No, I've been living in France for a couple of years. In all my time in Edinburgh I never went to the Hogmanay street party, despite living around the corner from Princes Street.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas to all, and thanks everyone for making this new forum a good place to be. I haven't been participating much of late because of work and getting drunk, but I'll be back with a vengeance in the New Year.

It's interesting you say this. Can you provide some sources which identify with the Left and claim that cultures must respect themselves and allow each other to govern themselves as they see fit, instead of attempt to impose certain values one upon the other? Can you name a Left source which states that "equality for all" isn't a universal value and therefore it doesn't have to be shared by the whole world? — Agustino

I don't have time to look out examples, but they're not all that hard to find. The branding, by sections of the Left, of many critics of Islamism (including Muslims and ex-Muslims) as "Islamophobic" (e.g., in Left-leaning student unions, one of which refused to condemn ISIS because they thought such a condemnation would be Islamophobic), the association of Islamists and the far Left in the UK (e.g., the Respect Party and the Stop the War coalition), and the toleration of Hamas with its reactionary politics among the supporters of the Palestinian movement, are well-known examples. The trajectory of Left-wing politics has been towards identity politics for the past several decades. In identity politics, what is important is the group, or as you say, the "community", and if a person's values and ambitions do not coincide with what are thought to be the collective values and ambitions of their group (race, sex, whatever), then they're stuffed. This is where socialism and your communitarian conservatism come together (even though they're very different political traditions).

Otherwise, I don't have time to address the rest of your post in detail or describe the struggles of liberal campaigners in the Middle East. In a nutshell I think you're saying that democrats and leftists in liberal democracies ought not to try to impose their favoured political and cultural values on countries where those values are rejected by those in power. Well, I'm not a supporter of neoconservatism and generally don't advocate such impositions from the outside. To that extent I think you're right that it is for people within a state to fight for freedom and equality if they want it.

Equally though, neither do I accept the right of religious conservatives, tribal sheikhs, absolute monarchies, and corrupt authoritarians, to impose their interpretation of Islam on millions of people. Why should they represent the true voice of the community, just because they managed to grab the power and have managed to hang on to it, often brutally? You talk as if you think the regimes of the Middle East were established by peaceful consensus by accepted people's representatives, but this is very far from the truth.

You may be aware, but speaking up against the powerful in the Middle East is not an easy thing to do, and I am not comfortable with a complete abandonment of those who are brave enough to fight. Generally I think you have a simplistic view of human society; for example, the divisions within many societies--especially those of the Middle East--are as deep and as explosive as the divisions you think you see between those countries and those of the West. Your us and them narrative just doesn't fit the facts.

What I advocate is to make ideas available, for whoever can make use of them, rather than imposing anything. The ideas of freedom and equality are available to all, and to me they are high points of human culture that still have a lot of potential. You accuse me of presuming, and this is true to a degree: I presume that what human beings share is more important than any supposed racial, ethnic, or cultural differences, which is why I treat the values I believe in necessarily as universal.

Recently I have turned more and more right-wing, and I am interested to discuss with members of this forum, many whom I know to be leftist/socialists. The way I see it, the left takes certain values, such as equality for all, freedom against culture/norms, etc. and then imposes these over the rest of the world, and anyone who doesn't respect them becomes a misogynist, racist, sexist, etc. The left claims to be tolerant, but only for things which respect their fundamental values; towards anything else, absolutely intolerant. But there are so many different ways of life under the sun. Who am I to condemn, for example the Islamic way of life and go tell them that their women should have a choice to wear the burkha etc etc? It's their fundamental right to decide what rules are to be obeyed on their lands, and what rules are not. Everyone has their own laws on their lands, in their families, and true toleration means not interfering with these. In fact, the world is beautiful precisely because there is diversity and there are many different customs, religions, and cultures. This diversity should be respected I believe, and we should not aim towards a globalisation of culture, in which we slowly aim for the whole planet to have and share the same values. All that is required, I think, are a set of international values, along the following lines: "My land, my rules. Your land, your rules. I will not interfere with you unless you do something that is threatening or damaging to me" — Agustino

You say you're turning right-wing, and then proceed to espouse a position that these days is very characteristic of the Left, namely identity politics and multiculturalism. The idea that Europeans should not condemn the barbaric and oppressive practices of certain regimes in Islamic countries, because this is an imperialist attack on all Muslims, is now the standard far Left position, sadly. As if the most powerful and most conservative sections of the Islamic world are the legitimate representatives of Muslim people, those that we must respect in the name of diversity. As if we should respect laws that oppress women, as somehow embodying a sacrosanct culture, while those women have no say in changing these laws. "It's their fundamental right to decide", you say, but fail to note that most Muslims, least of all women, have no such right to decide.

But the fact that you see your position as right-wing--which I don't think is a crazy thing to think at all--while it actually has a lot in common with much of the Left, does, I think, demonstrate just what is wrong with the Left today. In any case, the terms "Left" and "Right" have become pretty useless.

I've only got a few minutes so I'll keep it kind of short.

There's been a noticeable surge in affection for Brutalism lately. There have been books, documentaries, and blogs dedicated to it. A good site for pictures is the popular Fuck Yeah Brutalism.

One thing I've noticed is that the fans fall into two camps: those for whom it is, or once was, a genuinely viable architecture, and one that is aesthetically beautiful; and then those who, a bit like fans of horror movies, are attracted to what they see as the frightening, ugly, oppressive--and "brutal"--qualities of Brutalism.

I don't want to be too sniffy about this latter group, but I do think Brutalism deserves attention as architecture for people to live and work in, and not simply as photography and computer graphics that serve as backdrops for dystopian video games and sci-fi movies set in crumbling chaotic futures.

As to what's wrong with it, well, many conservative, traditionalist commentators, such as Roger Scruton, have declared that the central problems were thinking you could change the way people live, and thinking you could throw away centuries of architectural tradition and start afresh. Thus Brutalism and the Corbusian tradition of modernism that inspired it were too ambitious, too optimistic, too radical, and too totalitarian.

I think they're wrong about that, mostly. I don't believe that people are innately suited to living in little houses with front and back gardens, built side-by-side along a road, as Prince Charles and the creators of Poundbury imagine. The Brutalist visionaries challenged it, and though they failed, I don't think it was because their ideas were bad (well, not all of them anyway).

On the other hand, some people here may remember my first or second topic on the old PF, called "Anarchist Traffic Engineering", about the Shared Space movement in town planning. In that discussion I was advocating an approach to urban space that was pretty much the complete opposite of the kind of planning associated with post-war modernism, with its segregation of pedestrians and traffic. I'm not sure how to reconcile this.

Anyway, that's all for now. Here's a picture of Habitat 67:

I do miss likes, for some reason. But most people don't want member reputation scores, and like I said in the dedicated thread, it's currently impossible to have one without the other.

Since the software upgrade the subscription system has changed. Previously you would just manually make one-off payments, but now it sets up a monthly PayPal subscription. Go here to set it up and you shouldn't have to remember again:

http://thephilosophyforum.com/user/upgrade

I'll have to make an announcement about this.

It's just the way the software works, and I don't know the reasons for that design decision. I am glad of it though. I can recall a few times on PF when self-deletions caused a mess. People would even sometimes completely destroy a long discussion by removing their half of the posts.

Just PM a moderator if you want a post deleted.

I don't like the slightly truncated spatial dimensions of this new forum — Thorongil

Have you zoomed your browser? I couldn't use this site if I left it at the default size. Ctrl++ a couple of times.

I knew you'd be back!

It was highly progressive and obviously socialist in nature. — Question

I still haven't gotten to reading that book in totality; but, think it's a novel perspective than the usual finger pointing of the Nazi platform being on the far-right, which it was not. — Question

I think of the original Nazi platform as a kind of radical reactionary corporatism. Defined like that, we can avoid the confusions of Left, Right, socialism, liberalism and conservatism.

But the confusions are interesting. We can agree that the Nazis were not conservatives--and yet they were reactionaries, and they got most of their support from traditional conservatives. We can agree that with their social corporatism they were in some way socialist--and yet they were utterly opposed to the workers' movement, to social democracy and to Marxism. We can agree that some liberals and Leftists flirted with fascist ideas and that fascism was influenced by some Left-wing ideas--and yet most of the Left was engaged in fighting against fascism; in Germany the biggest enemies of the Nazis were the Communists and Social Democrats and their trade unions.

It turns out that one can make a case both that the Nazis were on the Left, and that they were on the Right. But the latter case is truer, I think. They were exuberantly reactionary, making them Rightists by almost any definition. They wanted a return to the days of glory and an end to the political and social innovations of the Enlightenment. Goebbels in 1933 said "the year 1789 is hereby abolished". Democracy, liberty and egalitarianism were to the Nazis part of a spreading disease that culminated in social democracy and Marxism. This had to be stopped, beginning with the nullification of the Weimar Republic and everything it stood for, and its replacement with a confident new spirit of strength, unity and racial purity.

Don't allow American politics to make you forget that the Right is as prone to authoritarianism as the Left.



From what I can tell, Goldberg's book might suffer from viewing the past through the lens of American politics--and I'm guessing he's trying to score points against liberals--but it does look interesting. I often hear people on the Left say that fascism had nothing to do with the Left and that National Socialism had nothing to do with socialism. It's a bit like the claim that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. But the opposite claims are no better: the truth is somewhere in between.

An odd question, and something of a reverse "what have the Romans ever done for us?"

Yeah, apart for the forcible seizure of power, the banning of trade unions and their replacement with direct Nazi control of working class life, the burning of books and the prohibition of non-Nazi art, the revision of textbooks to promote Nazi ideology, the banning of all other political parties, the removal of Jews' citizenship status, the dismissal of all Jews from professional employment, the control of leisure ("Strength Through Joy"), the suppression of dissent and the imprisonment of political prisoners in concentration camps, state terrorism by the SS and Gestapo, the direct political supervision of the whole population by installing a dedicated Nazi official in every block of flats or neighbourhood, the setting up of "People's Courts" and the overriding of the constitutional legal framework, the prohibition of jazz music, the persecution of gay people, the militarization of everyday life, the total Nazification of the media, the dismissal of teachers and professors who were not members of the Nazi party, the abolition of all youth organizations and their replacement with the compulsory indoctrination of children in the Hitler Youth, the reckless plunge into a self-destructive war, the myth of the Aryan race, and like you say, systematic genocide and invading Poland--apart from all that, what, exactly, was wrong with the Nazis?

Is that what you're asking? Or are you trying to make a distinction between the Nazis in power and the purer party platform--or more widely, the fascist platform in general--from which they had deviated?

As far as I can see the multiculturalist/assimilationist debate is vacuous; the reality is not on the same planet as the rhetoric, and this is the experience that leads folks to a place where they are content to die in the hope of having some effect on the world. — unenlightened

I agree, more or less. I did not mean to suggest that France's way has worked out better, although I do sympathize with the principle. The problem is that immigrants have been treated like second-class citizens despite the assimilationist letter of the law, and that the children of immigrants have been treated like immigrants.

Gotcha! Thank you for information. Also is the (L) option no longer available to show you like a post? — ArguingWAristotleTiff

We had a poll and it looked like people didn't like likes very much so I turned likes off. Ideally I'd like likes for posts but not accruing to members, but that's not an option (not yet anyway).

You flag a post to report it to the mods for breaking the rules.

Not that we have any rules right now. But you get the idea. :)

So factors/conditions for radicalisation we can influence are :

Abstract
1. Western foreign policy (to the extent it is unfair or immoral)
2. Racial inequality / discrimination
3. poverty

Personal/motivational
4. Personal experience (relates to 2 and 3)
5. sense of belonging (relates to 2)
6. Lack of education (not a rule of thumb but sufficiently correlated to take seriously)
7. Above may lead to wanting revenge or status

Ideological
7. violent ideology — Benkei

Evidence casts doubt on some of these purported factors. It turns out that European jihadists are very often well-educated, relatively wealthy, and integrated. Nor does their radicalization seem to stem from rage at Western foreign policy. Sorry for yet another link--and it's yet another piece by Kenan Malik--but this is really the best high-level analysis of radicalization that I've read:

https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/radiclization-is-not-so-simple/

Well said. Of course, postmodern leftists and liberals would have us believe that Toussaint Louverture was merely aping the mores of his masters, trying to take on values that would inevitably come to nothing in such an alien milieu ("just look at Haiti now!").

That's not as much of an exaggeration as it might appear: I've talked to people who said exactly that, though about India rather than Haiti.

On so many occasions I have written an email to an NT person containing, say, three questions. They answer none of them, and ask me a question instead. This seems like a straightforward communication disability, and it is the norm. Heck, this shit was routine on PF and drove me nuts. You just can't have a proper conversation like that. On the other hand, my email communication with other autistics is crystal clear. I ask three questions, and I get three answers, even if all three answers are 'I don't know' or 'I don't know what you are asking'. This is first class interpersonal communication. — bert1

For you it is.

Here's what this sounds like to me bert. Imagine a community of people called the lefters who have only one arm, the left one, and they walk around wearing capes so that nobody can see their disability. One of them says...

On so many occasions I have met a BT (brachiotypical) person, and most of the time they offer their right hand. This seems like a straightforward social disability, and it is the norm. You just can't shake hands properly like that. On the other hand, my handshakes with other lefters are always perfect. I meet one and they always offer their left hand. This is first class interpersonal etiquette. — A. Lefter

It is not always good communication to answer every question that is asked, and a response that ignores the questions completely may still be a good way of taking the conversation forward, allowing the questioner to see that the questions were misplaced, or trying to tackle things from a different angle. And from the questioner's standpoint, a response that doesn't directly answer their questions but nevertheless shows a deep insight into what they have said can be more satisfying; I often find point-by-point responses pedantic and facile. Granted, this way of responding may not work for everyone, may be difficult for some people to understand, and is sometimes open to abuse, but that doesn't make it "second class".

I'm sorry if this would get me boo'd off the stage at Autscape.

Strange, I'm not seeing that. Maybe because I'm an admin. (Just noticed you said that yourself)

With "my threads", you would see the threads with the latest action at the top, even if you hadn't personally contributed for a long time. It's a convenient feature only indirectly covered by other features, but I don't think it's a big deal.

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.