I'm not doing the whole quote argument today. Yes, the perception of moderates in the middle east is largely unfounded, but we can't ignore trends of improvement -- we need to acknowledge and celebrate them. I don't know your background or why you allow your hatred for Muslims to warp your opinions so drastically, but it's very disingenuous to represent this article as anything but a display of progress in the middle east.

I doubt it's actually Chally's real hardline opinion on things. Everybody's got their trope to play.

Das goes for kids.

Midget's universally loose a few screws.

Chally hates mudslimes.

Verb hates everything.

Ect ect.

It's just the hot topic button of discussion right now.

Quote from: Have A Holly Jolly Turkey on December 12, 2015, 01:02:40 PM

I'm not doing the whole quote argument today. Yes, the perception of moderates in the middle east is largely unfounded, but we can't ignore trends of improvement -- we need to acknowledge and celebrate them. I don't know your background or why you allow your hatred for Muslims to warp your opinions so drastically, but it's very disingenuous to represent this article as anything but a display of progress in the middle east.

I don't think Challenger, or I, for that matter are ignoring the positive trends. Long-term optimism is fine, and justified by the evidence. Our concern is this narrative of current optimism with the state of religion in the Middle East, which encourages complacency towards something as fundamental as incompatible values.

Whose complacency, though? We've been at war with extremists for 14 years, ISIS is the most talked about issue in western countries, the most popular presidential candidate is outwardly racist and hostile to Muslims, and anti-Muslim sentiment is on the rise. Hell, a trending joke on this site is to pretend to hate Arabs and Muslims. There is really no complacency in arguing for less hateful rhetoric.

Quote from: Snowtrap on December 12, 2015, 01:06:20 PM

Quote from: Have A Holly Jolly Turkey on December 12, 2015, 01:02:40 PM

I'm not doing the whole quote argument today. Yes, the perception of moderates in the middle east is largely unfounded, but we can't ignore trends of improvement -- we need to acknowledge and celebrate them. I don't know your background or why you allow your hatred for Muslims to warp your opinions so drastically, but it's very disingenuous to represent this article as anything but a display of progress in the middle east.

I doubt it's actually Chally's real hardline opinion on things. Everybody's got their trope to play.

Das goes for kids.

Midget's universally loose a few screws.

Chally hates mudslimes.

Verb hates everything.

Ect ect.

It's just the hot topic button of discussion right now.

"He doesn't love and defend Islam, he MUST be a bigot troll!"

Kindly take your stupidity elsewhere. I don't hate anybody, I'm not calling for the hatred of anybody, and I never have called for it.

Whatever you say slick.

Quote

Of course I recognize that quite a lot of Muslims in the middle east are okay with terrorism.

Do you? Because you were one of the people saying the "fraction of a fraction" bullshit.

Where? I've never said anything like that on here, and I've argued against it before. I didn't excuse those people by talking about the others moving away from extremism. There's so much casual racism and flippancy against Muslims on this site that the good aspects of the article needed to be pointed out.

One thing I wish the Pew poll had accounted for was the number of Muslims in the population. If the 'billion moderates' claim is a myth (which I believe it is), how many of the 1.6 billion Muslims actually respond  unfavorably to terrorism or terrorist organizations?

Am I supposed to reed pet you for that?

Whatever that is, you probably shouldn't do it.

Edit: ha, just understood the typo. No, that's not why I said that.

Quote from: Have A Holly Jolly Turkey on December 12, 2015, 04:59:47 PM

Where? I've never said anything like that on here, and I've argued against it before. I didn't excuse those people by talking about the others moving away from extremism.

You have.

I'll dig through your posts when you dig through mine and show where I'm a bigot.

tbh I'm genuinely interested to see where I've ever said that. I don't expect you to dig through posts, but I've never appealed to the 'moderate billion' argument. As for the bigot thing, look, I'm not trying to insult you with it. You vehemently deny it's just a forum character act, but you do tend to shit on Muslims quite a bit. You could really ask anyone and they'd answer the same.

Are they supposed to ask a billion Muslims?

No, what I mean is it would be useful to see the number of Muslims in each country's population totaled, to see how those percentages equate to a real number of Muslims that support terrorism. For instance, going off populations from Google there are 6,770,000 Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon combined; 40% support suicide bombing, so that's 2.7 Muslims. I suppose someone could just do the math, but I'd like to know the actual Muslim population from the poll.

Quote from: Have A Holly Jolly Turkey on December 12, 2015, 05:42:13 PM

Total population of Muslims that responded as in favor of suicide bombing against civilians: 154,351,700

If we keep being nice and defend these people. Maybe they'll change their minds on their own, right?

Well, it's a lose lose situation no matter where we go at this point anyway. It'd be nice if that whole 150 million where all lined up in a cluster together. That way you could just sweep the rug nice and easy. Not the case though. That number is splintered everywhere all across the planet.

Part of the problem with the radicals is that they're allowed and able to spread through the internet by posting shit up on whatever they feel like. Much harder to target a group of people when they're splintered into groups like that all over the place.

There isn't any real conventional way to fight this without resorting to something that's ridiculous. And even then, the collateral is the problem. That number of people who support actively being sacks of dicks is gonna grow if you start indescriminantly targeting the innocent folks.

It's just a big fucking circle at this point. And we get to sit here and watch as all the politicians and all the people given charge over this mess are just gonna make the wrong plays. We're gonna watch those innocent people get hurt, and we're gonna see the assholes, the true issue, dance around like ballerinas as they slide through all those preventative measures.

Quote from: Luciana on December 11, 2015, 10:44:25 PM

Israel is just as bad, if not worse than some things going on over there.

Fuck you, you lunatic.

Is Israel perfect? No, not by a long shot. But if you think Israel is "just as bad, if not worse" than Hamas firing rockets from besides residential areas and keeping weapons in schools and hospitals then you literally don't have a clue what the fuck you are talking about.

How does that justify bombing those residential areas, schools, and hospitals?

Quote from: Cadenza on December 12, 2015, 11:36:22 PM

How does that justify bombing those residential areas, schools, and hospitals?

What is Israel supposed to do?

They give warnings to people to evacuate when they fire back.

They're supposed to not kill civilians. If they weren't targeting civilian areas then they wouldn't even need to rely on a warning system that doesn't even work.

Palestine terrorist fires bombs from residential area.
Israel fires back directly into residential area, kills a bunch of civilians.
Palestine says Israel is committing war crimes.
Israel gets support of US and maybe one of our allies.

Rinse and repeat for decades.

You also forgot the part where Hamas places civilians in military strategic checkpoints so Palestine can garner sympathy points from the West when Israel targets them.

Just thought I'd add a minor addendum.