Am I politically correct?

[dazzleman]

BRTD, I've obviously been quite successful in getting under your skin.  I guess I should be flattered that you seem to think enough of what I say to be obsessed with making threads over and over again trying to prove me wrong.  Frankly, I don't care much what you think, because you have not so far demonstrated particularly good reasoning ability, to put it mildly, so I am not surprised that you continually misinterpret and misunderstand the points that I have tried to make.

As I think I have expressed to you before, I myself am suspicious of islam, but not flat-out anti-islam in all cases.  Still, if somebody is a muslim and that's all I know about them, I will err on the side of suspicion.  I'm not necessarily proud of that fact, but I am honest about it.  But I don't believe that every muslim person is irretrievably evil, nor do I believe that the religion when properly interpreted necessarily incites violence or forces people to be slaves, effectively.  Any philosophy can be twisted into something ugly, and that is what has happened with islam to a large degree.

I have also said that one of the principal strands of left-wing political correctness is anti-Americanism.  I continue to believe this to be the case.  Political correctness is an assault on certain traditional American values.  Some of what political correctness attacks is bad, but some of it is good too.  That seems not to matter to those who are promulgating it.  If you have not seen left-wing defense of islam, then your eyes are not open very wide.  No surprise there.  While some left-wing people may not be wild about islam taken on its own, I think they are less critical of it than they would otherwise be because of the anti-Americanism of fundamentalist islam.

You accuse me of overgeneralizing, but you are assuming some things that I have never actually said.  I never said, for example, that all feminists agree with MacKinnon and Dworkin, though I do think their ideas infect the movement in a more subtle way and affect the thinking of even those who wouldn't directly agree with them in a negative way.  You don't seem to understand subtlety too well, so I can see why you might misunderstand me on that point.  I have also never said that all left-wing people love islam.  But I do stand by my point about left-wing philosophy being anti-American at its base, and having a tendency to give a free pass to ideas they would otherwise find hateful because they are anti-American.

It's true that I blame much of what is wrong with the world on left-wing philosophy.  Of course, that is not the whole picture, but I think it's fair to say that far left-wing philosophy has caused a great deal of pain and problems here and abroad, even when well intentioned.  The same is true of far-right (and I don't define mainstream Republicans as far right, as you seem to), though I don't think that far-right ideas ever gained the currency that far-left ideas did after the end of World War II.