Hi all, first post here. I’ll try to limit my introduction to what will be most probably relevant going forward with this thread.
I’m an IRL friend of the notorious gman1225 and am currently a sixth-year PhD© in philosophy. Gman turned me onto the recent controversy on these forums culminating in his ban, and while I haven’t spent the hours of reading that would be required to fully inform myself on the subject, what I have read has fascinated me—hence my creating an account and this thread.
Politically, I consider myself a “post-liberal” (the best term I can think of, I’m afraid). In college, “radical leftist” would have been a more accurate descriptor, though to be honest my politics back then were quite abstract; I was swimming in the intoxicating waters of such postmodern theorists as Derrida, Foucault, and above all Deleuze (& Guattari), and didn’t concern myself with empirical politics much, except to provide esoteric buttresses for the fairly stock liberal views dominating the discourse of the elite northeastern university I attended.
Over the past few years, with a noticeable acceleration beginning around the Trump candidacy and especially election, I’ve found myself increasingly alienated from mainstream liberal ideology as well as radical leftist ideologies (though arguably, the former is being swallowed by the latter). This has been due to a number of factors, some more objective and some more subjective; for example, I think (and obviously this is far from an original or marginal opinion) that there has been an objective shift on the left (in particular, also on the right though), such that what was considered center-left is now considered right or even far-right. My own personal intellectual development has played a strong role as well (see my username).
Nowadays I try to give equal time to CNN and FoxNews (though I only listen to NPR in the car, never right-wing talk radio, which would just be too much), I try to read conservative and liberal publications, and I try to engage those who think differently than me in civil discourse. I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries—the last gasp of my leftism, a hope trodden savagely on by the Democratic Party establishment—and left the top of the ticket blank for the general. So I didn’t vote for Trump, and I have not historically been a “Trump supporter”, though I’m not afraid to criticize uncritical leftist discourses about Trump, either.
But enough about me: I just wanted to introduce myself and, hopefully, convey that I’m not here to troll. Despite my connection to gman, which is doubtless enough for many of you to oppose me a priori (or even call for banning me!) and without reading what I have to say, I’m genuinely interested in a rational or at least civil discourse on important issues that arguably are best discussed in precisely this sort of forum (where anonymity protects the expression of politically incorrect viewpoints—though I understand that’s been a matter of controversy lately).
Now, as per the title of this thread, what I’d like to discuss is whether it is inherently bigoted to think that immigration in Europe, and in particular Muslim immigration, is a problem. I guess the starting-point would be something like: there’s a lot of evidence that the way immigration has happened in Europe since WWII (starting with the various guest-worker programs, needed due to the decimation of European labor forces in the war) has led to empirical problems (e.g., the rise and even normalization of acid-attacks in England)—and arguably, there’s a principled problem as well, in that Islam is empirically connected to views and norms which are incompatible with “Western”, liberal-democratic, normatively-pluralist values (for example, a majority of British Muslims think that homosexuality should be illegal, and polls have consistently shown that a majority of Muslims in heavily Muslim nations favor the death penalty for apostasy, not to speak of Danish cartoonists, Charlie Hebdo, or Salman Rushdie).
I expect that many on these forums will affirm the proposition that it is inherently bigoted to hold these views, or perhaps even to publicly put them forth for discursive exploration and evaluation (as I have done here); what I am interested in is the reasoning behind this view.