Hey shanshee,
shanshee_allures wrote:
Thing is though, it might have been more useful if you yourself could point out where Cope went wrong. To say it's no good to 'generalise' (which seems to be the main gist of your resopnse) is basically generalising also. Correct some of his statements for him (and us!).
I see your point, but it was in the heat of the moment and I've been reading his drudions and hearing/seeing other rants for some considerable time now, and there was at several points something that disturbed me but I couldn't quite put the finger on... but which somehow reminded me both of sloganesque reasoning when I was still spraying protest on walls with the stalinists, as well as the new "let's be really critical of our own leftwing thought" attitude of many young intellectuals (who end up right). Like I said however, assuming everybody here knowes Cope's drudions, I thought I might just as well take this example and make the point, rather than going through all his drudions and picking out insinuations.
Still, even then I fail to see how I generalise in the same way, as (a) I do not generalise over people; (b) I do not generalise over Cope. In fact, I'm not judging Cope at all as a person; I'm just judging certain of his actions, as actions are the only basis for morality. I'm just making a point that, whereas his rants are probably always well-meant, when he oversteps the line of generalisation it's always in the same direction: by taking on islam and by referring to a "society" or a "culture" - i.o.w. by condemning an entire label. While this makes for forceful language and an occasionally funny read, that kind of systematic display of very subtle bias is onworthy of any free- or forward-thinking motherfucker, as he claims to be.
shanshee_allures wrote:
There lies also the danger of becoming Invertedly pro Islam without a clue the same way as many seem to becoming anti Islam without a clue.
Well, I'm not pro - I'm not contra either, related to the above idea that it's impossible to create morality judgements on anything but actions and their consequences. What I mean is, there's no point in being pro or contra islam, as we're talking about a label here, the judgement of which is only relevant in as far as we use it in terms of "I'm anti religion". However, being a label it is useless as a general tag carrying judgment applying to any group of people, since they're very heterogenous. What I mean is, it becomes a bit foul when you start judging any person who dares to adhere to islam just *because* he does that - and this only on the basis on some theoretical assumption based on a skewed vision on world history (and a complete blindness to -unsexy- economic processe).
I'll say more: even though I am probably one of the most anti-religious people I know, I'm still not sure whether that does me any real good. I mean, if religion didn't "work" on some level, people would have stopped believing long ago.
Arf!
& thanks for the compliment
