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Notes -
Not posting in the Gaza/Israel thread since this is more generic, IMO.
In the most recent Sam Harris podcast, he elevates the problem with Hamas to the more general problem of jihadi terrorism. The episode is here and there's also a transcript here.
In this, he paints a picture of Hamas being a jihadi terrorist organization that's beyond reasoning with in terms of any reasoning we'd consider compatible with liberal western civilized order. He reads this quote from a member of a different jihadi group that had just finished slaughtering young children:
He makes the point that atheists have a lot of trouble understanding how utterly fanatical and unreasonable jihadis can be. People of Christian or Jewish faith know, because they know how powerful their own faith is in their lives. But atheists are eager to attribute this kind of proclivity towards sadism and murder as a reflection of terrible conditions that they must be living under. That people living in a utopia would never succumb to such depravity. Sam argues that Muslims of faith are just as destructive outside of Israel and disputed Israeli territories.
For more concrete stats, I found this from Google generative results
The culmination of this episode is Sam practically condemning belief in Islam entirely. Almost bordering on saying that every Palestinian is a mope in the Muslim Matrix who could become inhabited by a jihadi Agent Smith at any time. He argues that unlike Jesus, or Buddha, the central most beloved figure in Islam is Muhammed, and he was not anything like a saint:
What I hear from this is that there are no "good" Muslims, or if they are good it's an aberration, or that they're Muslim in name only.
How does one operationalize such a belief? Is Sam arguing that accepting Muslim refugees is a mistake, full stop, and that the only way to deal with jihadis is the grant them their wish: death, because there's nothing else in the world we could offer them? Is that even enough to cure the problem?
There are two billion Muslims in the world. If bringing them capitalism and the pleasures of modernity (everyone gets Starlink, Steam deck, dirt cheap halal KFC and Chil Fil-A, etc as a poster recently suggested for pacifying the Palestinians) does not innoculate against jihadi mind viruses, what would?
It took Europe about 1000 years for their culture to develop antibodies to dogmatic below-the-sanity-waterline Christian crusader ideology, and Christianity's deck was not nearly as stacked against it (its central figure was still practically a hippie). Will we have to wait this long for Islam to do the same? Sam sounds like he's advocating a form of genocide by another name.
This is my position. The extent to which I find Muslims to be good neighbors is the extent to which they aren't actually very Muslim at all. Consider the Takbir, the famous cry of Allahu Akbar:
The history of Islam is as a religion of conquest and exultation in the defeat of enemies. The only reason we can shrug this off is that Islamic nations in the 21st century are pathetically weak compared to the West, incapable of doing anything other than slapping feebly with terror attacks intended to provoke, exploiting the humanitarian tendency of Westerns to reject total annihilation of their enemies.
My starting point would be rejecting Muslim immigrants to the United States. The best time to do that would have been five decades ago, but the second best time is now.
Isn’t that all technically applicable to (post-Constantine) Christianity, too?
It’s a universalizing religion with specific prescriptions. A big part of its canon is pacifist rather than martial, but clearly that didn’t stop the internal or external bloodbaths. A Christian state with a well-maintained standing army was much more competitive than a gathering of monks. Pragmatism has always trumped ideological purity.
But this goes both ways. We’ve manage to suborn most, if not all, of the violent bits. The same Protestantism which butchered Catholics would go on to tolerate one as President. If universalist liberalism could tame Christianity, why can’t it manage the same for Islam?
There are plenty of local areas in the US that are more or less completely controlled by fundamentalist Christianity. Granted that they don't have as free a reign as the leadership in Gaza, you'll notice these areas are not exactly persecuting nonbelievers, although it is difficult to get permits for a strip club there.
You're free to go visit St. Mary's Kansas; by all accounts it is a fairly pleasant town and the non-tradcath population is shrinking at about the average rate for rural Kansas. Likewise the town in Footloose was not completely a figment of Hollywood's imagination, and yet we don't hear about cases of religious persecution in the US from mainstream Christianity even in areas where the people who would likely be doing it could easily get away with it.
Right. Give Muslims 100 years of controlled immigration, and I really do believe it will dilute the extremism for them, too.
I understand this hasn’t panned out for Western Europe yet, but I remain optimistic.
It hasn't panned out for Western Europe, because they're a bunch of weirdos who think being French or German is determined by whether your ancestors were peasants dying for some Lord who wasn't even from that area 1,000 years ago. Throw in bad housing policy, and you have a situation where even fairly well-meaning multi-generation Turks in Germany don't feel German, let alone other Muslims with more touchy backgrounds with the West.
OTOH, if you come to America, have some kids, start a business, learn English (even if it's broken), and don't wall yourself in some ethnic enclave after your first or second generation, even many Trump voters will be happy to have you as neighbors. It is funny how so many people who despise birthright citizenship don't realize the moderating influence it has.
Yes, yes, yes, I know 3rd or 4th generation college educated immigrants are all SJW's who complain about America all the time. Well...what's more American than that?
France does have birthright citizenship (with some minor, practically pointless limitations), along with a host of cultural habits such as not asking anyone about their race or insisting that everyone with their passport really is a Frenchman. Their outcomes aren't much better than anywhere else in Europe, arguably even worse, given that something like a plurality of race riots in post-1945 European history happened there.
You seem to imply some sort of seamless assimilation here. That's simply not the case. Persistent differences in voting patterns and political attitudes between post-Hart-Celler immigrants and the legacy population are pretty well known, but even within the ostensibly fully assimilated white group there are significant differences. A US without e.g. Italians or Irish would be much hostile to the welfare state or restrictions on free speech.
Uh, did you adjust for region? New York is a lot bluer than the deep south- where statistically people have been there longer.
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Is a nation nothing but an economic zone?
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