Weird piece by Salon. It's not about white male privilege in the United States. It's about the fact that every country is having issues with Muslim Terrorists. Every country, not just the US.

Time to remind everyone that Christianity wasn't all wine and wafers until other social forces had whipped it like a barnyard animal for five or ten centuries.

Most religious texts are odious... ALL religious texts are unimprovable. It's definitional.

Islam is nothing special.

We need to outlaw dangerous semi-automatic ASSAULT COOKERS

Link:
http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.co.il/2013/04/we-need-pressure-cooker-control.html

Pressure-cooker users will just have to forfeit that right - for the children!

Crid, I think you should take a short nap, then try that post again.

When I read that ludicrous Salon piece, all I could think of was George Orwell's remark
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”

Probably the only point so far, where I agree with Patrick and not with Crid.

Christianity has always been a reflection of the society around it. Of course Christianity wasn't all wine and wafers a thousand years ago. It was brutal and bloody just like pretty much all of Europe.

Islam on the other hand, as practiced by the jihadis, is a reflection of Arab culture and Arab culture is for the most part, still stuck in the 12th century.

The addition of lots of unearned income (oil money) threw the proverbial gas on the fire, as the Arab lands were considerably less valuable as camel pasture before the oil companies started throwing money at anyone who would sign a lease.

The new multi millionaire desert tribal leaders had to find a distraction to keep from being lynched by the have nots and the bourgeoisie.
The evil Americans and the Jews made great scapegoats.

Oh, and most of the Arabs backed the Nazis during WWII, so basically they got what was coming toem in 1948.

Yes Ben David.

I think Di Fi needs to get right to work on background checks, serial number registries, and of course a TOTAL BAN on "high capacity" pressure cookers.

I hope it is a non-Muslim American because I don't want us to get involved in any more wars.

We all know it was a male between the ages of 17 and 40. So maybe we just need to ban them.

I'm really surprised some feminazi progressive hasn't suggested that yet.

"Most religious texts are odious... ALL religious texts are unimprovable. It's definitional. Islam is nothing special."

I love when people who know "nothing special" about Islam weigh in on it.

The Quran is said to be the word of god and is not disputable.

The Bible is taken more as a historical document.

Jews and Christians do not slaughter their neighbors per biblical contentions of when this should happen.

Furthermore, I can get behind a lot of the Jesus stuff -- feed the poor, etc. Islam tells Muslims not to give charity to non-Muslims (because they're going to hell anyway, and because money should go for Muslims and jihad) which I find particularly ugly.

I've mentioned my friend Lawyer Tom before. He's done well for himself and is a Christian and puts a good bit of his money into an organization that helps homeless people. I don't agree with him on whether there's a god, but I appreciate his charity, which is driven by his religious beliefs.

"Social forces had whipped [Christianity] like a barnyard animal for five or ten centuries..." LOL. That's as hilariously ignorant of biblical history as Sirota is ignorant of the individual/political dichotomy of Islam.

As for Christianity, it didn't exist until *after* the time of Jesus, who was a Jew. The history of Abraham, Moses, and the like was one of emerging from pagan cultures into a spiritual view of life. It was not quick or pretty. Reading the OT is reading the struggles, failures, and eventual successes of monotheistic thought. Those who believe the Bible some sort of monolithic code book simply have no idea what they are talking about. This, unfortunately, includes some who profess the Christian faith.

As for Islam, the Quran was written by one man at a much more recent time, and we know what it says and what it means. Putting that aside, there is the individual practice of Islam, which I believe to be peaceful. There is also -- as distinct as the other -- a political collectivism called Islam that seeks to take over the world, and includes the horrors of Sharia law. This, I believe, is behind the Islamicist terrorism.

"The Bible is taken more as a historical document."

... by those who aren't picky about the definition of "history".

"there is the individual practice of Islam, which I believe to be peaceful. There is also -- as distinct as the other -- a political collectivism called Islam that seeks to take over the world, and includes the horrors of Sharia law."

I do not think they are financially distinct. Do you?

> I think you should take a short nap

I think you should die of shame for being a sarcastically cuntly nine-year-old for decades.

Here's more about that guy.

A lot of this is horse shit. When a white male commits an action of violence, they aren't considered a lone wolf. They are quickly tied to talk radio, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush, Sean Hannity.

Abortion shootings are rare, and swiftly denounced by Christians. Yet that does not describe the protrayal.

So a white lone wolf swiftly denounced by the right, yet the right gets blamed as programming him through radio and rhetoric. Yet Muslim blows up innocent people while islamists in the middle was take to the streets cheering and chanting "death to America" and we are supposed to consider them isolated.

> Islam on the other hand, as practiced by the
> jihadis, is a reflection of Arab culture and
> Arab culture is for the most part, still stuck
> in the 12th century.

Aha! You agree with me: These cultures aren't yet hooked up to modernity. Very good!

Did anyone ever recommend you watch this video clip?

Well, here's an old white guy who has no IDEA how to engage his brain before sending out a mass email:

http://now.msn.com/peter-hansen-new-hampshire-rep-calls-women-vaginas-in-mass-email

And, yeah, probably nothing will happen to him, because it's all a "misinterpretation". Or something. And he has money, I would guess, so there's that.

But THIS is horseshit tripled: "White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation," writes author Tim Wise. "White privilege is knowing..." blah blah blah. Tell that to all the white guys who actually ARE jailed for their crimes. There's more of 'em than people think.

Ooooooooo, Cridmo! Simul-post! Been a while since we've done that. Was it as good for you?

o.O

> I love when people who know "nothing special"
> about Islam weigh in on it.

Oh DON'T BE A CUNT, Amy. You sniggering....

Great, you read some idiot articles. That's just ducky. You've had your buttons pushed by careerist assholes who promised to keep you safe, but only if you promise to panic just as hard as you can.

This is PATHETIC.

You a NOT a religious scholar. You're not a scholar period, and you have no business mocking the learnedness of others.

What is this sickness? Why are you dorks so eager to pretend that OMFG NO ONE HAS EVER HAD TO DEAL WITH *ANYTHING* LIKE THIS BEFORE EVER oh dear dead Grandma please protect me? (And here are some more insults for people who aren't afraid enough!

Crid, honey, slow down! I don't think Amy's in panic any more than I am, but I am certainly aware that I don't think Muslims should be able to take over the world through terrorism.

This: "...a political collectivism called Islam that seeks to take over the world, and includes the horrors of Sharia law." is what we DON'T want to happen. The more aware of this danger the rest of us are, the less likely it will happen (in our lifetime anyway. Once we're gone, I hold no hope. The liberals are too soft and touchy-feely about shit they refuse to see for what it really is. But I don't want to see my grandchildren subject to the mad ravings and edicts of a murderous pedophile, which is what Mohammed was.). As it stands now, those bastards are ENJOYING watching people panic, and the brave souls of Boston and elsewhere who are saying "FUCK YOU" to them have my whole-hearted support. I'm not panicked by any means, and I don't think Amy is either. We're AWARE. And we wish more people were.

Whoa crid! Why so much anger?

(When's the last time Joe Catholic ran over the lady next door because she cheated on her husband?)

Well Clara Harris did run over her cheating husband with a Mercedes. ;-)

"When a white male commits an action of violence, they aren't considered a lone wolf. They are quickly tied to talk radio, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush, Sean Hannity.

Abortion shootings are rare, and swiftly denounced by Christians. "

To quote the late, great Duck Dunn in The Blues Brothers: "If the shit fits, wear it."

@Jim P: " Well Clara Harris did run over her cheating husband with a Mercedes."
_________

yup. And Lorena Bobbitt and Catherine Becker nipped their husband's issues in the bud. If man maims a woman, joke about it and see how long you live. But when men are seriously injured victims of women, it's considered absolutely fucking hilarious.

Of course what Sirota is talking about is not white privilege, but leftist privilege. All of the recent atrocities that we have heard about, from the Giffords assassination attempt to the Holocaust musueum attack in D.C. to the VA Tech shootings, were committed by people who, if they had any identifiable political ideology, were committed leftists.

As for me, I find the idea that I'm supposed to think and believe certain things, because of my surface appearance and supposed ethnicity, mystifying. I don't grok that. How is my skin color (which varies a lot dependong on how much sun I've had recently) supposed to have any bearing on my political views? Suppose I am identified as being of ethnicity X, and I live in city Y where ethnicity X has a solid majority. City Y is dying on the vine; businesses are closing, schools are completely dysfunctional, the last four elected mayors are all in prison, and anyone who can afford to is either moving out to the suburbs in the next county, or leaving the area altogether. The evidence around me indicates that the current policies, advocated by all the self-styled leaders of ethnicity X, aren't working. Am I supposed to keep doggedly believing in them just because I'm an X? Is it more important to me to express my "X pride", or is it more important to live in a city that's functional? I know what my choice would be. Screw pride; do what works.

Whoa crid! Why so much anger?
He's in Cali. I'd be angry, too, if I had to live there.

> Why so much anger?

Because she's (baselessly) mocking those who don't buy into her (baseless) fear-mongering. Because she's insight from special study that she has not made. Because her condescension is pointless; you can have social distance from other people for free, and there's no reason to pretend to have earned it through (imaginary) learning.

Seekers, Islam is not an existential threat to Western civ. The anti-Dubya-war people were always right about that. (Hi, Eric!)

Islam is as fractured and mild and weird as any large religion can be. There's nothing unprecedented in the stupidity or harshness of Islam's strictures. Amy could find as much terror in the Christian Bible if she wanted to go looking for it there, and she's certainly done so in the past...

But golly, that's not the fashion today, is it?

Islam will fuck up a lot of lives, mostly women's lives, in the years ahead, by keeping people in poverty through 7th-century patterns. We should diminish that poverty by connecting those people to the civilization's richness... And we should doing that anyway, out of sheer decency.

But by definition, modernity has the women on its side. So when conflict becomes acute, we're armed with twice the genius and twice the ruthlessness.

AND WE HAVE DEALT WITH THESE THINGS BEFORE... We can't lose.



So what thrill do Amy & Company take in pretending this is novel?

Why do they want to condescend?

> He's in Cali.

Part of it.

Crid, I am always in fundamental agreement with you. It is just the details we sometimes differ on.

More proof that politicians are godless sodomites:

http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/16/news/economy/seniors-national-parks/

Anyone wishing to salivate over the fact that this particular politician is a Democrat in California is free to do so.

As for Islam, the Quran was written by one man at a much more recent time, and we know what it says and what it means.

The Quran was not written by one man.

Most Arabs were not literate at the time, so the revelations God made to Mohammed were memorized. The few available literati began writing passages down on available tablets, palm fronds, stones, and other items the could be written on or carved.

When Mohammed died in 632, the Quran didn't exist.

Mohammed's successor, Abu Bakr, decided to collect the book in one volume. He charged one associate with collecting the written verses and interviewing as many people who had memorized verses as he could find. The result was a hand-written copy of the Quran.

Other written copies of Mohammed's teachings are said to have existed at the same time.

In 650, Uthman, the third caliph, noticed there were variants in Islam in the newly-conquered territories as oral Islam overlaid existing religious practices.

He ordered a committee to use the existing hand-written text and contact any still-living associates of Mohammed to produce an official text of the Quran.

Uthman's version became the official version and all other versions (and any that varied from the official version) are believed to have been destroyed.

So, the Quran was written 20 years after Mohammed's death, written mostly from memorized passages, and was created to be the official religious book of a warrior movement bent on world domination.

"You're not a scholar period, and you have no business mocking the learnedness of others."

Pot, kettle. I've reset the surge suppressor on the irony meter.

"$10? At age 65? I think we need to look at that," Speier said. "There's a lot of people who can pay more than $10 for the rest of their lives."

That "there's a lot of people who can pay more" mindset is the problem with our government. It's not about what's a decent discount to give senior citizens or what's the right age at which to give it. It's about milking every last dime out of the taxpayers and cloaking the money grab in a mantle of "it's only fair."

Am I going to have to start bringing a tax return every time I visit a national park?

Sirota: If recent history is any guide, if the bomber ends up being a white anti-government extremist, white privilege will likely mean the attack is portrayed as just an isolated incident...

While you can't completely rule out a white anti-government extremist, I'm not seeing what there is about the Boston Marathon that would cause such a person to choose it as a target.

Maybe it's just a sociopath who wanted to kill people for no political purpose.

My money is still on a foreign terrorist. The Boston Marathon is an iconic American event, like the Super Bowl or New Year's Eve in Times Square and it seems like that's the kind a target a foreign terrorist would want to hit.

"the dynamics of privilege..."

There is no White privilege. There are liberal media people who have chips on their shoulders.

Again, there is no White privilege. It's the lame excuse of the envious slackers.

Take just a quick look, and you will find more diversity between blacks than is supposed between whites and blacks - because the politically correct think there are only two colors. Well, Asians don't count, because they obviously excel.

Islam is as fractured and mild and weird as any large religion can be.
Be that as it may, there was nothing "special" about shinto prior to WWII, yet it took two a bombs and the occupation of japan to tame it...and japan was then was less than 200 million people. Macarthur was right, shinto was a driving force behind japan's war effort. It will take much more than decency to tame islam.

"White privilege" is white people trying to get leverage on other white people by projecting their own racial anxieties and hang ups onto those other white people. It's the 21st Century Great White Hope.

JD wrote:

While you can't completely rule out a white anti-government extremist, I'm not seeing what there is about the Boston Marathon that would cause such a person to choose it as a target.

Seriously, JD?

* Boston is the home of the real Tea Party
* The marathon was on a holiday called Patriot's Day
* Patriot's Day commemorates the beginning of the revolution
* The marathon was held on tax day
* Boston is in MA, a very blue state, the first to legalize gay marriage. It's also home to some strict gun laws. Obama and his health plan have a lot of support.

It wouldn't be the first time crazy right-wingers have attacked us. I haven't forgotten John Salvi.

Crid, I'm the first to agree that Amy may be guilty of some confirmation bias on the Islam front, but there was no need to swear at her.

Of course there is white privilege. There's wealth privilege, too, and sometimes they get mixed up. No one's going to look at a nice middle class white lady like me and assume I'm a criminal because I'm in that demographic.

There's other privilege in other situations, like admissions and hiring depending on context. The existence of white privilege doesn't preclude other privileges.

"No one's going to look at a nice middle class white lady like me and assume I'm a criminal"

Wrong. We know that ex-convicts with a felonious history, like Martha Stewart, are so dangerous they must be prevented from going duck hunting.

So watch it, sister. Our betters in government have their eyes on you.

"It wouldn't be the first time crazy right-wingers have attacked us."

Who is "us"?

I intend to uphold the Constitution. I know quite a bit about firearms, security, the law, and risk analysis.

And I get the feeling that "us" does not.

So, elaborate.

It wouldn't be the first time crazy right-wingers have attacked us. I haven't forgotten John Salvi.

Nicole, that name didn't ring a bell so I had to look him up. Salvi was, apparently, an abortion opponent and he carried out fatal shootings at two Planned Parenthood reproductive health clinics in Brookline. He didn't shoot people at, say, a Red Sox game, or stab people who were strolling through Boston Common. His target was related to what he was angry about. Same with McVeigh. He hated the federal government; he bombed a federal building (not a corporate office building or a sports stadium.)

I'm not saying this can't possibly be the work of a sociopath or a right-wing extremist. Hell, it could be the work of a Brit, who's pissed off at Americans for the revolution. I just feel it's more likely the work of a foreign terrorist.

It wouldn't be the first time crazy right-wingers have attacked us. I haven't forgotten John Salvi. -- NicoleK at April 18, 2013 12:07 PM

Of course no one on the left, like Bill Ayers, was ever involved in bombing U.S. citizens. It has always been the right.

We have pictures now. Yes, they may not be the guys that planted the bombs, but.....yeah, theya ren't "white" or tea partiers. Or right wing. Sorry to burst your bubble libs.

If middle aged white women committed the overwhelming majority of a given type of crime, you would be suspected, Nicole. It's not white privilege, it's risk-assessment. Something all people use subconciously in all situations requiring judgement.

Yes, when those pictures didn't advance the narrative the left wanted to push, they kinda shut up about it.

I suspected there might be a problem with the "Tea Party white militia theory" when they released the info that the bombs had been built out of pressure cookers, and filled with shrapnel.

This is a common Middle East terrorist tactic from what I have read.

Prepare to have the whole incident swept under the rug. It serves no political purpose now, as it undercuts about five different Obama administration talking points.

Surprise, surprise: The bombers come from an Islamic area and (apparently) have Islamic views! How long before further coverage gets embargoed? And ten years from now, the majority of Americans will believe that the Tea Party did it.

Jim P, I dont deny there are left-wing terrorists, I just don't think they'd attack Boston.