There are stupid and violent people. Some of them are Muslim. Got it!
Sounds like you don’t understand, or at least accept, some basic sociological concepts. Maybe you agree with Margaret Thatcher, who said “there is no such thing as society”?
Why don’t you explain your point to me and elucidator as if we have nary a minim of perspicacity between us.
I’ll start you off: “As those of us who are super smart can plainly see from this citation…” Maybe I won’t be able to follow your reasoning, but you’ll at least have said something about the article and showed us how much more clear-sighted you are than most of us can ever hope to be.
You really love taking things out of context, do you?
The context boils down to “expecting society to do whatever doesn’t work, there is no society that’s not formed by individuals; if you want society to do something, you need to start working on getting it done”.
It would appear that in Pakistan, where 1/8 of the world’s Muslims live, there is no social penalty to be paid for outright advocating the murder of women, by their own family members, for flouting Muslim standards of modesty. It’s reminiscent of the atmosphere in the Deep South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In both places, some technical legal prohibition existed for lynching of the oppressed group, but widespread social approbation made/makes this technical legality irrelevant.
Sure that’s the comparison you want to make? I don’t think it shows what you think it shows.
ETA, I do think it’s a valid comparison, I’m just giving you a chance to connect the dots.
I’m always amused by people who complain this Thatcher quote is taken out of context. The first time I heard this, I was genuinely curious because this can be a real problem with isolated quotes (e.g., the Ben Franklin line about liberty and security). But then when I saw the context, to me it represents exactly what the quote sounded like initially! I can only conclude Thatcher apologists don’t really understand what her critics are objecting to.
My wife, who has a master’s in sociology and was a GTA at a Midwestern flagship state university, used to get essentially the same objection from right-leaning freshman she taught. (Ironically, it was an assertion disproportionately made by fratboys!) And it is actually a defensible position, albeit a reductive one I disagree with. But there’s nothing about the context of Thatcher’s statement that changes anything about the argument.
If you mean that the Muslim world has the chance to evolve and get better over time, or at least become less bad (since I think the Deep South is still a relative shithole by 21st century Western standards), then I agree.
Nope.
Do you mean that the Deep South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was emblematic of ‘the Christian world’ at that time, specifically in terms of the maltreatment of black people, and that ‘the Christian world’ has evolved somewhat over the last hundred years, away from that clearly Christian tradition of lynchings? Or do you mean that maltreatment of black Americans in that time and place would have been less severe had the North made an effort to segregate out the Christians?
By the way, I think you’d fit right in here in Georgia, part of that relative shithole, since you share some of the same opinions about Islam as many of my more vocal fellow residents. Oddly, they’re just a loud minority in the state, and odder still most have not purchased membership in any high-IQ clubs.
Neither. Interesting interpretation though.
Those weren’t interpretations. I’m attempting to ascertain what exactly you think the comparison to Jim Crow South tells you about present day Pakistan by using your own interrogative methods on that question. But you could save that fumbling effort by just telling us all what you think the import of honor killings in Pakistan is to the thesis of your OP (that Muslim ghettos are a valid response for Western societies to an undefined level of terrorist actions), or as it pertains to Islam in general.
What’s a GTA, by the way? I’m guessing the TA part is Teaching Assistant, but what does the G stand for?
Actually its the obvious interpretation.
Your point seems to be that there is a culture in the primarily Muslim country of Pakistan that tolerates honor killings (not only Muslims by the way), just like there was a culture in the predominantly Christian southern US that tolerated lynching.
The only reason to make such an analogy is to follow it to the conclusion that the issues in Pakistan should be handled in the same way as the issues in the Deep South, which in your case seems to be advocating that the Christians should have been forcibly relocated to where they wouldn’t be able to harm blacks.
Problem is, the Deep South was a small percentage of the world’s Christians, whereas most of the things being brought up in this thread are going on in countries whose populations are largely or overwhelmingly Muslim and where most of the world’s Muslim population lives.
Graduate, as in graduate student.
No. Funny how you’re calling me out for not keeping every post firmly anchored to the OP, but when other people went on various tangents you didn’t seem to have a problem with them. :rolleyes:
However, I do think it would have been a good idea to provide all blacks in the South safe haven in the North, and in fact that would still be good even in 2016.
And Pakistan had a female Head of State 30 years ago. It has a huge educated female middle class, as well.
But, at the same time, huge tracts of the country are tribal and or/rural and sparsely populated - which is where honour killings are concentrated.
What does all that mean - sweet fuck all, like the rest of this thread.
It means that a lot of vile, cruel and sexist behavior has grown out of Islam, that’s what. There are a lot of tribal and rural areas around the world where these things don’t happen, so what makes it happen there?
People like you love to point out that in one Muslim country X doesn’t happen, in another Muslim country Y doesn’t happen, and in yet another Muslim country Z doesn’t happen, but plenty of otherwise awful stuff goes on in all of them anyway and the common denominator behind all of it is Islam.
They say the first step in correcting a problem is admitting that it exists.
Actually, a more accurate version would be that a lot of vile, cruel and sexist behavior has historically been practiced by most of humanity. While most of the “first world” most-developed nations have (fairly recently) eschewed much of this behavior, it still persists in many other places in the world. And when some of those places have Islam as a shared characteristic, a lot of ill-informed people readily jump to the conclusion that the problem must be Islam itself.
Now, nobody’s denying that specific forms of radical-Islamist theocracy do indeed play a causal role in such problems. But specific forms of radical-Islamist theocracy are not the same thing as “Islam” in general.
:dubious: Funny how you’re not advocating a similar “safe haven” for, say, innocent French people at risk from terrorist violence. In the case of US Southern blacks (whose families in many cases have been in this country considerably longer than those of their attackers), you want to relocate the (black) victims and leave the (white) terrorists alone.
By ‘specific forms of radical-islamist theocracy’ you mean those that predominate in most of the Muslim world population wise , correct?