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Yahoo! Bans "Allah" in Screen Names
szembek writes "According to The Register it seems that Yahoo! is banning the use of the string "Allah" in all screen names. The issue apparently became apparent when Linda Callahan attempted to use her surname in her screen name. The following link has an interesting list of terms that Yahoo does allow, and ones they don't."
I've run into problems with my last name ("Marcum") due to the last three characters.
It's still not as bad as Blizzard's, filtering out words like "basement".
Ignoring the whole political issue of it, if they are going to filter a string, they should at least allow common legit strings that it is a substring of.
On the whole, Christians don't threaten death to company executives or members of the press if they disagree with their opinions. Jews, Christains, Atheists...there's lots of wackos amongst those groups, but in the last few decades radical islam wins hands down for self-righteous violence and terror.
Make no mistake -- Yahoo is behaving cowardly in this instance. This has nothing to do with respecting other cultures, and all about avoiding undue attention to the corporate entity. Clearly in this case, terrorism has be effective.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
The whole point of writing articles like this is so people WILL stop using their services. If no one bitched, most people wouldn't know about it.
However ignoring demands and dealy harshly with the IRA would seem to contradict what you are saying here. What really started working with the IRA was discussion and resolution(after Maggie "we do not deal with terrorists" Thatcher left). It hasnt been always smooth and a perfect prcess... but there are a lot less bombs going off in London these days. And offshoot nutter(ie The Real IRA) seem to be geting stamped out(I suspect by the actual real IRA combined with law enforment).
Im not suggesting that this is always the way to go. However I think it would be a more positive step to allow some other hope for people who firmly beleive that their only option to fight back is to wire exoplosives to themselves and walk into crowed cafes or crash airliners into large, occupied skyscrapers. There will always be nutter prepared to do this for their cause... but the nutters need a support network. A support network involves money and people. The IRA got into trouble when their US fundign started drying up. But there were still nutter to blow stuff up. Its because the animosity and hatred become an instituion. Its viewed as a good thing to hate the english/americans/whoever.
I should disclaim that I am half Irish and my mother was born in Belfast. She left when she was 6 but was raised in a firm republican family(my grandmother was buried with the flag of the Republic. Her sister was killed and her brother maimed by a pub bomb. My great grandmother ran a safe house and stored guns for the IRA against the blacks and tans during the civil war). For many years my mother would not become a citizen of Australia as it would involve swearing an oath to the queen. She had no rational reason to hate the english, and she is not a bad person, but she did. It was ingrained that deeply from a distance of thousands of miles from The Troubles. Later in life she realised this... and became a citizen. Ive witnessed levels ranging from dislike to hatred for the other side. Of course its a lot less these days. I wouldnt say that I understand where a young palistinian young is coming from... I obviously can not... but I know something about irrational disputes that get ingrained in people... and in families.
Is there any doubt that we have lost the war on terror? should we even bother fighting it anymore? We repeatedly show these extremist nutcases that they can get whatever it is they want by terrorizing us. Every article about these ridiculous cartoons on CNN.com ends with a disclaimer: CNN has chosen not to reprint the cartoons out of repect for Islam when all I can read is CNN has chosen not to reprint the cartoons out of fear of getting firebombed proof that we have lost: Yeah, Osama may be on the run in remote areas of Pakistan & Afghanistan, but it takes me 40 mins to get through security at the airport, and I have to have my personal belongings searched to ride the subway.
Clearly this is not true. You can buy T-Shirts with pictures of Jesus on them in all sorts of poses, there are millions of Jesus jokes. South Park (I just heard on the radio) has an episode called 'Bloody Mary' that appears to be parodying his mother. Where are these "Christian" extremists exactly, and whose embassies are they burning?
I see it a bit differently. If a nut did something violent in the name of Christianity, the vast, vast majority of Christianity would denounce the act and the practitioner. That doesn't seem to be the case with Islam. I'm not sure of the reason. Maybe they agree with the sentiment. Maybe they're scared of being targeted themselves. I'd like to think it's the latter rather than the former.
I think that people are people wherever you go. It doesn't matter whether you're a Christian or a Muslim, and both religions have had their ugly moments. The key difference between Christian fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalists right now is that Christain fundamentalists typically have a pretty decent quality of life, and Islamic fundamentalists don't. The Christian fundamentalists are capable of the same self-righteous rampaging as the Islamic fundamentalists, but the Christian fundamentalists have so much to lose right now, it seems unimaginable to behave that way (who can afford to burn down a building and go to jail when they're working off that second mortgage?). If you took all of the wealth in the US and Europe and handed it over to the Middle East, I have a feeling that you'd soon see an awful lot of poor, desperate, angry Christians burning flags in the street while a bunch of well-fed, well-clothed Muslim families watched from their living rooms and wondered what in the hell could possibly make those Christian lunatics so rabid.
Fundamentalists of any religion are crazy, and poor, desperate fundamentalists of any religion are dangerous.
If you think there is a continuum then you do not understand the question. It is wrong to kill babies. It is wrong to deprive women of freedom of choice over their own bodies and subject them to a painful pregnancy for any reason but the welfare of others. Thus, taking the middle ground is to acknowledge that one or both of these injustices are happening.
There are people who are willing to stand by to see these injustices happen, but those are cynical, apathetic people who are of a lower moral character than abortion doctors and those who murder abortion doctors because both these groups are doing what is right in their own reasoning. Don't you see? abortion is the greatest debate in history because to a religious person, or a secular humanist or anyone else, life is sacred. You cannot say that there is part of a life in a woman's womb, you cannot redefine life though existential debate for that is denying your own existence and your own right to life.
To allow abortion in certain cases and deny it in others is to acknowledge abortion as the slaughter of the innocent and as a woman's right. Thus in the cases where it is denied, you are forcing a woman into having her life changed by an unwanted child for no reason but your bossy authoritarian and when abortion is granted you are killing a human that has done nothing to deserve it.
In the US today, abortion is legal, yet when you accidentally terminate a wanted pregnancy through negligent driving it is considered manslaughter. This inconsistency leads to only one conclusion: a fetus is human if and only if its mother wants it. If this is about the beginnings of humanity, how can we not extrapolate this nihilist world view into our own lives? Am I only human because my mother and others continue to love me?
There is no middle ground when talking about what is life, it didn't work for Plato, Descartes or Wittgenstein who are all people smarter than you that have tried to define humanity and it won't work for me. The abortion debate should be thought through by each one of us, because it goes beyond choice or killing babies, it cuts to the very core of each one of our existences. The politically correct middle ground might be the safest option, but most great questions, the middle ground between two extremes is the only one that can be conclusively proved to be wrong.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem