Wut? Where? Proof please, I must have missed it.
You know that Islam is not a race, right?
It's a philosophical system like any other religion and one contrary to humanism which has to create tension in states with humanism as the main foundation for the constitution.

But you haven't. You chose to respond to the rhetorical bookend to my 2nd to last post, rather than the actual question, where I made quite clear what I was talking about and what I was asking. I didn't ask general questions at all. So far you've only had very minor oddities in your responses, and seem reasonably well spoken otherwise, so I'm going to assume it isn't a matter of english comprehension.
If you're debating other people about other things, it has nothing to do with me. But if you're "projecting" some random opinions on me, and battling those, then it matters to me what random opinions you think I have and how you think you're battling them.

I'm sorry I keep pushing forward your questions (regardless of what some other person who believes "me and my muslim brethren" are too dishonourable to address directly thinks), but I'm sure you'll agree that if you're engaged in a debate with me, and the very subject of the debate is unknown (at least to me), and the theses of the two participants has not been even clarified and seems to very likely be misconstrued, then going further along that path is quite pointless until those things have been cleared up.

I kinda feel that, if I wanted 'in' on this discussion I should have come here 10 pages ago, sod trying to catch up now, I just wanted to know why ever other line changes to backwards mirror writing after the page had finished loading?
That's the only thing that's making ME rage...

The author implemented an April's fools script. Most recent post in that blog is about it if you're curious.
Check it tomorrow I guess, though as you see the discussion did derail significantly already in here.

Ah OK, I thought it might be an April 1st thing...
I noticed that Know Your Meme has an Illuminati cursor today too...

If you think the far right is worse than the far left, you're not technically a centrist but more like center-left, slight distinction. You can't claim that somewhat theoretical neutral "safe" spot in the middle.
One can see this all the time. People saying "I'm on no one's side but those guys over there suck in particular". Couch sniping, that's what that is. I understand your frustration though and shared it for quite a long time, it's like sitting in a car that is veering off to the left and right and you're sitting there with your hands on the steering wheel, trying to hold it still. Sure, it sucks being increasingly isolated because everyone seems to go more and more left and right but technically, holding the wheel still is inertia. A car is never going entirely straight so one needs to make adjustments continually.

I didn't wake up one morning and decide "me so bored, gonna go right-wing so I can troll my leftist colleagues & acquaintances", on the contrary I've been avoiding such things for a long time. But when I look at my voting record, I've concluded that in recent years I've clearly been more in congruence with a right-wing stance than a left-wing stance on the majority of issues. I have personal feelings but they are never involved when I decide on political issues so I'm also not affected by the "shame" I'm supposed to feel for not being a leftist. In Lala-Land, my first choice would probably be the GLP (green liberal party) but last time I checked, we don't live in Lala-Land. If we did, we wouldn't need politicians or parties in the first place so there's that.

In my country things have veered off to the left for a long time, recently many people who had nothing to do with the right-wing have started to steer to the right as a corrective measure and because they're simply fed up. Meaning the right wing could capitalize on many protest votes. And instead of analyzing why this happened, leftists are now steering even more to the left to stubbornly defend their base instead of trying to improve the country. They won't reclaim their voters that way, all this does is widen the gap which is already pretty damn wide. So why do I play into this by supporting the right wing? Because the government is still too much left-leaning for its own good, so even though I am frustrated by the polarization, I have no choice but to pick a side. My core issue (not joining the EU) is only clearly championed by the major right-wing party, everyone else is either wishy-washy about it or pro-EU.

Ideally, I want all parties gone and people voting on issues, freed of partisan affiliation. But that's not how the system works (in part because many people are too lazy to think for themselves, party affiliation makes things easier) and if I just keep only voting on issues and don't also support the parties that support my issues most then I'm giving up a significant part of my voting power.

Threats of violence are the worst kind of hate.

An important "detail" many people seem to miss. Because "racism" just sounds good, convenient word to throw around :)

Technically, I should feel offended by all the unwarranted use of the word racism which ends up cheapening real racism. Most people just use the word to make themselves look good, most of them never having experienced actual racism themselves. As I've already mentioned elsewhere, I have been called "a little black dwarf" in kindergarten, and a classmate once said my dad was a "nigger". I found more cutting comebacks to retort with and therefor had no need to draw the racism card but I've nonetheless experienced actual racism so I know what it is.

I didn't answer the rhetorical bookend part of your question which (in full) was: "How am I supposed engage in discussion with someone who thinks they're absolutely trouncing me in some debate, but doesn't know (or doesn't wish to talk about) who or what or why they are debating, and what their own position in the debate is?"

My answers to that question wasn't telling you how to engage, rather I addressed the questions raised in the second part of the sentence (debating who/debating what/debating why/what position I take)

Don't ask general questions and act dissatisfied if you get general answers. Instead, repeat your earlier question if you think it was more specific.

But seeing as you'll stall forever if I don't go back all the way to post 184 where you asked questions that were redundant because the answers were already clear from previous posts of mine in this thread, I'll answer:

As stated very early on, I accuse you of conducting apologism for Islam = blindly and categorically defending your religion, disregarding evidence (even the non-correlational type) and by using the usual deflections and excuses common in the genre. Aka "ignoring the elephant in the room". That's not a good thing because how can one fix problems and progress if one categorically excludes the possibility that religion could be the problem behind Islamist attitudes and acts of terror.

If I had to pick one overarching thesis for you, it would be: When Muslims do bad things, it has nothing to do with Islam specifically, even if someone shoots a cartoonist and loudly yells "We avenged the Prophet Muhammad"...
Although you haven't even said if you thought the attack was unjustified, I hope you think it is. Hence my question number 2 which I hope you will finally answer. You see, you've avoided to take a position on some very important things, possibly out of fear.

I claim that nowadays there's more terrorism coming from Muslims than from any other religious group and I have raised the strong suspicion that the religion itself is likely to be the main contributing factor. There have been Muslim terrorists from all kinds of ethnic and national backgrounds so that leaves religion as the one common factor. Read post 141 again for more details.I wonder if you actually read my posts, at all. The answers to all your questions can be found in previous posts of mine.

As for the trouncing, you're mostly trouncing yourself by stalling, not taking clear positions etc so I can't take too much credit for that, even if you imagine me doing little evil victory dances in front of my laptop. My apartment is too small for such dances so I guarantee you, I'm not doing that.

Now that I've not only answered your last questions but went back to answer the ones before that, I hope you will finally have the basic decency to answer my questions, which I'll patiently repeat again:


1.) Do you think that there should be a law that prohibits people from drawing Muhammad, e.g. in a cartoon where he's naked and gets sodomized by an elephant god or whoever?

2.) Do you think the two brothers who shot up the Charlie Hebdo office and its staff acted in any way, shape or form justifiably?

Yeah, I suppose that French mosques and religious schools being spray-painted with swastikas and "sale raton" (when they aren't being physically attacked) isn't racist. I suppose that women being brutally beaten for wearing hijabs, and men being beat up and killed for looking muslim (even on occasions when they're Sikh) doesn't have anything to do with race or how they look. When people denigrate muslims in the same breath as (or implicitly through denigrating) "Turks" or "Blacks" or "immigrants", it isn't racism. It's not like what YOU experienced, which is REAL.

Wait...so you knew what I was asking, but decided to aim for something else....to be difficult? I don't understand. Either way, whatever. I usually only use the "reply" function to either respond to specific segments of a post (like I'm probably going to end up doing here), or to show that there is a specific person I am talking to. I am sorry you had to go through all the trouble of reading back to my original question, and I apologise for having put you through that hardship?

"Accused me"? Why would you accuse me? Is "apologism" (I assume you mean apologetics, i.e. the discipline of defending a position (often religious) through the systematic use of information) something wrong? Again, I responded to your initial "accusation" by pointing out that I'm not partaking in any apologetics, simply correcting what I see to be misinformation.

But your example is pretty bad. Does simply saying something automatically make it about that thing? When George W. Bush says that God told him to attack Iraq, and that it is a crusade against evil, does that make it about Christianity? (You didn't seem to think so earlier)

You possibly missed where I already responded to your post. And you also put down my argument about time. If it was purely about the religion itself, why would it be that muslims and muslim ruled countries/states were the same as everyone else for most of history, and then suddenly (according to you) nowadays be the source of more terrorism than any other religious group"?

Oh, I don't think you're trouncing me at all, I was just looking for a word to describe the language you were using in your discussions with me. Personally, as I've said right from the start, I'm really not interested in a religious debate or whatever, it is quite pointless. Thank you for clarifying your position (and your position on my position). I'm not sure what more I can say other than I think your point of view is misguided at best. You probably think the same about mine. Meh.

As for your two questions, lets get the 2nd one over with first. You accused me of cowardice, fear, I dunno...guilt(?), possibly silent agreement, all of which really annoyed me, because when I posed a similar question (set of questions) to you, picking stuff involving where you've set your location to just give it a sense of familiarity, you didn't condemn a single one of my examples. Not a single one. You evaded, shot down, justified, "explained away", and attempted to argue out of every single one of them. You still haven't condemned them. I didn't hound you about it (well, I did, initially, I guess, but I figured the point had been made). Yet somehow unless I explicitly give some sort of official condemnation, I am suspect. Oh geez yay. Yes, of course I don't think how they acted was justifiable. Would you be even asking that if you didn't associate a specific religion with me?

Now as to your first question, I'm not sure how I should answer it. Different countries have different approaches. France, for example claims to have freedom of speech, but even there (possibly even ironically as a result of the Charlie Hebdo attacks) there's been a crackdown on free speech. One fellow was arrested for having a flag with the Islamic declaration of faith (hey, it might be ISIL...even though he said it wasn't). Then there's the comedian who was jailed for posting "Je suis Charlie Coulibaly" on facebook. Another teen was taken into custody for mocking Charlie Hebdo (with what was likely a parody/edit of an actual Charlie Hebdo cartoon).
Now I'm not saying this to complain, just to point out that even though some people/governments may like to pretend, freedom of speech is not absolute anywhere in the world. As I said, different countries have different approaches. Some countries would have what you described as "hate speech", some would consider it offensive, some would draw the line between that and criticism of actual islamic practices and beliefs, some would be fine with one religion being denigrated but not another, etc.

Now if you're asking if in hypothetical Babarkland where I'd be the ruler there'd be such a law, then I'd say no, there wouldn't be. Then again, I'd like to think that in hypothetical Babarkland there'd be no need for the law, because people would be on a balanced and happy economic and sociopolitical level that they wouldn't feel the need to denigrate another person's faith.

You two can carry on, I just want to reply to this part.

Islam became radicalized in the XXth century obviously. Some of it from the fall of the Ottoman Empire after WW1 and the end of what was the remaining caliphate, then the foundation of Israel and Cold War alignments causing several proxy conflicts (including Russia in Afghanistan), the Iranian revolution reinstating sectarian tensions within Islam, and finally after the Cold War the dominant position the US had in the world interfered with several dynamics in the Gulf region (Iraq, etc...).

Bunch of stuff really, causing Jihadism, Wahabism, Fundamentalist Shiism, PLO, etc, etc... all of which DO share a certain religious aspect.

Interesting that you bring up the political origins...There's a lot of conflation with the language extremists use and their belief systems. I'm probably saying it very badly, and I've probably mentioned how I hate sharing videos as a source of information, but hopefully you can skip through to the bits I'm referring to using the links underneath. Someone mentioned Irshad Manji earlier in this thread (or perhaps it was another?) but she's not really the point of my linking the video, I'm referring to the statistician and how she explains it with her examples. Hopefully what I'm talking about won't be more than 5-10 minutes of the video (which I realise is a significant amount of time to dedicate to this).
Who Speaks for Islam

I think awalterj has a point. In socialist countries like Switzerland, where the moderate right (like svp/udc) is being marginalised, and economy utterly destroyed to cater some bearded slackers, we are way too lenient towards foreigners. Not only we we are losing our white christian identity to the hands of brown/black/yellow immigrants (most of which are drug dealers and rapists, yet still allowed to enter the country) and islamisation (I don't mean all muslims, but heck, all islamists are muslims, so, yeah, I mean muslims), but we still allow foreign foreigners to annoy us with "human rights" and such dubious inheritance of the post-WW2 era, as if a country wasn't entitled to treat its minorities however feels cool at a time. Generally speaking, we should stop mixing up morality and politics, politics isn't about moral issues, it is about money (except when it comes to the gays because frankly, saying no to morals doesn't mean saying yes to just any disgusting sexual perversion). We need money, if only for our army to be able to defend our borders against Italy and France, and to protect the world's elite, both in Davos and in the too few tax-friendly villages where they can feel genuinely welcomed.

The ever UE-loving leftists keep using morality to hinder social darwinism, to waste money on disabled people, to jealously nag our most succesful heroes, and to, finally, favour niggers from war-torn countries over good swiss citizens who don't do wars to start with, and who should be at least allowed to choose the skin colour of their neighbours. And when I say "of their neighbours", I mean "of their compatriots' neighbours", because unfortunately you can't really count on these migration-invaded cities to vote for their own ethnic preservation as well as we do for them from our remote mountain villages. This moralist crusade goes as far as wishing to facilitate legal investigations in swiss bank accounts, as if real economy could afford nitpicking on who places their money in Switzerland and why. I mean, take me, for instance, a greek citizen who just fled Greece to hide my economies in Switzerland when the crisis started threatening us. Would you want commies to hunt me down here ?

No way. I'll settle in awalterj's village, and happily help him set up the walls and miradors around it, to be safe, and will spend the rest of my life politically ranting on the internet from there (if just out of nostalgia of the nicely productive days of bush-era political flamewars). His honestly and awareness quite convinced me, which make this date the most important 1st of april of my life. Yay.

he didn't take anything back. The lawsuit against him (which was the origin for all this commotion) was quickly dropped because the prosecutors didn't saw any grounds to even start a case. Don't know what he does in his shows these days as I'm not really a fan of him as a comedian, but I remember an interview with him after the terror attacks in paris where said he will continue to use the islam in his works...
So, i am not agreeing with your point that criticism of the islam is repressed in the public discussion.

Despite that I wouldn't say that your journalist friend is completely wrong. But I don't think it's just a conspiracy to protect the islam. Instead that is the modus operandi for basically most media these days. They are not doing journalism but politics. You can hardly find an article today that doesn't try to bring across a certain kind of political stance on the relevant subject. For some media that is political correctness, for some it's neoliberial ideology and for some it's the exact opposite. Facts and reality quickly become irrelevant.

And as much as I share jamyskis opinion of being sick of movements like PEGIDA, the difficult thing is, that they actually have a vaild point with their criticism of the media.

Wonderful rhetoric. Why did you feel the need for satire?

It seems strange to me as it reveals a certain preference to ridicule your interlocutor rather than engage his arguments. Are you willing to admit it I wonder...

Only day where such threads deserve a post.

Well babark, it's with some trepidation I reply.

I don't know those individuals you're mentioning but 5 / 10 min is nothing... I rem spending hours posting with you... it sounds like the whole video is quite longer? Around what time do you want me to listen and what is it about?

Anyway, it's obvious radical Islam is a geopolitical phenomena. That does not take away from its religious nature. It's both radical (politically) and muslim (religiously). Islam is pretty unique nowadays in terms of missionary monotheistic religions where it comes to how the theological and the political mix very explicitly. Christianity and Judaism have separated those aspects, though Zionism is a step back - but that's a detour...

I find your surprise at my listing of historical root causes interesting itself. To me, the thing that derails conversations with you is that you take a lot of stuff personally, become defensive and evasive. So 'Who speaks for Islam?' Well, considering that theologically every iman is equivalent, nothing like a pope or patriarchs in Islam I believe, then every Muslim speaks for Islam. You claim to speak for Islam, but so does the asshole blowing up innocents. It would be great if you could figure it out, I can assure you I'm rooting for you over the terrorists politically, and I don't even much like you... but then, it's nothing personal.
Doubling down on the condescension I see. I appreciate the relative honesty, while mourning the higher respect I used to have for you.

Impressive and sad how political disagreements are made immediately personal, causing these disgust reactions on you guys... how hard it must be for you to accept you're really no better.

I'm definitely not telling you to watch the whole video, that is quite a investment of time, certainly not one I'd be willing to make (unless I found the video really interesting for some reason). Just that it relates to what you were speaking of. I'm kinda sorry I can't be more exact, I watched the video some time back and don't remember the exact points, and it is buffering very jerkily for me. I'd assume it'd be Chapter 4, and then you can skip forward to 6, and then possibly 9. It is probably expounded on throughout, but that should be enough to explain what I'm talking about- the idea of the religious "cause" of terrorism, the use of religion to push political agendas in areas and by groups dominated by muslims, and what the "normal" and the "extreme" is considered to be in these cases.

If you're including me in "you guys", I don't believe I take political disagreements personally. Just that it has been happening often in this thread (or at least this discussion, it has gone around on several threads by now) is that political discussions are personalised on to my person, and it annoys me. Instead of talking about what I'm saying and responding to that, which would possibly be an interesting back-and-forth, perceptions of my own background are constantly being brought up- "Oh, you probably fear for your life, so you can't answer honestly" "Oh, you're a muslim so you're probably being dishonourable" "Oh, you have Pakistan listed as in your location field, so you probably have a biased view of world history" "Oh, you're muslim so you probably secretly condone terrorist attacks". It is kinda depressing to me, because here is the only place online where such reactions occasionally pop up (which might be because here is one of the few places I decided to actually list "Pakistan" that I actually frequent- and the gog forums are still an awesome place, don't get me wrong). Why not treat me like a person as anyone else would be treated? I don't automatically assume every person I see with their location set to Germany is a nazi, or every person with their location set to the US is a isolationist with no real knowledge of the wider world.