I'm Islamophobic

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by asleepathewheel
Well, wouldn't you say that all sundays are de facto holidays? Easter being a Sunday, would be redundant-no non critical government worker that I know of is required to work that day.

Well, I mean Easter Monday . Or Good Friday for that matter.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by aneeshm
Any basis for that assertion?

Which one, the first or the second?

[snoopy369]

teetotalers

[LordShiva]

drunkiness

[Imran Siddiqui]

Teh Irish

[BeBMan]

Thumbs

[Monk]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Islam is not worse than other religions.
All of them are equally bad.

They are, Sir Ralph?

I'd say Christianity has an advantage compared to Islam in Jesus not having produced any legal code or other guidelines for civil society. Or that Judaism's advantage is the lack of missionaries and blame on people who aren't Jews.

[Barnabas]

I would say a religion in which the penalty for apostasy is execution is worse than one in which apostasy is not punished.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Monk
They are, Sir Ralph?

I'd say Christianity has an advantage compared to Islam in Jesus not having produced any legal code or other guidelines for civil society. Or that Judaism's advantage is the lack of missionaries and blame on people who aren't Jews.

I'm not into that "My religion is better than yours" stuff; too many wars have been fought because of this. My opinion is, that in the bigger picture every religion has the main purpose to keep its followers content and to fool them into submission under their rulers. Yours may, of course, vary.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by TCO
Let's first catch Bin Ladin and then cut his head off.

fixed

[VetLegion]

So, what is the reason it was difficult to say what you think? For an eloquent explanation replace "black" with "muslim" in the excerpt below.

Meanwhile, among nonblack Americans, a rigorous and intolerant ideology of “anti-racism” has grown up. The opinions a nonblack American has, or more precisely voices, about race are now a major in-group (I mean, among fellow nonblacks) status marker.

Let me just elaborate on that a little. Modern neuroscience perceives the human brain as a modular structure, different modules performing different functions. Since humans are quintessentially social animals, much of the brain is given over to processing social information. A big part of this information concerns in-group status. We need to be constantly evaluating, and re-evaluating, the status of ourselves and others in the various groups we belong to. A mistake in this respect can be fatal—as, for example, in the case of an undersized low-status male foolishly challenging one of the group’s alpha males. Evolution has a way of weeding these things out. Some neuroscientists have postulated an entire module of the brain given over to these highly important issues of in-group status evaluation.

Among American nonblacks in the present age, being known to have “incorrect” opinions about race results in catastrophic loss of status.

A literary example will illustrate the point very well. Here is America’s foremost observer of our social mores, Tom Wolfe, writing in the mid-1980s in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. In the extract below we have a lower-middle-class but upwardly striving white couple, the Kramers. The Kramers have a baby, and have hired a nurse to help look after it. Their yuppie instincts led them to an agency recommended by the New York Times, and the agency provided them with a crisply-turned-out, briskly efficient, English baby nurse, also white.

The presence of this Englishwoman in their apartment causes considerable psychic stress to the young couple. On the one hand, she is an employee, so of course they, who are paying her wages, ought to outrank her in status. One the other hand she is English. It is a peculiar thing—a very peculiar thing, when you consider this nation’s origins—that being English gives you extra status points in the U.S.A. all by itself. It’s odd, and I do not know why it is so; but I can assure you, being English-born myself, that it is so. So this baby nurse, socially inferior to the Kramers on an employer-employee scale, actually outranks them on status, just by virtue of being English. The psychic stress is, as I said, acute.

Then one day the husband, wife, and baby nurse are watching news footage of a race riot on TV. The English nurse passes some mildly anti-black remarks: “The colored don’t know how good they’ve got it in this country…” etc. I will let Tom Wolfe tell the rest.


Kramer and his wife looked at each other. He could tell she was thinking the same thing he was.

Thank God in heaven! What a relief! They could let their breaths out now. Miss Efficiency was a bigot. These days the thing about bigotry was, it was undignified. It was a sign of Low Rent origins, of inferior social status, of poor taste. So they were the superiors of their English baby nurse, after all. What a #$%@^&! relief.


As always with Tom Wolfe, this is absolutely spot-on social observation. Reveal yourself to be racially “incorrect,” and watch your in-group status points go swirling down the toilet. And look at the emotions on display there. In-group status evaluation is not just a matter of cold arithmetic. Powerful emotions are engaged: pride, humiliation, envy, fear.

[Heraclitus]

A good point.

[Lancer]

The immigration test should include a shot and a beer.

[LordShiva]

Noooo! I can't stand beer

Can I take two shots instead?

[BeBMan]

I take the other beer instead, so it's all right