Terror attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris

[salm]

In any case, that does not change the point that if you are a "cultural muslim", you're not the actual target of people who say Islam needs a reformation. The existence of cultural christians does not change that.

You might be a target because people will lump you in with extremists and believe that muslims are a completely homogenous group. And if you are lumped in with assholes you will probably dislike the idiots doing the lumping.

I can appreciate that part of the difference is that in the west, Christianity is still somewhat dominant, so when a liberal christian takes offense at being lumped in with a homophobic christian, big whoop, while if a liberal muslim is lumped in with terrorists, he can be physically harmed.

Pretty much.
Maybe one should highlight that getting physically harmed is not the core problem but a symptom of the actual problem of muslims being a marginalized subset of the population.
Christians and atheists are not a marginalized subset, so if christians or atheists are targeted it is bad for the individual but in the current conditions in Europe not a big deal for the Christian or atheist subset of the population.

Perhaps being from a situation where Islam is the state power and blasphemy can see you inconvenienced or even hauled up by the courts for sedition has unfairly coloured my view on the power balance and the harm of being lumped in, since in this particular case I, and not muslims, are the dispriviledged class. Not to say I do not have other priviledges that make up for it, but still.

So, maybe whenever you think "Christian/Atheist" when talking about Malaysia think "Muslim" when talking about Europe. Perhaps that is the closest you can get when comparing Malayan and European subsets of the populations.

[AniThyng]

OK:
1) The term "Uncle Tom" is extremely racist and offensive. Please don't use it again as racism pisses me off and I don't feel like calling you new and innovative variations of the word "motherfucker".
2) The previously mentioned racial epithet refers to a black man who helps in the subjugation of, or helps stall the advancement of black Americans for their own personal gain. Like Allen West or Dr. Ben Carson.

Are you seriously stating that the term is too offensive to use unless it is being targeted at black republicans?

I have to admit after googling them and seeing that they are in fact black republican politicians i am actually not sure i completely misused the term. A conservative Muslim might certainly see aliberal secular non observant Muslim politician as such a person. Also, clearly America has it's own issues on integration versus assimilation

[Broomstick]

A brief history of the term Uncle Tom since it is most definitely an American English term that may not be well known by others.

The term has mutated considerably over time. For one thing, in the origin novel Uncle Tom's Cabin Uncle Tom was (as the article states) a Christ-like figure and was clearly intended to be a good/positive character. This evolved over time to a meaning of "someone complicit in one's own oppression".

When I was young it was certainly an insult, but not a "forbidden word" level of racial insult like the infamous "n-word". As a kid, it was term you certainly could hear on TV without any censoring, as opposed to a lot of other words invariably censored. Over the past few decades it has become steadily more offensive.

This can lead to someone (particularly my age or older) using the term to describe someone and wondering why the kids in the room are going completely apeshit over the term. So, yeah, offensive, but since the term is undergoing some transition it won't be seen the same way in all regions of the US, or by all age groups.

[Elfdart]

That's funny. Just a week ago, Rania Khalek and Max Blumenthal committed the unspeakable sacrilege of using Twitter to point out that in fact Chris Kyle was NOT born in a manger on December 25th and didn't die for our sins. This vile blasphemy angered the faithful to the point where Khalek and Blumenthal were awash in death and rape threats, as well as anti-Semitic abuse.

The only substantive difference is that the American fundie sacrilege police are a bunch of cowards who talk tough but haven't actually done anything yet (knock on wood).

Right, thanks for getting the point - we don't actually kill people over these things. You say this makes the "fundies" a bunch of cowards like that's a bad thing but it isn't. It's good no one acted on that shit. No, American asshats, despite the guns and the tough talk, by and large do not go out and actually kill people no matter how pissed off they get. Those that do, like Timothy McVeigh, are the rare exception and treated as the low-life criminals they are and not as heros.

You are free to speak or think offensively, you are NOT free to act offensively.

Thugs don't deserve brownie points just because they are either too chickenshit to actually do the deed (see GamerGate), or too inept to carry out their attacks (like the Weather Underground blowing themselves up, or the jihadists whose bombs didn't go off).

[Elfdart]

You’re such an ass. The Reformation, with its numerous flaws, broke the central authority of a Theocrat over a large swathe and ethnically diverse people. It allowed the thought that they could ‘find God’ their own way. Once you had one splinter, it naturally led to thousands more which allowed this pluralism of which you spoke earlier to appear. Which means people have to learn how to get along with other people. That’s my point, not that we should welcome sectarian violence in the Islamic world.

So you have to break some eggs to make an omelet, right? The Reformation had Jack and Shit to do with pluralism and religious freedom. One of Luther's grievances against Rome was that the church wasn't doing enough to rid Europe of Jews. The Protestants who took over England after Henry VIII were just as keen on torture and killing religious undesirables as Catholics had been (and they in turn carried out hundreds of public burnings when they took power again). The point is that when splinter sects came about, their goal wasn't peaceful coexistence, it was the eradication and extermination of other faiths.

The pluralism and tolerance developed only because try as they might, neither Catholics nor Protestants could exterminate each other (see The Thirty Years War or English Civil War). So they began to tolerate one another because they had run out of options.

[Elfdart]

There is some connection between the events, however, which is maybe more direct than people think. For example, the radicalization of the attackers followed after an acquaintance of theirs had been showing them pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, where US and British soldiers were torturing Arabs.

Such a shame they weren't shown pictures of cats on Caturday instead and we could have all been spared this tragedy.

Radicalizing a person is much easier when you present him with the photos of his people being subjected to torture, humiliation and horrors of war, believe it or not.

Think of how much torture, murder, theft and rape has been incited by images of the Twin Towers. In fact, when the torture report was released by the Senate the first thing the torture enthusiasts did was to bring up 9/11 and show pictures of people jumping out of the burning buildings. The death toll from "waving the bloody shirt" of 9/11 stands at over a million dead.

[Simon_Jester]

Right, thanks for getting the point - we don't actually kill people over these things. You say this makes the "fundies" a bunch of cowards like that's a bad thing but it isn't. It's good no one acted on that shit. No, American asshats, despite the guns and the tough talk, by and large do not go out and actually kill people no matter how pissed off they get. Those that do, like Timothy McVeigh, are the rare exception and treated as the low-life criminals they are and not as heros.

You are free to speak or think offensively, you are NOT free to act offensively.

Thugs don't deserve brownie points just because they are either too chickenshit to actually do the deed (see GamerGate), or too inept to carry out their attacks (like the Weather Underground blowing themselves up, or the jihadists whose bombs didn't go off).

You're still missing the point- which is that the American type of thugs do far less damage for many reasons than the Muslim type of thugs.

Why might that be?

If I were you, I'd presumably say that it's because American terrorists are "chickenshit" or "inept" or "cowardly." Those are the words you use.

But wait. This invites the question: why do only inept cowardly chickenshits become terrorists in the American system? Why would American terrorists be so much less dangerous? I am unable to come up with an answer except that within the American cultural framework, there is little motivation to resort to terrorism. At least, little motivation among basically competent people who seriously intend to make their goals happen, and who have the planning and resourcefulness to stand a chance of doing so.

This is not a statement of American virtue, it is a sociological observation. Some societies channel violence into certain forms, but not into others. Under the conditions they now face, the Muslim world seems to channel some of its political energies and violence into terrorist organizations that persistently do the same kinds of things across a wide swath of the world. The US channels its energies in different directions. Other societies, still other directions.

You’re such an ass. The Reformation, with its numerous flaws, broke the central authority of a Theocrat over a large swathe and ethnically diverse people. It allowed the thought that they could ‘find God’ their own way. Once you had one splinter, it naturally led to thousands more which allowed this pluralism of which you spoke earlier to appear. Which means people have to learn how to get along with other people. That’s my point, not that we should welcome sectarian violence in the Islamic world.

So you have to break some eggs to make an omelet, right? The Reformation had Jack and Shit to do with pluralism and religious freedom. One of Luther's grievances against Rome was that the church wasn't doing enough to rid Europe of Jews. The Protestants who took over England after Henry VIII were just as keen on torture and killing religious undesirables as Catholics had been (and they in turn carried out hundreds of public burnings when they took power again). The point is that when splinter sects came about, their goal wasn't peaceful coexistence, it was the eradication and extermination of other faiths.

The pluralism and tolerance developed only because try as they might, neither Catholics nor Protestants could exterminate each other (see The Thirty Years War or English Civil War). So they began to tolerate one another because they had run out of options.

I would argue that the emergence of a large enough number of sects does guarantee that attempts to exterminate the rival sects will fail, and that a tolerant society is a predictable result. Societies like ancient Rome and China throughout its history have been religiously pluralistic for a number of reasons, and I strongly suspect this is one of them- if your society is 'broad' and encompasses many customs and traditions and religions, it is very hard for any one of them to become a focal point for violence or oppression of others.

Whereas very unified societies are often sternly oppressive toward anything other than the unifying ideology. The least religiously tolerant societies within Europe, for instance, were usually those which remained a sectarian monoculture the longest.

[Flagg]

OK:
1) The term "Uncle Tom" is extremely racist and offensive. Please don't use it again as racism pisses me off and I don't feel like calling you new and innovative variations of the word "motherfucker".
2) The previously mentioned racial epithet refers to a black man who helps in the subjugation of, or helps stall the advancement of black Americans for their own personal gain. Like Allen West or Dr. Ben Carson.

Are you seriously stating that the term is too offensive to use unless it is being targeted at black republicans?

No. I simply used 2 black men I have seen many many times called that particular epithet as an example.
But I probably should have made it clearer that that's what I was doing rather than sharing my personal view on the matter, because regardless of how I feel about them, the use of that term is unacceptable and I just wanted to let people know they were using a racist term because they didn't seem to be aware that it was one.

[Metahive]

[I would argue that the emergence of a large enough number of sects does guarantee that attempts to exterminate the rival sects will fail, and that a tolerant society is a predictable result. Societies like ancient Rome and China throughout its history have been religiously pluralistic for a number of reasons, and I strongly suspect this is one of them- if your society is 'broad' and encompasses many customs and traditions and religions, it is very hard for any one of them to become a focal point for violence or oppression of others.

Whereas very unified societies are often sternly oppressive toward anything other than the unifying ideology. The least religiously tolerant societies within Europe, for instance, were usually those which remained a sectarian monoculture the longest.

Ehem, do you know what the 16th and 17th century were like in Europe? The two centuries that were practically dominated by intersectional strife? Were pogroms and persecutions were the order of the day? It also ended up with protestant and catholic nations being neatly segregated from each other because they cleansed the other side away from their soil. Germany is literally the only exception in having an almost even split between Protestants and Catholics and they had to fight one of the bloodiest wars ever to get to this point, you won't find this in any other major european nation. Yeah, not what I would find exemplatory.

It also didn't stop those nations from going to war, they just found other excuses and the 18th century was full of war again, just not so much religiously motivated ones. And the 19th. And the first half of the 20th with the level of accepted violence steadily increasing (the sole exception being the cabinet wars of part of the 18th century).

[Broomstick]

That's funny. Just a week ago, Rania Khalek and Max Blumenthal committed the unspeakable sacrilege of using Twitter to point out that in fact Chris Kyle was NOT born in a manger on December 25th and didn't die for our sins. This vile blasphemy angered the faithful to the point where Khalek and Blumenthal were awash in death and rape threats, as well as anti-Semitic abuse.

The only substantive difference is that the American fundie sacrilege police are a bunch of cowards who talk tough but haven't actually done anything yet (knock on wood).

Right, thanks for getting the point - we don't actually kill people over these things. You say this makes the "fundies" a bunch of cowards like that's a bad thing but it isn't. It's good no one acted on that shit. No, American asshats, despite the guns and the tough talk, by and large do not go out and actually kill people no matter how pissed off they get. Those that do, like Timothy McVeigh, are the rare exception and treated as the low-life criminals they are and not as heros.

You are free to speak or think offensively, you are NOT free to act offensively.

Thugs don't deserve brownie points just because they are either too chickenshit to actually do the deed (see GamerGate), or too inept to carry out their attacks (like the Weather Underground blowing themselves up, or the jihadists whose bombs didn't go off).

So - you just ignore all the people with strongly held opinions, beliefs, and preferences who don't go around trying to hurt other people?

Oh, and no, I don't aware brownie points to the inept and clumsy - if you blow yourself up building a bomb you're still a piece of shit terrorist. I don't know how in the world you came to that conclusion.

Frankly, I'd say it's a good thing how so many American Fundy Asshats are, as you put it, "chickenshit".

[Thanas]

Frankly, american terrorists of the sort who are organized enough and disciplined enough to put their lives on the line already have state-sanctioned outlets for satisfying their desire to kill the other. Or did you miss the reports of all those gangs and extremists joining the US military en masse?

[Simon_Jester]

Any nation whose military is engaged in active operations will be hard pressed to stop people that want to "kill the other" from joining it if they have any brains. It's not impossible, but it's both challenging and a very new field of human endeavour to take a pool of military recruits and screen out people who like killing too much, or want to kill the wrong kind of people.

That provides an outlet for some, but it's a common outlet all over the world. A typical Islamic society doesn't provide a similar outlet, because those countries all do have their own national militaries. For émigré populations things are different, though, because there you can't feel like your nation's military is properly representing your own beliefs about who ought to be killed.

Then you have the terrorists whose hostility is directed against the state, or against some minority population that is specifically and characteristically American (e.g. American blacks). Something else seems to be suppressing them from trying to act on their terrorism most of the time. Probably a force that is also in effect in other countries as well.

Ehem, do you know what the 16th and 17th century were like in Europe?...

Perhaps I should have spelled out that the process I'm talking about can easily take hundreds of years.

It's like, the European powers (at least the ones outside the Balkans) seem to have learned not to fight major wars thanks to the disastrous effects of the World Wars- but that came after centuries of increasingly brutal modern and semimodern wars. And yet... eventually the lesson was learned.

In a similar sense, eventually the existence of a large number of sects that couldn't simply destroy each other, and that held substantially different beliefs, forced members of these sects to learn to live with each other. First they learned to stop declaring war on each other over sectarian differences, which... 'only' took about 100 years. They'd fight wars over plenty of other things, just not that.

Later, they learned to stop internally persecuting their own sectarian minorities, which 'only' took about another 200 or 250 years. And then there was a horrific persecution of one particular religious minority, one that was not merely a different sect, a persecution on a scale that would shock the conscience of Ghengis Khan. That did the bulk of the work of convincing people in Europe that it was a bad idea to discriminate against any religion for any reason.

Eventually, however... it happened.

If you think I'm congratulating anybody in any historical period over anything I just said, you're out of your mind. My point is, simply, that certain things eventually happen if you wait long enough, where "enough" can easily be more than a human lifetime. I don't know what your point is, are you calling it a coincidence?

If we look at the present state of affairs, the European level of religious tolerance is now high enough that nobody who adheres to their cultural values murders people for satirizing the founder of their religion. This condition does not hold in some other places.

I don't know why you bother to try to downplay this. Am I supposed to be literally incapable of perceiving regional differences among different parts of the world, for fear that it will lead to chauvinism?

[Ralin]

OK:
1) The term "Uncle Tom" is extremely racist and offensive. Please don't use it again as racism pisses me off and I don't feel like calling you new and innovative variations of the word "motherfucker".
2) The previously mentioned racial epithet refers to a black man who helps in the subjugation of, or helps stall the advancement of black Americans for their own personal gain. Like Allen West or Dr. Ben Carson.

Are you seriously stating that the term is too offensive to use unless it is being targeted at black republicans?

No. I simply used 2 black men I have seen many many times called that particular epithet as an example.
But I probably should have made it clearer that that's what I was doing rather than sharing my personal view on the matter, because regardless of how I feel about them, the use of that term is unacceptable and I just wanted to let people know they were using a racist term because they didn't seem to be aware that it was one.

You were calling Obama one just a couple months ago.

[Flagg]

You were calling Obama one just a couple months ago.

I didn't even remember that, and I'm almost certain I wouldn't have used the term were I not seriously ill and on a ton of meds that can and do fuck with my memory and judgement (still am).
AniThyng let me know in a PM which I read and responded with a personal apology, so here's my public one: Sorry about the use of the epithet in question against Obama earlier this year, it was unacceptable and won't happen again. Moreover I apologize to the members I wagged my dumbass finger at for using the term considering I did it outright and far "worse" than was used in this thread. Overall, mea culpa.

[SpottedKitty]

Whereas very unified societies are often sternly oppressive toward anything other than the unifying ideology. The least religiously tolerant societies within Europe, for instance, were usually those which remained a sectarian monoculture the longest.

This reminds me of a quote from Ursula K. LeGuin: "If nothing is very different from you, what is a little different from you is very different from you." Very relevant to this whole situation, IMHO.

[Metahive]

Whereas very unified societies are often sternly oppressive toward anything other than the unifying ideology. The least religiously tolerant societies within Europe, for instance, were usually those which remained a sectarian monoculture the longest.

O you mean like the Scandinavian countries which are ethnically and religiously rather homogenous and are today some of the most tolerant and welcoming places in Europe? While Germany, which had been a hodgepodge of different peoples, religions and ideologies for centuries generated the Nazis? Also, the US is famous for being a melting pot of cultures, yet it's also infamous for ethnic cleansing, slavery and racial discrimination. La-dee-da.

I think your formula for calculating national tolerance is short several key factors.

[Simon_Jester]

I mean the culture of the continent as a whole- Scandinavians learning lessons from what happened in Germany, Germans learning a lesson from what less psychotically intolerant nations did to them in the '40s.

And, even in the US... well, again, it is not normative to kill people for making fun of the founder of your religion. I don't understand it's so important to blow a smokescreen around that.

[General Mung Beans]

Whereas very unified societies are often sternly oppressive toward anything other than the unifying ideology. The least religiously tolerant societies within Europe, for instance, were usually those which remained a sectarian monoculture the longest.

O you mean like the Scandinavian countries which are ethnically and religiously rather homogenous and are today some of the most tolerant and welcoming places in Europe? While Germany, which had been a hodgepodge of different peoples, religions and ideologies for centuries generated the Nazis? Also, the US is famous for being a melting pot of cultures, yet it's also infamous for ethnic cleansing, slavery and racial discrimination. La-dee-da.

I think your formula for calculating national tolerance is short several key factors.

The United States is actually probably far less racist than most European countries, precisely due to its longer history of minority populations.

[General Zod]

Whereas very unified societies are often sternly oppressive toward anything other than the unifying ideology. The least religiously tolerant societies within Europe, for instance, were usually those which remained a sectarian monoculture the longest.

O you mean like the Scandinavian countries which are ethnically and religiously rather homogenous and are today some of the most tolerant and welcoming places in Europe? While Germany, which had been a hodgepodge of different peoples, religions and ideologies for centuries generated the Nazis? Also, the US is famous for being a melting pot of cultures, yet it's also infamous for ethnic cleansing, slavery and racial discrimination. La-dee-da.

I think your formula for calculating national tolerance is short several key factors.

The United States is actually probably far less racist than most European countries, precisely due to its longer history of minority populations.

I'd say that's debatable. We held onto slavery long after several European countries banned it.

[Metahive]

The United States is actually probably far less racist than most European countries, precisely due to its longer history of minority populations.

Took you a century plus a major civil war after gaining independence to abolish slavery and another century to get rid of institutional discrimination. O yeah and currently black people are still fair game for every dumbass with a gun.

Self Awareness is the traditional american dump stat, huh?

[General Mung Beans]

The United States is actually probably far less racist than most European countries, precisely due to its longer history of minority populations.

Took you a century plus a major civil war after gaining independence to abolish slavery and another century to get rid of institutional discrimination. O yeah and currently black people are still fair game for every dumbass with a gun.

Self Awareness is the traditional american dump stat, huh?

Hence why I qualified these statements by is, "less racist", and "most European countries". The order of abolishment of slavery among Western states was more or less inversely related to the proportion of the free population that were slave owners and their influence, hence why it was abolished first in Britain and France where they were more or less exclusively found in a handful of tropical colonies while being abolished last in Brazil. One might also add that while Britain and France abolished slavery before the United States, the northern states were some of the first jurisdictions to abolish slavery. Its true in the early 20th Century blacks were treated better in places like France than in the United States, but that again was a function of Africans in Europe being a comparative rarity (massacres and atrocities in the colonies compared rather unfavourably to lynchings), once mass immigration from former colonies started in the post-war era, racial attitudes hardened as seen by the popularity of Enoch Powell in the UK. Even to-day, nativist parties (FN in France or PVV in the Netherlands) or even crypto-fascist ones (BNP or the Hungarian fascists) generally do much better in Europe compared to America's. On the legal front, the United States has absolute birthright citizenship, something European countries have moved towards only recently if at all. There has been no real controversy (outside of FreeRepublic) on girls wearing hijabs to school in the US.

This study measuring racial attitudes by querying people whether they'd approve of living next to a neighbour of a different race is particularly telling:



This doesn't mean obviously that the United States is somehow superior to Europe in every which way-most European states have far superior health care systems that gets better results for far less money and better transportation systems for instance-but it is a useful corrective to certain romantic and self-congratulting views of Europe as a continent-sized Amsterdam or Stockholm and America has a continent-sized Texas or even Mississippi.

[Metahive]

Hence why I qualified these statements by is, "less racist", and "most European countries".

You're not being impressive at the moment.

Even to-day, nativist parties (FN in France or PVV in the Netherlands) or even crypto-fascist ones (BNP or the Hungarian fascists) generally do much better in Europe compared to America's. On the legal front, the United States has absolute birthright citizenship, something European countries have moved towards only recently if at all. There has been no real controversy (outside of FreeRepublic) on girls wearing hijabs to school in the US.

Republican Party. Blatant Racists who are openly working on disenfrenchising PoC's off the voting polls. 50% of the political establishment in the US. On par with every far-right party in Europe. Case closed.

Also, did you have to search long before you could find a poll mealy-mouthed and non-descript enough to support your apologetics?

Try some more interesting and informative statistics like poverty, imprisonment and neo-natal mortality rates and how each racial segment of the population compares to each other in those. Then try again.

[General Mung Beans]

Republican Party. Blatant Racists who are openly working on disenfrenchising PoC's off the voting polls. 50% of the political establishment in the US. On par with every far-right party in Europe. Case closed.

No the GOP and the European far-right parties are not comparable and I say this as someone who finds the vast majority of proposed Republican Party policies silly if not loathsome. Certain segments of the GOP are definitely comparable but certainly not the Republican Establishment who generally support a "path to citizenship" for current illegal immigrants as well as a guest-worker program because such policies benefit the capitalist class of the GOP. For that matter, would Le Pen or Wilders have gone to a mosque a few days after 9/11 and proclaimed that "Islam is a religion of peace"? Voter ID laws obviously have a racial angle, but the photo ID requirement at the polls most Republican politicians want are just a reflection of voting requirements in certain European countries (although obviously they also have automatic registration if not compulsory voting) and wondering "if those countries have such policies, why can't we have them"?

Also, did you have to search long before you could find a poll mealy-mouthed and non-descript enough to support your apologetics?

Its a pretty well-known study and its about as direct a question about racial attitudes one can ask, certain far more so than any other indicator you urge.

Try some more interesting and informative statistics like poverty, imprisonment and neo-natal mortality rates and how each racial segment of the population compares to each other in those. Then try again.

We are debating the prevalance of racist/nativist attitudes here-less direct indicators such as those you mention are just as much a result of socioeconomic policy as racial attitudes. By this sort of reasoning, anti-black racism must have been much more prevalent in Haiti than in the United States since blacks in the United States are much better off by most socioeconomic indicators.

As a question, do you think there is anything the United States does better on compared to that of most European states?