I hate to sound like a broken record, but seriously, watch the videos I linked to above ("Is feminism hate?" and "Not all feminists are like that"). They really highlight how mainstream this kind of thinking is, espoused by feminist senators, MPs, high court judges, NOW leadership, etc. Feminism as an ideology is a particularly fertile ground for 'no true Scotsman' fallacy because it lacks a defining document or founder (vs. for example Marxism). However its mainstream, doctrinaire form can be identified by the number of books a feminist author sells, or how much power they wield within an organization or government (see above). I'd really like somebody to comment on the content I've referenced...
Lastly, to reiterate slightly what I just said to AmiMoJo, I don't believe in rights for women or any delineated subset of humanity. I only believe in human rights. The problem with groups like feminists who militate only for women's rights is that it perpetuates an "us vs. them" mentality that frequently causes harm to the "other" (men) while simultaneously excusing/justifying it as deserved. I refuse to advocate purely for "men's rights" on the same grounds, and I see a lot of similar attitudes among some of the less enlightened in the "men's rights" community who necessarily see women as some kind of opposition to be overcome. That should not be the case, there should not be gender identity power blocks fighting each other over what should be human rights. Real equality cannot ever come from an interest group, it must be collaborative/cooperative from the start.
Your entire perspective is shaped by feminism-inspired gender exclusive blame. When the poster to whom I responded talked about how bad women have it, the implied cause was, of course, those evil, evil men who comprise half of society. Of course it's never considered how women might possibly be contributing to negative effects on their own gender, being the whole other half of society (and marginally *a majority*), because one of demonstrable fundamental tenets of feminist theory is that women are always victims and men always victimizers. When women harm women, it's still the patriarchy's fault. When men harm men, it's still an 'unintended consequence' of the patriarchy. Every kind of "gendered" harm is explained as being a product of the nature of "the patriarchy". Women who harm women are conceived as puppets of some inexorable, omnipresent but imperceptible patriarchal conspiracy force with no agency/choice of their own in their actions, and no responsibility/culpability for their outcomes. Women are always innocent, and men always guilty (which contributes to the current trend in the justice system that women routinely receive less jail time than men for the same crimes).
So, I'm not saying that men's problems are necessarily "women's fault" the way feminists says that women's problems are "men's fault". Men undoubtedly play a role, socially, in their own problems as a gender, but feminism irrationally dismisses that women possible play a voluntary role, socially, in their own problems as a gender. Furthermore, the extended problem is that while anybody who works to improve women's lives is lauded, people who work to improve men's lives are villified. There have been a few efforts to establish men's shelters for abuse, but they can't get funding under the same government programs as shelters for abused women because they're not women, and feminists are part of an active resistance to their inclusion (because men can't be victims of women). Feminists want everything for themselves, and if any men have the temerity to ask for similar services, they are portrayed as patriarchal chauvinist abuse-apologists who are "stealing from women". It's a disgusting, sexist double standard.
What we should be trying to achieve is a society that works on its problems without assigning blame to entire genders or phantasmal gender conspiracies, where each individual can be considered to be choosing to act for their own reasons and held equally and objectively accountable for their actions' effects, whether positive or negative.
(I might add, by the way, that I cringe at the term "men's rights" so often used among anti-feminists. Just as I dislike "women's rights" or "gay rights" or what-have-you. We are human beings, we have human rights, the end. I accept NO special rights, privileges, benefits, reverse/positive discrimination/sexism/racism, quotas for any gender, race, religion, age etc. You're a human, I'm a human, we're all fucking humans, and if we don't have equal access and equal consideration, we're acting/being acted upon in an unethical manner. It all needs to stop, and I oppose such things no matter what direction they come from, no matter how good the "intent" behind them is.)
This is because if you look at the methodology of that study, they designed such that if women answered affirmatively that 'x thing happened to them' but also answered that they didn't believe they had been raped but were interacting in a consensual way, that latter fact was ignored/discarded if the study's designers own opinion differed. E.g. if x thing was considered by the study architects to be rape, then it was rape whether or not the woman actually experiencing x thing believed it was rape.
This is the fundamental reason why my mother rejects feminism and why my wife rejects feminism, its adherents routinely dismiss women's own thoughts and feelings about their experiences whenever they happen not mesh with the feminist agenda. If a woman believes she wasn't raped, that some form of consent was present in her own mind, it is not right for some external arbiter to decide they know better about a woman's own state of mind and ethical status/disposition. Many feminists act like they represent all women automatically, whether or not those women want such representation, and any who actively refuse to have these activists speak for them are labelled 'gender traitors' or 'victims of patriarchal stockholm syndrome' or what-have-you, because having a vagina means you must conform your thinking to theirs or else.
It's the same thing with kids. I watch so many helicopter moms swoop in at the first sign that their kid is having difficulty and they solve the problem for them. Then they wonder why their kid isn't maturing or able to adapt to anything (by coincidence I was listening to a conversation between coworkers this morning corroborating this very phenomenon). Parents are a microcosm for society, and if there is too much coddling it produces weakness. Parents, like society, exist to protect their kids from the worst scenarios, but when my daughter runs into anything merely moderately difficult, I do nothing but give some advice and make her do it herself. Sometimes she whines or even cries about it, but after a few minutes of that she finally figures out that it's not going to get done without her own initiative and determination and ends up doing the thing about which she vehemently cried "I can't do it!" mere minutes before.
It's funny you accuse me of making up numbers at the same time that you accuse me of quoting numbers from "masculinist propaganda". It can't be both. And since you disrespectfully and lazily dismiss me out of hand with an assumption of bad faith making only the vaguest reference to the possibility that methodologies involved could be questionable, I'll let this lie here, since I have a feeling that if I did a lot of work writing up defenses of the aforesaid methodologies, you'd lazily dismiss those out of hand too with another assumption of bad faith.
Just remember, on the internet it's not important to convince an interlocutor, it's the audience that matters. You may be too lazy to look at the videos I referenced, but others may not be, and they won't look at them with the dogmatic prejudice of a convinced zealot. A lot of fence sitters are waking up, and the more your ilk ignores the substance of arguments to engage in things like genetic fallacy ("it's invalid because it comes from x!") the more those fence sitters will look askance at your dogma.
The last few years have seen a growing movement substantively criticizing modern feminism, and the words and deeds of mainstream feminist activists are no longer being given a pass and/or languishing in obscurity. You can be as lazy and dismissive as you want, in fact, I encourage it so people can see the inherent weakness of what you espouse. The audience is listening, let them see and judge for themselves.
So tell me, if men are so well treated, why is that men account for around 80% of all homeless? Why is it they account for more than 90% of workplace deaths, and rising? Why do men account for more than 80% of suicides among most of the adult age spectrum? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear how good men have it over the slamming of all their coffins.
With regard to your general 'feminism isn't a monolith' argument, watch the videos I linked to, since you obviously haven't. They address the subject far better than I can ad hoc with no sleep.
(And I don't deny some prejudice sourced in my humanity, but that cuts as equally to you as to me. You might as well disparage somebody for breathing.)
Wow, vapid ad hominem, what a great way to demonstrate your superiority. Did you even look at the videos, or are you afraid of any contrary opinions? That question is rhetorical, of course you are.
I realize now some time later that in my sleep deprived stupor I reversed 'connote' and 'denote' in my above writing. I apologize for any confusion my apparent dyslexia may have caused.
Feminists, as a class, are intolerant. Intolerance is like force, it's only wrong if you initiate it. I am intolerant of intolerance, and as such of feminists. I freely acknowledge this makes me a bigot connotatively, but not denotatively (pejoratively). I hasten to add that qualifying feminists as 'whiny' is not 'name calling' if, in fact, they are whining and that whining is the core of the issue at hand, all of which I believe are demonstrably true unless you can produce evidence to the contrary.
I would recommend you look at this video ("Is feminism hate?"), which though a bit long, is very methodical in its examination of the intolerance that is at the core of feminism. If it piques your interest, I would recommend other videos by the same woman which precede it in the same vein such as NAFALT (Not All Feminists Are Like That).
Actually, with some of those groups, while dissent might be shamed it would not be expelled. I've been to a few libertarian groups and nobody was pressured to leave, let alone kicked out, for simply having an opinion that didn't conform. That's because libertarians fundamentally value an open society where each person is entitled to their opinion (but must also be willing to take criticism for any public expression).
In science groups dissent is usually respected, especially if there is supporting evidence, though some may be mocked for more outlandish hypotheses. However there too, a degree of openness for repeatability and transparency is fundamental to scientific exchanges and advancement.
Some groups are predicated on control and dogma that will accommodate no correction or competition even to be expressed. Disagreement for them is not enough, anybody who says things they don't want to hear must be silenced completely and ostracized. If these people had complete political power, history teaches that they would just as likely execute or work to death anybody who had the temerity to disagree.
People can, and should, politely disagree, but anybody who demands that others be silenced and expelled is an enemy of open society that should be treated as such (I might add, not by being silenced, but by being exposed and ignored, the only ethical course for opinions which should naturally fail in the marketplace of ideas among adults).
From what is known about the exchange it seems likely that the Ada Foundation was threatening the con organizers in some way with some kind of negative action if they didn't get what they wanted. The organizers were acting under a duress that the Ada Foundation's representatives/agents initiated. Faulting the Ada Foundation is not a blameshift if, as is apparently the case, the organizers would not have been faced with a negative future condition that would be created by the Ada Foundation if the organizers didn't act.
Women are encouraged to participate only so long as they express "approved" opinions vetted by groupthink organizers, because an entire gender must necessarily be a monolith with no dissent. We should go to Susan B. Anthony's grave and hook up what's left her to a generator, since it's probably spinning hard enough to power New York City.
I like how they encourage women's participation by preventing women from speaking. If only they worked harder at keeping women from participating, maybe more women would be encourage to... participate... oh wait, that's completely stupid.
It's funny, my wife and I have been involved with some local skeptical groups (on her initiative, I might add) and some of the women already involved there started to side with the emerging Feminism+... *cough* I mean Atheism+ nonsense, and they started to push out people who they thought were 'discouraging women from participating' by not agreeing with everything they said about how great feminism necessarily is. The result? My wife became discouraged about participating and resigned as an assistant organizer.
These people aren't concerned with women participating, that's just the whitewash for their political goals. What they want is women to participate ONLY if they agree with what they say and will parrot it in one expansive echo chamber. Dissent will be shamed, expelled, and crushed. These people are the enemies of an open society and should be opposed whenever possible.
For the love of humanity, mod parent up. People need to be responsible for addressing their own difficulties, not force all of society to acquiesce and adopt arbitrary strictures to make sure they don't possibly ever cause somebody to remember something nasty.
So, all you whiny feminists, unless you are willing to be sensitive to people like this AC and ban all pseudo-military accouterments from all fashion forever etc. then you can STFU. That is of course if feminism wasn't already based on double standards run amok.
Unlike you, I'm not an apologist. I'm not going to defend improper behavior based on who is doing it, just like many in the US I also not only disapprove of the large amount of "collateral damage" being done overseas, but work against it politically. I have and will continue to vote for politicians who will decrease interventions and close overseas bases... granted nobody else votes for them so we get what we get.
The difference that you are still trying to minimize is that when the US military hamfistedly kills a bunch of civilians, we as a society don't go out in the street and ululate. The spectrum that exists for us as reaction goes from outraged disgust to, at worst, a personal conversation between redneck bigots about how good they think it is that more muslims are being killed. That sort of talk is not only constrained to a small number of people, but almost never public and never a community celebration because such behavior would likely lead to a riot since we as a society would never tolerate that.
Your attempt to separate religion and politics in the Islamic world is ludicrous. There is no tradition of separation of church and state in the Islamic world, half the countries' governments have Islamic in their official names, and they enact religious laws for religious purposes. Hell, in Saudi Arabia the government still, as in the last year or two, beheads people for being witches. Religion has always been a kind of politics, and the two have never overlapped more than in the Islamic world.
Celebrating military victories is a completely different matter because both sides are prepared to fight, and celebrating the end of a war is more different still since that is not celebrating killing but the end of killings. There is no relativistic weaseling here. A military attack is simple to define, it's when a military attacks another military. When some twit kills unarmed people going about their daily business, only in the most sick society can that be celebrated.
Your attempt at out of hand dismissal works both ways. I say that whatever sympathy and condemnation was expressed does not negate the fact that there were also celebrations.
It is a function of their religion because Muslims are the only ones who do it. The Christian minorities in the Middle East are culturally the same, but they don't do it, so it is not a function of culture. It's no excuse regardless. There is nothing, nothing that justifies a raucous celebration of the death of innocents who have done nothing other than live in a society you hate, and I won't be patronized by some white-guilt apologist about it.
The major difference is that when a Christian nutbag kills some people, in no part of the world is there a celebration in the streets. Whereas successful Islamic terrorism is in many places openly celebrated by whole communities passing out candy and cheering about how the murderers are heroes. It is intertwined with a culture of hatred and violence that is supported by communities.
Montana and Nevada are purely Spanish. I did forget the Dakotas and Ohio, didn't count New Mexico and Texas for arbitrary reasons, but yeah, point is proved to death.
If you think the civil service isn't political, I have a bridge to sell you. That's why they're called *political appointments* and are contentious in congress. Not just the secretary level but usually the administrator/director level and immediate underlings are routinely replaced from administration to administration. It's not just under the executive either, but on the judicial side most are appointed in a similarly contentious fashion for all manner of federal courts.
You have no place questioning my understanding. I've worked in the alphabet soup of Washington DC for years, and I can give you an education about how government really works that you won't find in a book (unless it's P.J. O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores).
You're the one who is wrong. Outside of the legislature, virtually no office is popularly elected. The Supreme Court isn't, the cabinet isn't, the bureaucracy under the cabinet isn't, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to sound like a broken record, but seriously, watch the videos I linked to above ("Is feminism hate?" and "Not all feminists are like that"). They really highlight how mainstream this kind of thinking is, espoused by feminist senators, MPs, high court judges, NOW leadership, etc. Feminism as an ideology is a particularly fertile ground for 'no true Scotsman' fallacy because it lacks a defining document or founder (vs. for example Marxism). However its mainstream, doctrinaire form can be identified by the number of books a feminist author sells, or how much power they wield within an organization or government (see above). I'd really like somebody to comment on the content I've referenced...
Lastly, to reiterate slightly what I just said to AmiMoJo, I don't believe in rights for women or any delineated subset of humanity. I only believe in human rights. The problem with groups like feminists who militate only for women's rights is that it perpetuates an "us vs. them" mentality that frequently causes harm to the "other" (men) while simultaneously excusing/justifying it as deserved. I refuse to advocate purely for "men's rights" on the same grounds, and I see a lot of similar attitudes among some of the less enlightened in the "men's rights" community who necessarily see women as some kind of opposition to be overcome. That should not be the case, there should not be gender identity power blocks fighting each other over what should be human rights. Real equality cannot ever come from an interest group, it must be collaborative/cooperative from the start.
Your entire perspective is shaped by feminism-inspired gender exclusive blame. When the poster to whom I responded talked about how bad women have it, the implied cause was, of course, those evil, evil men who comprise half of society. Of course it's never considered how women might possibly be contributing to negative effects on their own gender, being the whole other half of society (and marginally *a majority*), because one of demonstrable fundamental tenets of feminist theory is that women are always victims and men always victimizers. When women harm women, it's still the patriarchy's fault. When men harm men, it's still an 'unintended consequence' of the patriarchy. Every kind of "gendered" harm is explained as being a product of the nature of "the patriarchy". Women who harm women are conceived as puppets of some inexorable, omnipresent but imperceptible patriarchal conspiracy force with no agency/choice of their own in their actions, and no responsibility/culpability for their outcomes. Women are always innocent, and men always guilty (which contributes to the current trend in the justice system that women routinely receive less jail time than men for the same crimes).
So, I'm not saying that men's problems are necessarily "women's fault" the way feminists says that women's problems are "men's fault". Men undoubtedly play a role, socially, in their own problems as a gender, but feminism irrationally dismisses that women possible play a voluntary role, socially, in their own problems as a gender. Furthermore, the extended problem is that while anybody who works to improve women's lives is lauded, people who work to improve men's lives are villified. There have been a few efforts to establish men's shelters for abuse, but they can't get funding under the same government programs as shelters for abused women because they're not women, and feminists are part of an active resistance to their inclusion (because men can't be victims of women). Feminists want everything for themselves, and if any men have the temerity to ask for similar services, they are portrayed as patriarchal chauvinist abuse-apologists who are "stealing from women". It's a disgusting, sexist double standard.
What we should be trying to achieve is a society that works on its problems without assigning blame to entire genders or phantasmal gender conspiracies, where each individual can be considered to be choosing to act for their own reasons and held equally and objectively accountable for their actions' effects, whether positive or negative.
(I might add, by the way, that I cringe at the term "men's rights" so often used among anti-feminists. Just as I dislike "women's rights" or "gay rights" or what-have-you. We are human beings, we have human rights, the end. I accept NO special rights, privileges, benefits, reverse/positive discrimination/sexism/racism, quotas for any gender, race, religion, age etc. You're a human, I'm a human, we're all fucking humans, and if we don't have equal access and equal consideration, we're acting/being acted upon in an unethical manner. It all needs to stop, and I oppose such things no matter what direction they come from, no matter how good the "intent" behind them is.)
This is because if you look at the methodology of that study, they designed such that if women answered affirmatively that 'x thing happened to them' but also answered that they didn't believe they had been raped but were interacting in a consensual way, that latter fact was ignored/discarded if the study's designers own opinion differed. E.g. if x thing was considered by the study architects to be rape, then it was rape whether or not the woman actually experiencing x thing believed it was rape.
This is the fundamental reason why my mother rejects feminism and why my wife rejects feminism, its adherents routinely dismiss women's own thoughts and feelings about their experiences whenever they happen not mesh with the feminist agenda. If a woman believes she wasn't raped, that some form of consent was present in her own mind, it is not right for some external arbiter to decide they know better about a woman's own state of mind and ethical status/disposition. Many feminists act like they represent all women automatically, whether or not those women want such representation, and any who actively refuse to have these activists speak for them are labelled 'gender traitors' or 'victims of patriarchal stockholm syndrome' or what-have-you, because having a vagina means you must conform your thinking to theirs or else.
It's the same thing with kids. I watch so many helicopter moms swoop in at the first sign that their kid is having difficulty and they solve the problem for them. Then they wonder why their kid isn't maturing or able to adapt to anything (by coincidence I was listening to a conversation between coworkers this morning corroborating this very phenomenon). Parents are a microcosm for society, and if there is too much coddling it produces weakness. Parents, like society, exist to protect their kids from the worst scenarios, but when my daughter runs into anything merely moderately difficult, I do nothing but give some advice and make her do it herself. Sometimes she whines or even cries about it, but after a few minutes of that she finally figures out that it's not going to get done without her own initiative and determination and ends up doing the thing about which she vehemently cried "I can't do it!" mere minutes before.
This is one of clearest, most epicly concise statements on this matter I have ever seen, and I commend you for it.
It's funny you accuse me of making up numbers at the same time that you accuse me of quoting numbers from "masculinist propaganda". It can't be both. And since you disrespectfully and lazily dismiss me out of hand with an assumption of bad faith making only the vaguest reference to the possibility that methodologies involved could be questionable, I'll let this lie here, since I have a feeling that if I did a lot of work writing up defenses of the aforesaid methodologies, you'd lazily dismiss those out of hand too with another assumption of bad faith.
Just remember, on the internet it's not important to convince an interlocutor, it's the audience that matters. You may be too lazy to look at the videos I referenced, but others may not be, and they won't look at them with the dogmatic prejudice of a convinced zealot. A lot of fence sitters are waking up, and the more your ilk ignores the substance of arguments to engage in things like genetic fallacy ("it's invalid because it comes from x!") the more those fence sitters will look askance at your dogma.
The last few years have seen a growing movement substantively criticizing modern feminism, and the words and deeds of mainstream feminist activists are no longer being given a pass and/or languishing in obscurity. You can be as lazy and dismissive as you want, in fact, I encourage it so people can see the inherent weakness of what you espouse. The audience is listening, let them see and judge for themselves.
So tell me, if men are so well treated, why is that men account for around 80% of all homeless? Why is it they account for more than 90% of workplace deaths, and rising? Why do men account for more than 80% of suicides among most of the adult age spectrum? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear how good men have it over the slamming of all their coffins.
With regard to your general 'feminism isn't a monolith' argument, watch the videos I linked to, since you obviously haven't. They address the subject far better than I can ad hoc with no sleep.
(And I don't deny some prejudice sourced in my humanity, but that cuts as equally to you as to me. You might as well disparage somebody for breathing.)
Wow, vapid ad hominem, what a great way to demonstrate your superiority. Did you even look at the videos, or are you afraid of any contrary opinions? That question is rhetorical, of course you are.
Drop those dox AC. Considering that rabid feminists like Greg Laden try to get anybody fired who disagrees with them, turnabout is fair play.
I prefer the Richard Cheese version.
I realize now some time later that in my sleep deprived stupor I reversed 'connote' and 'denote' in my above writing. I apologize for any confusion my apparent dyslexia may have caused.
Feminists, as a class, are intolerant. Intolerance is like force, it's only wrong if you initiate it. I am intolerant of intolerance, and as such of feminists. I freely acknowledge this makes me a bigot connotatively, but not denotatively (pejoratively). I hasten to add that qualifying feminists as 'whiny' is not 'name calling' if, in fact, they are whining and that whining is the core of the issue at hand, all of which I believe are demonstrably true unless you can produce evidence to the contrary.
I would recommend you look at this video ("Is feminism hate?"), which though a bit long, is very methodical in its examination of the intolerance that is at the core of feminism. If it piques your interest, I would recommend other videos by the same woman which precede it in the same vein such as NAFALT (Not All Feminists Are Like That).
Actually, with some of those groups, while dissent might be shamed it would not be expelled. I've been to a few libertarian groups and nobody was pressured to leave, let alone kicked out, for simply having an opinion that didn't conform. That's because libertarians fundamentally value an open society where each person is entitled to their opinion (but must also be willing to take criticism for any public expression).
In science groups dissent is usually respected, especially if there is supporting evidence, though some may be mocked for more outlandish hypotheses. However there too, a degree of openness for repeatability and transparency is fundamental to scientific exchanges and advancement.
Some groups are predicated on control and dogma that will accommodate no correction or competition even to be expressed. Disagreement for them is not enough, anybody who says things they don't want to hear must be silenced completely and ostracized. If these people had complete political power, history teaches that they would just as likely execute or work to death anybody who had the temerity to disagree.
People can, and should, politely disagree, but anybody who demands that others be silenced and expelled is an enemy of open society that should be treated as such (I might add, not by being silenced, but by being exposed and ignored, the only ethical course for opinions which should naturally fail in the marketplace of ideas among adults).
From what is known about the exchange it seems likely that the Ada Foundation was threatening the con organizers in some way with some kind of negative action if they didn't get what they wanted. The organizers were acting under a duress that the Ada Foundation's representatives/agents initiated. Faulting the Ada Foundation is not a blameshift if, as is apparently the case, the organizers would not have been faced with a negative future condition that would be created by the Ada Foundation if the organizers didn't act.
Additionally, since you seem not to know, the presenter, Violet Blue, is a woman, not a man.
Women are encouraged to participate only so long as they express "approved" opinions vetted by groupthink organizers, because an entire gender must necessarily be a monolith with no dissent. We should go to Susan B. Anthony's grave and hook up what's left her to a generator, since it's probably spinning hard enough to power New York City.
I like how they encourage women's participation by preventing women from speaking. If only they worked harder at keeping women from participating, maybe more women would be encourage to... participate... oh wait, that's completely stupid.
... *cough* I mean Atheism+ nonsense, and they started to push out people who they thought were 'discouraging women from participating' by not agreeing with everything they said about how great feminism necessarily is. The result? My wife became discouraged about participating and resigned as an assistant organizer.
It's funny, my wife and I have been involved with some local skeptical groups (on her initiative, I might add) and some of the women already involved there started to side with the emerging Feminism+
These people aren't concerned with women participating, that's just the whitewash for their political goals. What they want is women to participate ONLY if they agree with what they say and will parrot it in one expansive echo chamber. Dissent will be shamed, expelled, and crushed. These people are the enemies of an open society and should be opposed whenever possible.
For the love of humanity, mod parent up. People need to be responsible for addressing their own difficulties, not force all of society to acquiesce and adopt arbitrary strictures to make sure they don't possibly ever cause somebody to remember something nasty.
So, all you whiny feminists, unless you are willing to be sensitive to people like this AC and ban all pseudo-military accouterments from all fashion forever etc. then you can STFU. That is of course if feminism wasn't already based on double standards run amok.
Unlike you, I'm not an apologist. I'm not going to defend improper behavior based on who is doing it, just like many in the US I also not only disapprove of the large amount of "collateral damage" being done overseas, but work against it politically. I have and will continue to vote for politicians who will decrease interventions and close overseas bases... granted nobody else votes for them so we get what we get.
The difference that you are still trying to minimize is that when the US military hamfistedly kills a bunch of civilians, we as a society don't go out in the street and ululate. The spectrum that exists for us as reaction goes from outraged disgust to, at worst, a personal conversation between redneck bigots about how good they think it is that more muslims are being killed. That sort of talk is not only constrained to a small number of people, but almost never public and never a community celebration because such behavior would likely lead to a riot since we as a society would never tolerate that.
Your attempt to separate religion and politics in the Islamic world is ludicrous. There is no tradition of separation of church and state in the Islamic world, half the countries' governments have Islamic in their official names, and they enact religious laws for religious purposes. Hell, in Saudi Arabia the government still, as in the last year or two, beheads people for being witches . Religion has always been a kind of politics, and the two have never overlapped more than in the Islamic world.
Celebrating military victories is a completely different matter because both sides are prepared to fight, and celebrating the end of a war is more different still since that is not celebrating killing but the end of killings. There is no relativistic weaseling here. A military attack is simple to define, it's when a military attacks another military. When some twit kills unarmed people going about their daily business, only in the most sick society can that be celebrated.
Your attempt at out of hand dismissal works both ways. I say that whatever sympathy and condemnation was expressed does not negate the fact that there were also celebrations.
It is a function of their religion because Muslims are the only ones who do it. The Christian minorities in the Middle East are culturally the same, but they don't do it, so it is not a function of culture. It's no excuse regardless. There is nothing, nothing that justifies a raucous celebration of the death of innocents who have done nothing other than live in a society you hate, and I won't be patronized by some white-guilt apologist about it.
The major difference is that when a Christian nutbag kills some people, in no part of the world is there a celebration in the streets. Whereas successful Islamic terrorism is in many places openly celebrated by whole communities passing out candy and cheering about how the murderers are heroes. It is intertwined with a culture of hatred and violence that is supported by communities.
Montana and Nevada are purely Spanish. I did forget the Dakotas and Ohio, didn't count New Mexico and Texas for arbitrary reasons, but yeah, point is proved to death.
If you think the civil service isn't political, I have a bridge to sell you. That's why they're called *political appointments* and are contentious in congress. Not just the secretary level but usually the administrator/director level and immediate underlings are routinely replaced from administration to administration. It's not just under the executive either, but on the judicial side most are appointed in a similarly contentious fashion for all manner of federal courts.
You have no place questioning my understanding. I've worked in the alphabet soup of Washington DC for years, and I can give you an education about how government really works that you won't find in a book (unless it's P.J. O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores).
You're the one who is wrong. Outside of the legislature, virtually no office is popularly elected. The Supreme Court isn't, the cabinet isn't, the bureaucracy under the cabinet isn't, etc.