My mistake, magellan. I had assumed you were sane. A bigot, but at least sane. I shan’t make that mistake again.
Sure. And some of them are Fundamentalist Muslims and some of them are people on the Right wing of American politics. You simply enjoy getting all upset about Islam while refusing to be concerned with the American Right. A simple case of deciding to choose to generalize about one large group while refusing to generalize about a different large group, (which, of course, has nothing to do with you being part of the group about which you refuse to generalize).
And yet, you constantly come back to making silly claims about Islam instead of limiting your attacks to the people who are actually threats, (Wahhabists, al Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.).
This thread is a clear example of your behavior. One small group of backward villagers in a patriarchal society decide to behave abominably. Muslim agents of the government of the country are notified by other Muslim villagers that this travesty has been decided. The Muslim agents of the government go to the Muslims of the court system who note that the decision is a violation of Islamic law as well as of civil law and order the barbarism to be stopped. The patriarchy of the village go ahead and behave abominably, so the Muslim courts and Muslim police move to arrest and judge the perpetrators. Then you come along and make a claim that the actions of a small group in the village are based in “Muslim” ideas. So, for you, all the Muslims in this story who behaved responsibly, (the villagers who protested, and the courts that tried to prevent it–including those who pointed out that the decision of the villagers violated Islamic law), are non-entities while the small number of backward villagers who caried out the act are representative of “Muslim” behavior.
I am not an apologist; I do not condone any of the bad behavior. I simply demonstrate enough intelligence and discernment to avoid making unsupported sweeping generalizations. You, on the other hand, are willing to spread hate and ignorance just to make sure that xenophobia thrives.
I don’t get concerned about the American right because I don’t see a specific threat there. That’s not to say that some specific threats may exist in America having nothing to do with religion, but I don’t see what they are. It seems you and others want to say that Muslims, even radical Muslims, are not the only group wanting to kill people in the U.S., so to focus on them is racist. That’s asinine. There is a clear common denominator that we can use to identify those individual who want to kill us, or to narrow the scope. Not using it makes as much sense for us thinking humans as not using our thumbs.
Aren’t all those included in the term “radical Islam”?
You’re absolutely wrong here. It’s not just one incident. This was just the latest of many incidents in which radical, backward barbarians have demonstrated their take on Islam. It’s not one incident. God, I WISH it was one incident, but it’s not. Nor two or three. And when you combine the backward, barbaric thinking demonstrated in these small villages and combine it with the backward, barbaric thinkinq demonstrated by the types of animals who drove the truck into the schoolyard in Iraq, you cannot help but to see that these isolated incidents have a common thread. Again: radical Islam.
You do not have to actually condone the behavior to give give it cover. Every time you and others insist on taking the spotlight off the common denominator—Islam, and more specifically, radical Islam—you do their bidding, albeit inadvertently. You give them cover by equating them with random domestic threats, and make it more difficult for us to focus our efforts.
The ‘few bad eggs’ argument has been demolished in poll after poll. (Pew Poll published Dec 2010)
This table shows the support for barbaric punishments.
Only Turkey and Lebanon show anything like non-savage responses to stoning, whipping and death to apostates etc. Even the ‘what about’ board apologist favourite Indonesia shows 30-42% in favour.
If Christians worldwide, excluding the UK and France say, were anything from 42% to 82% in favour of stoning adulterers or 30-80% up for executing apostates I’d say there was a big damn problem with Christianity and Christians too.
A spade is a spade is a spade and not an egg.
I have never claimed you were racist. You are misled by your xenophobia, capable of extending your hate and fear irrationally to millions of people who are not a threat when the actual threats are identifiable, but I have made no accusation of racism. It is odd, of course, that you cannot see a threat from the American Right when they also have already inflicted terrorist bombings and violence on the U.S.
Well, among numerous groups who want to harm us are radical, fundamentalist Muslims. That you cannot be bothered to distinguish them from other Muslims is genuinely asinine.
Yes, and I have never given anyone a hard time for expressing concern about them, however, you enjoy lumping all Muslims together with them as if we have no way to distinguish between them and people who happen to be Muslim who are no threat–as this thread demonstrateed from its OP.
In THIS THREAD you made no reference to “radical Islam” in your OP. Your clear implication was that the issue was one of Islam, not backward patriarchies or “radical Islam.” You are simply weaseling, now.
Piffle.
All I have ever done is point out that you enjoy conflating “radical Muslims” with all other Muslims in the world.
Making the distiction that I do makes it easier to identify genuine threats because I am not sifting through a billion people looking for a problem, but the several thousands who make up the genuine threat. The common denominator is radical Islam, but you prefer to defame all Islam. You would have us waste our efforts sifting through a billion people while, at the same time, driving Muslims who are on the fence about violence to look more favorably on violence as a legitimate defensive measure. You are letting the terrorists win. (That, of course, is a primary objective of terrorism: to cause the attacked people or organization to indiscriminately overreact and further alienate people who do not actually share the terrorists’ goals, forcing them to make an “us-or-them” choice that will bring them into the terrorists’ camp.) Congratulations.
Where are all the Christian world attitudes polls? I could only find out that most Western countries polled have rising negative attitudes towardsJews and Muslims. Also that attitudes toward women seem to correlate with SES more than anything else.
And why do all the countries in these polls stand out from the rest?
Frankly, no. Everybody I don’t have a prior reason to remember tends to run together for me in these threads. Sorry.
Except that it can make it appear like you think that they need to be called out as bad because someone else here is advocating for them. Otherwise there’s no context and it’s just a non sequitur, so our brains try to find a reason to make it fit, and you get called out for throwing down strawmen.
What you seem to not comprehend is that there really are people who want to rape us. Really. They raped some of us already and others have tried and failed. Still others have sworn to rape us more and never stop. So, some fear is both justified and healthy. And these people share one thing—they’re men. We certainly can quibble as to exactly how much of a threat there is (which the government is constantly avoiding discussing), and based on that how much fear is healthy. Healthy because it will cause vigilance
This is from where our disagreement stems. I agree that being male—by itself—is not the problem. Got that? I AGREE. But there are groups of men who do want to rape us. These people have a view of masculinity and women that compels them to do us damage. To not use the information that having a penis is a common denominator is the height of foolishness. To ignore that piece of information and view the group as “rapists” that might include Charles Manson types, or gang members, or skinheads, or the unstable is amazingly unhelpful. It is what the men want us to do. If they could argue in this thread that is precisely what they would argue. They don’t want you to focus on them, they’d prefer that we spread our attention over a broader group.
You are focusing too much on the fact that a defining characteristic of the group wanting to kill us happens to be sex. You kneejerk in not wanting to have that matter. But it does. That’s who they are. If they were a biker gang, that would matter, if they were skinheads, that would matter, the fact that they are men matters. So it is unhelpful in the extreme to try to define the problem as “rapists”. It’s debilitating. You can’t act on it. Even if you start there, the logical thing to do is ask, “what else do we know about these rapists?”. And then, unless you allow yourself to be hobbled by the PC notion that you can’t point to sex, you wind up right where I am: the biggest threat out there trying to rape us is men.
So, clearly, the only solution is to treat all men as rapists. If there is a rape, we should arrest all men in the area. Hell, to be safe, we should just cut off all of their penises and testicles. Sure, some innocent men might be involved, but it’s not like they’re doing anything to stop rape now. In fact, I heard thousands of them cheering on the streets when a woman was raped the other day. Really, their rights don’t matter anymore. Any one of them could be a rapist, and if we wait to find out which ones it will be too late. So we just have to treat anything with a penis like it wants to rape us. Because I’m scared, because I’m an ignorant shit, so I need to take away the rights of others to assuage my own childish fears.
If you want to start a thread berating nominally Christian nations for their desire to stone people for adultery, chop hands off and execute apostates and support that with reputable poll numbers then go ahead.
Then you can point to the nations where this is actually happening legally. Just like it is in democratic Afghanistan (the Mayor of Kabul’s patch - and legally too), our big buddies Saudi and Pakistan etc.
The simple fact is that large Muslim nations have anything from pluralities to large majorities advocating these policies in the name of Islam. In some - again as in Karzai’s Afghanistan the legal system does support execution for apostasy. This is not a few ‘bad guys’ - this is a cultural norm.
And some parts of Western Europe do have significant immigration from these places so it is a practical concern. Nothing to get all ‘the Muslims are coming’ hysterical over but a problem nevertheless.
I wonder why they are moving in the first place. 
:rolleyes: Given the low capacity for brian function that you’ve demonstrated repeatedly, this probably won’t penetrate, but here goes anyway. We don’t look at all men because the pool is too big. Thought it is better than looking at all people, as you cut the number you have to focus on in half. Now try to think why you used “men” in your example rather than “people”. I’ll wait.
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Now assuming a minor miracle occurred and you realize you did so because it was logical (you did manage to cut the number of potential perpetrators from about 300 million to 150 million), what might be a next step? Maybe looking at those over 16 years of age? again, that wold be logical, right? and then maybe we can make this list smaller still by eliminating those over, say 70 years old. Logical? Now I don’t know what number you’d be left with, but let’s call it 90 million. Can we do anything with that? I’d say no, and I will assume you will agree. Why? Because the pool is too big.
Now let’s look at what I’ve been doing. We start with the fact that a good portion of the people who want to kill us share one trait: they’re radical Muslims males. So how do we try to identify these individuals? Well, we could use your example and look to all males in the U.S. But that would just cut us to 150 million or so. Not very helpful. But wait what if we use the fact that these radical Muslims are (drumroll) MUSLIMS?! By doing that we cut the pool of most suspects down to the 7 million or so Muslims in the U.S. Now add the filter of gender, and you’re down to around 3 or 4 million. Use another filter, like, aged between 16 and 60 and the numbers shrink more. You get the idea.
The point is, if we make use of the fact that radical Muslims are Muslims we immediately cut the number of those who might in fact be murderous barbarians from 300 million to 7 million. We know that not everyone in the group is a murderous barbarian, but we do know that all the murderous barbarians wanting to kill innocents in the name of Allah will be in the group. Don’t you think that’s a helpful first step. Or does it make sense to you that in our desire to identify those Muslim extremists who want to kill us before they do that we spend equal time looking at elderly Norwegian ladies and have the FBI expend their resources equally among Mosques and Quaker Meeting Houses?
Really. This isn’t that hard. You just have to stop knee-jerking a try a little. If you can figure out how to post on this website you should be able to see the sense in what I propose and the flagrant stupidity of the nonsense you been putting forth.
Let’s start here: what is this threat from the American right?
First, this is the Pit and I’ve already stated that the primary reason for the post was too rant. And yes, this latest story, when combined with countless other incidents, does point a finger at Islam. Why, because that is the set which contains the dangerous animals we refer to as radical Islamists. Now, you’re a smart guy, and a Mod, so I’m going to guess you’ll be able to do this: search this thread for the number of times I’ve used the term “radical Islam”, “radical Islamists”, or something similar. Count them up and then see if what you’ve been saying makes sense.
Piffle, indeed. Notice how you had to say “in your OP”. I probably have another 75 posts in this thread. Given that this is Pit and I have already explained that my OP was primarily a rant, why would you ignore the man, many other times when I’ve said that Islam by itself is not the problem and pointed specifically to radical Islam? Why would you do that?
First of all, the threat I focus on is the one in the U.S., which immediately reduces the numbers to about 7 million. And that’s just with one filter. And I’ll invite you to search the boards for my opinion on applying the filter I’d use in the U.S. globally. If you do you will find that I am not an advocate of using the technique globally. Why? For the same reason I wouldn’t look for rapists by focusing resources on all males. The numbers are too big.
So, thanks for your selective reading and your push back on shining a spotlight on Islam. Radical Islamists might give you an award. Congratulations.
As opposed to the tiny pool of one out of every five people on the fucking planet. Oh wait, nope, you’re still a retarded bigot! Phew.
Thanks for proving that you don’t read very well. Or process information maybe not at all. There are only 6 or 7 million Muslims in the U.S., in a population of over 300 million.
I look forward to the next way you decide to advertise your poor reading skills and even poorer thinking skills. I just hope it’s as good as this last one. Don’t let me down now.
Hey, quick question. How do you know someone is Muslim?
Brown people wearing drapes of sorts & carrying explosive devices.
That was easy.
Good point. We need an easy way to identify them on the street.
Also, any businesses owned by them should be clearly marked. You know… for safety and stuff.
Magellan, does it bother you that you’re generating such comparisons?
Why the hell did you assume that?
Not for the reason you might think. Since these comparisons attempt to hint what I advocate, but don’t—and you can find nothing that I’ve written that will support such nonsense—and fail miserably, I find that pathetic. The only thing that is a bit bothersome is the inability of the usual suspects to digest what I actually write.
But hey, I’m used to it by now.