Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

Jesus, this is exhausting.

I said he speaks in generalities when it comes to religion and it gets him in trouble. You said he conflates Muslims and Arab people. I said I did not see him do that and I've watched a lot of his stuff. You then took what I said about his willingness to speak in generalities about religion and combined it with what you said about him always doing so with Arabs. Misleading.

I see him talk about Islam all the time. I don't see him talk about Arabs all the time. That is the basis of our disagreement.

Well then, let me explain. Religion is something one believes. Race is something you are (I recognize that people will argue that their belief system is more who they are than their race, but I reject that argument since you are born Asian, like one is born red-headed and you are taught religion). It's a choice to believe that there is a force in the sky that either dictates all that happens on Earth (or judges and punishes you for exercising the free will that that force has given you). I think it's perfectly acceptable to say that that is stupid, given the overwhelming lack of evidence of any type of god. And I think it's fine to point out all the evil shit organized religion is responsible for throughout history and all the evil shit people have done and do in the name of religion.

I don't know how I feel about how you phrased your question. I see that you are doing your best to have the conversation on your terms, but I don't think you're doing a very good job.

I think if you disagree more with the basic tenets of one religion over another, it's perfectly fine to talk more shit about that religion. I think if there are polls that reflect that the majority of the believers of one religion think death is an acceptable punishment for those who bad-mouth their prophet, then I think you may talk about them in generalities in a more negative way than you talk about Catholics who don't generally think that one should die if you say something negative about Jesus (and he talks a whole lot of shit about Catholicism).

I'm not buying what you're selling. If you believe that Judaism as a religion has a lot of dumb ideas, then go ahead and hate Judaism. If you believe that Jews in general have negative and unfair thoughts and approaches to dealing with Palestinians, then I think you may talk about them in generalities in a more negative way than you would Christians when it comes to that point. If you mean to imply that it's okay to talk shit about Jews as an ethnicity, then you're barking up the wrong tree. And I think that's what anti-semite implies. Where we part ways is on whether being completely anti-religion and being extra anti-Islam amounts to something along the lines of anti-semitism.

TM

It can't be that exhausting. After all, I've given you a bunch of specific quotes from him and told you where they come from and you're not going to look them up but rely instead on your memory of certain unspecified stuff you've heard him say. If you ignore the facts and don't trust my quotes, the rest is easy.

Frankly, I'm more interested in why you, someone clearly attuned to racist shit, doesn't find him blatantly offensive than in convincing you somehow that he is. I tired of trying to argue people into seeing bigotry a long time ago. It doesn't work.

I think the heart of the disagreement is that you don't perceive the conflation of Arab and Islam even when I give you specific statements and cites. The conflation is a fact, as those quotes show, it's just one you're choosing to ignore.

There's a second part of the disagreement that's really much less important and I don't have the patience to dissect, which is, once you get past the conflation, you find yourself able to say, hey, he just hates Islam - an awful lot - and that's ok. If he knew jack shit about Islam I might see that point, but he's just saying it off a shitload of prejudices and a few things he's found, like the polls he cites over and over again, to confirm his prejudices. Someone tries to school him on Islam, and his reaction is, wait a minute, before I talk to you, all I want to know is, in 50 words or less, what's wrong with the polls I found to justify my prejudice. It's like someone saying, shit, I have crime statistics broken down by race that say black folks commit a lot of crimes, before I talk to you about racism, explain those away in 60 seconds of good TV.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

Hell, if any Democrat wins, I think what we've been experiencing is the new Republican blueprint, because they'll just gerrymander themselves into office and threaten to blow shit up until they get their way.

It's what they did to Clinton in '92-'93.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Interesting. Do you have a cite on those polls?

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Deco...economy-stupid
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/2014-mid...e-had-an-edge/
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/natio...ry?id=26688877
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...ent_obama.html

The economy is actually doing reasonably well. Unemployment is below 6%, the stock market is hot, business profits are at unusually high levels. Massachusetts is doing phenomenally well on both an absolute and a relative basis, yet it elected a Republican governor. My read is that dissatisfaction is there but less focused on any one item or issue. A sort of incessant grumbling rather than a focused rage.

If you're working class to middle class, you're not enjoying this economy. If you're in the one half of this country making less than $40k, you're not enjoying this economy.

The overwhelming majority of this country is economically fucked, and pissed.

The economy is always a major driver, but my read is that it was not relatively critical, and if anything played less of a role than usual.

The data says otherwise.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

You had me right up until you said you're with Maher. I'm as far away from that racist shitbag as I can be. One of the things we Dems have to do is deflate his sorry overblown ego.

I'm with Maher. I'd say it to a Muslim: Your religion has too many lunatics in it.

Sorry, but it's true. All religions are full of shit and fantasy, but yours is the problem child of the moment. It's fine for you to sit back and say nothing. You have no duty to police the maniacs of your faith who murder and brutalize women. But when a pundit notes that most of the worst atrocities in the world result from your religion - which they do - and you decide to defend your religion, you have entered the debate. And when you enter the debate, you don't get to hide behind the "Racist!" card.

And Arab culture does skew patriarchal. Maher isn't crafting that of whole cloth. Don't like uncomfortable facts? Turn the channel.

All that said, if a University's students are of such weak minded PC character it can't handle having a guest who said something it didn't like speak at its commencement, they have the right to vote to rescind his invitation. Maher has a big mouth. This sort of thing goes with the territory. Which he understands.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Not Bob

Maher also (as Mrs. Not Bob mentioned to me last night) is one of the few people in his line of work who have intelligent people who disagree with him appear on his show. Like, for example, Rula Jebreal, who called him out on his bigotry in the most recent episode.

He's one of the last talk show hosts who honestly engages opposing views, rather than bringing opponents on just to shout at them, like O'Reilly.

Jebreal may have called him out, but she did a piss poor job of arguing. Claiming that a Maher commencement address was unfair to students because they couldn't debate Maher (who wasn't even intending to discuss Islam) was embarrassing. I'd previously considered her pretty smart. In that instance, she appeared a whiffle intellect at best, most likely put on the show because she happens to be smoking hot.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I said it was great to cover people but fucked up that it was done in a way the seriously downgrades coverage for the middle class. That is not my ox.

That strikes me as very different than what you've actually said over the years, about being the only guy on the board who has ever run a business and how the ACA was so damaging to people who own and run businesses. Maybe you intended the message to be what is quoted above, but that's not what has come across.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

I'm not a person people generally describe as being in a good mood, but I defy anyone from this board who has ever met me to claim that I am an angry person. So I have to say, of all the racist shit out there that I have experienced, that kind of casual comment--often receive during a heated conversation amongst people cursing or raising their voices much worse than I--is maybe the most annoying. And it makes me want to show some actual anger.

(And just in case, I realize you are intentionally making a joke about how ridiculous that type of shit is.)

TM

And suddenly, I feel bad for laughing at Adder's post. But I think he meant it as "yeah, you are absolutely right about why Obama always needs to look a little detached."

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

That strikes me as very different than what you've actually said over the years, about being the only guy on the board who has ever run a business and how the ACA was so damaging to people who own and run businesses. Maybe you intended the message to be what is quoted above, but that's not what has come across.

actually I spoke of the people who work at my business who will have lesser coverage. the stuff about running the business was more directed to follow up attacks that I didn't know what I was talking about. Around the legal community here I understand I'm known as a socialist for how I pay people.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

actually I spoke of the people who work at my business who will have lesser coverage. the stuff about running the business was more directed to follow up attacks that I didn't know what I was talking about. Around the legal community here I understand I'm known as a socialist for how I pay people.

And sometimes your comments have been focused on the secretary who loses out, but other times they have not been.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

And sometimes your comments have been focused on the secretary who loses out, but other times they have not been.

then i expressed myself poorly, and that is my fault.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I'm with Maher. I'd say it to a Muslim: Your religion has too many lunatics in it.

Sorry, but it's true. All religions are full of shit and fantasy, but yours is the problem child of the moment. It's fine for you to sit back and say nothing. You have no duty to police the maniacs of your faith who murder and brutalize women. But when a pundit notes that most of the worst atrocities in the world result from your religion - which they do - and you decide to defend your religion, you have entered the debate. And when you enter the debate, you don't get to hide behind the "Racist!" card.

And Arab culture does skew patriarchal. Maher isn't crafting that of whole cloth. Don't like uncomfortable facts? Turn the channel.

All that said, if a University's students are of such weak minded PC character it can't handle having a guest who said something it didn't like speak at its commencement, they have the right to vote to rescind his invitation. Maher has a big mouth. This sort of thing goes with the territory. Which he understands.

This issue, or these two issues, have long been very difficult for me.

Over the years, I have had muslim friends, some very close -- from back when I spent more time doing martial arts than law and family stuff. We chose my son's middle name to honor one of these people (we chose the "Anton" rather than the "Salahuddin-al-Muhammad", it seemed to go better with the first and last name). I've had both traditional muslims and Nation of Islam members (guys who used an "X", one who was even a bodyguard for Farrakhan) refer to me as "family." It was truly something I treasured.

And yet, and yet. Try talking to one of these guys about the fanatics that abuse their religion, and you got nowhere, or it got ugly. Just try getting someone to say that blowing up a bus full of children was wrong -- just wrong, whatever the motivation or message, whatever the grievances it was intended to address -- and it was awful. I learned to avoid conversations like that.

Extremists are to Islam what the Tea Party is to the GOP -- they have taken over the conversation and fucked up the brand.

As for references to "Arabs", Maher's comments are at least sloppy and at worst virulently racist. I don't listen to him enough to have a strong opinion.

But to move past Maher specifically for a minute -- there is a distinction, often very difficult to see or to make, between saying something negative about a culture, or the effects that a culture has on people, and defining a people in a racist way. Long ago I had a nasty argument with Ty where we were talking about the conduct of soldiers in the Pacific in WWII, and I made a comment to the effect that Japanese soldiers behaved a certain way due to culture. I didn't see that as racist, he clearly did. Yet I do think that culture has a powerful effect on how people behave, especially insular cultures.

It's a difficult line to see, but it is there. If you believe that someone raised in a purely muslim and Arab world, as that world has existed throughout the recent past, is not "different" in many ways, try discussing their views on women, gays, etc. Does that mean that being born of Arab parents makes you a certain way? No. It means being raised in a particular culture, and taught particular attitudes, affects you.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

then i expressed myself poorly, and that is my fault.

At this point, I can only conclude that your wife has hacked your account. You really aren't this nice, but she is.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

And suddenly, I feel bad for laughing at Adder's post. But I think he meant it as "yeah, you are absolutely right about why Obama always needs to look a little detached."

I would not have said it if I wasn't certain he would take it as intended.

[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

It can't be that exhausting. After all, I've given you a bunch of specific quotes from him and told you where they come from and you're not going to look them up but rely instead on your memory of certain unspecified stuff you've heard him say. If you ignore the facts and don't trust my quotes, the rest is easy.

Now I think you're just full of shit. You did a quick internet search to back up your claims on someone you have admitted you don't watch or pay attention to at all. And you accuse me of closing my eyes to this guy's racism. The problem with your argument is, you quite clearly have ignored huge swaths of what the man has to say and have zero'd in on the 3 or 4 quotes that back your argument.

I did a "Maher Arab" search on google and I see I definitely see some negative shit. I also see that your research is really fucking lazy in that you clicked on the second link ( http://religiondispatches.org/8-bill...-commencement/ ) and maybe clicked through one more time ( http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIP...13/lkl.00.html ) and now you are acting like you have sufficiently marshalled your evidence. But there is a sea of results that run the gamut on his thoughts on the subject. And they seem to reflect a more layered and complicated take on how he feels about Islam and Arab culture that you have ignored. It seems to me, you're the one who isn't really willing to do any work. Because I'm the one who actually listens to the guy regularly. But let's take a look anyway.

Here's the Larry King piece:

MAHER: Well, yes. I mean, look, the fact -- it's true that 99.999 percent of all the Muslim Americans are good, loyal people who we don't want to hassle. But it's also true that all the terrorists, OK, are from Muslim, Arab countries, OK? When people make the analogy to Tim McVeigh, that is not an accurate analogy. Yes, that was a case of domestic terrorism from a white guy. OK? What was the pool of support that Tim McVeigh had in the world? It was a few hundred people at most. OK?

We're talking about a pool of support in the Muslim world that is wide and deep. It's not the majority, but it is millions, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people. So we are not talking about the same thing when you compare Tim McVeigh with Osama bin Laden.

KING: How about, though, when it leads to you throw a Secret Service guy off an airplane who is going to Texas to protect the president? You throw him off because he's Muslim?

MAHER: OK. He was an Arab guy with a gun.

KING: With a permit.

MAHER: A permit?

KING: With I.D.

MAHER: All right, but aren't we in the "let's be safe than sorry" phase now? An Arab guy with a gun wants to get on a plane. He flashes a badge. Now, I have police kind of badges.

KING: You question him, he says, call my leaders. Call the Secret Service, they'll tell you who I am.

MAHER: Well, and shouldn't he be willing to undergo that?

KING: They wouldn't do it. Right? They threw him off the plane.

MAHER: They threw him off the plane to check him out. Do we want the message to go out to airlines now -- because this guy called a press conference yesterday and was kind of whining about it -- do we really want the message to go out to American Airlines who I think did the right thing, do we want the message to be, look, if an Arab guy with a gun waves some kind of a badge and you are not quite sure, you know, you could get sued. So wave him on and get up in the sky.

In this interview: http://www.timeout.com/chicago/comed...aher-interview he says on racial profiling:

TOC: Speaking of that: Do you still believe in racial profiling at airports?
Bill Maher: I believe in profiling, not racial profiling. All police work is profiling. Instead of having robotic people treat an 82-year-old grandmother the same way they would a sweating young Muslim man, nervous, eyes darting, [airports are] doing what the Secret Service does. The Secret Service are trained to see somebody who might be the one who’s gonna kill the President.

TOC: How do you spot a young Muslim man? What does one look like?
Bill Maher: Well, it doesn’t have to be Muslim; I’m just saying—look, are all Muslims terrorists? Obviously no. The vast 99.999 percent of Muslims do not want to attack us and they’re not terrorists. But everybody who has attacked us was a young Muslim man. To pretend that that’s not the case is to be ridiculously naive and to lose this battle.

Finally, here is a piece that compiles what seems like everything he's ever said that was negative about Muslims: http://www.islamophobia.org/134-isla...ill-maher.html

The problem with these cites is that they only pull the most negative shit. I've listened to him talk about the topic time and again with muslims and non-muslims. It's just not as simple as "He's a racist." And let's be clear. I don't agree with everything the man says. I think he often skews the conversation to bolster his own views. And on topics that he is obsessed with, he tends to go a bit off the deep end (religion, drugs, nutritional choices). But I don't think he's racist.

I think he looks at Islamic states and Arab culture and often sees some insane treatment of women, a whole lot of violence, a gun culture in many places that makes our fucked up gun culture seem civilized, beheadings as a solution, honor killings, etc. He looks at this through a lense of deep distrust of all things religious and he comes out the other end shitting on Islam. Is he always right? Absolutely not. He's said some stupid, ignorant shit. But so often when he wants to discuss what's wrong with Islam, he is immediately shut down by the Assfleks of the world who only want to focus on what's positive about the religion. I think, on this point, they're both ridiculous because, like everything else, in the wide spectrum of Islamic beliefs there is good and bad. And you should be able to discuss it without going HAM one way or the other.

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

Frankly, I'm more interested in why you, someone clearly attuned to racist shit, doesn't find him blatantly offensive than in convincing you somehow that he is. I tired of trying to argue people into seeing bigotry a long time ago. It doesn't work.

I think the heart of the disagreement is that you don't perceive the conflation of Arab and Islam even when I give you specific statements and cites. The conflation is a fact, as those quotes show, it's just one you're choosing to ignore.

I find it comical that you think you're schooling me on bigotry. I think you think I'm okay with racism when it comes to Arabs or muslims or some shit. If you're getting that from this conversation, I think you may be a little delusional and a whole lot full of yourself.

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

There's a second part of the disagreement that's really much less important and I don't have the patience to dissect, which is, once you get past the conflation, you find yourself able to say, hey, he just hates Islam - an awful lot - and that's ok.

Once again, misleading. And since I've spelled this out for you in my last post, I will try to be brief. If someone hates all religion and hates one religion the most out of all religions, I think that's fine.

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

If he knew jack shit about Islam I might see that point, but he's just saying it off a shitload of prejudices and a few things he's found, like the polls he cites over and over again, to confirm his prejudices. Someone tries to school him on Islam, and his reaction is, wait a minute, before I talk to you, all I want to know is, in 50 words or less, what's wrong with the polls I found to justify my prejudice.

This is just bullshit. You don't watch the shows. He wants to have a debate. He has people who will debate him on it all the time. He tries to back up his side of the debate and they do the same. The fact that he's not convinced doesn't make what you're saying true.

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

It's like someone saying, shit, I have crime statistics broken down by race that say black folks commit a lot of crimes, before I talk to you about racism, explain those away in 60 seconds of good TV.

Yeah. That's the whole fucking show. And he does it with every topic. The people he has on know the drill and aren't coming in blind. They know the topics and prepare for them. That's the format.

TM

[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

And suddenly, I feel bad for laughing at Adder's post. But I think he meant it as "yeah, you are absolutely right about why Obama always needs to look a little detached."

I know. I didn't want him to think otherwise, which is why I added the parenthical.

TM