Pastor Terry Jones as a representative of American actions and values

Well, no shit. :shrug:

But the dissonance is getting louder.

Giiiiven that her contrast was "isn't it worse that the American media is more focused on Jones who, while an evil dickhead, actually didn't bomb anyone, while ignoring civilian casualties from airstrikes", I would have to say no. Or is your retrospective reclassification of the contrast actually a subtle play of tu quoque vis-a-vis my (attributed) defense of Michael? Ahhh!

Also no.

Well, one could hardly argue otherwise, since Jones has a political effective weight of 0. He has almost no congregation and no direction aside from burning the Quran, which accomplishes...what? I'm not even sure what his message is intended to be, not that I've particularly paid attention to him.

Well, if we must talk about real comparisons, Jones is an outlier as a political mover. Oh yes, he's part of a statistical distribution, in that he represents a point: but he's still an outlier, so extreme that conventional multivariate sampling would probably exclude him, unless you take The Black Swan to heart. It's nearly a matter of preference as to whether outliers are real or not; a limited set of statistics exists to identify them but, as you imply, complete distributions are not for nothing. Maybe they aren't. His intellectual weight is nil but the media is on him like a spotlight; Sam might have a point if that were really her objective.

But, hell, while we're on it: the 'eminent' Mawdudi, anyone? And the answer is: Mawdudi who? If you really want to talk about a symptomatic Jones, why don't we get into a human religious symbol with some meat to him? He's doing far better philosophically than the deplorable Mr. Jones, and even had Sam on the hook; clearly his shtick must be much more well-honed to draw in such an egalitarian critic, no? :shrug: Ah! the tricky times we live in.

So if we want to talk about media interest, or disinterest, and line up burning Qurans and burning villages, how about instead we try a religio-social figure of some actual importance rather than the next Jim Phelps? (Although Jones' moustache is far more eminent, for sure.)

One supposes.

And in that respect, no different - at all - than evil Easterners, Northerners and Southerners. It's very clear that all of those people share with evil Westerners the fine sense of a good riot and an exciting conspiracy theory. I could add a few examples, I suppose.

Given that the involvement always turns out wrongly, I think the recipients of our disinterest should probably rejoice. How should our interest proceed? With what will we back up our involvement? And why should anyone else listen? Weighty questions.

 

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