Slam Dunk
Proposition: We should not be so reluctant to promote the superiority of Western Values.
The link is to an MP3 podcast of a panel debate held a couple days ago in England.
Maybe it is just I, but the anti side was so lame they must have consumed most of the available handicapped parking.
At no point did they even attempt to elucidate an alternative, superior set of values.
At most points, they gave the impression they simultaneously had not read the question, had read it, but didn't understand it, and read it, agreed with it, but didn't understand their agreement.
Throughout, they mistook failing to live up to those values as the values themselves, and, particularly Professor Dalrymple, excused non-Westerners of any responsibility for their own actions.
Tariq Ramadan does a good rant, but really needs to practice misdirection to make it somewhat less transparently obvious.
I had always thought the Left analytically challenged. This is another data point in support.
The link is to an MP3 podcast of a panel debate held a couple days ago in England.
Maybe it is just I, but the anti side was so lame they must have consumed most of the available handicapped parking.
At no point did they even attempt to elucidate an alternative, superior set of values.
At most points, they gave the impression they simultaneously had not read the question, had read it, but didn't understand it, and read it, agreed with it, but didn't understand their agreement.
Throughout, they mistook failing to live up to those values as the values themselves, and, particularly Professor Dalrymple, excused non-Westerners of any responsibility for their own actions.
Tariq Ramadan does a good rant, but really needs to practice misdirection to make it somewhat less transparently obvious.
I had always thought the Left analytically challenged. This is another data point in support.
posted by Hey Skipper at 10:26 PM
9 Comments:
A better question is why are we so guilty about the freedom and prosperity free trade has brought us especially in the face of worldwide socialist poverty.
Thanks for the recap of the discussion. Now I won't need to listen to it.
o/t but excellent news. Bloglines now takes one directly to new comment!!!! Way to go! If convenient, I'd like to do the same on my blog. Pls send me the code.
It takes chutzpah to frame a debate like that in England ever since the 'resolved, this house shall not fight for king and country' debacle.
However, when I saw the panelists, I was surprised to find Ramadan on the anti list. I thought he was supposed to be the poster boy Muslim who has found a way to meld Islamic belief with western values.
Sounds like genuine imitation alligator hide to me.
erp, Harry:
IMHO, it is well worth listening to, if for no other reason than opposition research.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dalrymple's a history and travel writer, not an academic. Excellent writer too - best books on the Indian subcontinent I've yet encountered - but his views on politics are somewhat eye-roll inducing. In one interview I read, he confused Bernard Lewis with Samuel Huntington.
In today's Sunday Times he referred to that debate and slammed the US for destroying Iraq when previously, it had been a prosperous, secular nation.
Ramadan's persistently called for Muslims in the West to integrate with their host nations. He takes a "living document" view of the Quran which I don't agree with much, and the same European intellectual disdain for neoliberal capitalism which I oppose even more.
Ali:
[Ramadan] takes a "living document" view of the Quran ...
Thankfully, The Bible has been a living document.
Why shouldn't the Quran also be?
Same reason as for the US Constitution. A living document view leads to intellectual noodling and endless squabbling, where the elites decide what they think the law should be.
Ali:
Okay, as someone who has become a strict constructionist, I'll buy that.
Except for one thing.
When there arises a consensus that the Constitution requires updating, an amendment is the result.
Unfortunately, except for Mormonism, the equivalent of amendments doesn't seem to exist.
If there is another alternative, I sure don't know what it is.
'Ramadan's persistently called for Muslims in the West to integrate with their host nations.'
Thus my surprise at the side he took.
Although he has infidel critics who regard him as some kind of Trojan horse.
As always, my first question is, how many precincts can he deliver?
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