The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

Karen Armstrong, Instructor at Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism, in a Oct. 22, 2001 Salon.com interview titled "Fundamental Problems," stated the following:
"Even though ideologically [in Islam] there can be no separation between church and state, both Sunnis and Shiites developed a separation very early on. In the Sunni world, the separation was de facto; Islamic law developed as kind of a counterculture to the aristocratic courts. In the Shiite world, there was a separation of church and state on principle. It was held that since every state was corrupt, clerics should take no part in them, that the religious should withdraw until the messiah came and established a proper Muslim state."

Oct. 22, 2001 - Karen Armstrong

This being nothing too concrete, just something to show the is _possible_

Wow what a pile of ****. I said I was libertarian, and I said none of those points. What are you, an Internet troll?

Most my coworkers from my first job, half were muslim, half were hindu, all were great people, even the women, none were "extremist". Second, we don't judge based on teachings, because a lot of religion is taken out of context. The way it really works, is you can't do the aggressive stuff because of the peaceful stuff, but some people don't practice their own damn religion right by not doing the peaceful stuff because of the aggressive stuff. That's really the end of it, if a muslim doesn't have religious protections to behead his enemies, then a christian doesn't have religious protections to burn down abortion clinics and junk. Those way over-extend either of those religion's practice, which is why we don't judge the religion as a whole.

my bad seems things are not as south as I had imagined. pegged you both wrong. removed the tag for good measure.

That was the most generic list of fear-mongering anti-right topics ever.

•Women are people, and the difference between people are surprisingly little, male or female. Same oxygen, same need for a job and living stability, same various hobbies, same various niche of fashion, women are not special people, they're average everyday people with the same problems. This is like saying "only men can rape" and then letting off female teachers that sleep with minors with 9 months in prison but Jared Fogle gets 15 years.

•Equalizing the employment field will make women get jobs as automotive mechanics and welders. They AVOID THOSE FIELDS because they are "for men", and they are often well-paying industrial jobs, if women participated in them, they'd find they'd make dollar-for-dollar their male counterpart, mainly because it's illegal otherwise. The only time it's legally questionable, is "commissions" based, a direct buyer of a product more frequently underpays for products by women than men, and since the woman is often a self-employed individual, they are literally the only person they can rely on to change that as well.

•Sexism is not okay, that falls back on "women aren't special, they are just average everyday, and deserve to be treated like they're men".

•Racism/Sexism is a something someone discovers, and either accepts or declines, in various degrees of magnitude. Women make jokes about men all the time, out of frustration that guys joke about them, and a lot of time the jokes weren't serious, they are a product of laughable ignorant stereotypes. I don't get upset the women make the jokes, what does upset me is when anybody perpetuates a caste system onto someone else, like telling a genuinely well-rounded female that they're a tomboy or weird, for pursuing a mechanical or mathematical field.

•People are a product of their thoughts. If we can teach pigs to act exactly like cats by raising them together, there is no reason to think "blacks" and "asians" act inherently different from birth. What they are, is raised by parents of different cultures, and when those parents interact with other parents, and children with other children, those gaps become smaller and smaller. Just a fact, black people's culture have become a LOT more like white people's culture, than it was 300 years ago. We're both a westernized culture, consumer market, service/industrial industry focused people, living for our various hobbies that aren't specific to blacks or whites. Black transgender chicks, can be programmers for fan-project spiritual successor games, I know one who is.

•There is such a thing as the human race. Divisions don't really determine aptitudes in anything. The one who wrote most of NASA's Apollo project code, was female.

•Also wrong, see above, product of growing up figuring out what oneself does.

•Criminality/wealth/poverty is a mixture of birth stature and personal choice. It's difficult to dig oneself out of a hole, especially without rich parents, but one does not have to pursue crime just because one is poor, especially in a country offering such easy access to basic food funding and such. I GREW UP POOR, I live very modest right now, I have no vices because they're all expensive, I try to work honest jobs, it IS possible, and both Dems and Reps are making it more difficult every day.

•Cops are people. There are a good portion of very terrible cops. Trust me, they'll stick it to a white guy that bothers them as well. We should probably have a better basis of people as cops, but you never knew Jared Fogle was a pedophile when he was the Subway Mascot, how do we ever tell if someone who appears to do well in their job has demons underneath? Cops as a whole, as people, are a reflection of the same problems people have. Some cops probably do illegal drugs, as it is a problem with some people, and Cops are human.

•The Farmer's Almanac says next year will be colder than last. It's debatable for a reason, the earth is assaninely big, less than 1/3rd of the surface is land, less than 1/30th of it is inhabited, and while humans can do amazing things, they barely scratched the surface with 19th century industrial revolution irresponsible pollution. With modern pollution-controls, we aren't in very great jeopardy of creating any mass problem within 2000 years, unless we get even worse with it, which is what we should be managing.

•As stated above, man is a small fraction, we can definitely pollute the environment, but not enough right now to cause full-scale global change. The earth is just not very stable, historically speaking, some years are famine, some years are freeze, the earth literally has a "El Nino/La Nina" weather cycle that changes ever 3-8 YEARS, and the fact that the Earth can be that inconsistent, makes it immeasurable over the period of 80 years, much less 300. We'd need another 300 to see the effects, and pessimist say "it'll be too late we'll all be dead", but actual scientists say in 300 years the earth will still be habitable, so get over it.

•We don't have the numbers because illegal ones tend to hide. From a wild *** guess perspective, in this day and age I'd consider the number of illegal to be very high and the number of legal to be much less, but historically, all non-native-american residents here are descendants of immigrants, so it's no big deal. The free benefits is what most people dislike, I would be pro-work and anti-benefits and honestly would like federal work laws to protect illegals without throwing them out. I really don't want to throw them out, and I'd like to extend laws to protect them, but not free government benefits. It's really as simple as that. I honestly like Germany's idea to assign government jobs to benefit recipients who are capable, that idea has such potential, **** the fact that it's socialist, we can have a capitalist market and the government can compete in that market themselves using a public sector job base to supplement employment. That'd be the best of both worlds, a 0-unemployment communism mixed with a high-competition and flexible capitalism.

•All how you were raised and what you decided to embrace. I'm a weeabo, and I was NOT raised Asian, I was raised in a poor white family.

•An American practicing any religion doesn't affect their trust. How they act based on religion, does. Westboro should REALLY be under federal investigation, IF they already aren't. THOSE guys come off as dangerous.

•A gun is optional, and the higher the ratio of armed citizens, whichever of them feel comfortable arming themselves, the better their response can be to defend themselves from crime. If 1/3 were armed, and someone robbed a bank at gun-point, they aren't the supreme martial law of the bank, because the odds are that someone there can defend themselves. It isn't mandatory, anyone using a gun aggressively is breaking a law, anyone using a knife aggressively is breaking a law, anyone using threats of physical hand-to-hand violence is breaking the law, so nothing changes with a gun, except that no single person can bend a group of people to their will in event of a crime in progress.

•This is clearly not the case, we never said it was, but what you said was "most gun owners are responsible for murder so we can't trust guns in the hands of untrained", and that couldn't be further in the other direction. If you drink too much water, you'll die, and if you drink no water, you'll die, and at this point, gun agenda is always looking like "hydrophobia" or "polydipsia", nobody can accept that "honest law-abiding citizens can own whatever they want" and that "we should enforce crimes, rather than pre-crime".

•Obama, is sort of funny. He did make the ACA, and it DOESN'T in practice work. He DID decrease the unemployment rate, but the "workforce participation" is the lowest it's been, people simply stopped looking for jobs because benefits are often easier, which is definitely something needing addressed, I refer back to Germany in making it practical and stable, because right now, between high congressional salaries, and overextended benefits, our country can't balance the budget and is in danger of being unable to afford even the elderly oneday soon. "Obama is evil" is satire at it's very roots, people dislike him so much they conjecture if he's muslim, which is ignorant as ****, but even laid out in intelligent conversation, he's not a very good president.

•No health care at all would be better than Obamacare. Obamacare is NOT cheaper, prices on healthcare rose dramatically afterwards, citizens are paying fines or being forced to purchase healthcare, that they can barely afford, that does NOT cover medical things. It simply doesn't. Anything, requires hundreds of dollars out of pocket, which if anyone could afford, they wouldn't need healthcare. Healthcare policies more than doubled, their coverage covers almost nothing. We need REAL healthcare, and you need to get it through your head, ignore media you see about America, I LIVE HERE, we NEED real healthcare, and the first step is not having the ACA. We SO BADLY need to ACA gone.

•Taxes are a balancing act. I took Economics. Reaganomics was a concept fixing, where taxing the rich, limited how many people they'd hire or keep under the same company name, because after so much wealth you actually earned less, than if your company was smaller. We need to be aware as to not smother and limit businesses. Sadly, right now, businesses could use more accountability (among other budget changes), but Democrats and Obama have been in office 8 years, how in **** have they not raised taxes then? Answer: Oligarchy. Modern democrats, are a ******* Oligarchy, liberals are NO LONGER progressives. End of.

So stop taking the teachings of religions out of context and judge them by what they actually say in their books. Listening to some person like tatsu go absolutely bonkers about a religious text taken out of context and actually considering what they say as a valid argument is incredibly stupid. Read the damn text. It's right there. I've read the whole thing when it comes to the Bible. I haven't read the whole koran, and I don't particularly want to. The most vocal people for Islam blow up school buses in Israel. The most vocal for Christianity go to refugee camps in the West Bank and treat people for disease and malnutrition.

See. The. Difference?

Is it not obvious?

Is it not plain before you?

Can I not be any more clear?

I'm not here to judge the religion by its people. I'm here to judge their teachings. The Bible is the best possible moral code as yet invented. The Koran is a xenophobic wannabe written by a man who thought he heard God in his dreams. The Koran was written for the people of its time - the Bible's teachings still apply today.

The Muslim countries who sent athletes to the Olympics looked like idiots. They shunned the Israeli teams. Their women wore hijabs in scorching heat for races. It's so backward as to be ridiculous.

Erm...

I mean sure those books are probably all full of inconsistent stuff, but sill...

Also:

Sorry to tell you, but that religion of yours has a lot more insane followers than you think. A quick google for christian terrorism yields you hits like this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25216351

Sure you will say "those are not real christians", but so do muslims say about ISIS.

The problem with religion is that if you reason based on what someone wrote in a book without even questioning it (faith) you can come to pretty bad conclusions.

I remember a "very" christian woman who killed her 2 babies just after being christened. Her reasoning had no flaws:
-Life on Earth is not very important, what's important is eternal life after death.
-If my children die right now they'll go to heaven as they haven't done anything wrong.
-If my children live a long life on Earth it is possible that they die with sins and go to hell.
-I really love my children so I don't care going to hell as long as they go to heaven.

Any man whose knowledge of the world wasn't based on faith but on facts would find the acts of that woman crazy and horrible.

Anyway, back to Islam vs Christianism, they both are the teachings of one main character: Jesus and Abu l-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Hāšimī al-Qurayšī. The first one was helping others all day long and forgave every one even those who crucified him. The second one was a jewish-prophet-wannabe/war chief who used his followers to conquer land and wealth and took revenge on his enemies by beheading them.

So yeah, if I have to choose between people who believe in old books (because the the older the wiser, no?) I would choose those who believe in the Bible.

@squishypon3
Ok, let's take these one at a time.

The authenticity of Muhammed's letter of protection to the monks at st catherine is very doubtful. All indications point to it being a forgery as a means of protecting themselves against a zealous and violent Islam of the time (who can blame them). The fact that you even need an extra-quranic treaty forbidding behaviour that was otherwise encouraged within the Quran says something about Islam.

There is absolutely no mention of this treaty in the Quran or Hadif. The document existing today is widely held to be a 'copy', not an original. It has pictures of mosques with minarets, which only came into fashion after the time of muhammad. And only a few years after it was supposedly written, Muslims then went on to conquer Egypt which was full of coptic christians. For 1400 years Islam has not recognised this treaty as one of the traditions of muhammad within the Hadif and coptic christians are still to this day regularly persecuted.

You have to realise that the middle east coming out of roman times was heavily christian majority. Look at the middle east today and you'll see a historical story of one religion driving out and replacing another. This isn't a story of co-existence.

Quran 9:30

You didn't quote this one correctly. Or rather you've misunderstood what it means to be 'under a muslim government'. First of all, Islam has three codified ways in which to deal with non-believers.

1. Sword
2. Conversion
3. Dhimmi status (slave tax, less civil rights etc.)

Quran 9:29

Dhimmi status is set up to be a submission to Allah - that's literally what 'Islam' means. You are a second class citizen, have to pay heavy taxes, have basically no legal protections, and are singled out much like a jew would be under nazi germany. For all intents and purposes you are a slave subjected to treatment so harsh that the goal is to make you convert.

Second, this instruction only applies to muslim citizens and not muslim government aka sharia law. Zealous followers are great in war, but during times of peace muhammad doesn't want them going around randomly killing all the dhimmis without 'due process' because they are essentially tax assets. If a dhimmi is however brought before a sharia court and judged to have 'corrupted the land' as per the Quran (e.g. homosexual) then they are put to death.

Ironically this is actually a call to violence and political usurpation. When christians talk about a 'kingdom of god', they are talking only of a heavenly kingdom in the after life. The Romans misunderstood them to mean they wanted to overthrow the emporer, which is where the early christian persecutions came from. On the other hand, when Islam talks about the 'kingdom of Allah', they are literally talking about sharia law being imposed on Earth as represented in the life of Muhammad laid out in the Quran and Hadif.

ISIS themselves sum it up best in their periodic mag - Dabiq Issue 15

You didn't quote that correctly, see above for the correction. Non-muslims are fair game under Islam unless Muhammad gave them a peace treaty, which ofcourse could be rescinded at any time. From the rest of Muhammad's behaviour within the Quran and Hadif it's clear that he wasn't so much into peace treaties unless it suited him.

Muhammad started preaching in Mecca peacefully and only got 50 followers before being kicked out. He then went to Medina and becomes a self described politician and warlord. At first, in order to prevent reatliaion from the native jewish tribes of Medina, he preaches tolerance and co-exitance.

The character of a man however is best discovered when he comes to power. Only 2 years after he arrives, jews are being forcibly driven out of Medina. Coexistence was something that he promoted only when he did not have the power to conquer - strategy 101. Tolerance of Islamic ideology eventually leads to the institution of sharia (Allah's law), thus reversing the pattern of tolerance.

Sahih Bukhari (52:177)

Just like christianity is divided into OT/NT, Islam is divided into Mecca/Medina (peaceful/violent). Some of his followers weren't idiots. When questioned about the reversal of the earlier peaceful stuff, Muhammad states the Islamic principle of abrogation 4 separate times.

Quran 2:106

Quran 16:101

Quran 13:39

Quran 17:86

Muslims who are truly and genuinely peaceful are only this way because they aren't fully aware of the ideology that they support. It's fine to defend them as individuals, but do not get confused in also defending the ideology that they subscribe to. Islam is dangerous because the more a muslim learns about Quranic teaching, the less room they have to escape from supporting anti-human action.
Quran (2:216)

Quran 4:95

Quran 47:3-4

So on so on...

@tunsel11
Yes, that is what christians believe. I didn't say i was a christian though

@cola_colin

Those are Amadi muslims. They're a very small minority of truly peaceful people who aren't represented by mainstream Islam. Think of them like the peaceful mormons of christianity. Their religion is technically called Ahmadiyya, not Islam.

Amadi's are regularly persecuted and killed by Sunni/Shia. Whenever you see muslim on muslim violence, it's generally an amadi getting killed. And whenever you see peaceful muslims standing up for western values, it's generally an amadi.

Judging their teachings? Okay, so long as you use it to do nothing to any wide swath of people based on it, as nobody is to be judged on any basis besides the individual basis.

Which really invalidates the point of doing it, besides confirming it to be the second most hostile religion ever aside from Christianity, and the most hostile religion in modern times. Not even the most terror attacks, those are still committed by local civil groups, republic of this, militia of that, IRA, PETA, ect. 1 out of 3 terror attacks are islamic-based on a GOOD month, usually more like 1/10.

Actually, the most hostile religion ever is communism/socialism

One of the big things you haven't mentioned though is that like you'd said Islam must protect Christians under peace treaties, as well as one of the basic tenants of Islam being to respect treaties- and are religiously bound to follow treaties. Such as the Geneva convention. Which many Islamic countries have signed. Making what they are doing wrong.
(Though obviously ISIS is attempting to create their own Islamic state, hence the name, it not being formally recognized though makes it void.)

Not to mention early Islamic laws of war- though we're later contradicted afaik.

Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, the first Caliph, told his military commander: “Stop, O people, that I may give you ten rules for guidance on the battlefield. Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. You must not mutilate dead bodies; do not kill a woman, a child, or an aged man; do not cut down fruitful trees; do not destroy inhabited areas; do not slaughter any of the enemies’ sheep, cow or camel except for food; do not burn date palms, nor inundate them; do not embezzle (e.g. no misappropriation of booty or spoils of war) nor be guilty of cowardliness…You are likely to pass by people who have devoted their lives to monastic services; leave them alone."

Let me leave this little note though. I don't believe Islam is a "good" religion. But honestly- I don't believe any religion really is. Outside more personal spiritual ones I suppose?

The thing is, for me, is that while I believe most religion is just kind of negative I don't believe most religious people are this negative. I don't like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc as a whole. But I'm totally fine with Christians, Muslims, and Jewish people standing by themselves. Because religion is all about interpretation. It just so happens right now Islam's interpretation that pushes the negative side has showed up the most for now... But it's not hard to find negative interpretations spoil centuries caused by literally any other religion.

that is the most bullcrap-loaded image I've ever seen.

I'm curious to know If you truly believe that; if you do under what regime the whole of europe runs according to you; if it's socialism do you really think that's what it looks like over here?

It certainly ignores the actually important question of "how many resources do we have?"

If you have not much resources and people have to basically fight for food than you get the not-so-pretty scenarios. If you life in abundance than everything is great anyway.

yeah we'd need guns to defend ourselves while coming back from the grocery store and shiit...

I fuckin knew it. I knew something was fishy about that meme




The bullshit level of insinuating the claim that america is better off than Europe because of it's political choices has just gone from utter bullshit to scathingly paradoxical.

what so you couldn't find ONE decent picture of wealthy luxuriant NOT-europe america??

What do you mean? It's socialism that ignores the question of how many resources do we have. Wealth isn't a fixed pie. Anyway, i don't want to hash out the same arguments I already posted in this thread. If anyone is genuinely interested in the topic, i suggest starting with milton friedman's free to choose lecture series. Or if you're a reader, you can't go wrong with wealth of nations.

I guarantee you, future historians will look back at this period and wonder at our madness in exactly the same way we look back at our ancestors in horror as they normalised practices we now consider barbaric such as slavery. Time is money, taxation is theft of life.

Socialist societies always end up eating themselves to death as they run out of other peoples money. It killed the Romans, the Russians, the Chinese, the South Americans, and it is currently strangling Europe and North America. The economic debate for socialism was lost decades ago, and the moral debate ended centuries ago with the abolishment of slavery. If one is intellectually open, you only need to google how much money has been spent on the war on poverty since the 60's and then evaluate the outcomes (better/worse/same).

Anyway, I'm n0t really trying to convince anyone. Just an intellectual observation about fitness, competition, survival, and the rise and fall of economic entities. The person with one arm isn't going to do as well as the guy with both his arms.

just HAVE to nitpick here.

no.

that show an acute lack of knowledge of history. slavery wasn't "normalized".
the only occurrence in which the term "normalized" seems appropriate with history and slavery in particular is when slavery went through a-quasi unidirectional recession and finally extinction. and even then there were back-and-forths.

as when slavery was "prominent" ; well.. it wouldn't necessarily be during the 16th-19th century and most definitely wasn't biggest in the U.S. during the end of that period.

to be "normalized" wouldn't slavery have to have been abnormal before? whereas slavery was pretty much always a thing just changing where it was most prominent geographically dating all the way back to 8000 years before christ.

fun fact : before the 14-18th century slaves weren't necessarily black in fact more often than not they weren't.