Other people already responded to this post pretty adequately but I really hate comments like this. On top of coming off to me like a blatant appeal for approval, you're creating a false equivalency between having a political agenda and not having sympathy for the victims. I take pride in my political agenda, because I believe that politics can be one of the most powerful ways to affect peoples' lives, for better or for worse. As a person who is extremely interested in politics and has a very strong and consistent worldview, I would be mad at myself if I DIDN'T enter into debates like this. To me, that would show a bigger lack of sympathy.

I didn't want to bring this up earlier because I felt like it would be too irrelevant/attention-grabby but my dad's family is all French, came over after WWII, and my paternal grandfather worked in the French embassy in Washington, D.C. I got off the phone with him earlier, and thankfully all my relatives in Paris are safe. Given all that, it really upsets me when people try to accuse people who encourage discussion in threads like this as being callous and unconcerned with human life. I realize that was not your specific intent, but it's definitely a strain that runs through a lot of these topics. I am not just sitting on an ivory tower, removed from emotion.

Posts like this are the reason no one can take you seriously. You bristle like crazy the second anyone points out how you're making a double standard specifically for Islam, and in the same post attack the religion like crazy with snarky sarcasm and an actual fucking xD. For the record, the Bible is exactly like the Quran in terms of the crazy amounts of violence and intolerance it is filled with, including actions condoned by God, actions committed in the name of God, and actions committed BY God. An Alien coming to Earth would have a pretty hard fucking time distinguishing between the two.

This double standard is part of the problem when it comes to discrimination against Muslims.

Fundamentalist Christians claim that the word of the Bible is inerrant, and that if something in reality seems to contradict the Bible, it must be REALITY that is wrong. They do not worship a God, they worship a book. Fundamentalist Muslims are the exact same way. Both texts contain many passages that, when one is not allowed to interpret and contextualize them, seem to promote abhorrent practices. Moderate members of both religions believe that their holy books were either based on God's word/the word of angels but dictated to and interpreted by mere men, or were entirely written by men based on events they witnessed or were told about. If you are not allowed this sort of leeway, then you can start talking about the most objectionable aspects of the religious text, not to mention the actual contradictions present in some of them, due to their multiple authors.

You just claimed it was effective and posted:
-a us news and world report article that only gave individual opinions on the situation with no evidence suggesting it was either effective OR ineffective
-a wikipedia page with an entire "criticism" section, including mentioning a study that suggests that, given how few terrorists there are relative to other people in general, the racial profiling component of the TSA's airport security is not a relevant factor in catching them
-a quote from a member of the Bush administration asserting his opinion with no evidence to back it up

So how are you deriving that conclusion?

I do not, because I consider myself a reality-based person, hence why I read your links looking for actual evidence and found none.

Yeah, you're definitely making a tangible and reality-based argument here, filled with empirical observations, statistics, and sound logic. I'm just a goddamn hippy though!

I never said increased airport security overall was not a necessity, nor did I begin to discuss the more murky topic of wiretaps and electronic surveillance IN GENERAL. I made a specific point about racial profiling, and have yet to see you present any evidence on that subject.

Elliot Rodgers was pretty objectively a men's rights activist. Just as how every time people on that side of the fence post a video of some particularly bitchy social justice warrior with some goofy hair color yelling over someone else and saying ridiculous ad hominems to try to make a point about feminism as a whole, some people probably exploited our same biases towards anecdotal evidence in Rodgers' case. It doesn't change what the dude was, it could just be less relevant than those people would let on.

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