I recall bringing up Timothy McVeigh and/or the Oklahoma City bombing several times in response to the suggestion that racial profiling, often explicitly focusing on people from the Middle East, was a reasonable effort to identify terrorists.
I don’t think many people have come out and said “All Muslims are terrorists,” and I would wager that any who have been that explicit could be dismissed as short-term right wing extremist cranks rather than residents. However, more subtle linkages between Muslims and terrorism are made here by conservatives. I don’t remember which names to name off-hand, but I am sure that they weren’t made by RedFury, rjung, ElvisL1ves…
I’m confident if you continued to search for discussions of the beheadings in Iraq, you would find some broad brush strokes being painted, generally by conservatives and that sort of thing.
I have come to reallize and accept that part of being a leftist is truly thinking that you are in the center. The more left you are the more you beleive you are in the center.
So leftists will rarely see things as slanted left, unless it is much more left then they are.
It seems to hold, Righties see a bias in the media, leftists don’t yet a majority of journalists vote left of center each election. Those journalists see themselves in the center, while alternitive media sees themselves as right of center.
Yes the board leans to the left and has gotten more so in the past year.
Huh? Like I said before, I’m moderately left with libertarian leanings, but I find the American “center” to be skewed to the right overall. I can’t think of any liberal who thinks their value system is somehow American’s center.
Reminds me of an essay I read awhile ago talking about just this: when we’re trying to dismiss someone’s argument as overly emotional, we don’t use words like “grunting,” “grumbling,” “hollering.” We use words like “shrill,” “whine,” “screech.” Often we also use words like “hysterical” and "harpies,"not “testosterone-driven” or “centaurs.”
In other words, we use words that suggest the argument is being made in a high-pitched voice, with the assumption that the logical arguments are made in a low-pitched voice. And we follow up by using words that feminize the debating opponent.
Here we go again – you and your fellow grunting centaurs getting on everyone’s case about what adjectives we use. Quit your bellowing, you big heaving slab of man, you!
No, that doesn’t work at all.
So? That’s a debatable positiong to hold, and is not the same as saying Muslim = terrorist.
But you still haven’t found a quote that substantiates rjung’s claim. And keep in mind that there is the issue of “resident conservatives”. While that term is unclear, it surely doesn’t mean someone who came in for a month or two and was banned.
Yeah, you can certainly see that. Which is why folks like myself, or rjung, or Siege, make such a big show of being centrists. We’re always talking about how centrist we are, aren’t we? The board liberals do that constantly. :rolleyes:
In fact, which group of politicians makes a huge show of being “regular folk”, emphasizing (often nonexistent) rural roots, and talking with deliberately working class affectations even if they’re not? Which party sells itself on fantasies, claiming that the rights and the way of life of “ordinary Americans” are constantly under threat from some amorphous evil emanating from universities and big cities?
And if you had two brain cells to rub together, kanicbird, you’d realize that the evidence you use to justify the above claim could equally be demonstrated to say the same thing about you. Right wingers see some tremendous bias in the media (despite the fact that the editors that determine the content of the media, along with their bosses and all the powerholders in the companies, are almost all Republicans) because they only consider things “centrist” if they’re actually tilted far towards the right. Clearly the fantasm of leftward media bias (which could hardly be true in an environment in which the folks deciding what to show or write about are staunch Republicans) is actually the result of the right considering anything leftward of Tom DeLay to be “leftist propaganda”.
All I’m saying is that’s every bit as valid a conclusion of your premises as yours was.
It’s funny, though, that the right presents “media bias” as if it were some shapeless power permeating society and twisting people’s minds. The media are thousands of different organizations and the multiplicity of venues is staggering. You can get your news with any kind of spin you want - either unabashedly on one side or the other, carefully centrist, or anywhere else on the scale. Even if it were true that much of the media tilted left-wing, clearsighted conservatives like kanicbird would see right through it and gravitate towards right-wing sources (and a lot of them do, of course.) So (again, under the assumption that this fantasm of leftward bias actually existed) how could the lefty media have any power anyway?
Of course, there’s nothing objective to support this silliness, which is why it’s touted so heavily on right-wing AM Radio and much less so amongst the more “elitist” right-wing pundits you see in the right-leaning commentary magazines. The lack of objective evidence is also why folks like kanicbird resort to handwaving claims that “you lefties just can’t see it because you’re so blindly partisan”. How much more obvious could your excuse to dodge proof be, kanicbird?
OK, to everyone out there, I took the liberty of spreadsheeting the data, and here’s the info I came up with. At first, I started with all terrorist incidents since 1968, but there are many groups that are defunct, and way too much data to wade through. So I chose exactly a 10-year span from 5/27/95 to 5/27/05 for the following numbers:
Top 15 Terrorist Groups as ranked by Incidents
Unknown groups 10,097
Hamas 408
Revolutionary Armed forces of Colombia 394
Other Group 263
Communist Party of Nepal - Maoist 246
National Liberation Army (Colombia) 197
Basque Fatherland and Freedom 178
al-Fatah 115
Taliban 107
Corsica (FLNC) 96
Rafidayn 81
People’s War Group 74
United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia 73
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 53
Earth Liberation Front 50
Hmm…well, that list seems to fall well short of 99.999% of terrorist groups being Muslim
Let’s try, and this’ll look better for you:
Top 15 Terrorist Groups by Total Casualties
Unknown Group 31,032
al-Qaeda 9,930
Hamas 3051
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam 2556
Other Group 1818
Riyad us-Saliheyn Martyr’s Brigade 1657
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia 1657
al-Fatah 1225
Rafidayn 1221
Movsar Baryayev Gang 819
Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade 799
Jemaah Islamiyah 765
Dagestan Liberation Army 701
Lord’s Resistance Army 699 (Radical Christian group in Uganda)
Abu Sayyaf 671
Still looks far short of 99.999%. Unfortunately, there’s no way to rank terrorist groups by membership size, so these are the only numbers we have to work with.
In what way do they not? They seem to be “broadly inflammatory remarks” equating Muslims with terrorists. Even the issue of racial profiling based on being from a Middle Eastern country is more or less equating Muslims with terrorists, although the link there is certainly more tenuous (implying a higher probability of terrorists coming from a Middle Eastern country).
Is it just the “SDMB resident conservatives” that you have a problem with? Before I take the time to hunt up any other such links, it would be helpful to know which you will and will not reject based on this criteria? What makes someone an “SDMB resident conservative”?
Not sure if that’s my nickname for them, because I don’t think I’ve used it before. However, if you could just remind me of the roster of Usual Suspects, that would be of great help.
Oh, stop being so damn argumentative. rjung’s quotes didn’t substantiate his statements. I agree that it’s factually wrong (and because it’s wrong, and has negative implications upon the lives of Muslims to do so, morally outrageous) to claim that 99% of terrorists are Muslim. That’s still a big step from saying that Muslims equal terrorists, which is what rjung was claiming people did. The quote on feminism didn’t even remotely make the claim he said it did, and if the other one was by some briefly-present troll, it’s not relevant. Trolls come in here and say things all the time. Remember the Stormfronters? Or the NAMBLA-types? If you believe that one conservative poster who was here for a couple weeks is representative of some kind of SDMB bias, then you also must believe that we are racist pedophiles, since racists and pedophiles show up (usually briefly) at times.
You know perfectly well who the resident conservatives are, and it’s argumentative and childish for you to pretend that Taggert, who made 208 posts, was around for a month, and was subsequently banned is somehow the equivalent of Starving Artist or Shodan.
Talking with someone like you, who will argue a point or fuss over definitions when they know perfectly well that their fussing is invalid, is like finding a kid with his hand in the cookie jar and crumbs on his face, who says over and over that he didn’t take the cookie. You’re making yourself look worse when you argue like this.
Quit being argumentative? Why, so you can make the assertion unchallenged? Look, you stupid cunt, I quoted somebody who fucking said: “2. “Middle East” equals “Terrorist” for the average American, since the name of every terrorist on the news nowadays, for some mystical reason seems to be Muhammad this, Omar that or Abdullah the other.”
I never cited Taggert, you stupid motherfucker. I cited PaulFitzroy, Rune and DirkGntly. Know what you are talking about before you post. So define “resident conservative” shithead, since it is so obvious. Does it have to be Bricker? What about kidchameleon? Duffer? Why not Rune? There are a ton of conservatives here. I don’t know which ones are resident.
Fucker, you don’t have the first idea what you are even talking about, let alone going on to try to disparage me. You are really sounding like a big whiny pussy, all because someone dared call you a Bush apologist. Well, you’re not a Bush apologist. You’re just a stupid cunt. Feel better?
Excuse me? Miss Drama Queen, we weren’t talking about you. We were discussing rjung. I’m sorry that the discussion didn’t center entirely on you; I see it upsets you when you’re not the center of attention.
And I certainly don’t see why you think I’d be upset at being called a “Bush apologist”. Any insult from the likes you you, or Elvisl1ves, or Demostylus can only really be interpreted as a compliment. I don’t aspire to be a part of the crowd of empty-headed True Believers that you guys enjoy so much. You guys insult anyone who’s not one of you, and I’m frankly quite satisfied not to be included in your group.
You seem to think that since I used Demostylus’ statement as an example that I was upset by it. Not so - I merely used it to illustrate the idiocy of you and your friends. If your little crowd equates “Wishes to occasionally be free of whining about Bush” with “Supports Bush”, it just indicates that you’re an idiot. I cited it as an example, in order to demonstrate how stupid you are. Honestly, I can’t imagine what could make you think I would feel injured by an insult from one of you - haven’t I made the fact that I’m contemptuous of the opinions of mindless, brainless sheep? It hurts me no more when one of you insults me than when duffer does. The insult of an idiot ought to be recognized as a compliment.
