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)?
You'd have to show that all muslims behave as you claim - independent of other socioeconomic factors. I gave the example of the million+ muslims in the US for whom mistreatment of women is barely even on the radar. If you weren't innumerate that would be proof enough for you to see the error in your conclusions. If you were a bigot you'd give credit for that normalization of the treatment of women to factors outside of being muslim but refuse to give credit for the mistreatment of women in other countries to outside factors there.
It's like you're asking me for a rigorous study when I explicitly said "I haven't done a rigorous study".
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.
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.
Really? You don't see how judging the faith of a billion people based on the actions of a subset of its members is not innumeracy and bigotry? Do you also dislike judaism because its people are greedy? How about catholicism because their priests are pedophiles? Protestantism because the nazis embraced lutherism and the deutsche christen? Christianity because the murderers in Rwanda were christian? All are innumerate conclusions embraced by bigots.
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".
Really? So, you've ruled out wealth? GDP? Literacy rates? You've looked at the roughly 1 million muslims in the USA and counted less than 5 "honor killings" in the last 30 years? You've noted the repression of women in the poor hindu communities of India and the kurdish areas of the middle east, including bride burning and honor killings and determined they don't share a commonality in wealth and education with similar communities of muslims?
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.
PS - Gay sex, illegal in Texas and 13 other states until the "activist" SCOTUS struck down the law in 2003 (and even then 3 of the 9 justices were still in favor of keeping it illegal).
Its broader - think of it as 'how to live life in harmony with god." Some of it is social contract enforced by the state - like prohibition against murder and its redress, some of it is private 'contract' with god - like praying five times a day. The more extremist the interpretation the more harsh the punishments and the more of the private contract stuff is deemed to be enforced by the state rather than god taking care of it, similar to the way anti-gay marriage laws have been put on the books recently by religious extremists in the US and adultery laws were previously.
Here's a part of a transcript where Feisal Rauf, the "ground zero imam," describes sharia in the context of american law:
QUESTIONER: Peter Fedynsky, Voice of America. At a recent demonstration near Ground Zero opposing the Islamic center, there was a banner behind the (the state ?) that said "stop shari'a law before it stops you." And I would venture to say that many of the concerns of those present were not only the planes slamming into the Twin Towers, but minor things like women refusing to unveil themselves for a driver's license and then major things like news of stonings, of honor killings. And -- or -- and then some people would say that the Cordoba -- Cordoba in history was a place of Muslim conquest. So this -- the question is, what is the compatibility of shari'a law with American constitutional law?
MR. RAUF: Absolutely consistent, first of all. And I've written about it and have lectured about it.
The fundamental rights of -- the opening lines of Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" -- the equality of human creation is a fundamental principle of the Abrahamic faiths -- "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" -- the fact the creator gave these rights to us, not any government or man-made agency, is a religious concept among which our life, life and property, then changed to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
Seven centuries before these words were penned by Thomas Jefferson, Muslim jurists said all of shari'a law, all of Islamic law is intended to uphold six fundamental objectives: the protection of life, of human dignity, which relate to liberty, to religion, to family, to property and the intellect. And what do we do (after ?) life to pursue our happiness? We get married to our loved ones, we seek material well being, we seek our intellectual pursuits and we seek to practice our faith religions.
And by the way, Islamic jurists have said from the earliest of times -- because Muslim communities lived as minorities first in Abyssinia, in Ethiopia, at the time of the prophet -- and they said that wherever Muslims are a minority, they are required to follow the laws of the land. It is a requirement of shari'a to follow the laws of the land. There is much more I can say about this, but I think this covers the ground for the time being. In many respects, yes, there are aspects of shari'a law which we ourselves have trouble with. But in many respects we practice shari'a already when we practice when we adhere to our dietary laws, we are practicing shari'a law. When we bequeath our estates to our children in accordance with the dictates of shari'a, we are consistent with American law and consistent with Islamic law. And when we pray, these are all commandments of shari'a law. So 90 percent of shari'a law is fully compatible, and not only compatible, is consistent or compatible with American constitutional law and American laws. The areas of difference are small and minor.
To a regular muslim, sharia includes things as basic as praying five times per day. It's one of those words that people with an agenda have latched onto and focused on what the scary people do. There is plenty in the various muslim traditions to forbid things like the stoning of women. It's just that the crazies want to stone women so they pick and choose the parts that give them political cover, especially among the uneducated who aren't likely to question what they are told. Here's an discussion of stoning (for adultery, as stoning for a barehead is essentially non-existent) in sharia that illustrates the point.
It's kind of like how plenty of homophobes get all worked up about the line in leviticus that says,"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." but are perfectly happy to scarf down the "Endless Shrimp" meal at Red Lobster despite lines in leviticus that say things like, "Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you."
I consider it bad because contemporary Muslim societies still treat women a certain way.
That's an extreme oversimplification that is essentially begging the question. 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.
Maybe, but sharia law is scary, and these actions are consistent with it. So, maybe, maybe not.
Its only "scary" when implemented by fundos, just like what happens when western law gets implemented by fundos and you get stuff like what went down in Franco's Spain or Pinochet's Chile or even apartheid South Africa. Like most all institutions it is the good or the evil in the hearts of the men running the institution that determines if the institution will be a force for good or evil.
By John Rendleman InformationWeek April 9, 2001 06:58 AM
The University of North Carolina has finally found a network server that, although missing for four years, hasn't missed a packet in all that time.
Try as they might, university administrators couldn't find the server. Working with Novell, IT workers tracked it down by meticulously following cable until they literally ran into a wall. The server had been mistakenly sealed behind drywall by maintenance workers.
So what, in the subsidy, gives you the right to demand they make any product to *your* specifications, exactly???
The government has far greater restrictions on what it can do than private industry so when the government subsidizes private industry the results must also conform to those same restrictions. One of which is the right to full control over one's own property. Don't like it? Don't run a business dependent on government subsidization.
If the CEO of a poorly performing company came out and said "We lost money this year because consumers refuse to support us." that CEO would get fucking FIRED.
Seems to work great for the MAFIAA. They even get senators fawning over them because of it. Where's my senators? (yes, no need to spell out the painfully obvious fact that I don't bribe senators).
Have you ever tried to use a 16:9 monitor turned sideways? It's ridiculous.
Yep, I loved it. I keep my 24" rotated just for a maximized web browser.
The viewing angle on the vertical (now, the horizontal) part of the monitor is terrible so you have to be sitting exactly in front of it or you can't see it.
Don't buy cheap monitors. There are different types of LCDs and the more costly ones have better vertical view angles - which translates into a wider horizontal view angle once rotated. Most people don't rotate their monitors - or even viewing them from anything but dead-on, so using the cheaper type of LCD is more cost effective for the low-end of the market.
On the other hand, you'll also lose subpixel rendering which does have a big impact on reading.
Not necessarily a problem - I loved the idea of subpixel rendering and couldn't wait to try it out, but to my eye it just makes the text blurry. I've tried it on lower dpi screens (1080p projector on a 110" screen) and that just made it even more blurry and I've tried it on higher dpi screens (200 dpi IBM T220) and it didn't help either, just made the text "different" but not really better.
It's harder to design menus for left or right positioning because our languages flows horizontal, not vertical.
Since all of our monitors are now manufactured in China, this is clearly an example of a Chinese conspiracy to increase the dominance of Han characters over western languages.
While we'll probably never know due to the lack of transparency about the whole process, it's likely due to AT&T. Their network can't very well handle the traffic it has now and certainly won't be able to handle pegged upstream and downstream connections from the growing number of iPhones.
The phone doesn't do the torrenting, it just remotely controls the torrent client that runs on imageshack's servers (and their bandwidth).
However, I still think CCTV is beneficial to society as a whole. I'd rather get arrested for climbing a wall, than have a mugger or rapist go free because there is no evidence.
Would you rather have a reformer politician blackmailed into silence because the entrenched powers acquired a clip of him entering a motel with a hooker? Even if he she just happened to be walking in the lobby door at the same time as him?
Then there's that funny thing - CCTV footage getting "lost" when it would have contained official misconduct.
The pantopticon is a tool of the powerful for the powerful sold to the citizens by convincing them that they are weak.
Publicly owned and run CCTV systems are on a much smaller scale than you might expect.
But they are practically all connected to the same database which is easily accessible to nearly anyone - as this particularly story demonstrates - and thus magnifies the potential for abuse by many orders of magnitude.
FYI - here are some actual stats on the number of public CCTV cameras in the UK - it is pretty high, starting with nearly 7,500 in London: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8159141.stm
Slashdot Mirror
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)?
You'd have to show that all muslims behave as you claim - independent of other socioeconomic factors. I gave the example of the million+ muslims in the US for whom mistreatment of women is barely even on the radar. If you weren't innumerate that would be proof enough for you to see the error in your conclusions. If you were a bigot you'd give credit for that normalization of the treatment of women to factors outside of being muslim but refuse to give credit for the mistreatment of women in other countries to outside factors there.
It's like you're asking me for a rigorous study when I explicitly said "I haven't done a rigorous study".
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.
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.
Really? You don't see how judging the faith of a billion people based on the actions of a subset of its members is not innumeracy and bigotry? Do you also dislike judaism because its people are greedy? How about catholicism because their priests are pedophiles? Protestantism because the nazis embraced lutherism and the deutsche christen? Christianity because the murderers in Rwanda were christian? All are innumerate conclusions embraced by bigots.
Entitlement to cause harm to others is always a bad thing. Sadly, that's the pro-pirate platform.
Wow, you say shit like that and then you whine that you get moderated as a troll?
What priapistic little solipsist you are.
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".
Really? So, you've ruled out wealth? GDP? Literacy rates? You've looked at the roughly 1 million muslims in the USA and counted less than 5 "honor killings" in the last 30 years? You've noted the repression of women in the poor hindu communities of India and the kurdish areas of the middle east, including bride burning and honor killings and determined they don't share a commonality in wealth and education with similar communities of muslims?
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.
Yes, you apparently are. Bigotry is innumeracy.
PS - Gay sex, illegal in Texas and 13 other states until the "activist" SCOTUS struck down the law in 2003 (and even then 3 of the 9 justices were still in favor of keeping it illegal).
or is it "law" in a different sense?
Its broader - think of it as 'how to live life in harmony with god." Some of it is social contract enforced by the state - like prohibition against murder and its redress, some of it is private 'contract' with god - like praying five times a day. The more extremist the interpretation the more harsh the punishments and the more of the private contract stuff is deemed to be enforced by the state rather than god taking care of it, similar to the way anti-gay marriage laws have been put on the books recently by religious extremists in the US and adultery laws were previously.
Here's a part of a transcript where Feisal Rauf, the "ground zero imam," describes sharia in the context of american law:
QUESTIONER: Peter Fedynsky, Voice of America. At a recent demonstration near Ground Zero opposing the Islamic center, there was a banner behind the (the state ?) that said "stop shari'a law before it stops you." And I would venture to say that many of the concerns of those present were not only the planes slamming into the Twin Towers, but minor things like women refusing to unveil themselves for a driver's license and then major things like news of stonings, of honor killings. And -- or -- and then some people would say that the Cordoba -- Cordoba in history was a place of Muslim conquest. So this -- the question is, what is the compatibility of shari'a law with American constitutional law?
MR. RAUF: Absolutely consistent, first of all. And I've written about it and have lectured about it.
The fundamental rights of -- the opening lines of Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" -- the equality of human creation is a fundamental principle of the Abrahamic faiths -- "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" -- the fact the creator gave these rights to us, not any government or man-made agency, is a religious concept among which our life, life and property, then changed to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
Seven centuries before these words were penned by Thomas Jefferson, Muslim jurists said all of shari'a law, all of Islamic law is intended to uphold six fundamental objectives: the protection of life, of human dignity, which relate to liberty, to religion, to family, to property and the intellect. And what do we do (after ?) life to pursue our happiness? We get married to our loved ones, we seek material well being, we seek our intellectual pursuits and we seek to practice our faith religions.
And by the way, Islamic jurists have said from the earliest of times -- because Muslim communities lived as minorities first in Abyssinia, in Ethiopia, at the time of the prophet -- and they said that wherever Muslims are a minority, they are required to follow the laws of the land. It is a requirement of shari'a to follow the laws of the land. There is much more I can say about this, but I think this covers the ground for the time being.
In many respects, yes, there are aspects of shari'a law which we ourselves have trouble with. But in many respects we practice shari'a already when we practice when we adhere to our dietary laws, we are practicing shari'a law. When we bequeath our estates to our children in accordance with the dictates of shari'a, we are consistent with American law and consistent with Islamic law. And when we pray, these are all commandments of shari'a law. So 90 percent of shari'a law is fully compatible, and not only compatible, is consistent or compatible with American constitutional law and American laws. The areas of difference are small and minor.
http://www.cfr.org/publication/22940/conversation_with_feisal_abdul_rauf.html
To a regular muslim, sharia includes things as basic as praying five times per day. It's one of those words that people with an agenda have latched onto and focused on what the scary people do. There is plenty in the various muslim traditions to forbid things like the stoning of women. It's just that the crazies want to stone women so they pick and choose the parts that give them political cover, especially among the uneducated who aren't likely to question what they are told. Here's an discussion of stoning (for adultery, as stoning for a barehead is essentially non-existent) in sharia that illustrates the point.
It's kind of like how plenty of homophobes get all worked up about the line in leviticus that says,"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." but are perfectly happy to scarf down the "Endless Shrimp" meal at Red Lobster despite lines in leviticus that say things like, "Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you."
I consider it bad because contemporary Muslim societies still treat women a certain way.
That's an extreme oversimplification that is essentially begging the question. 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.
If religion didn't exist, people would blame their bad behavior on something else. Video games, or rock and roll music perhaps...
There's been a hell of a lot of evil perpetrated in the name of "democracy" too.
Maybe, but sharia law is scary, and these actions are consistent with it. So, maybe, maybe not.
Its only "scary" when implemented by fundos, just like what happens when western law gets implemented by fundos and you get stuff like what went down in Franco's Spain or Pinochet's Chile or even apartheid South Africa. Like most all institutions it is the good or the evil in the hearts of the men running the institution that determines if the institution will be a force for good or evil.
The real killer though were the carts for that console which took the same game carts as its equivelent in the arcades and they were GBP250 each.
Say what? What arcade games were on cartridges that could be plugged into an atari 800?
All of the wireless carriers are subsidized by virtue of their government granted monopolies.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=6505527
By John Rendleman
InformationWeek
April 9, 2001 06:58 AM
The University of North Carolina has finally found a network server that, although missing for four years, hasn't missed a packet in all that time.
Try as they might, university administrators couldn't find the server. Working with Novell, IT workers tracked it down by meticulously following cable until they literally ran into a wall. The server had been mistakenly sealed behind drywall by maintenance workers.
So what, in the subsidy, gives you the right to demand they make any product to *your* specifications, exactly???
The government has far greater restrictions on what it can do than private industry so when the government subsidizes private industry the results must also conform to those same restrictions. One of which is the right to full control over one's own property. Don't like it? Don't run a business dependent on government subsidization.
The only time you *ever* get to dictate how a product is made...is when you make it yourself.
Or the government subsidizes it. Which is the case here.
If the CEO of a poorly performing company came out and said "We lost money this year because consumers refuse to support us." that CEO would get fucking FIRED.
Seems to work great for the MAFIAA. They even get senators fawning over them because of it. Where's my senators?
(yes, no need to spell out the painfully obvious fact that I don't bribe senators).
So - you have the right to do anything with your harwdare as long as you choose not to buy this hardware.
Got it.
Have you ever tried to use a 16:9 monitor turned sideways? It's ridiculous.
Yep, I loved it. I keep my 24" rotated just for a maximized web browser.
The viewing angle on the vertical (now, the horizontal) part of the monitor is terrible so you have to be sitting exactly in front of it or you can't see it.
Don't buy cheap monitors. There are different types of LCDs and the more costly ones have better vertical view angles - which translates into a wider horizontal view angle once rotated. Most people don't rotate their monitors - or even viewing them from anything but dead-on, so using the cheaper type of LCD is more cost effective for the low-end of the market.
On the other hand, you'll also lose subpixel rendering which does have a big impact on reading.
Not necessarily a problem - I loved the idea of subpixel rendering and couldn't wait to try it out, but to my eye it just makes the text blurry. I've tried it on lower dpi screens (1080p projector on a 110" screen) and that just made it even more blurry and I've tried it on higher dpi screens (200 dpi IBM T220) and it didn't help either, just made the text "different" but not really better.
It's harder to design menus for left or right positioning because our languages flows horizontal, not vertical.
Since all of our monitors are now manufactured in China, this is clearly an example of a Chinese conspiracy to increase the dominance of Han characters over western languages.
While we'll probably never know due to the lack of transparency about the whole process, it's likely due to AT&T. Their network can't very well handle the traffic it has now and certainly won't be able to handle pegged upstream and downstream connections from the growing number of iPhones.
The phone doesn't do the torrenting, it just remotely controls the torrent client that runs on imageshack's servers (and their bandwidth).
However, I still think CCTV is beneficial to society as a whole. I'd rather get arrested for climbing a wall, than have a mugger or rapist go free because there is no evidence.
Would you rather have a reformer politician blackmailed into silence because the entrenched powers acquired a clip of him entering a motel with a hooker? Even if he she just happened to be walking in the lobby door at the same time as him?
Then there's that funny thing - CCTV footage getting "lost" when it would have contained official misconduct.
The pantopticon is a tool of the powerful for the powerful sold to the citizens by convincing them that they are weak.
Publicly owned and run CCTV systems are on a much smaller scale than you might expect.
But they are practically all connected to the same database which is easily accessible to nearly anyone - as this particularly story demonstrates - and thus magnifies the potential for abuse by many orders of magnitude.
FYI - here are some actual stats on the number of public CCTV cameras in the UK - it is pretty high, starting with nearly 7,500 in London:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8159141.stm
This is something that I've tried and tried and tried to explain to some of my friends that work in marketing.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
--Upton Sinclair
And of course, their servers were obviously insecure, as evidenced by someone managing to alter content on the servers.
Bad sign that what with the fact that one of the OSDV directors, also its nominal CTO sells himself as a security consultant.
I'm with (b)