so you are going to wage a 7 page flame war against him because he didn't qualify a single retort properly, and then didn't clarify it as he began to think you were being willful in your misinterpretation of him?
seriously, look at the guys posting history, what do you really think he was trying to say?
I'm not here to draw any dispositional conclusions about Kosh. I think he's a perfectly intelligent, reasonable person.
But his framing of this topic, from the very first post, was inflammatory. Worse yet, it ignored the actual complexity of the issue. Saying 'Islam causes radicalism' is like saying 'wood causes fire'. The issue here is geopolitical, not religious.
He should have added qualifiers to his
very first post, parametrizing his remarks to a specific region and context. He should have changed his subject line. He should have taken steps to avoid hurting the Muslims reading this thread.
Furthermore, I'm concerned that Kosh's Islam prototype is based on what he reads in the news. A lot of Kosh's opinions seem to be based on the availability heuristic: when pressed for evidence, he provides single anecdotal incidents via news articles (useless), rather than population statistics. This concerns me, because it's inaccurate. This is bolstered by the fact that you'd say things like 'pretty much all major Islamic societies are tied to the culture there'. This is untrue. With 60% of the world's Muslim population in the Asia-Pacific region, you can damn well bet that pretty much all major Islamic societies are tied to the culture in the Asia-Pacific region. A once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca is not the grounds to assume that Asian-Pacific cultures are all somehow linked, in the worst way, to the Mideast.
The reason people think this way about Islam is because most of what they hear about Islam is linked to the Mideast. Again, availability heuristic.
What Kosh
could've done to work around this is to point out that states that are
uniformly Muslim are problematic. And he'd be right there. The Mideast may only have 20% of the world's Muslims, but something like 90% of the people in that region are Muslim, and so are the countries. That monoculture is
definitely problematic.
But he didn't. He failed to include any geopolitical parameters or qualifiers. He failed to point out that his argument applied to radicals, rather than to the guy running my local eyeglasses store, or to the Muslims here on HLP.
If Kosh had focused his arguments on that hotbed of radicalism, he would have been on safe ground. But he made a sweeping generalization that included the 60% of the world's Muslims who live in cosmopolitan, multi-religious societies where they make up only 24% of the population. That betrays bad research, bad understanding, and misguided intent.
In retrospect what should have been done is an immediate lock and a suggestion to try again, but with a better-framed first post and subject line. As it stands it's just absurdly clumsy. Kosh's responses in this thread have done nothing to help him.
