa to expose the atrocities committed by The regime of Bashar Al-Assad and terrorist extremist group ” the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ISIS toward the civilian populations if the city. We shed light on the overlooking of these atrocities by all parties. We are a nonpartisan and independent news page. — raqqa-sl.com

Against this, @Benkei says: "You blindly assume that Western values are wanted there".

But no, I'm not a fan of Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, or Assad.

And one has to be either simply ignorant or in possession of a broken moral compass to say this:

So, why doesn't France invade America too, for bombing a hospital just days before the Paris incident? This is double standard nonsense people are spouting here. The reaction to American atrocities is: oh, please stop. But they never stop. Yet when brown people do it, you are so quick to support dropping freedom from the skies! Come on now, go sign that invade America petition. — discoii

This is interesting, from anthropologist Scott Atran:

Mindless terrorists? The truth about Isis is much worse

Again, I literally do not know where to begin. What are you talking about?

Your narrative — Benkei

What narrative?

Just by talking about it? — Benkei

Yes, because there is a battle of ideas.

I'm really not sure about what the West should do, and I entered this discussion not to argue for Western intervention but to criticize the views of Western leftish liberals, which I believe contribute to a political, intellectual and moral climate that increasingly makes it more likely that similar terrorist attacks will take place, or at least makes it more difficult to fight against the most ambitious and viciously reactionary movement the world has seen for a long time. In other words, I think the Western left-liberal Islamophilic denigration of Enlightenment values is opening the space for fundamentalism and radicalization; it is the other side of the coin of the right-wing xenophobes.

That said, I think I would support photographer's proposals, despite having opposed all Western intervention for the past few decades:

1. Declare war on the caliphate and treat citizens who have dealings with it under the good old statutes of treason, etc..

2. As the caliphate depends on holding territory, give maximum aid to alternative claimants to the territories they have a legitimate claim to and can control.

3. Selectively destroy munitions, military infrastructure, administrative centers etc. as we would do with any conventional enemy.

4. Above all avoid any rash changes in foreign policy. I see no need to change our policies on Syria, for instance. Assad needs to go, the refugees need help. — photographer

Jamalrob, perhaps you don't see the excessive simplicity you argue for. What you describe above is the typical "Islamo-Fascists that hate our freedoms" -jargon back from the Dubya days. — ssu

No, I described what ISIS are doing and what their motivations are. Again, it is frustrating to discuss this with people who want to think I'm saying something I am not. Do not try to fit everything into your ready-made templates.

By the way, most Kurds are extremely conservative regarding women (which is reflected to their homophobia as well), it's mostly the Ocalan branch of Kurds that are pro-women and it was precisely this pervasive gender conservatism that turned Ocalan to feminism in the first place. — Πετροκότσυφας

This is a good point. I did not mean to suggest that women had gained emancipation throughout Kurdish society.

I answered the question you keep saying I haven't answered:

The problem is that there is a bunch of dicks with power and territory who plan to kill millions of people in the Middle East and destroy any traces there of secular values, freedom for women, reason and the diversity of cultural heritage, democracy, dissent, and religious difference, and who are sometimes willing to take that war overseas, making this not just a problem for the Middle East. If people in the West, who benefit from the freedoms that ISIS is trying to eradicate, do not show solidarity with those in the Middle East who are fighting them, then they are morally bankrupt. — jamalrob

Otherwise your post is so confused I wouldn't know where to start.

There is a romance, slick and cool factor that is attracting these kids to find purpose within the ranks of ISIS. It is very similar to the gang codes of inner cities or out here in the West with the Hell's Angels and the Dirty Dozen where the initiation often involves taking out another from the rival gang. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

I think there is a lot of truth in this. I don't know what can be done about it.