re: #52 CuriousLurker

Yet in your #44 you said:

Now that I’ve provided some recent examples it’s suddenly changed to groups numbering tens of thousands (or more) and the time frame has changed. Never mind the difference in technology between now & even 20 years ago.

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The intellectual dishonesty is amazing.

Intellectual dishonesty?! My original post was clear enough. I spoke of the Nazis and the Communists. I did not, originally, speak of depraved individuals operating entirely outside the context of their own societies. My original examples were of large groups. The goalposts have not shifted one centimeter.

I also carefully chose the phrase “extremist movements” to distinguish even between groups such as Aum Shinrikyo, with tiny followings but still “groups”, and large scale “movements”.

The time frame is also unmoved. The Nazis and the Communists under discussion were, no matter how widely you cast the net, phenomena of the 19th and 20th centuries. I did not reach further back because yes, if you go far enough back, it’s not “new”. But in the time frame that is implicit in the examples, it is new. Again, no intellectual dishonesty, no moving of goalposts.

There is no page limit in which an essay can be confined that is not open to the style of criticism you allow yourself. Bad faith is presumed. Examples are brought up that contradict, not what I wrote, but what you unreasonably and unjustifiedly impute to me. No amount of care in exposition can foreclose such argumentation.

By now, you surely know exactly what I meant. You also know that it’s all true. And that it’s fair.

To draw an analogy, we have something new going on also in West Africa.

Oh, one might say, there have been Ebola outbreaks before.

But a fair reading would nod and realize—-yes but not on anything remotely of this scale.

And one might say, there have been epidemics before.

But a fair reading would nod and realize—-yes but not in the era of vaccines and modern medicine, not this lethal on a case by case basis. True, we have mass epidemics of the flu, and many more are killed than so far, or even prospectively with any luck at all, by Ebola. So one could argue, if in a picky mood, that it’s not new. But you know what I mean here too.

So I guess you’re just in a picky mood tonight. Understandable since once you assume bad faith and read casually and don’t do this checking of meaning, it sounds like an attack on your faith. Which it is not. Because that’s not me. I’ve read “Mother without a mask”. I’ve been to UAE, twice. The people there were good, as good as people get which is everywhere and always imperfect.

But—-ISIS is not good. And it’s bad in new ways, new for our own age, in that it revels in things that for centuries have been done, if done at all, away from the light.