Yet another Islamic attack in London...

[Drew]

Drew, you don't realise the context of the discussion at the time when I was talking about PRC polls. I believe it was you who said 'Challenge!' when I said there were at the very least tens of millions of Muslim radicals on Earth. I'm trying to prove to you that the threat is bigger than you thought it was. That's it.

If that's a step towards totalitarianism, it's a step I'm willing to take. Also, I'm not proposing mass execution or torture or rape of my opponents, so don't equate me with ISIS.

And I don't think you understand the distinction I'm making. I totally sympathize with Johnny Depp jokingly speculating about when was it we last had an actor shoot a president. That doesn't mean I want someone to actually do it, nor that I wouldn't condemn the attacks if they happened. And as you'll recall there was an outpouring of Muslim solidarity for the victims after the attack.

So, what I'm telling you is you're looking at the wrong metrics, and you can't criminalize thought. And, since we glossed over this earlier, I absolutely contend that Nugent's comments are an exact analogue here: "If Obama wins re-election in November, I will either be in dead or in jail by this time next year" is pretty damned explicit, to the point where the Secret Service brought him in for an interview, yet large numbers of his fans and GOP supporters had no issue with his comments - he was cheered, for christ's sake.

Anyway, maybe it's different for you Brits, but in the States our legal code is based on the belief that you're innocent until proven guilty. It's absolutely OK to question The Nug' to make sure what he said wasn't a credible threat providing doing so does not interfere with his civil liberties, but it's not ok to lock him up on an island, along with anyone who has sympathy to his views, simply because they could be made manifest into violence. And if you don't agree with this simple statement that democratic rule of law is based on, then I really don't know what to tell you.

 

[Insomnia]

And I don't think you understand the distinction I'm making. I totally sympathize with Johnny Depp jokingly speculating about when was it we last had an actor shoot a president. That doesn't mean I want someone to actually do it, nor that I wouldn't condemn the attacks if they happened. And as you'll recall there was an outpouring of Muslim solidarity for the victims after the attack.

So, what I'm telling you is you're looking at the wrong metrics, and you can't criminalize thought. And, since we glossed over this earlier, I absolutely contend that Nugent's comments are an exact analogue here: "If Obama wins re-election in November, I will either be in dead or in jail by this time next year" is pretty damned explicit, to the point where the Secret Service brought him in for an interview, yet large numbers of his fans and GOP supporters had no issue with his comments - he was cheered, for christ's sake.

Anyway, maybe it's different for you Brits, but in the States our legal code is based on the belief that you're innocent until proven guilty. It's absolutely OK to question The Nug' to make sure what he said wasn't a credible threat providing doing so does not interfere with his civil liberties, but it's not ok to lock him up on an island, along with anyone who has sympathy to his views, simply because they could be made manifest into violence. And if you don't agree with this simple statement that democratic rule of law is based on, then I really don't know what to tell you.

But if you were interviewed in a formal survey and asked 'Would you sympathise with someone who shot and killed Donald Trump, a terrorist action?', would you have the same sentiment?

There's a screenshot of an Al Jazeera livestream of the Westminster attack, with hundreds of people doing 'HAHA' reacts to footage of scene. But I don't think that's telling. Why? Because there are just as many edgy 14 year-olds who would do the exact same thing, it doesn't mean anything. But if you sat those 'edgy' kids down and asked them if they actually supported the things they were laughing at, I think you'd get a different story.

There's a world of difference between finding a joke about killing the President funny or sympathising with the joke (or making the joke itself) than sitting down in a formal survey and being asked if you sympathise with terrorism. Understand that distinction.

Also, I'm sorry, I got a completely different Nugent quote, and I will retract my previous argument, because my quote was not the one you were referring to, I got mixed up. So yes, that quote is directly implying physical violence/death threat towards the President.

And I do disagree with that statement, to a degree, because it entirely depends on who the person is. If Nugent had links to extremist anti-government groups or anti-Obama groups and had links to terrorists and terror-funding organisations (as every single outspoken ISIS supporter has links to Islamist terrorists, or almost every outspoken Neo-Nazi in the West has links to Neo-Nazi crime/terror group does), then it's an entirely different matter, in my eyes.

 

[Drew]

Actually, that gets into framing pretty. Framing it as "hey, this is terrorism, it's a Very Bad Thing because we Hate Terrorists. Do you support it?" is going to elicit a very different response than something more muted like "do you sympathize with the motives of the Charlie Hebdo shooters?" I don't know how the question was framed in the survey, so I can't really weigh in, but I think a telephone survey is maybe a lot less formal than oyu think it is; this isn't a police interrogation.

But, to your broader question, if I was asked "do you sympathize with Johnny Depp's comments about when was the last time an actor shot a president?" I'd probably say no... But, I KNOW I have liberal friends who would say yes. And, again, that's their right. We live in a democracy, they have their right to free expression, and they can only be arrested for that expression if there is concrete evidence that they're going beyond idle talk and are actually preparing to take action, and even then they're entitled to a trial by jury of their peers, before they can be convicted. We can't just lock them up on an island because they said, "yeah, right on, you tell 'em, Johnny!" when they heard his comments. We have rule of law. That's one of the things that separates us from the terrorists.

 

[eggzoomin]

Just to throw a little maths into the debate:

There are about 1.6 billion Muslims on earth. Taking the comment about tens of millions holding extreme views as true and using 20 million as the lowest number of that, that equates to 0.125%. Given the population of Muslims in the UK, that would be around 3400 people. Even at 100 million, that scales to 17000. At the last election, Sinn Feinn (political wing of the IRA) and the DUP (political wing of the UDA) polled over 250 000 votes each. And yes, I am more than old enough to remember long before the Good Friday agreement and am rather nervous about it dissolving at the moment.

 

[Drew]

Just to throw a little maths into the debate:

There are about 1.6 billion Muslims on earth. Taking the comment about tens of millions holding extreme views as true and using 20 million as the lowest number of that, that equates to 0.125%. Given the population of Muslims in the UK, that would be around 3400 people. Even at 100 million, that scales to 17000. At the last election, Sinn Feinn (political wing of the IRA) and the DUP (political wing of the UDA) polled over 250 000 votes each. And yes, I am more than old enough to remember long before the Good Friday agreement and am rather nervous about it dissolving at the moment.

While you are 100% correct, the "we are talking about a decimal point rounding error" argument doesn't seem to be one Insomnia is particularly impressed by.

I mean, with a global population of around 7 billion, Muslims make up almost a quarter of the world's population. If there was something inherently violent towards nonbelievers in the Muslim faith, we'd probably all be dead by now.

 

[eggzoomin]

While you are 100% correct, the "we are talking about a decimal point rounding error" argument doesn't seem to be one Insomnia is particularly impressed by.

I mean, with a global population of around 7 billion, Muslims make up almost a quarter of the world's population. If there was something inherently violent towards nonbelievers in the Muslim faith, we'd probably all be dead by now.

Just went back through the last few pages of this thread. I see your point. There was a survey that was conducted by ICM that claimed 4% of UK Muslims supported extremism and used for a Channel 4 programme - its methodology was later comprehensively debunked. To be honest, the general public and the media are not really well set up to deal with data or statistics.

 

[bostjan]

While you are 100% correct, the "we are talking about a decimal point rounding error" argument doesn't seem to be one Insomnia is particularly impressed by.

I mean, with a global population of around 7 billion, Muslims make up almost a quarter of the world's population. If there was something inherently violent towards nonbelievers in the Muslim faith, we'd probably all be dead by now.

With the current state of the world, it won't take 1.6 billion people or even 3400 people to end civilization, but just a few people with nuclear weapons and the right opportunity.

While we are busy bickering about whether Iran is worthy of nuclear weapons or not, we currently have a hot-headed PotUS who doesn't seem to put very much stock in evidence-based decision making, and we also have a group of some small number of people within the USA who want nothing more than to destroy a large number of people. We also have equally nutty small extreme groups who are willing to kill large numbers of innocent people in order to take out their rivals over differences in dogma. We also have a dozen or so nuclear warheads from the USSR that have been totally missing since the 1980's. There is also the fact that any idiot with a couple of old smoke detectors and any one of a thousand combinations of other household items could construct a dirty bomb that might not make an earth-shattering kaboom, but would certainly make headlines, if detonated in any one of several particular areas. There is also the fact that nuclear bomb technology has existed long enough that there are thousands upon thousands of folks out there who know exactly how to construct one, if only they had access to the right grade of fissible materials.

Putting that all together, it truly is a miracle that we haven't annihilated ourselves out of existence already. And odds are actually not too hot that humanity will look at all positive 100 years from now. If humanity gets wiped out, odds are way higher that the culprit will be widespread war or an out-of-control biological weapon than the odds of a massive solar flare or asteroid doing the deed.

 

[Insomnia]

Just to throw a little maths into the debate:

There are about 1.6 billion Muslims on earth. Taking the comment about tens of millions holding extreme views as true and using 20 million as the lowest number of that, that equates to 0.125%. Given the population of Muslims in the UK, that would be around 3400 people. Even at 100 million, that scales to 17000. At the last election, Sinn Feinn (political wing of the IRA) and the DUP (political wing of the UDA) polled over 250 000 votes each. And yes, I am more than old enough to remember long before the Good Friday agreement and am rather nervous about it dissolving at the moment.

1) The idea that only 20,000,000 people hold extreme views is utterly ridiculous. It's over 20,000,000 alone that support ISIS, a group that routinely kills moderate Muslims across the world, and does so to such a barbaric and insane extent, that Al Qaeda and Taliban members are calling them 'too extreme'. The number of people who hold severely anti-gay and anti-disbeliever and sexist views is going to be insanely higher than 20,000,000.

2) It's more than upsetting that Sinn Fein and the DUP are not only still around, but are thriving. Whilst they've (seem to have) moved on from actively supporting terrorism, I'm sure the sentiment is still there. It's worrying that they're not relics now.

While you are 100% correct, the "we are talking about a decimal point rounding error" argument doesn't seem to be one Insomnia is particularly impressed by.

I mean, with a global population of around 7 billion, Muslims make up almost a quarter of the world's population. If there was something inherently violent towards nonbelievers in the Muslim faith, we'd probably all be dead by now.

Islam is inherently violent. Islam is inherently peaceful. Welcome to the wacky world of religion, where logic isn't welcome...

However, I would like to say that the groups I've mentioned (gays, disbelievers, women, critics of Islam, liberal reformers) generally don't have good lives in the majority of majority-Muslim countries.

 

[Insomnia]

Actually, that gets into framing pretty. Framing it as "hey, this is terrorism, it's a Very Bad Thing because we Hate Terrorists. Do you support it?" is going to elicit a very different response than something more muted like "do you sympathize with the motives of the Charlie Hebdo shooters?" I don't know how the question was framed in the survey, so I can't really weigh in, but I think a telephone survey is maybe a lot less formal than oyu think it is; this isn't a police interrogation.

But, to your broader question, if I was asked "do you sympathize with Johnny Depp's comments about when was the last time an actor shot a president?" I'd probably say no... But, I KNOW I have liberal friends who would say yes. And, again, that's their right. We live in a democracy, they have their right to free expression, and they can only be arrested for that expression if there is concrete evidence that they're going beyond idle talk and are actually preparing to take action, and even then they're entitled to a trial by jury of their peers, before they can be convicted. We can't just lock them up on an island because they said, "yeah, right on, you tell 'em, Johnny!" when they heard his comments. We have rule of law. That's one of the things that separates us from the terrorists.

We've already had one person in this thread say it's absolutely fine to call for the genocide of people. Do you agree with their sentiment?

I see it like this: Quite frankly, it's a lot more harmful to society to allow terrorist sympathisers to recruit and convert, than to ban their speech. You and I disagree on this fundamental level. We can continue arguing down a philosophical road of 'what is freedom, are there limits, and should it be inherent', but I think it'd be much easier for you if you found practical reasons against my view.

For example, if there is an instance of a Western nation arresting terror sympathisers, which causes the sympathisers' followers to rapidly take up arms/commit terror against the state for what they see as injustice, then that is a practical reason against my claim, as it actually causes more terrorism.

By all means, take whatever road you want, I'm just suggesting this to you.

 

[eggzoomin]

Insomnia, you were the one who said tens of millions. I offered two mathematical renderings of that, at either end of the scale. If you meant hundreds of millions, that wasn't clear from the way you said "tens of millions." My point, to be explicit, is that you appear to have greater concern about radical Wahhabi Islamic terrorism than about other forms of extremism, which doesn't appear to be mathematically grounded to me. If we're talking about the likelihood of death, I am far more concerned about the ~150 women a year murdered by men they know in the UK annually - yet we as a nation devote a fraction of the resources and attention to that issue, compared to what gets spent on terrorism.

Re Ireland, neither of the Irish parties have moved on from their roots - Arlene Foster met Jackie McDonald two days after the UDA killed Colin Horner in front of his three year old son, in May. What's more worrying is that the government are quite happy to pal up with them and won't condemn the House of Saud, either.

Re your response to Drew, those groups don't have good lives in virtually any state where religion holds significant sway - and plenty of secular states too.

 

[Insomnia]

Insomnia, you were the one who said tens of millions. I offered two mathematical renderings of that, at either end of the scale. If you meant hundreds of millions, that wasn't clear from the way you said "tens of millions." My point, to be explicit, is that you appear to have greater concern about radical Wahhabi Islamic terrorism than about other forms of extremism, which doesn't appear to be mathematically grounded to me. If we're talking about the likelihood of death, I am far more concerned about the ~150 women a year murdered by men they know in the UK annually - yet we as a nation devote a fraction of the resources and attention to that issue, compared to what gets spent on terrorism.

Re Ireland, neither of the Irish parties have moved on from their roots - Arlene Foster met Jackie McDonald two days after the UDA killed Colin Horner in front of his three year old son, in May. What's more worrying is that the government are quite happy to pal up with them and won't condemn the House of Saud, either.

Re your response to Drew, those groups don't have good lives in virtually any state where religion holds significant sway - and plenty of secular states too.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/

The implementation of Sharia is one example. Every implementation of Sharia around to date (and almost every single one in history) promotes the oppression of gays and women and dissidents. It means these Muslims want to base their law not on freedom or democracy, but they want it governed as a theocracy. However, I do realise that someone's interpretation of Sharia is subjective, and could be very wide ranging. But we have to think about where they'd draw their idea of an Islamic theocracy from (probably from the real-world instances of one).

The polls on favourable views of ISIS proves that in Pakistan alone, the 9% of Pakistani's who support ISIS are 17,000,000. The numbers really do start to add up. And that is just the number of Pakistanis who support a terror group who also kill devout Muslims (ISIS). The numbers would get higher if you asked them about terror groups that only kill non-believers, or terror groups that killed gays, or if they support the killings like that of Charlie Hebdo or the fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie. There are tens of millions at bare minimum, and honestly, I think it could be over 100,000,000.

There are at the very minimum another 2,000,000 in Malaysia, another 12,740,000 in Nigeria, another 1,500,000 in Senegal.

Not sure where I said there were only tens of millions of radicals, egg. Now, if you can find me non-Islamic groups in the UK that support violent sexism worldwide through recruiting and financial payment, if you can show me non-Islamic organised anti-women preaching (and especially to such an extent that those who've listened to the talks have gone out and murdered women), if you can show me thousands of known anti-female terrorists/ideological murderers operating in the UK, then I'll put the resources equally. Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism is a much bigger issue in the UK than domestic sexist murder. I also don't see what relevance it has to this conversation? You're now complaining that the UK government spends too much combatting much more prevalent issues?

Also, yet again, your point about 'well other religions treat them badly too' and 'secular states are also bad to them' has no relevance in terms of critiquing Islam. I've already explained how this thread changed my views on Islam earlier, if you want a more detailed response, I recommend you find that post.

 

[eggzoomin]

It's quoted at the top of the page:

"Drew, you don't realise the context of the discussion at the time when I was talking about PRC polls. I believe it was you who said 'Challenge!' when I said there were at the very least tens of millions of Muslim radicals on Earth."

I'm going to politely bow out of this thread now - shouldn't have posted in the first place.

 

[Drew]

It's quoted at the top of the page:

"Drew, you don't realise the context of the discussion at the time when I was talking about PRC polls. I believe it was you who said 'Challenge!' when I said there were at the very least tens of millions of Muslim radicals on Earth."

I'm going to politely bow out of this thread now - shouldn't have posted in the first place.

No, stick around, it's nice to have someone else who understands statistics.

1) The idea that only 20,000,000 people hold extreme views is utterly ridiculous. It's over 20,000,000 alone that support ISIS, a group that routinely kills moderate Muslims across the world, and does so to such a barbaric and insane extent, that Al Qaeda and Taliban members are calling them 'too extreme'. The number of people who hold severely anti-gay and anti-disbeliever and sexist views is going to be insanely higher than 20,000,000.

However, I would like to say that the groups I've mentioned (gays, disbelievers, women, critics of Islam, liberal reformers) generally don't have good lives in the majority of majority-Muslim countries.

I'll merely note in passing that, not only have we already discussed ad nauseum that passage, including a multi-page discussion on what it means to "support" or "approve" of something in the context of a poll, the fact that what we're concerned about is intended or actual actions because we as a free democracy do not ban thought, etc etc etc, and that I'm beginning to have pretty serious concerns about your reading comprehension, ability to retain information, or both, since you keep coming back to that post...

...I'll also point out that in a thread about Islamic terrorism, this is the second or third time you've cited that same poll and then immediately moved on to "yeah and they's also anti-gay and anti women too!" Considering that has nothing to do with the subject of Muslims engaging in terrorism in the US and UK, and considering that my own country has a pretty shitty record of its treatment of women and LGBT communities, if the strongest argument why we need to step up domestic investigation of Muslims and engage in "heavy vetting" of Muslim immigrants is "their governments treat gay people poorly in their own counties," let's just take a moment to acknowledge the fact you're clutching for straws and trying to conflate two unrelated problems, Muslim terrorism and the rights of minorities in foreign countries, because you're not able to make Muslim terrorism look like a pervasive enough problem otherwise.

 

[Drew]

Not sure where I said there were only tens of millions of radicals, egg. Now, if you can find me non-Islamic groups in the UK that support violent sexism worldwide through recruiting and financial payment, if you can show me non-Islamic organised anti-women preaching (and especially to such an extent that those who've listened to the talks have gone out and murdered women), if you can show me thousands of known anti-female terrorists/ideological murderers operating in the UK, then I'll put the resources equally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church

Or did you already kick Catholics out to an island off the coast and subject immigrants from Catholic-majority countries to "heavy vetting"?

 

[eggzoomin]

No, stick around, it's nice to have someone else who understands statistics.

Honestly, having read through the rest of the thread, I recognised that there's no point - if it was going to get resolved, it would have been many pages ago. There's that old saw about arguing on the internet...

Re Catholicism and secular states, insomnia said himself he's only interested in discussing Islam and that is really the key takeout for me - this is not an ecumenical discussion for him. He can hold any opinion he likes - it is a free society. Now if he ACTS on it... that's different. I do wish we were drawing a distinction between Wahhabi Islam and mainstream Islamic scholarship, though - it's like saying the Westboro Baptist Church represent all Christians.

 

[Drew]

Honestly, having read through the rest of the thread, I recognised that there's no point - if it was going to get resolved, it would have been many pages ago. There's that old saw about arguing on the internet...

Re Catholicism and secular states, insomnia said himself he's only interested in discussing Islam and that is really the key takeout for me - this is not an ecumenical discussion for him. He can hold any opinion he likes - it is a free society. Now if he ACTS on it... that's different. I do wish we were drawing a distinction between Wahhabi Islam and mainstream Islamic scholarship, though - it's like saying the Westboro Baptist Church represent all Christians.

Well, the other takeaway that's becoming increasingly clear to me, as he continues to conflate discussion on just how legitimate a threat Muslims in general are in the US and UK as a source of Islamic terrorism, with Muslim majority nations' governments having a poor record on minority rights (nowhere near a unique Muslim challenge, even though we've made some progress in recent decades) is that his problem isn't with any legitimate concern for his well-being that Islamic terrorism might pose, per se, so much as it is with Islam in general. Since he seems incapable of separating a belief that Muslims are bad from a legitimate and rational assessment of the risk of terrorism they pose, then we're not going to get anywhere. The best we can hope for is to make it increasingly clear to anyone else reading this that his objections are based on personal bias and not rational analysis.

 

[bostjan]

Man, I can't imagine how crazy things would get in an open religious debate on here with the current state of things...

There are violent people in all walks of life: Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Atheism, Hinduism, even Buddhism. There's not really going to be a reliable statistical gauge of how violent the people are in each group, but maybe we can get some idea, vaguely, and by number of violent acts, which nations are the most violent? Iran? Syria? Iraq? No, it's actually more like Columbia, Venezuela, Panama, etc. How do you square that up with the assumption that Islam is intrinsically more violent than everything that is not Islam?!

 

[vilk]

Honestly, having read through the rest of the thread, I recognised that there's no point - if it was going to get resolved, it would have been many pages ago. There's that old saw about arguing on the internet...

Re Catholicism and secular states, insomnia said himself he's only interested in discussing Islam and that is really the key takeout for me - this is not an ecumenical discussion for him. He can hold any opinion he likes - it is a free society. Now if he ACTS on it... that's different. I do wish we were drawing a distinction between Wahhabi Islam and mainstream Islamic scholarship, though - it's like saying the Westboro Baptist Church represent all Christians.

One important thing to point out, however, is that there are 4.5 million Wahhabist Muslims, as well as major gov't entities that embrace Wahhabism. This makes it less comparable to WBC, which only has 70 members and 0 of them in major gov't roles.

Even so, those 4.5 million Wahhabists only make up half a percent of all Muslims.

Man, I can't imagine how crazy things would get in an open religious debate on here with the current state of things...

There are violent people in all walks of life: Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Atheism, Hinduism, even Buddhism. There's not really going to be a reliable statistical gauge of how violent the people are in each group, but maybe we can get some idea, vaguely, and by number of violent acts, which nations are the most violent? Iran? Syria? Iraq? No, it's actually more like Columbia, Venezuela, Panama, etc. How do you square that up with the assumption that Islam is intrinsically more violent than everything that is not Islam?!

Is Islam more violent than Buddhism? =/= Are Muslims more violent than Buddhists?

Everyone brings up the point that there are bad people of every category, which is usually true. However, it is possible to compare religious philosophies on a literary/academic level.

The hero of Islam was a warlord. He commanded armies to kill people. Idk if it happened historically, though I think it's supposed to have, but even just in the literature. Even just in the literature can we see subjugation of women, violently totalitarian theocracy, rape, etc. Anyway, literally more than half of all Muslim men are named after this dude. He's largely thought of as the perfect man.
^and I have many of the same gripes with Judaism. Abe, Moses/Aaron are freaks.


Let's compare that with Jesus. That dude, in the book at least, was a pacifist. The most violent thing he did was flip a table.

Let's compare that to Buddha. The original guy was a pacifist, but there's lots and lots and lots of crazy variations out there. But as someone who has studied Buddhism formally, I'm not really familiar with any that promote any kind of violence. Some of them don't even let you hurt bugs.

Let's compare that to Vishnu. That guy destroys the whole earth. However, he also makes everything. I guess that kinda balances out. And he smokes weed.


I'm rambling, and comparing "main dudes" of a religion isn't the same as comparing the tenets of a religion, necessarily. But the main point I'm trying to make is that it is possible to legitimately find one religious philosophy more violent than another irrespective of the behavior of the actual adherents to that religion.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

Per Buddhism, mutilation as punishment for petty crime wasn't officially denounced until the early 20th century. There is not a single major religion without blood on its hands.

 

[vilk]

^yeah, that's what I'm talking about when I say: it is possible to legitimately find one religious philosophy more violent than another irrespective of the behavior of the actual adherents to that religion.

I believe you that Buddhists might have mutilated people as punishment for petty crime. But what matters in discussion of comparing religious philosophies is whether or not the historical fact of mutilation was derived of a religious mandate. I don't remember anything about mutilation rules when I was reading the Lotus Sutra or any of the other canonical Buddhist literature I've read. It might be out there, because there are soooooo many varieties. But do you get what I'm trying to say?