[Dean's World] Dave Price: Reality-Barren Rhetoric

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
Reality-Barren Rhetoric
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1171996549.shtml


   An amusing exercise in deliberately missing the point over at the
   inaptly named "Reality Based Community" blog, where Mark Kleiman
   [1]pretends to be unable to recognize irony, and on that basis accuses
   Mark Steyn and Glenn Reynolds of justify past genocide in Bosnia and
   future genocide of Muslims in Europe, and demands Steyn be treated as
   a pariah.
   The argument is pretty silly. Having read [2]Steyn's book (and I
   disagree with one of its apparent tenets, that Muslims as a whole are
   unlikely to embrace Enlightenment values of individual freedom), Steyn
   is obviously warning against the possibility of far right groups
   engaging in genocide against Muslims as a response to terrorism, not
   making the case for it.
   After citing something Glenn wrote about the unforgiving historical
   responses of civilized societies to attacks by barbarians, the piece
   ends with this very flawed argument:

     I might unavoidably have the choice between killing and eating
     another human being and starving to death myself. But I wouldn't
     "have to" become a murderer and a cannibal. That would, in fact, be
     the wrong thing for me to do in that circumstance. And no amount of
     pseudo-historical theorizing about "civilized people" and
     "barbarians" is going to change the fact that mass slaughter is the
     wrong thing to do.
     Is that so hard to understand?

   Sure, but that's very obviously a false analogy. An attack by
   barbarians is by analogy a situation where your choices are to kill
   someone, or be killed by them. This is a choice being actively imposed
   on you by the actions of others, not the passive condition of hunger,
   and that makes the morality very different, as different as the
   Serbian treatment of Kosovar Muslims and the U.S. treatment of Japan
   and Germany. We firebombed Tokyo and Dresden and nuked Nagasaki and
   Hiroshima in order to defend ourselves from a threat; nobly refusing
   to fight back on the grounds that "mass slaughter is the wrong thing
   to do" would not have been a superior moral choice, nor would a
   negotiated peace that left those regimes in power. No amount of
   sophistry is going to change the fact that massacre in self-defense is
   not always wrong, and indeed sometimes necessary.
   Apparently, that is hard for some to understand.

References

   1. http://www.samefacts.com/archives/terrorism_and_its_control_/2007/02/mark_steyns_final_solution_to_the_euromuslim_problem.php
   2. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/002-0266613-5524847?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=america+alone