Pastor Terry Jones as a representative of American actions and values

Interesting, its not even a hidden agenda. Obviously, they know their audience very well.

 

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I called for this man's death several months ago in this very forum and was punished by the mods for suggesting such a thing. Yet here we are months later and the murder of the innocents has happened because of him. So I ask- is it not better to wish one man dead than allow his diatrabe to go on and incite more hate?

 

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Oh those evil Westerners. I hear some of them don't even change their underwear.

Well, that sounds perfect. The ideal situation, all things considered. We're uninvolved and we prevent involvement with us. Live and let live.

I'll offer an opinion where the opinion is justifiable and relevant.

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If you want to argue details, that's a different thing.

 

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Midnight Snacks

This is a very interesting and, yes, to some degree expected turn of the rhetoric.

And here's the thing: Is it possible, Geoff, that maybe S.A.M. is exploiting Pastor Jones as a general critique of "America", as such, in order to make a point about how people exploit the particular in order to criticize the general about Muslims and Islamic culture?

I've actually seen this rhetorical pattern many, many times over the years at Sciforums. I've even seen this circle play out in relation to S.A.M. a few times.

But in terms of that cycle, and the unfortunate fact that, at some point, if we intend to establish any basis for judgment in relation to it, it becomes an argument over who started what, I would only point out that in addition to that device, we also actually have S.A.M.'s actual opinion available to us: "Personally I consider Pastor Jones a symptom of the malaise, rather than a cause."

She is exactly correct. If Jones is exemplary of anything about American culture, it's who and what our culture can produce and what we do with such people and ideas.

Jones is small-minded beyond average. He is intellectually and psychologically crippled. His protégé Sapp is the much similar. They are not representative of either mean or median American intellectual or psychological maturity. But they are representative not only of what our culture can produce, but of what it requires. Nature is not extraneous. Humanity is part of nature. The most affecting society in the whole of the human endeavor, having created the greatest contraption for organizing people ever devised, requires a number of, shall we say unpleasant stations. In order to maintain our prosperity, we require a certain proportion of humanity to live in poverty ranging from working to crushing. Just, you know, for instance. We might also assert that American society produces a certain number of sociopaths and psychopaths. These are natural results, just as we require a certain number of children to die in fires or other structural catastrophes that occur as a result of a failure to observe proper residential structure safety codes. In other words, it's going to happen.

The issue of comparative cultural identification° basically comes down to an undefined array of perceptions. Statistics aren't quite as important to the vernacular comparison°, but can be if it's so important as to get academic about it. The frequency and character of a society's deviations from civility are, for our purposes°, the first level of comparison.

For "patriotic"° Americans, the Islamic world is ripe for ridicule and alienation. And why not? After all, between killing rape survivors, hanging homosexuals, blowing themselves up and slitting babies' throats, Islamic culture has a few discords to reconcile. And, boy howdy, they are spectacular problems. Very easy to revile; very easy to see.

Setting aside, for our purposes, the question of cause and effect, or how things came to be the way they are, we might look, instead, to the frequency and character of American deviations from civility. From domestic violence and child abuse to gang shootings, road rage, serial killers, thug cops, you name it .... Yes, these are spectacular. They are easy to identify. They are easy to condemn. But it is more controversial to discuss any relationship between American corporate needs abroad—petroleum in Nigeria, for instance—contributes to what cannot rightly be called atrocities, but represent nonetheless atrocious results.

From another point of view, though—oh, say, the perspective of someone burning an American flag with the word "DEATH" spray painted across it—the role of Western and specifically American concerns in Nigeria is spectacular, and killing children, and easily identified and condemned.

What difference do we—Westerners, Americans, not-Islamic-radicals—establish between the brutal toll of their society, and the unfortunate toll that is merely coincidental to the needs and workings of our society?

Pastor Jones is, indeed, one of our symptomatic deviations from civility. And yes, I'm glad he's the kind of asshole he is, instead of the kind of asshole he's trying to pick a fight with. But he's still an asshole, and he's still a deviation from civility according to our cultural necessity, and that makes him an acute depiction of where and how we are astray even from our own professed psychomoral ideals.

One telling facet of the discussion is how insecure are the Western critics of Islam. Yes, we realize that many Muslims are presently feeling a bit jumpy about the cultures they are identified with, but, as we noted, the bombings, the hangings, the whippings and stonings and acid attacks—these are all very much visible, and easy to identify and condemn.

But how many who would respond to the proposition about Jones by attacking Islamic culture are especially confident about the innocence of their own society? The self-righteousness of supremacy comes either from a deluded belief that one's faction can do no wrong, or else a sociopathic belief that one's faction is somehow entitled to behavior that would otherwise be viewed as wrong or sinful.

So, yes, I think it very strange how seemingly oversensitive some of the pro-Western voices are. The Jones question adequately caricatures a rhetorical device Western jingoists are long-known to use. But we justify them by painting them as victims?

"... is it wrong for Michael to do the same?"​

No less wrong, hateful, or anti-(fill in the blank) than it was when S.A.M. turned the generalization on the Americans and Americanisms to begin with. From that point, it's all a matter of definitions, and to each his or her own.
____________________

Notes:

° comparative cultural identification — Some might suggest I just invented a euphemism for supremacism, and while I would not agree conclusively, yes, I can at least see why.

° vernacular comparison — Some would remind that the U.S. has lost under 3,000 people to terrorism within our national boundaries. We might also pause to think about the number of traffic fatalities, heart disease mortalities, and gun deaths in the United States each year. We have a war on terror, and Michelle Obama is evil for suggesting Americans will find benefit in adopting healthier dietary habits. Considering heart disease and cancer (≈11m dead), firearm deaths (≈300k; also ≈650k injuries), and traffic deaths (≈380k) over the last ten years, we find the statistical outcomes do not reflect the practical responses the society has undertaken. Imagine what people would say if the federal government spent a trillion dollars in a domestic "War Against Heart Disease" to combat the more than six hundred thousand deaths each year resulting from heart disease. I mean, if Michelle Obama ... well, suffice to say it brings us 'round the circle. How do certain arguments get any play at all? Is it that some folks, recalling Nancy Reagan and the War on Drugs, are expecting a failed War on Deep-Fried-Bacon-Wrapped-Twinkies? And while I'm thinking of it, I should also point out that I cannot begin to explain the brutal irony of, well, okay, let's just start with the five pounds of bacon as a midnight snack. But I digress ... I think.

° for our purposes — That is, setting aside the criteria of differentiation, i.e., the simple fact that the difference is noted at all. Black, white. Man, woman. Christian, Muslim. Us, them.

° "patriotic" — Specifically, because of the quotation marks, to be taken in a sarcastic context equating to the jingoistic.

 

A lot of them. Symptomatic of a biased media, and their own selection biases.

They haven't figured out the government blatantly lies, and at this point the media is not to be trusted.
WHY they don't get this?

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A charge Islamic women have leveled at American culture, and to some degree deservedly so, we're obsessed with, and judged by our looks. It's not about the content of our characters, it's about how hot we are.

Wearing more revealing clothing is causing the western obsession with having the perfect female body to spread in most of the countries of the Middle East, which aren't as repressive...for the most part good, but I wish they didn't have to get our neuroses along with our freedoms.

And yes...appearance has a great deal to do with the self-image reflected back at you here. Thinness being a very big part of that...

This blog article references a survey that found women who weigh 25 pounds less than average earned over 15 K a year more, on average, than more typically-sized women. The survey was taken in the US and Germany.

http://blogs.wsj.com/juggle/2010/10/06/for-women-it-pays-to-be-very-thin/

Women also lose more pay than men for being overweight than men do.

Underwear???? Why would I wear that? That's just more laundry

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(from the department of Feeling Breezy)

 

They can achieve even if overweight or not good-looking. But it's one more disadvantage, whereas to be really ugly and male is less of a problem.

Women are obviously still judged more harshly for being overweight than men are, as witness the giant statistical pay bump for being very thin. Which reminds me, the last time I went job-hunting I was nowhere near thin, I wonder what will happen now...

 

from that link.....

"Technology can occasionally give you a false sense of security that you can see everything, that you can hear everything, that you know everything," said Air Force Major Gen. James O. Poss, who oversaw the Air Force investigation. "I really do think we have learned from this."


excellent
10 years down the road, with many a wedding celebration, schoolchildren, sleeping villagers and whatnot left for dead by the wayside, lessons have been learned.

i like it
god bless america

 

/eek

some just do without trying
ja
lemme build a shrine to google's employee #20

boy!

 

It seems to me it's more to do with culture and clothing and marketing. Take nude public baths for example. I've read signs in Japan that say: Please carry your towel over your shoulder and not in front of your groin. Why? Because it makes other people feel self-conscious about being nude. If we were more nude, perhaps we would care a lot less as naked bodies would appear more normalized.



MPO is that there is nothing wrong with criticizing belief, culture, nations, lack of belief, etc.... As a matter of fact, that's one of the ways society changes. Someone has to think Slavery is immoral as well as say something. I see France passed a law today banning the veil. Should we say something about that? Or would that be to criticize of the French people and the French culture? My feeling is most people will think it's perfectly fine to generalize in this case - I mean, they're Western and French to boot.

 

of course
5 grand goes a long way in afghanistan. it is also much more than the 1 grand they used to get back in the day. such is our largesse and generosity

in any case, we all know that the darkies don't feel pain the way the regular folks do.......

The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund was created by an Act of Congress, the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act (49 USC 40101), shortly after 9/11 to compensate the victims of the attack (or their families) in exchange for their agreement not to sue the airline corporations involved..........At the end of the process $7 billion was awarded to 97% of the families; the average payout was $1.8 million. (wikishit)

/chuckle

a govt bailout for the airlines involved?
that was the real concern?

hahahahaha

 

Well some people are more equal than others

 

Here is what my honourable friend has to say about Terry Jones.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgSzoCXXgIc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F99_FR-qkJY

Coz she's crying, she's crying she needs soldiers, coz we're dying, we're dying where's all our soldiers. she asks allah to send soldiers!


Allah hu akbar!

 

Monsieur Verdoux says ....

Well, that seems to be the point.

"Wars, conflict—it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!"

(Henri Verdoux)​

The horrors of war are myriad. The slaughters of innocents commonplace, an unfortunate necessity of warfare insofar as humans have been about this business. The rhetoric of war and terror makes all the difference in the world.

What makes the hundreds and thousands of innocents killed in our war against terrorism any less horrifying than what the Palestinian suicide bomber does? Our regret, I suppose. We tell people we're sorry the innocent people got in our way. The suicide bomber's friends all boast and claim responsibility. And the suicide bomber chooses specifically to hurt civilians. We only hurt civilians because it's more important to us that we hit or miss a target that may or may not be there. See, killing the civilians isn't our first priority; it's just an unfortunate necessity. That's what makes the thousands of innocent people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan less important than the hundreds of innocent people killed in Israel or the United States.

But there are other, less spectacular atrocities. What of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of children in Nigeria who die of preventable, treatable diseases because their parents aren't paid enough to afford good medical care? This is one of the costs demanded by the fact of petroleum in that land. Are the rapes committed by Colonel Qadafi's goon squad any more reprehensible than the abuses and exploitations of migrant workers in Asia? What of the sweatshops that make our cheap clothes? Do we really think there aren't rapes and beatings and even the occasional burder going on there?

These atrocities are just as necessary as any other. But if we maintain degrees of separation 'twixt us and them—obscure the tracks that connect a co-worker's sweater to the brutal revolution in Nepal that nobody ever pays attention to except for its atrocities—it is easier to wash ourselves in a river of necessity. We are not evil for this toll. We are not responsible for this toll. It's over there, not here. There isn't any real connection because we aren't standing in the sweatshop. We aren't beating or raping the workers. We aren't buying and selling children in the skin trade. We aren't the ones poisoning a local water supply with our petroleum extraction and refining techniques. None of this is our fault.

Or, at least, that's why it is important that the problems should be at least a little tougher to identify. I mean, come on, these are Americans. Remember? We don't support atrocities in Palestine. We don't support human rights violations in Palestine. We only pay for it, but ... er ... um ... right. Still, that doesn't mean it's our fault. Not only are we not doing it directly, which means we're not doing it, but it's Israel, and the Palestinians are terrorists, so it's not an atrocity but an unfortunate necessity.

All you need to do is put one hypothetical degree of separation 'twixt you and the outcome, and you can convince Americans you have nothing to do with it. One valence, plausible enough that the biggest idiots in our political society won't reject it out of hand, and you're golden.

It's the American way.

"I have made my peace with God; my conflict is with man."

(Henri Verdoux)​

 

Of course; this set of rationales is pretty visible and even old-hat by this late juncture.

But you seem to avoid the salient question, which is whether the putative table-turning adds up to anything defensible as "critique" in the first place. Generally that sort of object-lesson approach is almost sure to be counterproductive, even if pursued in good faith. When undertaken with such evident glee and foreclosure of channels for insight and engagement, it seems to me far less defensible. Criticism-via-trolling is a delicate undertaking in even the best of circumstances, and in this case the putative "critique" seems to be nothing more than a pretense to troll.

To look at it another way: if it's a problem that bigots go around cherry-picking examples to argue generalities, then how does having S.A.M. do that even more vigorously - in perpetuity, with a chip on her shoulder and the public sanction of the likes of yourself - help anything? We still end up with a discourse dominated by such stilted trollings, which goes nowhere worthwhile. Maybe this, to some extent, subverts the prospect of said stilted discourse working to the ends of a certain faction of bigots. But it does so at the cost of handing it over to some other faction of bigots that are perfectly happy to keep the discourse in the gutter indefinitely, provided that allows them to get in lots of cheap shots (this has been going on continuously for literally years now, yes?). And this surrender leaves the mods unable to do what they should be doing in the first place, which is preventing these kinds of troll-dominated dynamics altogether.

S.A.M. isn't playing the elevated game that you would propose to justify her activities. She's happily exploiting your equivocation to run bigoted trollings, apparently in the hopes of bullying her way to some pedestal of unquestioned personal discursive authority. If anyone did want to run the elevated object-lesson-critique you propose, the very first thing they'd have to do to make it work would be to silence S.A.M. on the subject.

Also, I personally do not buy the "they started it" component of her justifications. Maybe somebody, years and years ago, really did do something like that before S.A.M. started in. But that's beside the point: the reason she's so hypersensitive to that sort of trolling from others is that she's exactly that type of troll herself, and so gets outraged and energized when she sees others using it. This is about nothing more than her own ego, and not any high-minded set of principles or ideas, let alone any subtle strategy of meta-trolling that will subvert or subliminate other trollings.

Also, there's a false equivalence at the root of this role-reversal program. To wit: the stuff that bothers S.A.M. and whoever about stilted characterizations of Islam comes with the territory of not having any central authority that can definitively say what Islam is for or against. With that freedom to self-define in Islam, comes the liability that others are comparably free to characterize it. The lack of standing for anyone to say that anyone else's notions of Islam are incorrect is just that. That's not to say that all characterizations are equally valid, but that the process of sorting them out is necessarily a delicate, inconclusive one that pretty much defies the sorts of politicized, debased discourse we have around here. Proponents of such are necessarily left with the (unenviable) task of education and subtlety - it's the cost of having an open, fluid religion like that. This stuff does not apply to, say, the USA, which is an organized polity with an explicit system for deciding and announcing such matters, including a legitimate national leader entitled to so speak for the nation. To advance a stilted characterization of the USA requires willfull ignorance of the official, legitimate voice of such - to advance a stilted characterization of Islam only requires regular old garden-variety ignorance. So, the table-turning fails to make its point: demonstrating that a bigot can mischaracterize America by ignoring its definitive, official voice gets us exactly nowhere on the problem of characterizing Islam in the absence of a definitive, official voice. It just makes everyone pissed off and self-righteous.

And I'd suggest that the proper recourse to regular ignorance is education - and that counter-trolling based on willful ignorance is decidedly inappropriate. Supposing what one cares about is addressing ignorance and cutting down on the stilted characterization and trolling, that is. If one just wants petty revenge on some anonymous bigot - really, to arrogate for one's self the right to speak for Islam, at least to the heathens here - then retaliation works just great. Just don't dress it up as Lady Justice and expect me to like it - there are real opportunities for education and progress being systematically foreclosed by S.A.M.'s rage gratification here, and I have zero sympathy for her as any sort of "victim" of this situation. If she doesn't like dealing with this stuff, she shouldn't spend all her time as a proponent of a religion without definitive authority to an audience that's largely foreign and ignorant of the details of such. Clearly, she likes that scenario, and her role in it, and derives personal gratification from such, at the expense of most everyone else here. She should be regarded like any other troll, and not afforded special considerations out of some misplaced white guilt. If you don't like the nasty stuff about Islam here (and you shouldn't, of course), then fight it with education or sanctions (if appropriate). Don't go backing even worse trolls in some vain hope that the result will be "progress." It manifestly will not be.

 

You're over-intellectualizing this, and so missing the main factor in pretty much all supremacism everywhere: uncritical self-interest. The people you're criticizing there are hardly the types to have spend time thinking out a consistent axiomatic basis for their position, no?

That's not to say that you can't argue that supremacism functionally amounts to something like one of those beliefs. But it's a bridge too far to impute that supremacists actually hold some positive belief like that. Mostly, they'll just avoid taking on the question directly at all - avoidance being a better method for coping with cognitive dissonance, than spending time convincing yourself of some explicit excuse is. Which also explains why the responses you get when you do confront supremacists with the question are always piece-meal, casuist, inconsistent or otherwise ill-posed: they're more attempts to avoid the subject, than serious responses.