He’s a fucking narrator, of a movie about Muslims, put together by an extremely fundamentalist Jewish group.
I’d basically put it in the same ballpark as you writing and producing a film about the effects of homosexuals getting married, hiring some gay guy to narrate your garbage. Or perhaps you could put together a film on illegal immigration. It might be cheaper to get an illegal immigrant to narrate that one.
I believe the offical certified magellan01 technique is:
Get a list of dentists from the ADA
???
Safety!
Warning: If you try this, PC thugs will accuse you of being a rabid anti-dentite even though you haven’t said we should do anything to the dentists. Just be, you know, wary of them.
I can understand the problem people have with the Hollywood version of political correctness. I don’t understand the problem people are having with the “don’t discriminate based on race or religion” part of political correctness.
It all depends what you mean by “discriminate”. Is taking into account information about religion, or race, gender, nationality, automatically “discrimination” in the sense that we abhor? Or can one use that information to assess different levels of threats, etc.? The PC line some want to take would mean that if one were to look at religion as a factor, that you’d have to assume the level of threat coming from Muslims and Quakers is the same.
In fact, let me ask: does anyone think that to be the case?
And I’ll pose the question another way, as well. Let’s say a car bomb is driven into a mall in New Jersey, killing 100 innocent people, including children. You have to bet $10,000 of your own money on the religion of the person responsible. Which religion do you choose?
I’d go with Christian–statistically speaking, there are many more Christians in the U.S. than there are any other religion, and given that there does not appear to be a showy target (i.e. the bomber just wanted to kill people) I figure it’s probably just some guy, not a big-name terrorist organization.
Okay. So you simply look to the the fact that there are many more Christians in the U.S., the same way you would guess the religion if the question was: a man won the lottery in NJ, what religion was he? On the other hand, you do take into consideration other information: the lack of a “showy target” (debatable as it is). But you seem to not ask an additional question that could make your bet better informed, i.e., is there a particular religion that has shown itself to have adherents that have committed similar acts? Wouldn’t it be wise to make your be be a smarter one by having it be based on additional information?
No, because the evidence suggests that this act was done by a local crazy person (why else would it be in New Jersey? There are plenty of better targets). A local crazy person is statistically more likely to be Christian. Your “additional information” is not actually information pertinent to the case, but general information about the world (that may or may not be accurate). I am looking at information pertinent to the case. If the hypothetical was “Carbomb in L.A. with a note saying ‘Die infidels’”, I’d bet Islam.
And, besides, what religion did Timothy McVeigh belong to?
No. But you are using the fallacy of the excluded middle: there are stances between ‘Assume every religion is equally threatening’ and ‘Assume a person is a threat just because he is a Muslim’.
See, here’s the thing, Magellan. I agree with you (to some extent). I agree that one can make a reasonable guess at someone’s religion based solely on their actions. For example, if all I knew about a guy was that he refused to eat pork, lived in New York, and didn’t go out on Sundays, and for some reason I had to guess at his religion, I’d guess Jewish. And it’d be silly not to.
What you are doing, and what I disagree with, is assuming the converse as well. You seem to think that you can make a reasonable guess at someone’s actions based solely on their religions. But it doesn’t work that way. Given only that someone is Jewish, you shouldn’t say “Oh, he must live in New York”, because you will frequently be proven wrong and people will be mad at you for judging them before you know them.
But, you ask, what is the substantial difference between the two? Surely, you say, both thought processes are just inferences based on known information? And that is true. However, in the first example, we are given a wealth of info, and infer only a meager amount. But in the latter, we start with only a meager amount, and infer a great deal. As such, the inferences are much more likely to be inaccurate. Furthermore, the (frequently incorrect) inferences in the latter would change how you treat the person. And that is the very definition of prejudice.
No, what Magellan, myself, and others are saying is that if a person is a Muslim and spends a lot of time listening to radical clerics spouting their hateful bullshit, doesn’t seem to have many friends other than the nutjobs s/he meets at the mosque that allows radical fuckwits to preach there, and in no way tries to integrate themselves into the society they are living in, then that person needs to be looked at with some suspicion, because they are far more likely to want to cause public harm than the muslim who doesn’t try to separate themself from society in general.