This is, to a degree, debatable. Not the part about individuals who commit mass shooting, but the part about terrorists. Obviously the Osama bin Ladens of the world are a different level of sociopath, but the individual 18 year old kids who blow themselves up have a lot of mental health issues, they just live in situations of occupation where they have learned that their lives are devalued and that committing such acts is the only way to bring value to themselves. It's messed up, sure, but not as different on an individual level as you might think.

Yes, and with the largest army in the world and relatively indiscriminate rules about what defines an enemy combatant, a lot of people need to worry about us causing them harm. It doesn't change the fact that your fear of Muslims is disproportionate to the actual likelihood that the dude who deliberately choose to immigrate to the United States that you see on the street is going to cause you harm.

How did I know that, after I brought up actual fact, as well as terms like "American exceptionalism", you were going to make a blatant appeal to anti-intellectualism. Just because you are not smart enough to understand how what you're saying is filled with double standards and bigotry, doesn't mean others are not.

Yes, obviously we'd all like terrorists not to be in our country. We'd also like police officers to have a 100% rate of stopping murders before they happen, but the Bill of Rights protects against police officers committing unlawful searches and seizures and soldiers taking quarter in our houses, as well as gives us all due process, the right to an attorney, the right to be tried by a jury of our peers, etc. Unless we have a magic wand that we can wave that tells us exactly where the terrorists are, I don't see why we should have the right to harass innocent Americans, especially when our mistreatment of Muslims gives more ammunition to the rhetoric of groups like ISIS and helps them recruit more people.

My point is that what you're saying is preposterous and racist and makes no sense whatsoever.

1) Your entire example is an anecdotal one that has nothing to do with terrorism or anything else we're discussing.

2) The reason the article uses "racism" as a term and not "Islamophobia" is because a big sticking point there was the men being South Asian, and there is a lot of racism against people from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh (not all three of which are Muslim countries) in the UK. Does that mean fear of racism should trump action in stopping child molesters? Obviously not. It just means none of this is even remotely connected to the conversation we're having.

3) EVEN IF these Muslim men were particularly religious (which I saw no evidence that they were), and EVEN IF their sexual abuse was occurring in a religious context- have you heard of something called the Catholic Church? Last time I checked, when you say "religious figures accused of child molestation", most people don't immediately think "Muslim". However, people don't seem to blame the religion itself in the case of the Church, merely the individuals within it. That's the point- you're trying to connect dots that aren't there to justify your IRRATIONAL feelings about Muslims.

I'm sure it's already clear to everyone who has read this thread that you don't really care about whether something you refer to as "fact" is factual or not, but this statement is also completely bogus. If you were being intellectually honest and using the definition of "civilized" that anthropologists actually use, ie an advanced society with complex divisions of labor, then it is true that the United States and the UK are more "civilized" than many Middle Eastern countries. Nazi Germany was too, by the way. If you are trying to use an unscientific definition of "civilized", based on cultural norms and values, you have to reckon with the many many innocent people that our countries have killed for political purposes. Either way, it's far from a fact and you are dumb.

Just a warning, I am about to go through and address all of the racism and idiocy since I last posted, it will probably lead to several very long posts or lots and lots of shorter ones

http://www.cadredc.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Homey-D-Clown1.gif

pancake_hero

pie hero...demoman...?

1) I'm just gonna springboard off of this point to talk about a mostly unrelated but important topic, which is the exaggeration of the link between mental illness and violence- http://depts.washington.edu/mhreport/facts_violence.php

That is not to say that mass shootings are not often perpetrated by mentally ill people, I was just reminded of something that I thought people in this thread ought to know about.

2) saam's point does not require the two situations/motivations for them to be the same, it's about the level of overreaction and racial profiling that the rest of us commit after these events occur. Unless you have statistics to show that a larger percentage or even a larger total number of Muslims living in the U.S. are involved in terrorism than the percentage/amount of white people in the U.S. who commit gun violence, then acting that way afterwards is the same in both situations.

You probably shouldn't say mean things about facts like that, I like facts which is why I try to use them in discourse whenever possible. You should try it out too!

Yes, and we have lots of words for people like you!

I found one! ^^^^^^^

Yes, and we have a lot of words for people like them!

This is known as racial profiling, it is or should be illegal everywhere, and it will not have any affect on the ability of terrorist groups to commit atrocities, it will only hurt ordinary people.

What the fuck are you talking about you racist freak

Yes, and we have lots of words for people like you!

Weird, all of the news reports I saw seemed to suggest there were roughly 8 ISIS members responsible for this attack, I guess the French authorities let the other 1,569,999,992 perpetrators escape.

This, to me, represents exactly what I was talking about in regards to American exceptionalism. Your statement boils down to "these people kill us indiscriminately, so we should do the same to them, but we're still morally superior to them". Do you not see how this begets yet more violence, and allows us to, say, react to a terrorist attack by invading a country that didn't do it and killing over 200,000 civilians? And yet, you think we're more civilized and evolved? Why do our actions not deserve as much scrutiny as theirs?

It is true that, by percentage, the number of religious extremists in our country is lower than that in some Middle Eastern countries. They still exist, and exert a pretty ridiculous influence on our school boards and local legislatures, but they're still in the minority nationwide...slightly. But if we can find non-religious motivation to justify our acts of violence, then it's irrelevant from a foreign policy standpoint, what matters are the acts themselves.

As for the Samuel Huntington "clash of cultures" model, it's ridiculous. The majority of Arab countries are still allies with us, because the global neoliberal capitalist order creates pretty strong incentives for countries to remain so. The few exceptions do not break the rule, and most of the countries most utterly outside this system are not in the Middle East.

Ahem,

Please do not cite Milo Yiannopoulos in any serious context

Please do not act like your (also partisan) position holds the monopoly on sympathy for the victims of an atrocity. Please do not also act like you are the one staying out of the political arena when you have a) already quoted someone using a tragedy as an attempt to attack liberal media outlets he does not like and b) when you say "getting shit done so this could be prevented in the future" in the same sentence which, judging by the tone of your post, probably implies making it harder for people to immigrate to France despite how utterly irrelevant that is to this issue.

Yeah, those are the only people piggybacking off a horrific event to espouse their normal political rhetoric, something Milo "Fucking" Yiannopoulos would never ever do

The person splitting hairs over a definition is the person playing the semantics game

I am saying that there is no true definition and the entire construct of terrorism as you are using it was manufactured by the West, and the United States in particular, for the purposes of denying agency from our enemies and giving ourselves the moral high ground in order to justify any and all foreign policy actions we take ever

I guess we are allowed to stop caring about our own country's imperial actions once they hit their 40th birthday or so?

Every example I posted fits this definition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_state_terrorism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions

Again, it depends on whether your definition of terrorism includes state terrorism