Taboo wrote:Ibrahim wrote:Taboo wrote:Ibrahim wrote:This entire thread is a continuation of your defense of Harris from the New Atheism thread, minus the vitriolic attacks on Harris' critics, and minus Harris' overt calls for violence.
No it is not. It is my bringing hard cold data about attitudes prevalent in Muslim societies, and your being unable to deal with it except by evasion and by histrionic rambling posts about US being mass-murderers, which is completely off-topic.
False on two counts. First, you brought no "hard data." You brought an opinion poll. Second, because you lack any historical knowledge or context you cannot support your claims beyond repeated references to an opinion poll, so you mock their inclusion and falsely claim that they are off-topic. But this is to be expected.
Well, when I want data about what people think, I look for people who actually asked them, rather than ask for the personal opinion of some pompous fool in a far away country. It seems you're incapable of understanding that. Not surprising, given the way you pick and choose what to reply to from my posts.
I replay to what is worth replying to, and indeed I'm generous enough as it is given the amount of tripe you post. Clearly the "far away pompous fool" is this equation is you, given the inaccurate or false claims you make in service to your pet ideology.
What they will find is me making reasoned arguments, followed by you accusing me of racism, followed by another reasoned reply, followed by another baseless accusation.
Yet another self-serving falsehood.
Everyone can indeed see it.
Even if this were true, I'm not the kind of weak-willed person who will alter my views based on a dozen people on a small webforum thinks. I correctly identify and refute the supremacist propaganda you post, and if other people here, or even all of them, were convinced by your falsehoods then I pity them but it doesn't concern me in the least.
This is not evidence of the lack of a civil society, nor is it even true for the most part, but certainly it is a feature of traditional societies in underdeveloped places.
It's not supposed to be,
So your first feeble attempts to support your theory had nothing to do with your theory after all? If you say so. Brilliant.
Standards, please.
Yes. I have them, you don't. I have done my best not to attack you personally, while you have done nothing but attacking me personally.
A clear falsehood. You insult me constantly, I merely refute your supremacist propaganda. I find this arrangement perfectly agreeable, as it only makes you look more desperate and irrational as these exchanges go on.
A fraudulent claim based on historical and cultural ignorance, and not related to the first claim, as I said. I underdeveloped countries social activities are traditional and not with state institutions because they are largely absent.
There you go again about state institutions. Civil society is NON-STATE institutions.
I know, becuase I told you that in the first place. If all that is left to you is pretending that my corrections of your inaccurate ranting were your own ideas in the first place then this will become dull even more quickly than usual.
It was you who started a thread about "civil society" and then you who posted "data" suggesting that participation in state programs was much lower in "Muslim countries" and now, when I explain why this is an inaccurate measure, you're shrieking at me that the two aren't connected? Would have been quicker if you hadn't tried to make a connection in the first place.
Not to mention that its an example of you introducing a third point when the first and second failed to amount to anything. Now your complaint is not that these people aren't engaged in state-run institutions, but that they allegedly aren't accepting enough of outsiders. So now you are confusing three arguments that don't advance your original theory. The only constant is your conviction that your own culture is superior to these other cultures. You're sure you're better than these people, but you're never sure exactly why.
That's the very definition of social trust in sociology, but I take it you don't care about that sort of stuff. All you're trying to do is show how racist I am, damn the actual arguments and the lives of people actually living there.
You know nothing of the arguments and lives of people living there, you are only rehashing generalized claims about them supported by opinion polls in order to smear them. Thus all the self-serving falsehoods.
Frequently it is unreported, and notoriously difficult to prosecute successfully, your your claims above are yet another self-aggrandizing supremacist fiction.
Well, the same argument surely applies all around the world. Odd of you to single out the West in what you claim is a global phenomenon.
Blatant falsehood. I was the one telling you that it was a global phenomenon, you are the one focusing exclusively on a group you with to smear. Again, you are repeating my corrections as though they were your own ideas.
"Honor killings" are incredibly rare, relative to domestic violence.
I recall reading an article where the Turkish interior minister claimed that there were hundreds of honor killings in Turkey, with the number of women killed spiking from 66 in 2002 to almost 1000 in 2009. Admittedly, the source does not state that all those were honor killings, but the 14-fold rise is hard to explain statistically otherwise.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2011/041 ... r-killings
Again, this is a question of how these killings are labeled and counted. E.g. American men murder their partners constantly, but this is never called an "honor killing." How the murders are sorted is more important to you than the actual murders, so that you can smear other cultures as inferior.
Also, you ignore the basic point, which is that Western (or East Asian, African, or South Asian) men kill their wives or partners will depressing regularity over matters of "honor," but this is lumped into the overall crime statistics because it doesn't serve any propaganda purposes. You stress the allegedly unique "honor killings" of the Muslim world as propaganda tool for convincing the gullible. Or you are one of the gullible and were convinced of this yourself. It works the same either way.
Again, you fail to distinguish between domestic violence between spouses (man harms woman he is sexually involved with) from honor killings where generally it is the father or a brother who harm their own kin. The two are quite easy to distinguish.
Again, parents kill their children with distressing regularity. This emphasis on a specific category for a specific ethnic and cultural group serlves no purpose other than to smear that group and assert your own superiority, and moreover none of this is relevant to the alleged point of this thread. You're just throwing all talk points in willy nilly to see what sticks, which weakens what little justification and credibility your arguments ever had.
A laughable self-serving fiction, as already described.
Willfull blindness. Covering your eyes won't make it go away. Empowered women's groups fighting against it on the streets of Cairo and Ankara will.
Your propaganda makes that struggle more difficult, and you collectively smear those very women with your supremacist garbage. Not that you really care about what happens to them anyway, they are only relevant to you as something to exploit for propaganda purposes.
Is it actually your contention that no one in America was killed in the current calendar year simply because they were homosexuals? If you were only naive this would be charming.
By the government? Or with the full cooperation of the government? Please, show me. Again, it's not the whole Muslim world in this bin, just Iran, and maybe Sudan. The killings are based in religious-law, so they are religiously motivated.
This response in incoherent, please try to rephrase it in a way that makes sense.
Yes, the military, economic, and political violence of European and North American states has delayed and in some cases prevented the development of other parts of the world.
When it comes to the Middle East, held for centuries by the Ottomans and only for decades under Anglo-French mandates, I think it is hard to place the blame for underdevelopment on the West more than on the Ottomans.
Like I said, you have a feeble supremacist justification to divert blame from your preferred cultures. No doubt the fact that ethnic/sectarian cleansing only began in the colonial era, after centuries of coexistence is purely coincidental. The fact that the latter Ottoman empire advocated a (failed) policy of pan-Islamism and subsequent colonial powers exploited sectarian divisions to secure their rule is also coincidental. But hey, you live now.
And other countries such as a war-torn South Korea have built themselves from the ground in less than 60 years the ME has been free. I think some of the blame must also like with local institutions.
A laughable comparison which completely ignores the nature of colonialism in the Middle East, and the ongoing meddling of foreign powers in the "free" Middle East post-WW2. One hopes this is cynical propaganda and you don't actually believe such simplistic drivel.
I should think that you have a handy justification for this, but either way the relative development of different countries is relevant.
I don't understand. Are you saying we should hold less developed countries to lower standards about women's rights? "It's ok to beat your daughter and force her to wed whomever you want, you're underdeveloped." Ugh. Disgusting double standards.
Intentional misrepresentation. Rather, you take problems that are universal and exploit the fact that they may be more prevalent in certain underdeveloped countries to score points for your supremacist ideology. To pretend that you care about these people at all, when you only open your mouth you assert your "superiority" over them via self-serving propaganda is what is truly disgusting.
If anything traditional societies are more disgusted with it than sophisticated modern people, at least in my personal anecdotal experience. But just bear this in mind: out of ten women that you know, one of them was sexually assaulted and didn't report it. Now, ignore that and whine about the inferiority of Muslims instead, because those are your priorities. Indeed, this sub-rant of your larger rant isn't even linked to your initial claims in this thread, which are themselves a continuation of a failed line of attack in another thread. So try to have some perspective.
One in ten? Well, a report last month carried out by a U.N. Women agency, Egypt's Demographic Center, and the National Planning Institute found that more than 99 percent of hundreds of women surveyed in seven of the country's 27 provinces reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment ranging from physical harassment to rape. Perhaps you should try to have some perspective.
And your solution to this problem is to spew self-serving supremacist propaganda on a forum. Clearly you're the hero here, dehumanize all of these people for your own propaganda purposes and then cry crocodile tears for some of them when it suits you. Why tackle problems in your own back yard when you can do nothing and brag about how things are worse some place else?
So the logical conclusion for a person like you is to argue that this is a feature of an entire civilization based on the laws of one country.
Well, since you're judging western civilization on the basis of its worst (apparently, Southern frat-boys), I think I can do the same.
Not what I was doing, but kind of you to admit your own superficiality and maliciousness.
I know you don't.
I now am sure that you do not. After I tried to disabuse you of your mistaken notions, you have repeated the same fallacious claims about state involvement.
I told you such metrics were irrelevant after you introduced them. Again, you are fraudulently trying to pass my corrections of your ranting off as your own ideas.
This is clearly historically false, and also largely false in the present day. If there are any Islamic cabinet ministers in Europe or North America today please let me know.
Rama Yade, in France, for one. Although she's in jail now for electoral fraud. Baroness Sayeeda Warsi in the UK. I guess your ignorance and hatred of the West again drove you to make false statements.
Nice Google work and thank you for pretending you knew who they were before yesterday. I will congratulate France and the UK for only being 1000 years behind the Islamic world in this regard.
Why is that? This sounds like the racism of low expectations. I believe that, someday, Westerners will move beyond these narrow prejudices.
As integrated minorities engage in politics more and more, it will certainly happen.
Indeed, no doubt your supremacist propaganda will hasten the day.
As to the participation of non-Muslims, it did help that Jews, Armenians and Greek merchants were often. richer and generally more educated than their Muslim peers.
When/where are you referring to? This sounds perilously close to some truly moronic arguments that Pastaneta used to float over at SpengFor, and as much as I hope you are following in her venerable footsteps I'll give you a chance to clarify this line of argument.
Don't talk to me, the claim is from Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Revolutions, page 189 in my edition, at the start of the section on the Greek Revolution. The Ottomans employed Greek Phanariotes to reach diplomatic deals with Western powers among other reasons because Ottoman Turks did not speak the European languages, and were not versed in the Western style of diplomacy. I haven't seen a single source for any of your misguided claims, come to think of it.
That was not your original claim, though I'm glad you rad some unreleated information in a book. Maybe.
Non-Muslim minority groups in historical Islamic states were able to participate in the civil society to a level unprecedented in Western civilization.
Again, you seem to think Civil society means "government" (as in tax collectors and vizier's assorted helpers). It does not.
I do not think that. What has given you this idea? If you explain where your comprehension failed I might be able to make things more clear for you.
Just earlier in your post:
"I underdeveloped countries social activities are traditional and
not with state institutions because they are largely absent."
For the third time, I was in response to your introduction of this as a metric. Again, you are pretending my corrections of your falsehoods are your own ideas.
Your ignorance causes you to mistake context for irrelevance. And what you "can't stand" is being corrected by a Muslim.
I can't stand ignorant pompous fools. Religion is irrelevant.
We both know this is false.
Explain to me what historical participation of Phanariote Greeks in the Ottoman administration has to do with current levels of citizen pariticpation in NGOs and other civic societies from Morocco to Lahore?
It proves that sectarian intolerance is a recent invention, and my historical argument is that it only arose in Islamic civilization during the colonial era, as my examples in India, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and to a lesser extent the Arabian Peninsula and Persia prove. Thus if its a recent feature of "Islamic countries" then the centuries-old religion and culture cannot be to blame. But it is the nature of supremacist propaganda that it will switch focus to whatever time period is most convenient. When you think it serves your ideology you will brag about European history, I've seen you do it, and when history is inconvenient to a smear you are trying to make then you will dismiss history as irrelevant, you live now. Completely transparent.
So, in answering what Phanariote Greeks have to do with low levels of civic life from Morocco to Lahore, you reply that historically, Muslims only recently started doing "sectarian intolerance". Which has nothing whatsover to do with low levels of MUSLIM civic participation in mostly Muslim countries. In other words, a non-argument that is completely irrelevant.
As usual, you are conflating two different things and failing to understand either of them.
That aside, I am relieved to see you finally admitting that the Muslim words does suffer from a current epidemic of sectarian intolerance, towards other religions, non-religion and towards heretical branches of itself.
Obvious falsehood. I express more concern for this problem than you ever have, and know more about it than you do. Your claim that I ever denied that this was taking place is a shameless lie.
Strike two on whether or not you are rehashing that piece of Pastaneta historical revisionism. Perhaps you don't understand how foolish it sounds when you respond this way to examples of historical cooperation and coexistence. "Well, it was only because none of them were smart enough to run the thing!" Its like dialogue an un-subtle writer would come up with for a racist blowhard in a novel or screenplay. So presumably you mean something else entirely...
Again, you have a problem with it, take it up with those lying Marxist historians and their lying sources, not with me. I merely read those books.
I'msure you read
of them.
Not at all. You are smearing the Islamic world as inferior, even as your celebrated superior cultures engage in systematic murder and discrimination. Inconvenient facts like these expose your entire supremacist narrative as a self-serving double standard, and a pure fiction.
Western women can marry whomever they want, have extensive rights in divorce court, and have police forces actively pursuing complaints of sexual violence. Can Pakistani women claim the same? No. Can Saudi women claim the same? No, they can't even drive to court because they are not allowed to drive. Western Women can vote. How many Muslim Arab countries still deny women the ballot, while supposedly granting it to men? Your claims of equivalence are laughable.
I wonder how much stronger the religious right in America would be if a foreign power had been directly murdering Americans, not to mention funding dictatorships or monarchies that systematically wiped out progressive elements within the society in order to secure their rule. As usual, you blame the victim because it furthers your self-serving supremacist ideology. If anything you are delighted at the conditions of women in some Islamic countries because it helps your propaganda, and of course you would ignore arranged marriages and lack of divorce rights among Ethiopians or Hindu Indians because, hey, you're not greedy. You only try to assert your supremacy over one group at at time.
You almost exclusively provide double-standards to further your agenda. I guess that's a kind of consistency. Being consistently inconsistent.
Males perpetrating violence against women need to be punished. I see this happening far more often in the West than in the Middle East.
Be sure to tell that to ten women you know.
I personally know over a dozen women who worked in Jordan for the Peace Corps. I don't need to tell them anything, they are the ones telling me the horror stories. I have seen the stats on sexual violence gathered by the US embassy in Cairo, and the stats gathered by the UN. I know what I'm talking about. It's not so evident that you do.
I doubt that. You don't really care about the horror stories on any moral level, its just opportunistic exploitation for you.
What laws? What books? I think people in the Eastern world are actually starting to enjoy comically hypocritical and self-serving Western outrage.
The actual state law in places like Pakistan, Afganistan, Sudan, Egypt, etc. You really should stop, you are only going to keep embarrassing yourself further.
I'm never embarrassed because don't lie and I don't spread false propaganda. Strange that you would mention it in this context rather than just posting the relevant statutes.
What is the subject of this thread? At that start it was about "civil society" but then you started ranting about how Muslims were rapists who only hired Jewish ministers because they were to dumb to do the jobs themselves.
Precisely, civil society in the Muslim world is not exactly "The problems with sexual violence in the western world thread", but I take it such subtleties are beyond you. All you can do is say stupid lavender like the above.
Asking you to give specific examples of your vague generalized smears if "stupid sh!t" now? If you say so.
or their own oppressive governments.
YES! That's my point. Their own governments ARE oppressive, and their sets of social values are also oppressive.
Again, you are conflating two unconnected things. Moreover, people in Islamic countries are doing more to combat oppressive government than you are doing by calling them backwards rapists on the Internet. But that's just one man's opinion, probably you are the real hero after all.
And my point is that as long as the civic values stay what they are, little meaningful (positive) change will occur. You can't have free societies without tolerating minorities.
Again, I'm sure heroically smearing these people
en masse as inferior will bring about those changes all the sooner. For the most hilarious juxtaposition, talk about your belief in the importance of tolerance in the same breath.
You're delighted in the difficulties Egypt faces after the Mubarak era. Everything you say is self-serving propaganda both exaggerating those difficulties and claiming that they are inherent and therefore cannot be corrected. Its beyond your meager abilities to be a supremacist and a bleeding heart at the same time, so don't try.
Read my words above. No personal attacks,
just statements about the world.
Mostly false statements.
Now look at yours: nothing but you trying to make yourself feel better about not having any facts by calling me names.
False. I correct your fraudulent propaganda by supplying historical context and present comparison.
Keep spreading falsehoods about the inferiority of these people, and tacitly accepting their murder by Western (or Western-backed) military forces. That's probably the best way to make the world a better place in the future, right?
The revolution in Egypt is now several years old, and little positive change has occurred. It seems the facts are with me. As long as the people of the Middle East stick to these oppressive value systems, they will have difficulties creating a modern inclusive political system. This in turn will keep harming their economy, since keeping half of your workforce below their potential just because they don't have a dick is mind-numbingly stupid.
[/quote]
"I'm right that these people are inferior, and I will continue to be right about these people being inferior, and how dare you imply that these people are inferior, and by the way they all rape women. Civil society."
Do you have anything to offer but supremacist boilerplate? Aside from the insults and feigned outrage of course.
