ScottSA

This is the most interesting angle in defence of moral equivalence yet! So Christians and Buddhists are not killing off the rest of the population, but they would if they could, and they can't because you're there to nip them in the bud. Is that a reasonable encapsulation of your thesis? One would think, if one lived in the real world, that nipping fanatics in the bud would tend to drive them to violence instead of stop them. So really, nipping these hordes of Christians who are straining at the leash to institute a Reign of Terror, ought to be driving them to bomb the rest of us, shouldn't it? Where are these murderous would-be fanatics?

So you boycott a store and then complain that one of them shut down? What kind of mushy thinking is that?

Can I feel free to disbelieve you entirely? Did they have a Wiccan room too? How about a Rastafarian smoker's room? Because, you see, "unis" have multifaith rooms for precisely that reason...so they are not inundated by requests for rooms for various cults. Which university was it that broke that cardinal custom? I don't believe you.

Do tell. Have you had a great deal of experience with Islamic prayer? Which Muslims don't believe in a call to prayer 5 times a day?

"Quiet reflection rooms" are not the same as foot baths, and I sincerely doubt you had two "reflection rooms" when and if you were in university, since any one I've been to (as well as hospitals) have a multifaith room, if any. Muslims don't share their rooms with anyone else, so I suspect the "uni" will now have a multifaith room and a Muslim room. If you've ever heard Muslims at prayer, you'll know that "quiet reflection" isn't very descriptive of it. Muslims tend to caterwaul and blare prayers from microphones in high places, and lately they seem to have added bomb factories to the mix. At least it ought to be a stimulating learning environment, what with Muezzins bellowing from the clock tower 5 times a day, footbaths soaking the floorboards and the odd explosion in the Student Union building.

To links describing accusations of wrong doing. The sort of thing any large company faces everyday as a matter of course. Oh right, and a Bolshevik Democratic "action group" report. Hardly "proof" of anything. Gosh, I bet I could dig up an accusation that socialists roast babies too...surely there must be some examples of accusations proven in court?

Yes, it came to Vernon two years ago and started rounding up people and shooting them in the parking lot. Then it invited all these outsider RVs to park in its lots, and made all the kids work for it. They probably whip them too. I hear they have fundamentalist meetings every morning, where they chant and wear hair shirts and curse Jews and Muslims and eat babies. I mean, kids should be flying kites, not working. Why I remember before Walmart came, when home was the range, and the skies were not cloudy all day, when kids didn't have to work, aye, those were the days...saved paper too, because the classified job section was so much shorter...why now there are THREE PAGES of dead trees advertising jobs! Sure some of that is the vicious capitalist economy, but lots of those evil capitalist jobs are because of spin-offs from Walmart too, damn their black souls.

They forgot to mention that the entire bathroom has to be re-oriented so as to not crrrap in the direction of Mecca, as is happening in the UK. I have another issue, however, and that is this: if people are not crapping in the direction of Mecca; in which direction are they crapping? I strongly suspect that the bathrooms are re-oriented under the guise of goodness so as to spew caca in the direction of Scotland. Ever since Bannockburrrn, the English speaking world has had it in for we wee Scots. I've had enough, and I'm seriously thinking of blowing myself up in the name of an oak tree of whatever my filthy heathen strong but savage ancestors worshipped before the English God came prancing along on his high wee harse. Crrrap on Scotland, will ye?

Christ, I thought you'd take the time to read those few short sentences before spouting back the same tired rhetoric. Apparently even that is too much effort for you to engage in.

Lol...these are 2006 Code Pink talking points. Update them if you want to be taken seriously.

I can't remember the name of the fallacy that entails using one conclusion to back up an entirely different argument, but that's a classic example of it. The world is a safer place because Saddam is gone. Of course the threat of terrorism has increased. There is absolutely no contradiction here.

What tripe. You simply make stuff up, tell the other side that they don't know what they are talking about, and ignore the arguments you don't understand. I doubt you even know to whom I was refering in the last post.

This thread has degenerated into the worst example of head-in-the-sandism I've ever seen. Even the America-firsters weren't as utterly ignorant and blind as Riverwind is. There are really no grounds for argument here...people point out the obvious invalidity of his argument with numerous examples and he blithely dismisses them as "temporary." One might as well make the idiotic claim that Hiroshima only affected Hiroshimians or the sack of Rome only affected the city of Rome. Everything in Riverwind's vacuous mind apparently takes place in a vacuum.

I agree that western separatism is out there lurking. I don't think Harper himself is holding it back...but the fact the Cons are in power certainly is. If the Libs take power because of an Ontario vote, it'll be back with a fury. I'm all for western separatism, as long as Saskatchewan and BC are included (preferable Manitoba too). The west can't hinge itself economically on oil revenues forever...I suspect farmland will be in big demand in the not too distant future.

Here's another example of Muslim murder commited to shut down opposing opinions. Quite recently too: Muslims Silence Critics By Robert Spencer FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/6/2007 After a police raid Friday at Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland, bakery employee Devaughndre Broussard admitted to murdering Chauncey Bailey, the editor of the Oakland Post. Bailey was writing a series of investigative articles about the Bakery – and that’s why, according to police, Broussard killed him. http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read...AA-19F3CF14C516

Oh dear, a minute ago you were claiming that there's no such thing as race and now you're claiming to be the same race as me? Your complete befuddlement seems to extend beyond describing your political affiliations.

One argument that seems to keep cropping up when self-loathing westerners try to draw moral parallels between Christianity and Islam by trotting out "abortion clinic bombers" and "fundamentalist Christians" and so on, is on the face of it ludicrous. The next line of retreat is often a reference to bumpiles in Abu Griab, or "traumatic" Koran peeings-on...as if these singular events even hold a candle to the daily atrocities committed in the name of allah. Nothing more need really be said about the moral difference between being piled in a heap vs having your head sawn off with a paring knife. When this is pointed out, the final retreat is all to often to "historical wrongs"; usually ranging from the KKK to the Inquisition to Northern Ireland. And it is this final attempt at moral equivalency that is really the worst, because it's based on false information that has been bandied about for a few decades in the west that many of the stories have become truisms even though they are false. As irrelevant as events that took place several centuries ago or were conflined to small regional areas might be to the global Jihad, lets take a look at some of these parallels. Do they really compare in scale or scope to the thousands of killings a month all over the globe today in the name of Allah? Here's a website that has taken the time to put some figures together. It has its own research, but any more or less competent amateur historian knows it already anyway: So, you think the Ku Klux Klan and the Spanish Inquisition are bad? So do we, but... Put the Numbers in Perspective More people are killed by Islamists each year than in all 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition combined. (source) Islamic terrorists murder more people every day than the Ku Klux Klan has in the last 50 years. (source) More civilians were killed by Muslim extremists in two hours on September 11th than in the 36 years of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. (source) 19 Muslim hijackers killed more innocents in two hours on September 11th than the number of American criminals executed in the last 65 years. (source) http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

I'm fine with the moderation. I find the arbitrary warnings a bit tiresome, and one in particular to stop picking on Islam to be verging on outrageous and emminently ignorable, but overall not bad. I think a bigger problem is that one or two of the lightweight posters seem to think this is a chatroom or somesuch, with "lol"s and smiley icons sprinkled in every post. I really couldn't care less about the edit tracking or locked posts or whatever...I think that's mostly a concern for people whose opinions slide all over the place according to the immediate argument, and who for some reason want to hide the fact. But I haven't seen Waz around, so who cares?

Being "tolerant," in the way it's seen by the liberal mind at least, is only possible to those who believe in nothing and so 'tolerate' everything. There is nothing virtuous about tolerance at all. And I spose you don't see the several levels of irony in your sentence above?

The only straws she's grasping at are the ones hanging off your strawman. She is saying quite clearly that when Christians boycott something, it means they don't buy it. When Muslims boycott something, it means they burn it down and slice the heads of the owners off. And then burn a few cars and set off a few bombs for good measure.

There's not a fact within 1000 yards of your argument; just a lot of hot air, glaring ignorance, and galloping naivete' That's the trouble.

Rational according to what measure of rationality? Pol Pot was entirely rational according to his rationale; so was Hitler, Stalin and anyone else in control of a "large economy." I daresay someone waiting for the return of the 12th Imam and risking war with superpowers is hardly rational according to any western standard, but entirely rational according to his own.

There's simply nothing to say to this sort of stupidity.

Why does he need an independent claim? Harper's claim is self-evidently true. Like it or not, Quebec separatism is in disarray...it expected the federal - provincial tug of war to continue, and when Harper simply let go of the rope it fell on its ass in the mud. That is a direct result of Harper's policies.

True now, but not historically true. Until the 17th century (1683 to be exact), the struggle was one of brute force against brute force with both sides rooted in unshakeable religious conviction. Christianity made advances in Spain, and Islam made advances in Bysantium and attempts in Europe. After that, Christendom shot ahead in every sphere of existence for centuries, just as firmly rooted in conviction, but in a conviction that had learned to be more open to science and social change. Islam simply stopped, and even regressed. But it's only in the last 200 years or so that the subject of Islam's intolerance has become an accusation by the west, and only in the last 25 that anyone in the west (other than colonial administrators) really cared one way or another. It's also only in the last 50 years that the west has been worthy of accusations of decadence. And our recent decadence and relativistic thought system is our greatest weakness, because while Islam may believe in the wrong things, at least it believes in something. Your question, "Is either one wrong?" speaks volumes about our weakness in the west. We say we believe in tolerance, but that's simply another way of saying we believe in nothing and so we accept everything. Islam believes we are wrong, but we're not quite sure Islam is wrong. How can we ever win as long as we hold that attitude?