[Maru]

Originally Posted by Dezzy

There's no realistic way for the UK to become an extremist country. It is just pure hysteria that is based on neither reality nor fact.

Extremism must be stamped out but to act like an entire religion is the enemy is pure ignorance and will only accentuate the problem of extremists, not solve it.

Extremism is a relative term to you and I. It is also relative to it's environment. Who is to say in 20-50 years that this definition of extremism won't change? Extremism might become 'progressive' and then progressive might become the new norm. I agree with you that it's often difficult to predict what the social conditions will be in future years. I never thought in a million years Donald Trump would be elected, and yet here we are... anyway, people are naturally fearful of change and resistant to forces they feel will adversely affect their status quo. So it's only natural some will form resistance against this... it's neither a good or bad trait to being human, but a tendency we have developed over the years as a way to survive in ever-changing circumstances...

For me the immigration-resistant arguments often come down to this in it's most logical form... by silencing this innate resistance, we are accepting these cultural changes without question and restriction (resisting our instincts), which further hinders our ability to carefully examine possible qualifiers aka dangers to our villages (society's) current members (such as religious sects aligned with terrorism)... you, myself and most of society doesn't know Muslim religion intimately enough to filter this danger out, much less to examine which ideals promote this extremism (though it seems most suspect the head garments, suppression) thus creates the hysteria when groups of society want to invite these people in unquestioned (not saying this is your stance). Logic and experience has something to do with this, but it's usually baked in with other values such as preserving one's own cultural identity and sticking to what works... because it's something we are familiar with, and it provides us with security in an ever-changing world, it's the course they will most likely opt for.

It doesn't necessarily have to align with the primary motives of bigotry. Ironically enough, people who are anti-Christian, or otherwise have been taught/conditioned to dislike it's most oppressive tenants, tend to look for the sister tenants (similar rules) in Muslim culture and use those as the basis for it's monopoly on extremism... so they use that as a guiding post. Still, some of those tenants are still widely accepted in Christianity today... but because it is already well-integrated with our society, we tend to whitelist (no pun intended ) it despite this obvious contradiction...

Anyway, we tend to band together in resistance where potential qualifiers for dangers are involved, no matter how ridiculous the arguments... because I think even evolution knows humans are often hysterically bad at examining these threads ()... hence why these fears tend to rise more vehemently from the unknown factors than the known... we are pretty good at telling when the Christian church down the street might be out to get us, so our natural resistance stops there... damn Jehova's witnesses and their street polluting fliers.

Familiarity is a source of comfort. But again... extremism is relative... humans are pretty good at coming into **** and ****ing it all up. So who knows who will be running the world. We have only had great record keeping for a relatively short period of time, so it's not like we understand everything about the signs these rhetoric gain traction and we can't see all that happens in the world thanks to media that picks and choose what it reports... as a society anyway. If we did, we would have a cure to stop all fascism, hatred, sexism, etc...


Anyway, I am still scanning the thread...