If you're up for an experiment, why not go a bit further. You're assuming he was targeted because he's brown, but you have to do everything he did except be brown to really test that. So change your name to an ethnic Muslim name. Start sending money and traveling to the Middle East. Leave similar comments. Have someone report you as a possible threat. If nothing happens to you then you've got a pretty good case.
Normal depends on the level of detail you apply. If you report it as "sending money to family" maybe. If you report it as "sending money to Egypt" well how many Americans regularly send money to Egypt? Not many as a percentage.
The fact that he's a college student himself probably makes it very unusual. How many students send money to their families rather than vice versa? Could definitely be accepting money from one group and forwarding it on himself.
My understanding is not over simplified, but perhaps my example was. Doesn't change the point. Since Islam has ramifications for all aspects of life, including politics, education, economics, civil rights, and so on, you cannot arbitrarily claim that Factor X is responsible for an ailment in Muslim society, because in reality Factor X is probably influenced by Islam itself.
You are the one over-simplifying here, because you treat me like a cardboard cutout. Oh, I can't have a real argument, I can't even be a rational person, I'm simply a bigot who don't know his nummers good. That makes my arguments easy to dismiss, I'm sure, and that's fine if you aren't interested in actually discussing it. Otherwise you're doing yourself a disservice because I'm really not a complete retard. We may both learn things.
You'd have to show that all muslims behave as you claim - independent of other socioeconomic factors.
Why all Muslims? I already explained how I view the relationship between followers and the religion. It's not so black and white.
Because that's the mother of all cop-outs. You choose to hold an opinion that denies the basic humanity of an enormous group of people and are perfectly happy to do so on ridiculously flimsy evidence.
So because there are a lot of Muslims I'm not allowed to dislike Islam? That makes no sense. There are a lot of Americans and plenty of people around the world dislike America. That's life. Sometimes people don't like your beliefs, actions, or some combination.
Do you also dislike judaism because its people are greedy?
No because I don't think many Jews are greedy.
How about catholicism because their priests are pedophiles?
Yep I have lost respect for Catholicism as a religion due to the behavior of the Church and its priests. And?
Christianity because the murderers in Rwanda were christian?
No because unless you're being purposely obtuse it's trivial to see how many Christians aren't like that.
When it comes to what I originally talked about, how women are treated in Islam, it's not so trivial to see that "most" Muslims treat women as well as we expect in the West. In more than one major Islamic society today (not 1000 years ago) there are very unfair laws about women.
Now if Christian militias were going around murdering people, every day, in many separate areas, for decades, then yeah I would dislike Christianity too. Fair is fair. Or for example I probably would have hated Christianity during the 30 Years War in Germany. Is that really hard to believe? But times change. I look at religions as they are now in addition to their histories.
Really? So, you've ruled out wealth? GDP? Literacy rates?
I'm not sure you can rule out OR "rule in" wealth, GDP, and literacy rates, because they are not separate from Islam. Islam can affect a nation's wealth since Islam has economic edicts in it (like preventing interest, which some Muslim communities abide by) that make a society less competitive. At that point you can no longer say "They do X because they are poor" because Islam may make them poor. I'm not saying it does, but that since for many people Islam is a "total way of life" which impacts economics and education, you can't rule out Islam as being tied to the very things you wish to rule out.
I don't get it. It's like you're asking me for a rigorous study when I explicitly said "I haven't done a rigorous study". And then being snide about innumeracy as if I had tried to present a numbers based argument and completely failed. But when did I do that?
I'm not innumerate, I'm not a bigot. What's bigoted about saying I don't like Islam because of how it treats women? It's just a religion. I'm not sorry if it offends you that I don't like a certain religion and I don't see why I should be.
Okay let's get more rigorous since you seem to want to. My claim which freaked you out so much was "I consider it bad because contemporary Muslim societies still treat women a certain way."
You claimed that's "an extreme oversimplification" and then concluded that I "want to judge a religion by the societies in which it is prevalent but ignore all the other factors that influence those societies." (I'll note you're assigning motive, want, without any basis other than the fact that you didn't like what I said. You actually don't know my motives or reasoning, just my conclusion.)
Maybe how I should have responded is to state that religion is a big factor of a society, especially a religion as old as Islam, and in many Muslim societies Islam is arguably the biggest factor because the introduction of Islam changed it so much.
Your statement, implying that Islam is separate from, or at least a relatively small factor in, the societies in which Islam is practiced, makes me think that you see Islam as a well defined and outlined doctrine that people either subscribe to or not. And any action they take can be labeled as "Islamic" or "not Islamic" based on some set of rules. So terrorists who suicide bomb a market are "not Islamic" because you know some rule that disqualifies them.
Maybe I've misunderstood you, but if not, let me clarify that I don't believe in that approach. To me, a religion (any religion) is defined by its initial documents and leaders as well as modified over time by the actions of its followers.
So with that in mind, what kind of evidence would you need to hear from me to support my claim that I don't like Islam because (one reason, anyway) of how it treats women in many contemporary Islamic societies, without just judging me as a bigot (ie having no real reason except pre-existing discrimination)?
1. You agree that the TLD system is man made. 2. You agree that the intent of the.ly tld is what matters.
I'm going to call this close enough. I'm sure you understand that what I'm arguing is that intents can change. You may disagree, I have no problem with that. I'm just surprised by the people who jumped on me and said it's their "right" to discriminate based on religion and we can say/do nothing about it because it's their "land."
Fair enough, I'm just happy that you recognize that it is an issue of what we find useful, not an issue of some country having a "right" to a tld. To me, using leverage to encourage secularism is a bigger win than maintaining some list of country codes, but whatever.
That's an extreme oversimplification that is essentially begging the question.
It's certainly not begging the question. There is an external fact, the way many contemporary Muslims treat women, and there is my judgment of that fact. There is no circular argument because my judgment is separate from the facts.
You want to judge a religion by the societies in which it is prevalent but ignore all the other factors that influence those societies. You might as well judge buddhism by the state of cambodia under the khmer rouge or even secularism by the state of the USSR and China during the cultural revolution.
No, I'm willing to entertain other reasons for the state of things. However, since there are so many Muslim countries, each with different circumstances and histories, and there are also Muslim communities within non-Muslim countries... when you start canceling out factors, the biggest one that remains is "Muslim".
Obviously I haven't done a rigorous study of every single Muslim culture but I'm comfortable enough taking a guess based on what I do know.
Just like Libya doesn't have to honour the rest of the world's DNS. But when countries do that you'd probably complain about censorship.
Yes I would call it censorship if asked but it wouldn't affect me personally because I don't live in Libya. So I probably wouldn't just go around volunteering that information. The issue here is they are taking advantage of a shared resource (dns) and imposing their own religious views on its use, unlike other members. If the rest of the world said "no sites related to libya outside of.ly", e.g. tit for tat, then at least it would be fair. As it is, it's like they have a punitive trade tariff but their trading partners don't retaliate at all. That's my sense of it.
He wrote "expect", not "require". The UK registry doesn't require anything, although the.US registry does.
I don't know what that has to do with anything. The issue is, are the restrictions imposed by the US and the UK fair or not? To me, since I like separation of church and state, it's perfectly fair for the UK to have a restriction that says "only UK sites allowed" because that's a secular decision, but if they suddenly said "no anti-Anglican sites allowed" then I wouldn't like it and I would say maybe the UK shouldn't have control over a tld since they don't understand secularism. That's exactly what's happening with Libya, but with Islam.
I also see lots of other domains from all round the world (at work, an international organisation -- and I'm including tiny islands' domains here) and almost all of them are being used as intended.
Fair enough, but that doesn't make what I said "ignorant". Surely you see that you are a minority of internet users. The vast majority have never been to a.ly site that actually was related to Libya. That's all I was saying.
It is for the Libyans to decide what a legitimate use of their "land" is. Should.int be open for trade? Should.aq (Antarctica) be forced to sell domains -- they don't at present?
It's not for the Libyans to decide. We come to agreements with people and honor them. If we don't like them, we change the agreements and reevaluate. I don't get what's so complicated about this. If we simply said "countries that discriminate based on religion in the assignment of domain names do not have access to a tld" then the problem is solved. The Libyans land is no longer their so to speak. And since the land is virtual, that's actually really easy to implement.
The enlightenment of both Christendom and the Islamic world came from the same source: the Greeks. If anything is inherently positive about 'Christian society' is that it steps aside just a little more easily than an Islamic one.
Great, that's a start. I would add to it that the human form role model of Christianity (Jesus) presents positive traits to emulate and almost no negative traits, whereas Mohammed is mostly negative (from a modern perspective). That's about it. But taken together those are HUGE differences.
You must not have read very carefully then, as there is Deut 20:13-14 wherein the Israelites were told that when they conquered a territory they could certainly take the virgin girls (which in the period would be almost invariably children) as concubines.
Okay fair enough I didn't read the whole page, I just picked a quote and found the analogous situation for the Koran. Like I said, the number of bad phrases in two books isn't as important to me anyway as the actual practices in the various societies. Actions speak louder than words and all that.
For starters, Libya doesn't have to tolerate worldwide usage of that domain. It's for sites based in Libya. That's what country-specific TLDs are for.
And the rest of the world doesn't have to honor Libya's usage. We could set up our own.ly registrar and root server and all that. They can keep.ly internally if they want, the rest of the world could use like ".libya" instead.
When I surf to britishshoes.co.uk, I expect that the online shopkeeper is in somewhere in the UK, not in his Mom's basement in Omaha.
Really, interesting. So you would be all for kicking out all non-US companies from the.com tld since it was originally for the US. Or, eh, maybe just kicking out all non-commercial sites from.com. I guess I'll have to shut down my non revenue generating blog.
But no somehow I doubt you care that much about the true original intent of tlds.
I think you miss the key point, and that being the purpose of country-specific TLDs. They're not just so you can come up with clever spellings.
That's what they were originally for, but in reality a lot of them are more important for the clever spellings than anything else. Why are you so resistant to changing that? What right am I violating by suggesting ly be taken away from Libya?
Metaphorically, you are talking about taking their land.
So what? Metaphorically you can come up with any situation you like. Metaphorically the Libyans are acting like brigands, taking advantage of "their" land not for any legitimate purpose but simply as a way to harass others who do have a legitimate purpose for it (like trade).
You advocate changing the treaty so that it works in your favor. I don't know whether to make a comparison of US treatment of American Indians, or to go with abuse of eminent domain.
Yes you are right. And I'm not seriously advocating that we amend whatever treaty has doled out tlds based on country codes. I don't really care that much. However I am very surprised that there is so much animosity to the mere idea of doing that. Why shouldn't we use leverage to punish repressive countries? (I'm not a moral relativist, obviously.) I mean are you also against sanctions for Iran... it's THEIR land, they can build nuclear weapons and biological weapons if they like! Come on, that sort of thinking is very naive.
I've read lists like that before about several religions. I guess I'm more interested in the historical treatment of women in various societies, at least more so than a simple list of offensive phrases in some documents. (Not just women, of course, but that's what we're talking about.)
To me a religion is more than a philosophy defined in some foundational book. I don't consider Islam a bad religion because the Koran says so and so about women. I consider it bad because contemporary Muslim societies still treat women a certain way. Comparing multiple religions over a thousand year period and coming up with one winner is impossible, but it's pretty clear that Islam is not the winner. Its "golden age" was far too short and never came close to the enlightenment of Christian states today.
In terms of sheer quantity, the Bible beats the Quran by about a factor of seven. Qualitatively, IMO the Old Testament is worse than the Quran, but the New Testament is better.
That website is pretty focused on the Bible so I don't think comparing those particular lists is very fair, even in terms of quantity.
But qualitatively, what do you see as worse in the Old Testament than the following little nugget from the page you linked to:
"All married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess." You can't have sex with married women, unless they are slaves obtained in war (with whom you may rape or do whatever you like).
The closest thing on the page you linked to is:
19:20 And whosoever lieth carnally with a woman, that is a bondmaid, betrothed to an husband, and not at all redeemed, nor freedom given her; she shall be scourged; they shall not be put to death, because she was not free. 19:21 And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, even a ram for a trespass offering. 19:22 And the priest shall make an atonement for him with the ram of the trespass offering before the LORD for his sin which he hath done: and the sin which he hath done shall be forgiven him.
So in the Koran, jihad fighters are encouraged to take slaves and have sex with them. In the Bible, it says it is wrong to have sex with a slave, but you are not punished very much.
It's also odd that your page leaves out the hadiths, which are a lot like the gospels of Christianity. They chronicle Mohammed's life and actions and are a very important part of Islam, both in jurisprudence and in dictating Muslim behavior (since they are supposed to emulate Mohammed).
Because it's their country's code, and "we" have decided that each country can do what it wants with its code.
Exactly, so "we" can also change that.
I don't get why this is so scandalous. All I'm proposing is that if a country has a useful tld (and ly is useful as an English suffix), and shows itself to be intolerant of worldwide usage of that domain, then take it away.
I'm not saying cut them off from the entire internet. Give them a new tld. We have 3 letter country codes, give them that one.
Why do people think everything is concrete and can never be changed if "we" made a mistake initially?
But it seems you don't like it when Libya wants to follow Libyan standards for the Libyan domain.
They can do whatever they want, but "we" all have rights to change how shared, virtual property like tld's is administered. It's not like I'm talking about taking their land for god's sake.
Okay let's agree that neither of the groups have a right (I certainly didn't mean to imply that we have an inherent right to the.ly tld). How do you decide a conflict?
You can do it by voting. I'm pretty sure Libya is a smaller country than the US plus other English speaking populations.
You can do it by reasoning with principles. I'd say language use is a decent principle. The ly suffix is more useful to us than to them.
How would you choose to do it, that leads to them keeping.ly? Are you just arguing that what's done is done and no backsies? Seems childish.
Fair enough, then let's take things on a case by case basis. Libya has shown that they do not deserve to be in charge of a tld that happens to be a common English suffix. They have no inherent right to it, so this is just an issue of expedience and user experience for English speakers. Let's just reassign Libya a new tld.
every country is allowed their own TLD. Would you prefer a situation where one country is allowed to pick and choose which other countries are "worthy" of a TLD?
How about a compromise -- several countries, but not Libya? Or any other country trying to impose religious law onto the dns system?
.ly is essentially "their internet". If you don't like it, use someone elses.
Funny because they're using our letters, and ly is a common English suffix. How about if we reassign them to use . instead. (Those are Arabic letters, in case slashdot eats them.)
Yes but why is it for them? They didn't build my internet. How about if we say, well ly is a useful suffix, so we're taking the ly tld and keeping it. Why isn't it up to us to decide that and administer it how we see fit?
That's my point, it's not as simple as saying "let them decide" because this is a global, shared, intellectual property. It's perfectly reasonable for others to expect certain rules and standards to be followed.
I want to set rules that say if you partake in the global dns system, there is a minimum code of conduct which you must follow, or you get kicked out. How is that not self-determination? That's me determining for myself what I would like to see. Ah, you mean you want Libya to have self-determination and democracy, but not anybody else for some reason.
I don't want a fight, but I'm curious what you have to say. I don't know a whole lot about Paul. I find it very hard to believe that he was worse than Mohammed.
And about the equivalence, I'm talking about lumping all 3 major religions into just "Abrahamic religions" in reference to treatment of women, not the divine being/prophet part. Sure they're all full of shit, women have been treated badly in all of them, but stopping there is leaving a false impression. For one it ignores the last 1000 years of evolution in the religions.
There's actually one with some astronaut chatter mixed in, amazingly well connected to this discussion, though not the same Dido or astronaut. What are the odds. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5Z2WZ1P3NU
Since when did the actual cause of something become a red herring??
Would you say fundamentalist Christianity is a red herring too in relation to Texas's enforcement of the sabbath? Or is this excuse business reserved for sharia?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're up for an experiment, why not go a bit further. You're assuming he was targeted because he's brown, but you have to do everything he did except be brown to really test that. So change your name to an ethnic Muslim name. Start sending money and traveling to the Middle East. Leave similar comments. Have someone report you as a possible threat. If nothing happens to you then you've got a pretty good case.
Does the slippery slope argument really hold weight?
As McCarthyism progressed in this country, did people who like math or drink chocolate milk come under fire?
Entirely normal
Normal depends on the level of detail you apply. If you report it as "sending money to family" maybe. If you report it as "sending money to Egypt" well how many Americans regularly send money to Egypt? Not many as a percentage.
The fact that he's a college student himself probably makes it very unusual. How many students send money to their families rather than vice versa? Could definitely be accepting money from one group and forwarding it on himself.
I wonder why they needed real time updates instead of just putting a passive receiver on, having it record, and picking it up later.
My understanding is not over simplified, but perhaps my example was. Doesn't change the point. Since Islam has ramifications for all aspects of life, including politics, education, economics, civil rights, and so on, you cannot arbitrarily claim that Factor X is responsible for an ailment in Muslim society, because in reality Factor X is probably influenced by Islam itself.
You are the one over-simplifying here, because you treat me like a cardboard cutout. Oh, I can't have a real argument, I can't even be a rational person, I'm simply a bigot who don't know his nummers good. That makes my arguments easy to dismiss, I'm sure, and that's fine if you aren't interested in actually discussing it. Otherwise you're doing yourself a disservice because I'm really not a complete retard. We may both learn things.
You'd have to show that all muslims behave as you claim - independent of other socioeconomic factors.
Why all Muslims? I already explained how I view the relationship between followers and the religion. It's not so black and white.
Because that's the mother of all cop-outs. You choose to hold an opinion that denies the basic humanity of an enormous group of people and are perfectly happy to do so on ridiculously flimsy evidence.
So because there are a lot of Muslims I'm not allowed to dislike Islam? That makes no sense. There are a lot of Americans and plenty of people around the world dislike America. That's life. Sometimes people don't like your beliefs, actions, or some combination.
Do you also dislike judaism because its people are greedy?
No because I don't think many Jews are greedy.
How about catholicism because their priests are pedophiles?
Yep I have lost respect for Catholicism as a religion due to the behavior of the Church and its priests. And?
Christianity because the murderers in Rwanda were christian?
No because unless you're being purposely obtuse it's trivial to see how many Christians aren't like that.
When it comes to what I originally talked about, how women are treated in Islam, it's not so trivial to see that "most" Muslims treat women as well as we expect in the West. In more than one major Islamic society today (not 1000 years ago) there are very unfair laws about women.
Now if Christian militias were going around murdering people, every day, in many separate areas, for decades, then yeah I would dislike Christianity too. Fair is fair. Or for example I probably would have hated Christianity during the 30 Years War in Germany. Is that really hard to believe? But times change. I look at religions as they are now in addition to their histories.
I also wanted to add something about this:
Really? So, you've ruled out wealth? GDP? Literacy rates?
I'm not sure you can rule out OR "rule in" wealth, GDP, and literacy rates, because they are not separate from Islam. Islam can affect a nation's wealth since Islam has economic edicts in it (like preventing interest, which some Muslim communities abide by) that make a society less competitive. At that point you can no longer say "They do X because they are poor" because Islam may make them poor. I'm not saying it does, but that since for many people Islam is a "total way of life" which impacts economics and education, you can't rule out Islam as being tied to the very things you wish to rule out.
I don't get it. It's like you're asking me for a rigorous study when I explicitly said "I haven't done a rigorous study". And then being snide about innumeracy as if I had tried to present a numbers based argument and completely failed. But when did I do that?
I'm not innumerate, I'm not a bigot. What's bigoted about saying I don't like Islam because of how it treats women? It's just a religion. I'm not sorry if it offends you that I don't like a certain religion and I don't see why I should be.
Okay let's get more rigorous since you seem to want to. My claim which freaked you out so much was "I consider it bad because contemporary Muslim societies still treat women a certain way."
You claimed that's "an extreme oversimplification" and then concluded that I "want to judge a religion by the societies in which it is prevalent but ignore all the other factors that influence those societies." (I'll note you're assigning motive, want, without any basis other than the fact that you didn't like what I said. You actually don't know my motives or reasoning, just my conclusion.)
Maybe how I should have responded is to state that religion is a big factor of a society, especially a religion as old as Islam, and in many Muslim societies Islam is arguably the biggest factor because the introduction of Islam changed it so much.
Your statement, implying that Islam is separate from, or at least a relatively small factor in, the societies in which Islam is practiced, makes me think that you see Islam as a well defined and outlined doctrine that people either subscribe to or not. And any action they take can be labeled as "Islamic" or "not Islamic" based on some set of rules. So terrorists who suicide bomb a market are "not Islamic" because you know some rule that disqualifies them.
Maybe I've misunderstood you, but if not, let me clarify that I don't believe in that approach. To me, a religion (any religion) is defined by its initial documents and leaders as well as modified over time by the actions of its followers.
So with that in mind, what kind of evidence would you need to hear from me to support my claim that I don't like Islam because (one reason, anyway) of how it treats women in many contemporary Islamic societies, without just judging me as a bigot (ie having no real reason except pre-existing discrimination)?
1. You agree that the TLD system is man made. .ly tld is what matters.
2. You agree that the intent of the
I'm going to call this close enough. I'm sure you understand that what I'm arguing is that intents can change. You may disagree, I have no problem with that. I'm just surprised by the people who jumped on me and said it's their "right" to discriminate based on religion and we can say/do nothing about it because it's their "land."
Fair enough, I'm just happy that you recognize that it is an issue of what we find useful, not an issue of some country having a "right" to a tld. To me, using leverage to encourage secularism is a bigger win than maintaining some list of country codes, but whatever.
That's an extreme oversimplification that is essentially begging the question.
It's certainly not begging the question. There is an external fact, the way many contemporary Muslims treat women, and there is my judgment of that fact. There is no circular argument because my judgment is separate from the facts.
You want to judge a religion by the societies in which it is prevalent but ignore all the other factors that influence those societies. You might as well judge buddhism by the state of cambodia under the khmer rouge or even secularism by the state of the USSR and China during the cultural revolution.
No, I'm willing to entertain other reasons for the state of things. However, since there are so many Muslim countries, each with different circumstances and histories, and there are also Muslim communities within non-Muslim countries... when you start canceling out factors, the biggest one that remains is "Muslim".
Obviously I haven't done a rigorous study of every single Muslim culture but I'm comfortable enough taking a guess based on what I do know.
Just like Libya doesn't have to honour the rest of the world's DNS. But when countries do that you'd probably complain about censorship.
Yes I would call it censorship if asked but it wouldn't affect me personally because I don't live in Libya. So I probably wouldn't just go around volunteering that information. The issue here is they are taking advantage of a shared resource (dns) and imposing their own religious views on its use, unlike other members. If the rest of the world said "no sites related to libya outside of .ly", e.g. tit for tat, then at least it would be fair. As it is, it's like they have a punitive trade tariff but their trading partners don't retaliate at all. That's my sense of it.
He wrote "expect", not "require". The UK registry doesn't require anything, although the .US registry does.
I don't know what that has to do with anything. The issue is, are the restrictions imposed by the US and the UK fair or not? To me, since I like separation of church and state, it's perfectly fair for the UK to have a restriction that says "only UK sites allowed" because that's a secular decision, but if they suddenly said "no anti-Anglican sites allowed" then I wouldn't like it and I would say maybe the UK shouldn't have control over a tld since they don't understand secularism. That's exactly what's happening with Libya, but with Islam.
I also see lots of other domains from all round the world (at work, an international organisation -- and I'm including tiny islands' domains here) and almost all of them are being used as intended.
Fair enough, but that doesn't make what I said "ignorant". Surely you see that you are a minority of internet users. The vast majority have never been to a .ly site that actually was related to Libya. That's all I was saying.
It is for the Libyans to decide what a legitimate use of their "land" is. Should .int be open for trade? Should .aq (Antarctica) be forced to sell domains -- they don't at present?
It's not for the Libyans to decide. We come to agreements with people and honor them. If we don't like them, we change the agreements and reevaluate. I don't get what's so complicated about this. If we simply said "countries that discriminate based on religion in the assignment of domain names do not have access to a tld" then the problem is solved. The Libyans land is no longer their
so to speak. And since the land is virtual, that's actually really easy to implement.
The enlightenment of both Christendom and the Islamic world came from the same source: the Greeks. If anything is inherently positive about 'Christian society' is that it steps aside just a little more easily than an Islamic one.
Great, that's a start. I would add to it that the human form role model of Christianity (Jesus) presents positive traits to emulate and almost no negative traits, whereas Mohammed is mostly negative (from a modern perspective). That's about it. But taken together those are HUGE differences.
You must not have read very carefully then, as there is Deut 20:13-14 wherein the Israelites were told that when they conquered a territory they could certainly take the virgin girls (which in the period would be almost invariably children) as concubines.
Okay fair enough I didn't read the whole page, I just picked a quote and found the analogous situation for the Koran. Like I said, the number of bad phrases in two books isn't as important to me anyway as the actual practices in the various societies. Actions speak louder than words and all that.
For starters, Libya doesn't have to tolerate worldwide usage of that domain. It's for sites based in Libya. That's what country-specific TLDs are for.
And the rest of the world doesn't have to honor Libya's usage. We could set up our own .ly registrar and root server and all that. They can keep .ly internally if they want, the rest of the world could use like ".libya" instead.
When I surf to britishshoes.co.uk, I expect that the online shopkeeper is in somewhere in the UK, not in his Mom's basement in Omaha.
Really, interesting. So you would be all for kicking out all non-US companies from the .com tld since it was originally for the US. Or, eh, maybe just kicking out all non-commercial sites from .com. I guess I'll have to shut down my non revenue generating blog.
But no somehow I doubt you care that much about the true original intent of tlds.
I think you miss the key point, and that being the purpose of country-specific TLDs. They're not just so you can come up with clever spellings.
That's what they were originally for, but in reality a lot of them are more important for the clever spellings than anything else. Why are you so resistant to changing that? What right am I violating by suggesting ly be taken away from Libya?
Metaphorically, you are talking about taking their land.
So what? Metaphorically you can come up with any situation you like. Metaphorically the Libyans are acting like brigands, taking advantage of "their" land not for any legitimate purpose but simply as a way to harass others who do have a legitimate purpose for it (like trade).
You advocate changing the treaty so that it works in your favor. I don't know whether to make a comparison of US treatment of American Indians, or to go with abuse of eminent domain.
Yes you are right. And I'm not seriously advocating that we amend whatever treaty has doled out tlds based on country codes. I don't really care that much. However I am very surprised that there is so much animosity to the mere idea of doing that. Why shouldn't we use leverage to punish repressive countries? (I'm not a moral relativist, obviously.) I mean are you also against sanctions for Iran... it's THEIR land, they can build nuclear weapons and biological weapons if they like! Come on, that sort of thinking is very naive.
I've read lists like that before about several religions. I guess I'm more interested in the historical treatment of women in various societies, at least more so than a simple list of offensive phrases in some documents. (Not just women, of course, but that's what we're talking about.)
To me a religion is more than a philosophy defined in some foundational book. I don't consider Islam a bad religion because the Koran says so and so about women. I consider it bad because contemporary Muslim societies still treat women a certain way. Comparing multiple religions over a thousand year period and coming up with one winner is impossible, but it's pretty clear that Islam is not the winner. Its "golden age" was far too short and never came close to the enlightenment of Christian states today.
In terms of sheer quantity, the Bible beats the Quran by about a factor of seven. Qualitatively, IMO the Old Testament is worse than the Quran, but the New Testament is better.
That website is pretty focused on the Bible so I don't think comparing those particular lists is very fair, even in terms of quantity.
But qualitatively, what do you see as worse in the Old Testament than the following little nugget from the page you linked to:
"All married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess."
You can't have sex with married women, unless they are slaves obtained in war (with whom you may rape or do whatever you like).
The closest thing on the page you linked to is:
19:20 And whosoever lieth carnally with a woman, that is a bondmaid, betrothed to an husband, and not at all redeemed, nor freedom given her; she shall be scourged; they shall not be put to death, because she was not free.
19:21 And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, even a ram for a trespass offering.
19:22 And the priest shall make an atonement for him with the ram of the trespass offering before the LORD for his sin which he hath done: and the sin which he hath done shall be forgiven him.
So in the Koran, jihad fighters are encouraged to take slaves and have sex with them. In the Bible, it says it is wrong to have sex with a slave, but you are not punished very much.
It's also odd that your page leaves out the hadiths, which are a lot like the gospels of Christianity. They chronicle Mohammed's life and actions and are a very important part of Islam, both in jurisprudence and in dictating Muslim behavior (since they are supposed to emulate Mohammed).
Because it's their country's code, and "we" have decided that each country can do what it wants with its code.
Exactly, so "we" can also change that.
I don't get why this is so scandalous. All I'm proposing is that if a country has a useful tld (and ly is useful as an English suffix), and shows itself to be intolerant of worldwide usage of that domain, then take it away.
I'm not saying cut them off from the entire internet. Give them a new tld. We have 3 letter country codes, give them that one.
Why do people think everything is concrete and can never be changed if "we" made a mistake initially?
But it seems you don't like it when Libya wants to follow Libyan standards for the Libyan domain.
They can do whatever they want, but "we" all have rights to change how shared, virtual property like tld's is administered. It's not like I'm talking about taking their land for god's sake.
Okay let's agree that neither of the groups have a right (I certainly didn't mean to imply that we have an inherent right to the .ly tld). How do you decide a conflict?
You can do it by voting. I'm pretty sure Libya is a smaller country than the US plus other English speaking populations.
You can do it by reasoning with principles. I'd say language use is a decent principle. The ly suffix is more useful to us than to them.
How would you choose to do it, that leads to them keeping .ly? Are you just arguing that what's done is done and no backsies? Seems childish.
Fair enough, then let's take things on a case by case basis. Libya has shown that they do not deserve to be in charge of a tld that happens to be a common English suffix. They have no inherent right to it, so this is just an issue of expedience and user experience for English speakers. Let's just reassign Libya a new tld.
every country is allowed their own TLD. Would you prefer a situation where one country is allowed to pick and choose which other countries are "worthy" of a TLD?
How about a compromise -- several countries, but not Libya? Or any other country trying to impose religious law onto the dns system?
.ly is essentially "their internet". If you don't like it, use someone elses.
Funny because they're using our letters, and ly is a common English suffix. How about if we reassign them to use . instead. (Those are Arabic letters, in case slashdot eats them.)
Yes but why is it for them? They didn't build my internet. How about if we say, well ly is a useful suffix, so we're taking the ly tld and keeping it. Why isn't it up to us to decide that and administer it how we see fit?
That's my point, it's not as simple as saying "let them decide" because this is a global, shared, intellectual property. It's perfectly reasonable for others to expect certain rules and standards to be followed.
I want to set rules that say if you partake in the global dns system, there is a minimum code of conduct which you must follow, or you get kicked out. How is that not self-determination? That's me determining for myself what I would like to see. Ah, you mean you want Libya to have self-determination and democracy, but not anybody else for some reason.
I don't want a fight, but I'm curious what you have to say. I don't know a whole lot about Paul. I find it very hard to believe that he was worse than Mohammed.
And about the equivalence, I'm talking about lumping all 3 major religions into just "Abrahamic religions" in reference to treatment of women, not the divine being/prophet part. Sure they're all full of shit, women have been treated badly in all of them, but stopping there is leaving a false impression. For one it ignores the last 1000 years of evolution in the religions.
Have you heard any of the remixes?
My favorite is this one, from an album called Cafe del Mar, Aria 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejr07ANQObo
There's actually one with some astronaut chatter mixed in, amazingly well connected to this discussion, though not the same Dido or astronaut. What are the odds. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5Z2WZ1P3NU
Since when did the actual cause of something become a red herring??
Would you say fundamentalist Christianity is a red herring too in relation to Texas's enforcement of the sabbath? Or is this excuse business reserved for sharia?
When I search for b.us, I get "b.us is an invalid name." What's up with that?
"by.us is an invalid name."
Seems like a minimum of 3 characters is required, I didn't know that.