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One of the problems is that these "super" lists of enemies change, and change, and change.
I think Paul Gottfried has done a satisfactory job of showing that almost everything "conservatives" claim as part of their "lasting values" now, and often for good reason, and very recently. It's an embarrassment if you want to stick to the same list of enemies you'd gotten used to, or even if you want to practice the minimal honesty of saying that you were all against X, Y and Z till the party line changed on such and such a date, when yet again the "conservatives" committed and pretended that they had not done so.
Let me give an example of very recent coinage. As a rightie, you got to be against feminists, unless they defined their feminism in some exceptional way, such as "feminists for life" (that is, opposing abortion, the opposite of what feminism usually means). This was fine till after the 9/11 attacks the new owners of conservatism, unsympathetic to traditional Christian values and folk-ways and keen to impose liberalism by force of arms in the Middle East, decided to recruit themselves allies they liked better than the withering tribe of traditionalist Whites. They made a pitch for feminist support, constantly pressing the talking point that Islam is opposed to feminism. (As opposed to us - we are all for it of course, all decent people are!) All loyal supporters of the conservative parties picked up the party line, and hey presto! Within the last few years, feminists moved off the enemies list, and anyone who opposes or did oppose them moved onto the list, but without "conservatives" accepting the obvious implications about themselves and their "bedrock abiding values".
Stuff and nonsense. I've always thought that a culture that can reproduce itself is demonstrating a vital superiority over one that can't, and if that means praise for Islam and condemnations for our death spiral demographics and the radically corrupted sex-role "reforms" and the "reformers" that gave rise to them, so be it. I have enough real beefs with Islam without inventing fake ones. I'm not going to condemn someone who's managed the intensely difficult feat of remaining married to one woman and bringing us several decent kids including modest, marriageable girls, in our corrupted and corrupting culture, because his name is "Khalid" and because he worships a barbarous god and is inclined to inflict harm on unbelievers. The people who suddenly appeared on the "friends of true conservatives" lists (an unreciprocated friendship to be sure!) do lots of harm too.
What happens when you simply remember the old script and stick to it? When you notice that no new and better arguments have replaced the old ones, that it has only been a question of a change of "conservative" management, and of allies, tactics and talking points? Then you get read out of the "respectable" ranks of conservatism, and find yourself an "extremist". And likely sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-environment, and whatever label is next. This is by the standards of respectable, "mainstream" conservatism.
Frankly, I am suspicious of consistent lifelong moderates. Because with the speed that the left ups the price of respectability, and the speed with which the right abandons and reverses "key, unchanging" positions and adds new positions, it takes very tricky footwork of the kind that the "steady, consistent moderate" pretends not to do to remain "moderate".
I think Paul Gottfried has done a satisfactory job of showing that almost everything "conservatives" claim as part of their "lasting values" now, "conservatives" were dubious about if not hostile to before, and often for good reason, and very recently.
David, I'm pretty sure I disagree strongly, but that's an interesting argument. Want to expand it into a post so we can argue it??
Marc
And now for something completely different ...
David, your remarks about feminists and conservatives are very strange to me. But you cite Paul Gottfried, and the ideas of the paleoconservatives are very strange to everybody. Let me nail some theses to your door:
1. You don't have to be a feminist, or even like feminists, in order to believe that women have a right not to be enslaved, stoned, hanged, drenched in acid, or gang-raped by Pakistani tribunals. You don't even have to be a feminist to believe in the civil equality of women, though some feminists like to pretend that you do.
2. If conservatives and feminists are now allied against Islam, this is news indeed. If anything, the cowardly silence of feminism in the face of Islamist terror against women has made them less friendly. And it's not only "conservatives" who dislike such "feminists".
3. Some people have been "read out" of "respectable conservatism", usually for anti-Semitism and other forms of medievalism. That kind of thing is considered unacceptable - shouldn't it be?
4. Neo-conservatism (which is what Gottfried is complaining about) started out as an effort to stiffen the foreign policy spine of the Democratic Party. (This was an inevitable failure, as no such spine exists.) Neo-conservatives are more liberal on social issues than traditional conservatives - in that area, they shade into the libertarians. On foreign policy, they're more like the old school Scoop Jackson liberals (who are otherwise extinct). None of which is anything new. Pretending that they're invaders from Mars doesn't really help anybody, but then, Gottfried is into fatalism.
5. As you point out (I think) times change, and standing by one set of principles can make you a conservative, a radical, or even a conformist, all in one lifetime. That's as it should be. Abolitionism was pretty extreme in 1850; obviously extremism is not always the worst of everybody's problems.
Well, I'm going to tentatively agree with David, in that ALL parties change over time, just as the SOCIETY changes over time. If you looked at early 1900's Democrats, they would not agree much with today's democrats, or with 1800's democrats (and same for Republicans). I shouldn't have to answer for (or take credit for) Polk's candidacy, just because he once had a D on his name. I doubt we would agree on much.
This is not 'being hypocritical', it's just new blood and new political forces recreating party lines. One of the reasons I don't like parties is their creation of uneasy alliances into groupthink. This obscures complicated topics into yes/no strong/weak talking points that undermines the idea of independent thought. In the end, people are shocked, SHOCKED when entirely different wings of the same party disagree.
On a side note, I imagine everybody sees this video as funny, because nobody sees these traits in themselves (or their political cohorts). Getting people to recognize extremism in their own wing is very, very hard.
What happens when you simply remember the old script and stick to it?
Well, 99 times out of 100, you end up living in a well-discarded past.
Let's say for the sake of argument that the old script was the original Constitution, unmodified by abolition, civil rights, women's right to vote and a number of other significant changes.
Even what once seemed to be bedrock absolute foundational principles do change over time and usually with good reason: progress.
If you were to divide the whole of human history into 100,000 discrete pieces each representing a particular generation in a particular part of the world, there would be no more than 2 or 3 that I would prefer to live in than the current one pretty much anywhere in the "West." Because from a moral (& technological) point of view, the past pretty much sucks compared with the present.
I havent' thought of this particular division of time before. If we start counting at the earliest human fossils, i.e 197,000 years ago, and we assume a generation to be 15 years, that means slightly over 13,000 generations. [18 years, then 11,000 generations]
The bulk of that time though, Roland, would fall into the pre-history category. If history begins with written records, we're talking about a total period of 5,500-6,500 years. But each generation would be divided into geographic divisions, of which there could be a nearly infinite number.
For instance, I don't think I'd mind living in 388 b.c. if it were in Athens. Not so sure I'd be quite as willing to live during the same period in Chad. Not sure I'd want to live in Chad right now, for that matter. Of course, I wouldn't want to live in 388 b.c. Athens either, if I were a woman, or a house slave, or an attractive young boy; only as a disgruntled older playwright.
Armed Liberal: "David, I'm pretty sure I disagree strongly, but that's an interesting argument. Want to expand it into a post so we can argue it??"
I don't know that I can create posts any more? And it's not that big a point.
Powerful political parties confer legitimacy / "moderation" on their supporters.
Example: Ronald Reagan extended legitimacy to a lot of views that would otherwise have been considered extremist.
Powerful political parties change their stands often, quickly, surreptitiously, and often for top-down reasons.
Example: Australian Labor parties at state and federal level used to hug a "motherhood" statement about an ultimate "socialist objective". It said something about the union origins of the parties and what they were founded for, but being undefined it didn't restrict governments much, and by "much" I mean "at all". In an unguarded moment New South Wales Labor Premier Neville Wran eventually defined his "socialist objective" as attracting enough big business support so he could stay in power forever. That made the truth as blunt as you can get. What happened was, the party moved to the financial "sweet spot" on something like that very instructive graph you posted, Armed Liberal, on "what is going wrong". The opinions of the workers and the paper constitution of the party were no longer wanted, what mattered was big donors and their sentiments, and enough yuppies to back them up.
When the party moved, those who had not changed their beliefs, likely because their working lives had not changed, became "extremists" outside the legitimated to and fro of the parties.
John Cleese explains extremism in terms of temperament. People with nasty temperaments and high self-deception use left or right wing enemies lists as excuses to vent.
There is some of this. But the picture is inadequate - and not just because he shows the left as targeting only cartoons while he shows the right as targeting real people.
The indifferent selection of enemies lists is not so indifferent. The left online is more than a dozen times more profane, and in the Anglosphere much more inclined to get violent.
The missing bit that interests me is that in some cases, yes you will get cantankerous people speaking up for "extremist" positions, because they're the ones that didn't quietly give up and shut up when the party moved quickly and deviously in the direction of its big donors.
They didn't pick their causes indifferently as an excuse for a fight, rather they are a selection of the least compliant, most obstreperous people who really did believe in what the mainstream parties said.
When there's a lot of this going on, when the parties are moving fast and the gap between who and what they were supposed to stand for and what the guiding circles of the party and its big money supporters and its academic and media supporters actually want and are going for, then all you need to become an "extremist" is not to be in on the scam and to be a loser from the scam sufficiently painfully that you belly-ache in public about it.
The John Cleese picture of "extremism" implies that the complaints of "extremists" ought to be disregarded entirely, as they boil down to arbitrary lists of people to hate on, chosen to make people feel good about acting on their innate nastiness.
If you accept that view, the natural thing is to congratulate yourself on your superior goodness, and stop listening to the substantiative arguments of anyone defined as an "extremist" because you "know" they don't really have any substance to them except bile. Obviously, that kind of deliberately deaf "calm moderation" is infuriating. Less obviously...
...the John Cleese view of "extremism" acts to support back-room dealing with a pronounced class bias, and nowadays, with mass immigration and high demographic instability, possibly with other strong biases.
I don't think that's right.
I don't think that "move along, nothing to see here" is the right attitude to the movement of the boundaries of "moderation" and the consequent creation of "extremists".
Particularly when "conservative" parties, claiming to stand up steadfastly for flattered constituencies and "abiding" values in fact move fast and deviously for elite-driven reasons, and when activists take up new talking points that they hope will lead them where they used to believe that they were going, while the new direction of the party is somewhere else entirely.
#6 from mark: "Even what once seemed to be bedrock absolute foundational principles do change over time and usually with good reason: progress."
This is only preferring Thursday to Wednesday because now it's Thursday.
My opinion is that when surveys ask people if they think we are on the wrong track or the right track, those who say "right track" are not automatically right and those who say "wrong track" are not automatically wrong.
When there's a lot of this going on, when the parties are moving fast and the gap between who and what they were supposed to stand for and what the guiding circles of the party and its big money supporters and its academic and media supporters actually want and are going for get big enough, then all you need to become an "extremist" is not to be in on the scam and to be a loser from the scam sufficiently painfully that you belly-ache in public about it.
Re: #5 from Alchemist ...
I think conservative parties offer people who often don't have much real active support in the circles of power a comforting image of steadfastness. I don't think they deliver on it.
I do see hypocrisy there. I don't think that "changing as society changes" comes near to describing what is going on, particularly when the changes are radical, top-down and driven by business interests in things like unorganized and preferably rightless cheap labor.
When I look at the "conservative" parties that are hoping to be swept back into power in the UK, Australia and America I'm unimpressed.
Of course a lot of crazy, bad people on the right are going to wind up outside the safe bounds of moderation as defined by these parties. That's a constant.
But a lot of good people are bound to wind up right wing and "extreme" just because the parties that confer non-extreme status are that bad, that feckless, that much run by insider and behind the scenes interests, and doing that bad a job for people who, targeted by the left, have little option but to vote for them.
I'm referring to mostly older, respectable and usually White people with conservative mores - I think of them as the "nice cup of tea and a biscuit" people. I don't anticipate any harm from them as "extremists" or any good either, as they have no powerful political patrons and are more and more losers.
#5 from Alchemist:
"Getting people to recognize extremism in their own wing is very, very hard."
YES!
Part of what spurred my comments in this thread is that I'm disengaging from the respectable right.
It still seems to consist, in America, of people like Bill Kristol, who I remember being absolutely smug and contemptuous of the ignorance of people who didn't know that Iraq was secular and that religious denominations could not be a problem for us there. When we found out in a bloody fashion how wrong that was, I wrote him off forever as the kind of puffed up phony who gets people killed in large numbers. Apparently other people didn't, because he's still there and still an appropriate spokesman to define what's "conservative".
When I find myself nodding along with talking points that might have their origins in someone like that, I get a "Wile E. Coyote" moment: a little sign goes up in my mind that says WHAT IN GOD'S NAME AM I DOING? This might be respectable - apparently it still is in the "respectable" range - but it's mad.
That sense that the respectable range of opinion is nuts is extremism by definition. I see clearly that the "extreme right" label belongs on me now, and it always will.
When I think back to the runup to the two wars of the Bush Presidency, I am sincerely ashamed of what I thought back then, that must have been obvious in my attitude even though I kept clamping down on any inclination to say it: I was not far from the David Frum "unpatriotic conservatives" line, in my heart. Ye gods! :( Yet then, I was more "moderate" than now, in the sense that moderation is defined by being "part of the conversation" as defined by elites rather than outside it and irrelevant.
I think back on my dear, departed grandmother, who would clearly fall foul of Glen Wishard's points in post #4, "medievalisms" and all. But I think she, the extremist, represented a moral order that was more reliable, more fruitful and vastly less dangerous than what passes for conservatism now.
I lived in Australia during Wran's Premiership. I remember running into him in a bookstore and being taken by the fact that those in power were not as estranged from the every day life of the people in Australia as they were in the U.S. His politics made no difference to me, but the fact that he could walk among the common folk without anyone taking too much notice did.
But, times do change. I do think it is good for you to point out that politicians are whores and seem to be prostituting themselves now, more than they have in quite a while.
I also share your concern about Conservative Movement and the Republican Party. But, I am old and the world is not mine any more.
#4 from Glen Wishard: "And now for something completely different ..."
OK. :)
#4 from Glen Wishard: "David, your remarks about feminists and conservatives are very strange to me. But you cite Paul Gottfried, and the ideas of the paleoconservatives are very strange to everybody."
They are becoming less strange to me now than a mainstream that effectively ignores Mark Steyn's basic, vital points on demographics. I haven't read much on "paleoconservatives" yet, but I don't see how they could be stranger than an affected indifference to artificial infertility, mass immigration, radicalizing multiculturalism, population replacement and their consequences.
#4 from Glen Wishard: "Let me nail some theses to your door:"
OK. (David Blue hands over hammer and nails.)
#4 from Glen Wishard: "1. You don't have to be a feminist, or even like feminists, in order to believe that women have a right not to be enslaved, stoned, hanged, drenched in acid, or gang-raped by Pakistani tribunals. You don't even have to be a feminist to believe in the civil equality of women, though some feminists like to pretend that you do."
OK.
#4 from Glen Wishard: "2. If conservatives and feminists are now allied against Islam, this is news indeed. If anything, the cowardly silence of feminism in the face of Islamist terror against women has made them less friendly. And it's not only "conservatives" who dislike such "feminists"."
Conservatives and feminists are not now allied against Islam. Rather, right-wingers who desired such an alliance changed their talking points but got no joy.
#4 from Glen Wishard: "3. Some people have been "read out" of "respectable conservatism", usually for anti-Semitism and other forms of medievalism. That kind of thing is considered unacceptable - shouldn't it be?"
I'm on the brink of saying: it shouldn't be.
I haven't read enough on "paleoconservativism" (if that's a word?) to say that yet, though. I don't know what weird doctrines I might find myself unexpectedly defending as deserving a place in the sun. I am not up on conspiracy theories regarding Masons, fluoridation and precious bodily fluids, if those are relevant.
#4 from Glen Wishard: "4. [...] but then, Gottfried is into fatalism."
Currently, a lot of things are looking pretty inevitable to me too.
#4 from Glen Wishard: "5. As you point out (I think) times change, and standing by one set of principles can make you a conservative, a radical, or even a conformist, all in one lifetime."
Yes, it was my intention to point that out.
It followed that John Cleese was wrong to say that extremism is just about being nasty and feeling good about it. Standing where you stood last year can make you an extremist.
#4 from Glen Wishard: "That's as it should be. Abolitionism was pretty extreme in 1850; obviously extremism is not always the worst of everybody's problems."
True.
But how society changed so that the same guy with the same position who was once "tolerant" is now "extremist" and a bigot in an interesting question. The John Cleese line - effectively "don't listen to extremists, they're evil and have no real ideas" doesn't cut it.
Rather than putting "extremism" down to random villainy and bad temperament, I'd say: look at the class, race, gender and other status markers of the people who are constantly getting wrong-footed such that they become "extremists" (though their opinions may not have changed at all), and compare that to the people the people who are getting to stay respectably moderate (though their expressed opinions must have changed radically).
"Extremists should be stigmatized and a deaf ear should be turned to their arguments" - without any investigation of where this label is coming from, and who it sticks to and who gets to be teflon - is not neutral or random in its targeting.
#13 from toc3: "I lived in Australia during Wran's Premiership. I remember running into him in a bookstore and being taken by the fact that those in power were not as estranged from the every day life of the people in Australia as they were in the U.S. His politics made no difference to me, but the fact that he could walk among the common folk without anyone taking too much notice did."
Yeah, this is one of the best things about Australia.
And I wasn't taking a shot at Neville Wran either. I never disliked him, and I still don't. He didn't have and of that American-style "do you know who I am??" about him. I respect the regular blokes much more than the legends in their own minds.
I was just making a point about politics, and how easily you can find that the rules have changed and that you are "extremist" and "out of the discussion" - even if your opinions have not changed since they were "common sense," and even if you can point to words in the founding document that say you're right.
The people these rule changes happen to tend to be the ones without lots of big money donors and other "agents of influence" such as high status academics and media figures who are solicitous to their interests. The people who keep winding up in the respectable zone - well with them it's the opposite.
I really like this line of discussion, let me sleep on it.
David -
I don't mean to discredit paleocons just for being paleocons, and I didn't mean to call your grandmother a medievalist.
The paleocons hail some great writers: Robert Nisbet, Michael Oakeshott, and Russell Kirk. And you've got to love a political movement that draws inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft - talk about fatalism.
But it's funny that they should come up in this discussion, because some of the people who call themselves paleocons are the biggest drawers-up of enemies lists that you ever saw. At the top of the list are American Jews - you know, Zionists. Zionists, Zionists, Zionists, and more Zionists. And like all Zionist-haters, they claim the Zionists singled them out first.
Now the left hates all conservatives, neo, paleo, crunchy, vanilla, and chocolate. They hate all libertarians, too. But some paleocons get friendly nods from the intellectual left, because they buy into the whole leftist claptrap about US Imperialism, and because they hate Israel. So they get to participate in extremism on both ends.
Re: #17 from Glen Wishard: no problem, Glen.
#17 from Glen Wishard: "Now the left hates all conservatives, neo, paleo, crunchy, vanilla, and chocolate."
Kathleen Parker is getting strange new respect! (link)
And they watched the John Cleese video... and there was much rejoicing.
Re: #5 from Alchemist: well said.
The part where I disagree is that you seem to see this mostly as a bottom up process. "ALL parties change over time, just as the SOCIETY changes over time." And you seem to see this as mostly benevolent or harmless and natural.
What I see is a process of politically and legally driven top-down radical social change, which I suspect is often influenced heavily by the short-term interests, thoughtlessness, fashions, prejudices and reflexes of small numbers of big donors and system-happy petty intellectuals.
This means I consider what's happening less legitimate, more alarming, and less likely to contain naturally corrective feedback loops.
Some posts by Maggie Gallagher at The Corner on "The Amazing Power of the Culture": (link) (link) (link) (link).
I don't expect you to agree with her on marriage, gay marriage - but do you see what she is getting at on the top-down nature of the process?
I feel like that too. It seems to me that for decades needed legislation to protect families and support family formation went nowhere because nobody who mattered (a very small crowd) thought that preventive maintenance was in their short-term interest. Then swiftly and terribly the law resolved the tension about struggling families by redefining the institution altogether.
It was bold and cheap for the legislators to be so sweeping and theoretical, but multitudes of people were shocked by the sudden redefinition of the main institution of their lives, they were living in a private reality - a definition of madness - if they didn't go along with the new official reality (and its incentive structure), and effective feedback was essentially nil.
The new structure produced less happiness, frequently blighted prospects for children, and mainly not enough children - not nearly enough.
All right then: mass immigration! Again, with not much regard for whether people want it, and with swinging theoretical certainty that the obvious grave risks would come to nothing.
We're living in a social laboratory run by people who've given evidence that the're far from being up to the job - even when they're thinking about the job, as opposed to their short term interest in things like access to cheap foreign labor.
At each stage the serious, unreconciled skeptics became "extremists" and "dead-enders". Yet the evidence often shows that their concerns were justified.
On the whole I think conservatives have done a lousy job of protecting their constituents, the people who most needed and wanted stability. And in many cases the conservative political parties have themselves been drivers of wild experimentation. Australia owes the dubious rise of mandatory multiculturalism to Malcolm Fraser and the Liberal Party (think: conservative party), not to Labor and the left. In America, the liberal talking point that practically every bad thing Obama does, including massive and useless emergency economic interventions, was done by George W. Bush first is correct.
I don't think mainstream conservatism has been on the job.
I agree with Paul Gottfried that it makes sense now to speak of "the right" rather than "conservatives" because there's not enough left to "conserve". For example, Donald Sensing laughs at fears that gay marriage will undermine the traditional concept of marriage. He thinks it's been done in already. If you want that marriage structure, you would have to reconstruct it. That would be a radical right wing project, not a "conservative" one.
What are the prospects for radical right-wing projects like trying to give kids parents they can count on again? It's really tough.
But I think people need the courage to buck the trend, be anachronistic and extremist as needed, and be lonely and lose if that's what it comes to, but not seek "strange new respect" from dubious allies.
Basically anyone who calls America the "Great Satan" or the leftist or cultural Marxist equivalent should not be an acceptable ally.
Hmm, there's a problem with my timeline. That is, the floodgates for culturally indigestible mass immigration opened in America in 1965, that's before the corrosive effect of family "reform" could have created a problem for this to be the solution to.
My impression that the true governors of the state and thus society are very narrow elite and that they act like experimenters with little concern for the welfare of the patient they are experimenting on remains.
buddy larsen at Belmont Club said what I want to say: "boys at play throw stones at frogs, frogs die in earnest." (link)
When this is happening, there are worse things for a man's soul than to depart so far from the mainstream of political fashion that you are called an "extremist".
The depressing part: You can show an extremist the video. They will laugh at it. Then proceed to say things that show they are still running the same tape, utterly unaffected by the video they just laughed at. Tried the experiment.
Before the discussion, shouldn't you show them the John Cleese "Argument Clinic" sketch?
Some responses to individual statements...
Now the left hates all conservatives, neo, paleo, crunchy, vanilla, and chocolate. They hate all libertarians, too.
As a 'leftist', I don't hate righties, I just don't agree with them very often. I do hate some of them (mostly, the ones who write books calling me Hitler/idiot/Islamic appeaser). I actually am quite fond of libertarians, and I dig the whole libertarian vibe. I vote for many of them in local elections.
Now, there are some liberals who hate all righties. Just as there some righties who hate all liberals. Everybody knows who I'm talking about here. These are the people I put into the 'extremist' camps, the people who openly advocate for a good purge....
What I see is a process of politically and legally driven top-down radical social change
I would agree there's alot of that. Some directed by the parties, alot directed from corporations (that have a wider reach these days than either party) But even these have changed dramatically as business and technology has changed. In many ways it's made the corruption worse.
If anything, the cowardly silence of feminism in the face of Islamist terror against women has made them less friendly.
This is totally off topic, but, as someone who hangs out with a lot of feminists, it's stupidly untrue. For example here's NOW trying to get help for Afghan women. Here is a Ms magazine page dedicated to the middle east.
Now, I don't agree with everything on these pages, but you'll find very few of the articles are "silent" on Islamic issues.
You're not a leftist, Alchemist. You're just a liberal. In fact, confusion about the difference between leftists and liberals is proof that you're a liberal.
The NOW page you link to describes women who are victimized by "extreme poverty", "gender-based violence", and "religious extremists". This seems to be caused by the fact that Afghanistan is "war-torn" - I wonder who's to blame for that.
Islam and Shari'a are not mentioned of course. They do utter the word "Taliban", which they are familiar with because they habitually apply it to Republicans.
The Ms. blog is topped by two stories about genital mutilation (FGM) - so common it has an a initialism. Search these stories for possible causes of FGM. If Catholics practiced FGM, do you think they might mention the Catholic Church?
Below that you find a tribute to Rachel Corrie, to Hissa Hilal ("a feminist jihadist of the highest order") and a call for "Waging a Worldwide Feminist Jihad".
Glen, you're cherry-picking here, there's only one line in NOW that mentions poverty, and the rest is entirely focused on religious persecution:
From the NOW page:
They're clearly talking about persecution of women by extremists (not by the US). Even the mention of words "war-torn" are not used as blame of the US, but of the fact that our efforts have not been enough to help women succeed. Based on the status of the country, that's an accurate statement.
If Catholics practiced FGM, do you think they might mention the Catholic Church?
Gee, I'd certainly hope so. FGM is a rather extreme position, used only by groups who feel that women are not allowed basic rights and privileges.
I could go through all of these, but we're getting off the point. To rope this back in:
Where I think you disagree is the feminist approach to dealing with extremism (something this post has not tackled). Most groups advocate awareness, fund raising and support. Most feminist groups see violence (even against oppression) as counterproductive.
So to come back to the post: Clearly, joking with extremists about their views does not crack their shell. So how should extremists be approached? Is there a way to bring them back into the conventional fold. Or, is extremism a natural by-product of freedom?
When approaching 3rd world nations, how can extremism be tackled across cultures?
Sorry, I meant:
Most [feminist] groups advocate awareness, fund-raising and [financial] support.