You’ll have to excuse him. I believe he’s an American doesn’t realize that what French people think of when you say “liberal” and what Americans think are very different.
Sounds like the day after the Boston Marathon bombing.
You can’t be racist against a religion you fucking morons. What race is Islam? Are all people of that race Islamic? Is it a racial trait, encoded in your genetics somewhere?
Islam is a religion, a belief system, something that dictates how you live your life. How in the world can a belief system be immune from criticism? Or automatically accused of being bigoted for criticizing it. Am I racist if I criticize the anti-vax movement? Are anti-vax retards a race?
I’m so fucking sick of the liberal douchebag apologists who, ironically, feel totally at home to criticize Christianity, but then the fucking FORBIDDEN THOUGHT alarm goes off on their head if anyone gives Islam the same treatment. And I’m not saying that as a butthurt pseuedo-oppressed Christian, since I’m quite clearly not religious. I’m saying that as someone who fucking hates the weenie apologists who come out of the woodwork to make it their full time job to reassure everyone only a tiny minority of Muslims are the cause of all the problems, and all true Scotsman Muslims are really good people and blah blah.
If the Aztec religion were still around today, and still fucking sacrificing virgins and ripping people’s beating hearts of their chest, you’d be on here full time saying “no religion is better than any other, most aztecs are fine people, all the people of other religions are just as bad” and all that other bullshit.
There’s a pretty much an unfailing correlation between how much a culture embraces Islam and how fucking backward and barbaric and shitty it is. What’s the least shitty Muslim-dominated place? Turkey? Yes, exactly, because they have a long tradition of secularism and trying to keep the fanaticism of their Islam in check.
Now you could say you could read anything into a religion, and it’s the culture that determines how people act on their religion. Fine. Who cares? Then the cultures are shitty. Cultures are still not races. An Arab or Indonesian or whatever the fuck you think people are being racist against raised by wolves does not adopt Islam as some sort of fucking racial trait.
“Racism” is an extremely easy card to play. It doesn’t take any thought on your part, and we’re so programmed to run and hide at the very idea of racism that people don’t do a good job of clarifying nor listening to that clarification. It’s a trump card for morons. But there’s an easy guide to see if a potential claim is racist: Does it suppose that there’s a trait that’s determined biologically by someone’s race? No? Then it’s not fucking racist.
Islam is practiced by people of different races all across the world. It’s shitty everywhere. You are all mentally weak if you interpret criticizism of a belief system and a way of life as bigotry.
Ahmed Merabet, the Muslim police officer brutally executed by the terrorists.
Fanaticism and Fundamentalism are a blight and a disease. I personally hope the French police and military hunt them down and then kill them, like the rabid animals they are, and then do the same to those who incited, armed. financed, and trained them.
As far as being careful to not offend them, that doesn’t matter, these assholes want to kill everyone anyway. Taking “offense” was just an excuse. Let them get offended. a LOT.
Murdered. “Executed” implies that it was done by legal decree according to Webster.
The term “racism” in this context is lazy shorthand for bigotry, as you seen to eventually acknowledge in your final sentence quoted here. And lots of criticism of Muslims is indeed bigotry, just like lots of criticism of Jews is bigotry.
Obviously, not every criticism of Islam (or Judaism or black people or redheads) makes one a bigot. Bigoted criticisms tend to (a) be fundamentally ignorant about the subject; (b) play on ancient stereotypes; and/or (c) be attributed to the entire heterogeneous group.
Non-bigoted criticism of Islam: Too many Muslims believe that apostasy is something that governments should care about.
Bigoted criticism of Islam: Islam is “shitty everywhere.”
Very good post.
Just so you know. I’m considered by some to be a librul. My boss is a practicing Muslim. BOTH of us want to see these assholes gunned down on sight in the street.
Why are you bringing Muslims into this? SenorBeef was criticising Islam.
A distinction without a difference. “Judaism is shitty everywhere” is bigoted, as is “Jews are shitty everywhere”, or something similar. Same for Christianity and Christians, same for Islam and Muslims.
I want them caught and interrogated. Interrogated a lot. Lock 'em in a room with Dick Cheney for a few weeks.
As an aside, I don’t like it when the news (or anyone else) says “he was shot like a dog.” That’s offensive to dogs. Dogs are good people. It’s racist.
I would like to see them arrested and tried. As much fun as it would be to peel their skin off square inch by inch, Representative Democracy is the rule of law.
Is it possible to establish a factual basis that you would accept supporting this statement? Or are you rejecting the conclusion no matter what argument could be made in favor of it?
“Islam is shitty everywhere” is a shorthand for my greater statement, which is that the more a society is dominated by Islam, the shittier it is. Couldn’t we objectively measure this in some way? Poll to determine the commitment and fanaticism to Islam in various places, and then cross reference that with their quality of life, equality for women, fairness in criminal justice, etc.
Now I’m receptive to the following argument: Some places are backwards and shitty for various reasons. And it just so happens that by historical happenstance, these shitty places are where Islam happened to spread. So Islam itself is not the culprit, but rather a shitty culture that just happens to be Islamic takes the worst aspects of the religion and practices them.
Or we could assume that not all religions are scripturally and traditionally equally focued on all values. And hence, the values of different religions can vary. And that perhaps living your life by Islamic doctrine actually does make your culture and your country shittier. I suspect that those on the other side of this argument are philosophically unwilling to consider this as a possibility. The Koran could, on every single page, say “oppress women, kill infidels, rape kids, those are the top priorities of our religion” and there would be endless people arguing that all religions are equally good or bad and that nothing about Islam is any worse than Christianity or anything like that. That’s what I was getting at with my Aztec comparison.
Personally, I suspect both factors feed into each other. Certainly Islam exists among ethnically and geographically diverse areas and tends towards the same sort of extremism in places that aren’t culturally similar except for their shared religion. It is very likely that Islam’s doctrine is more regressive by modern standards than those of other major religions.
On the other hand, lots of places that practice Islam are culturally backwards in ways that aren’t specifically related to Islam, and would be unlikely to simply be beacons of modern liberal values even if they happened to have formed another religion in their areas.
Most likely the poor cultural values of the areas of the world generally dominated by Islam and Islam’s more militant and aggressive doctrines feed into each other in a death spiral, each amplifying the effect of the other.
It’s arguable. There’s nuance. It’s subject to study and argument. Those who simply decide a philosophical position about how it’s bigoted to make judgments about another religion are not willing to see nuance or argument. It’s not a matter of knowledge for them, but a matter of faith.
You’ve always struck me as a pretty reasonable guy, and so I’m not going to assume you’re in that group. But then I would expect you to be amenable to the idea that we could objectively analyze whether or not following Islamic beliefs and doctrines detrimental to that society. It is indeed possible, and a matter to be analyzed, whether or not “Islam is shitty everywhere” is correct.
No it isn’t. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are all bronze-aged perversions of reason and the world would be a better place if none of them existed. That is true everywhere.
There are plenty of nice Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Kudos to them for having the sense to follow their shitty, shitty religions selectively, and skip over the truly repugnant bits. Their selective adherence to scripture doesn’t make their religions themselves any less shitty.
Muslims/Jews/Christians are shitty everywhere = bigotry.
Islam/Christianity/Judaism is shitty everywhere = stone cold fucking truth.
And for the record, lest I be accused of false equivalence, Islam is by far the shittiest of these three shitty religions.
You probably could, but I doubt it would support the “everywhere” sentiment (I notice that now you’re specifying “fanaticism” as a metric, which surely changes things). Sure, things would be shitty in lots of Muslim places, but they’d also be fine in lots of Muslim places. Dearborn MI would look great – especially compared to most Christian places on Earth (Central/South America, Eastern/Southern Europe, the Christian parts of Africa). Various parts of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey would look pretty good compared to various Christian parts of Central America and Africa. US and Canadian cities, towns, and neighborhoods with relatively high Muslim populations would probably look the same as places without many Muslims.
This is, mostly, what I believe. The leftover room is for the sects and chunks of Muslims and Islam that explicitly embrace violence – that almost seems like a whole entire different religion (and, in many ways, it is). Both theologically and in daily life, average American Christians probably have a lot more in common with average Dearborn Muslims then the assholes who shot the cartoonists in Paris.
As a Jew IMO, there’s rational criticism of Judaism and non-rational criticism of Judaism.
Rational: the mechitzah sucks. The Haredim demanding the right to segregated buses ad planes is unacceptable. The settlers. The dietary restrictions kosher restrictions are silly. The Israeli treatment of many Palestinians is not good. The thank god I am not a woman prayer is gross and so is not allowing women to become rabbis in many forms of Judaism. The laws of niddah are stupid and so is allowing only a man to give a get while leaving women aganot.
Not rational: the holocaust never happened / was deserved. Israelis are Nazis. The Old Testament is all Judaism is and it is full of this nasty god who wants to punish people cruelly while the New Testament is Christianity and full of peace and a loving god so obviously Christianity is far superior to trivial and legalistic Judaism.
Uh, I do think that the makers of the magazine were equal opportunity offenders, but the ones defending what Charlie B did (and that included criticism to Islam) were mostly the same liberals that you despise.
No, liberals like me would not support that.
That was easy.