Now if this is the situation and your ideologically coloured take on the cartoon dispute has been criticised i.e. it has been argued that your take involves believing that the two situations are morally equivalent then it is no good to just reply ‘you dont see what we see ’ where this means ’ you disagree with us ‘. Do you get that ? You need to offer philosophically appropriate reply i.e. show that Gerrard type criticisms do not work : the best would be if you could show that her argument is unsound or at least invalid.

The suspicion of course is ( only confirmed when Chris popped up ) that you cannot offer an argument ( as this is understood in analytic philosophy as opposed to English lit . ) but only rhetoric mixed with occasional attack on persons character. :-)

It’s like an old burlesque routine.

“I repeat, you have a banana in your ear!”
“I can’t hear you. I have a banana in my ear!”

It was funny the first few times.

251: As a characterization of, as Chris notes, the speech of obsessive ideologues, the post works just fine. Importing claims of “moral equivalence” into it seems a bit much.

As for which of the enablers of the whole “Clash of Civilization” meme is actually hoping to eliminate / exterminate the other, this just in from one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers:

I’m honestly starting to suspect that, before this is over, European nations are going to have exactly four choices in dealing with their entire Moslem populations—for elementary safety’s sake:

(1) Capitulate totally to them and become a Moslem continent.
(2) Intern all of them.
(3) Deport all of them
(4) Throw all of them into the sea.

That right there is what calls the 1930s to mind. That kind of thinking is a perfectly logical progression from pointing at a few rioters and shrieking about how Those Muslims Want to Conquer Us, or playing the “if you don’t stand up and defend Danish race-baiting, you hate our Enlightenment values” game. And circulate it enough, behind the cover of “humor” or otherwise (and I’m sure Sullivan’s commenter would hide behind just that excuse if confronted) and it eventually translates into real violence… which would be part of why mosque arsons, grave desecrations and outright attacks on Muslims are up in the last few years across Europe. (The sort of violence that the CoC crowd never seem to notice or remark on while mistily eulogizing the likes of Theo “Muslims are goatfuckers” van Gogh.)

That’s the dynamic the Jyllands-Posten cartoons are part of. And as far as I’m concerned it deserves all the mockery it gets. The more, the better. Nothing could be less “vacuous.”

If you believe that MAD won’t work with a particular opponent, what are your choices?

You can discuss mutual verifiable disarmament. They get rid of their nukes, you get rid of yours. If they go along with it, the world is a considerably safer place. But so far the USA has never ever agreed to that. On a lesser matter, we have never promised that we would not make a first strike, as the russians have. Our reasoning on that was rather byzantine. We said that the russians gained in world opinion by promising that, but if they ever wanted to treaten a nuclear strike they’d just break the promise, which cost them nothing to make. But we are honest, not liars, and if we made that promise we wouldn’t break it. So we’d be at a disadvantage.

We never promised that we wouldn’t nuke non-nuclear powers. We have sometimes pretended that our President was crazy and might start a big nuclear war. We have pretended to be a nuclear threat to the world. (Or maybe it’s been true.)

So the first approach fails. We have refused to consider nuclear disarmament.

The second choice is to nuke them now. If there’s a chance they’ll nuke you, and that’s unacceptable, you have to nuke them first.

Or then, there’s a third choice. You can wait until the last minute, when you think they’re about to nuke you, and nuke them first then. But that method requires constant vigilance. You have to live in constant fear, on a hair-trigger reaction, ready to nuke them at any moment. It’s a bad way to live. So if you don’t believe that MAD will work on somebody, and you can’t accept getting nuked, then you really do need to nuke them now.

How do you feel about that approach to life?

Myself, I figure that iran is susceptible to MAD. And if not, we’ll at least hit them back. That’s about all you can do. Nuking a country because you think they might nuke you someday is crazy. Particularly in a world with multiple nuclear nations. If you prove that you’re willing to nuke others just because they look dangerous, somebody else is likely to think you’re following the Golden Rule….

So my version of the Golden Rule is: Be ready to nuke everybody else, just in case that persuades them not to nuke us when they want to. But don’t actually do it unless they do it first.

What is it you have failed to understand here?

You say, “Have you noticed that there are americans seriously discussing using nuclear weapons to delay that potential threat? Who’s the worse threat here?”

And I hope they modify the MAD doctrine, for it assumes that both sides want to live, but if one with access to the “red button” believes that an honorable death is not something to fear, but is in fact attractive, and holy, then the MAD doctrine dissolves into madness. I’m sure Robert S. McNamara would agree.

Well except for those New Yorkers who died to radical Islam.

How many muslims have died in our response? You guys have been serving that soup for a long time now, it’s gotten pretty thin.

The Nairobi 5,000+ killed and wounded probably have a bit to fear. The bombings in Spain, England, the US, Israel, Russia, Chechnya, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sudan, Turkey and elsewhere.

That’s it? Not such a big deal. We’re spending a few trillion dollars to minimise it, and it’s pretty minimal.

Yeah, Western civ probably has something to fear from radical Islam and the rhetoric that makes it grow. We might even what to show disapproval of that rhetoric and stand up to its threats.

Go ahead. Disapprove of the rhetoric! Stand up to the threats! Let’s start a blog just for that! Every day we can post about how much we disapprove of their rhetoric and we can stand up to their threats some more!

When Iran gets the bomb and if Pakistan falls into chaos, we’ll have a whole lot more to fear, superpower or not.

Well, yes. If they spend 50 years at it someday they might become as big a threat as we are. Wooo!

Have you noticed that there are americans seriously discussing using nuclear weapons to delay that potential threat? Who’s the worse threat here?

It’s like a man driving an expensive BMW, fast, and he finds a wasp in the car. He’s so intent on killing the wasp who might sting him that he drives off the road and into the embankment. Of course the wasp is only going by instinct. But the man can think, he doesn’t have to do the instinctive thing.

We are powerful. They are weak. They can only hurt us by sneaking in and using our own technology against us. We have nuclear, biological, chemical, and genetic weapons that can destroy them. And you’re all upset about what revenge they might someday be able to take for what we’ve done to them.

That aside, Zdenek’s claim is morally wrong.

Say two people are having an argument about something—say, whether iraq has nuclear weapons. And both of them are making up evidence to support their claims. And later it turns out that iraq does have nukes, or it doesn’t, either way. Does that mean the one who turned out to be right wasn’t a liar?

Suppose that two people are having an argument—say, about whether Bush is evil or stupid. The one who says he’s evil claims that nobody could have done such evil things so consistently by accident. The one who says he’s stupid claims that nobody could have messed up this badly on purpose. Does it matter to their logic which one turns out to be right? They’re both making the same mistake.

And you are making the same mistake as your opposite numbers in muslim lands.

Hope that helps, though it seems extremely unlikely that you can see it even now.