Perhaps you’d like to point out where I “ranted”, or where I didn’t engage with the ideas. Please disagree with me, but try doing it by actually disagreeing with the things I said rather than my perceived weakness in debate.
specifically i was referring to you saying
I (can't speak for biggytitbo) feel the people with the trillions of dollars and all the weapons are slightly more dangerous than the people who are so powerless they think blowing themselves up is a worthwhile idea
. Firstly Amis talks about this idea of 'powerlessness' motivating suicide bombers and explains why he thinks it's a fallacy, probably about a third of the way through the discussion. It seemed odd to me that someone who had listened to the discussion would use this trope when discussing it, without giving any attention to the way that the trope had been discussed. Just ignoring the parts of the thing you're criticising that disagree with your own axioms isn't a good way of disproving it.
What does this actually mean? A murderous ideology? If he’s going to use empty phrases like this he deserves to get pulled up on them.
It's a fairly waffly phrase, but I guess you could define it as an ideology whose end-point is the lessening/taking of human life. I think Amis' very patchy 'Horrorism' essay is basically his explication of the shorthand 'a murderous ideology.' He wasn't going to recapitulate the whole essay at that point on stage, so he used a shorthand version of his conclusions. A bit irresponsible really, but it was in a response to a very tendentious question. I agree you can pull people up on sloganeering like that, but Morris really didn't 'pull him up'/take him to task in any way, shape or form, he just wilfully misinterpreted him in the manner of a Sun journalist. is there any procedural difference between 'a murderous ideology/they're all murderers' and 'immigrant says britain is tough place to settle/ immigrant says I hate Britain'? It's a horrific standard of debate, I was astonished to see Morris sinking that low.
My point remains valid – there’s no context to this debate, as if Muslims have been terrorists and suicide bombers since the very beginning of the religion, and in terms of danger to our current way of life, Muslims are a vastly lesser threat than the country with the largest army in the world and the willingness to use it.
Your point is fairly valid, but it's not especially pertinent; it doesn't have anything to do with Morris' particular criticisms of the speakers, it doesn't directly address any of the points that the speakers made (the one that seems most relevant here is Amis' comparison between public reaction to My Lai and to Abu Ghraib, which like his stuff on the 'powerlessness; of suicide bombers you've not addressed at all, while criticising him for things he hasn't said) and it doesn't even fall under the blanket heading of the discussion, which was about writing post 9/11 and the problems faced by critics of militant islam in a predominantly liberal culture.
I think that this excerpt from the original report is pretty relevant
This was the signal for everyone else to bail in, raining shibboleths down with great fury: Israel, they cried. What about Israel? Won't somebody think of the Palestinians! This, of course, despite the fact that I don't ever remember Amis or Anthony saying anything anti-Palestinian. Remember - this is the liberal world, where disagreeing with Islamism is the same as hating Palestinians. Because, in this world, Palestinians aren't people - they're a rhetorical device. You'll score points in every argument as soon as you mention them.
Me personally, I think that the Israeli government's attitude to Palestine over the last 20 or so years is only matched in grotesque, vulgar amorality by America's attitude to Israel's transgressions, particularly in stifling action over them by international bodies. BUT, I also think that Amis is basically right about the nature of Islamic extremism, though he sees it as more fundamental to the modern theology and I see it as more maintained by a political elite. But the number of people I talk to who don't think it's possible to hold the two views side by side in the same head is astonishing, and this tendency, as evinced by both you and biggytitbo in this thread, to ignore the actual terms and arguments of the dissent and instead revert to familiar timeworn internet arguments that anyone who has been on a messageborad in their life can recite by heart, is just depressing.
I mainly lurk here, but it's interesting to read most of the time. I only posted because what could have been an interesting thread looked set to swamp down into Boborski vs the liberal world, where everyone gets to feel like an iconoclast. Free self-validation. It happens in every 'Islam' thread on here within the first few pages, it's monotonous.
This is what I mean about capital-L Liberalism, it's primarily, in philosophy at least, a tradition of question, devil's advocacy and dissent from consensus. Someone like Anthony who has gone from one set of beliefs to the other as a result of questioning the stance of himself and his society would seem to reflect this quite well. It's notable for me that in all the audience questions I've seen transcribed and all the discussion I've seen of this on various forums, it's only Amis' stuff about My Lai/A-G that I hadn't really heard discussed before. That's a good thing, although I think he didn't mention some things about the comparison that explain it better than the genuine social progress he was trying to sketch. But new information, new parallels, new frameworks; those are the things that seem liberal to me. Mayeb I'm coming at this from too much of an academic standpoint, but social liberalism and intellectual liberality have always seemed to me to be combined in the same people, but almost always stemmming from the latter. And you only have to look at how miserably cliquey and jargon-infested all the 'liberalising' and 'democratising' academic movements (be it quasi-scientific like structuralism or formalism, or primarily social, like feminism or post-colonialism)of the last century have become in such a short space of time to see how social liberalism is as vulnerable as any other ideology to intellectual regimentation, nepotism and stultefication.
Whose morals? If this debate is being dragged down to the level of who’s better morally then it really is pointless.
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Well to be honest I think you're absolutely wrong on that. The debate in question, rather than your (and others') interminable one with Borboski about America and the rights and wrongs of the war, was about what options writers have for dissent in a culture that subscribes very heavily to the idea of cultural relativism (a big issue for Terry Eagleton, who can never remember how much of a cultural relativist he is, from essay to essay) the most important part of which is almost always moral relativism. If you disagree that any moral judgements can be made across cultures, you can say that you don't feel superior to the Taliban. (although this has a certain inherent level of 'my reticence and belief in relativism is superior to your condemnatoy, judgemental stance. In which case you might feel superior to the Taliban for being less dogmatic.) But saying so is hardly 'pointless,' it's absolutely fundamental to the orginal debate. Personally, academic post-modernism bores me, and I think it's going beyond that to the point of being very pernicious; I think there have to be certain things that you can say are better ways to conduct yourself than others, and I think if you don't believe that then you resign a huge amount of the intellectual volition that's a gift of being human. You don't have to ACT on it, but you should be making some kind of judgement on everything you encounter. The Taliban's attitude to women encapsulates murder as a punishment for being accused of adultery. The Taliban's attitude to works of art that don't celebrate their religion is that they should be destroyed, their attitude to history is also exclusive/destructive. Unless you believe that your own personal morality is superior to that of any institution's, be it the Taliban or the government of the USA, how can you offer judgements either way on any event, phenomenon or ideology? Their morality is much more strongly defined and much more actively punitive than mine. It's more moral, really, by a lot of definitions, but I'd say morally worse.
I find the difference between that kind of thing a lot more interesting to read about than standard issue East/West debate. It's about the actual axioms of that kind of debate. Jutl is always interesting to read on stuff like this. But really, I'd just for once like to log on here and read about the specifics of an argument, rather than have the argument used as a springboard for very familiar tracts.
Why is there no criticism of you for the illegal warmongers of Washington and London,
About a tenth of the world's population have, odd grammar aside, already typed that sentence on the internet. Notably less than have discussed Martin Amis' attitude to cultural relativism in any depth.
My main issue with your original post, FM, was opening with 'yawn at Borboski again.' Exactly what part of what he said do you genuinely disagree with? He pointed out quite rightly that biggytitbo had used a load of internet cliches, and had not addressed anything in the original debate before doing so. Your yawn seemed to be suggesting that he'd trotted out his standard pro-Blair schtick, but this time he hadn't. Seemed like you'd taken his disagreeing with someone's un-pertinent remarks as being an active endorsement of Martin Amis' retracted comments. That, combined with the dismissive tone of it, seemed if anything to be actually below Chris Morris' level of contribution on the matter.
