Hmm, given the number of conservatives, Republicans and Tea Partiers on the planet vs the number of Muslims (as an undifferentiated grouping*) it would seem to be obvious that the brush size required might be just a little different.
Giant cauldron meet one cup Japanese tea kettle.
If you’re going to argue against “lumping” the former* you would be obligated to “unlump” the latter, right?
**You’ve clearly distinguished above there are subgroups on the right, otherwise why bother separating conservatives and Republicans and Tea Partiers if you don’t actually think they are distinct subgroups?
I’m hoping that you mean you’re finding it hard to have any sympathy for magellan. But, yeah, I was obviously off my game to not recognize his insanity at the outset.
Come to think of it, that seems to be exactly what he wants: all Muslims to be registered with the government. And then a “culling” among that population. Nah, culling doesn’t have any negative connotations when applied to humans, none whatsoever. :rolleyes:
I really don’t see why you’re having such a difficult time understanding my point. The bad guys? Radical Islamists. Are all Muslims radical Islamists? No. But all radical Islamists are Muslim. And if you’re going to try to find radical Muslims where would you look?
A: synagogues
B: churches
C. Buddhist temples
D. Quaker Meeting Houses
E. mosques
You really don’t care about unintended consequences, so long as you get to taste some of that sweet, sweet revenge. Someone must pay, anyone will do. I’d rather live next door to a terrorist than a patriot like you.
As soon as they do something wrong. But that comes first. Surveillance and investigation of a particular religious subset of the citizenry stinks to high heaven. Especially if based on nothing more than belonging to a suspect religious group.
And if we are so goddam chickenshit that we have to sacrifice such a principle as freedom of religion, maybe we should step aside and let somebody else take a crack at being the Americans, if we haven’t got the guts for it.
I care about trying to stop people before they try to kill us. As far as your living arrangements, I, too, would prefer that you live next to a terrorist then me. If you’d like to increase the odds of that happening here in the U.S., make sure you move next door to a Muslim.
…
Now pay attention to what I wrote…I’d say remember your logic class, but I think I’d be asking the impossible. I did not say that all Muslims are terrorists.
Ask the survivors of the Alfred P Murrah Building.
However, there is no need to “start” with Islam or Muslims. We can start with the radical Islamists and skip one entire wasteful (and hate engendering) step. This is for the same reason that you are probably not interested in being “wary” of everyone on the American Right, because you already know that the extremists like McVeigh and Nichols and Fortier are only an identifiable subset of the Right wing, (and, of course, you are not comfortable being wary of yourself ). The radical Islamists are quite open about who they are and we have no need to go getting all paranoid about “Islam” as though we need a whole series of successively finer filters to discover the bad guys. You simply enjoy putting your hate on the largest number of people that you can envelope in your paranoid fantasies.
I’m not all that interested in how often you backpedal and try to weasel out of your primary declarations. As Kimstu has noted, you switch between “Islam” and “radical Islam” with no real consistent behavior. I just quoted you making the absurd claim that numerous stories (that generally refer to backward patriarchies with abhorrent practices such as are also found in similar Christian and Hindu and Animist, (and probably Buddhist), communities), “point to Islam” when what they actually point out is that much of the world tends toward barbarous behavior. Every time the similarities between barbarous acts by Muslims are compared to barbarous acts by other groups, you pretend that there is something special about Islam even though there is no such special feature.
Because I am more interested in pointing out the flaws in your true beliefs than I am in watching you cover your ass with (im)plausible deniability. When you initiate a Recreational Outrage rant in the Pit that you title “More Muslim Marvelousness” and then ignore the aspects of the story that indicate how the actions of the Muslims who perpetrated the crime were opposed by Muslims before the crime–including references to Muslim courts that noted the the proposed action was in violation of Muslim law–you are sending a clear signal that in your odd little world, only the bad actions of Muslims are worthy of note. Backpedalling with claims that you really only meant the “bad” Muslims fails. You are selective about the evil you choose to examine in the world, so you come to an incorrect conclusion about any “common denominator.” You claim it is Islam, yet we find similar behavior in many other locales and communities. The “common denominator” is not actually Islam, but the regressive societies in which the Muslims and Christians and Hindus and Animists and others live while their actions are opposed by their more progressive Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Animist, and other neighbors. By deliberately limiting the groups you examine, you place bias into your purported results. Of course it appears that “Islam” is the “common denominator” when your examination limits your survey to only Muslim communities. That is merely a tautology–and a lame one.
NOW I think I see where the confusion is. It’s apparently not bigotry so much as simple misapprehension of statistics.
magellan01, I’m willing to believe you when you say that you’re not bigoted against Muslims per se and that you don’t believe all Muslims are terrorists. But you’ve fallen into the statistical fallacy of assuming that because a higher proportion of Muslims worldwide, as compared to Jews, Christians, Buddhists and Quakers* worldwide, are terrorists, therefore it must be more likely that any given Muslim is a terrorist than that any given Jew, Christian, Buddhist or Quaker is.
This seems superficially logical, but it’s fallacious. Since Muslim self-identification is only one of the correlating factors for terrorist activity, and a very weakly correlating factor at that, it’s extremely misleading to use Muslim self-identification solely or even primarily to estimate the likelihood of danger from terrorism.
This is very clearly shown by the fact that your statement about how to “increase the odds of living next door to a terrorist” is actually false. According to a recent report from the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, as of 2010 there were actually more non-Muslim Americans than Muslim Americans involved in terrorist plots.
Yup, believe it or not, according to the actual statistics, living next to a Muslim in the US nowadays would decrease your likelihood of living next door to a terrorist, not increase it.
Naturally. That’s a very important and valid goal. But in order to work most effectively toward that goal, we MUST use the most effective and intelligent ways of identifying WHICH people are likely to try to kill us.
Relying on intuitive-seeming inferences from weak correlations with extremely vague factors like religious identity doesn’t actually get us closer to that goal, although I understand how it naively seems natural to assume that it will. In fact, and somewhat counterintuitively, it actually moves us farther away from it.
If we tried to apply enhanced scrutiny and avoidance to Muslims as a group, the way you’re suggesting, we’d be wasting an appalling amount of time and resources, and cutting off useful contacts and information. That category is just too broad, and its overall correlation with terrorist activity just too weak, to be a useful filter for terrorist-spotting. As tomndebb notes, what we have to do is skip that time-wasting step and go straight to identifying the factors that strongly correlate to terrorism, like involvement with radical Islam in particular.
Metaphor time: If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, and you know that the needle’s in a section where the hay is rotten, you don’t waste your time picking through the entire haystack stalk by stalk. Instead, you figure out where the rotten section is and concentrate your search there. Especially if you don’t have a lot of time to waste.
Technically, Quakers are traditionally a sect of Christianity, and therefore Quaker meeting houses are a subset of churches, but I’m going with your categorization here just for clarity.
History teaches that whenever governments stop at nothing to root out conspirators, traitors and opponents in their midst, there soon is no shortage of conspiracies, treasons and opposition.
My point is, you stomp on the Muslim community as a whole to crack down on the possibility of a remote minority of them being dangerous, you’ll very soon have a lot of dangerously pissed off Muslims on your hands. Mission accomplished ?
Here’s something else to ponder: Statistically speaking, the average Muslim American is more likely to have reported some suspected terrorist activity to the government than to be a terrorist himself or herself.
When we talk about “cracking down on the terrorists”, we need to make sure we’re not actually cracking down on our most valuable allies in the fight against terrorism.
Just so I catch this before whatshisface does, you have your math wrong. A greater portion of Muslim Americans than non-Muslim Americans engaged in terrorist activities in that year —it’s just there are way, way fewer of the former than the latter. That said, 20/6,000,000 ≈ 0.0003%. You should really be worried about murderers, thieves, paedophiles, rapists, and whatever else being your neighbours. Muslims, not so much. Actually, scratch that — you shouldn’t worry about your neighbours at all. They’ll usually be fine. Really.
ETA: not to mention, I don’t think terrorists usually go after their neighbours.
Well, I have a very good reason for spelling like a Canadian.
Now that I think of it, from the perspective of social desirability, it’s probably better to be worried that your neighbour is going to zap you with his/her 1920’s-style “death ray” than be worried that s/he’s a Muslim terrorist.
Perhaps the better question might be if you are not a Muslim, are you more or less likely to be harmed by a Muslim terrorist? Of course, if you are a Muslim, you stand almost no chance of being harmed by American terrorism, unless your definition of “terrorism” is expanded to include military force. Which changes the numbers. A lot.
What you did say was the only way to combat terrorism is to treat all muslims as if they might be terrorists; whether they actually are is unimportant to you. Kill them all, and let Allah sort them out.
). The radical Islamists are quite open about who they are and we have no need to go getting all paranoid about “Islam” as though we need a whole series of successively finer filters to discover the bad guys. You simply enjoy putting your hate on the largest number of people that you can envelope in your paranoid fantasies.