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On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 07:30 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 07:18 oBlade wrote:
[quote]
Why is that bigoted? How about if Rick Scott sincerely said "Islam loves the US," how would your response change in that case?
Anyway, you're ignoring the actual MSNBC interview. Joe Scarsborough made the same mistake Plansix did (or rather, Plansix repeated it), which is that he asked whether Scott believed "all Muslims" hate the US and suggested that's what Trump said/meant (which he didn't if you actually listen to the source). That is a misinterpretation of the statement and the context where it originated. And it's probably deliberate. Once an interviewer says something like that, you can't erase it from memory. It poisons the rest of the discussion. There'd be no room for Rick Scott, whatever his views (again I have no idea), to represent an otherwise reasonable position - like taking a stance on the extent religion is a factor in radical Islam - because he'd just get pressed with more bait. There's nothing wrong with not answering a question like that, as we can see folks have already judged him guilty of some kind of bigotry-by-association as they love to do.
If someone said "Pakistan hates India" or "Turkey hates Kurdistan" or "Christianity hates paganism" or "There is a tremendous poverty in the black community," do you believe these are bigoted statements? Or can you at least see they're not synonymous with "All Pakistanis hate India" or "All Turks hate Kurdistan" or "All Christians hate paganism" or "All blacks in the US are poor" respectively, which is good, because those would all clearly not be true statements - am I missing anything? Please, it's painfully obvious that you're jumping through hoops to try to justify the statement and Rick Scott's response. Islam isn't a thinking entity, so when Trump says that it "hates America", he is unambiguously saying that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. He is clearly qualifying the followers of Islam as a hateful group, which is by definition bigoted. And even if you were right that Trump meant something completely different by "Islam hates America" (which he didn't, so you're wrong), Rick Scott could have easily said so, and responded with "I disagree that Muslims hate America, but I agree that Islam hates America" (which would be a nonsensical statement, but that's where your logic leads). He didn't, because he either agrees with Trump and is bigoted as well, or he disagrees with Trump and he's a coward who doesn't want to stand up against bigotry. I'm seeing that you're hesitant about considering any examples... Is the statement "France hates the US" bigoted? Do you think it's synonymous with the statement "All French people hate the US," or do you think maybe the terms "Islam" and "France" are abstractions? Do you think if I say I hate country music that it means I have a personal loathing for Bob Dylan? You are doing exactly what Joe Scarborough would have done if Rick Scott had been stupid enough to go down that road. The point I am plainly trying to lead you to is that "All Muslims hate us" (the antecedent of "us" was the West, not the USA) is not synonymous with "Islam hates us." I don't care about the truth of what Trump said for this point.* I care very deeply that people don't have the keenness to spot their simple logical mistake. If you make a claim about X, it's not a claim about all the parts or members of X, nor is it a generalization about the parts or members of X. If I say the 787 is a smart aeroplane, nobody would be up in arms saying "what do you mean, aeroplanes can't be smart that doesn't even make sense, so what's so smart about a tire and landing gear and bathroom mirror an-" because you know exactly what the meaning is. I know that bigotry is a touchy subject, but that's not an excuse for conflating statements that aren't the same just to throw Rick Scott under the bus for sport. I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. Yes, I'm saying in any other context you would be able to see the distinction between talking about a geopolitical force and making a universal statement about the adherents to it, except in this specific case you've been conditioned to overreact sharply to anything that could be even perceived as bigotry. You are repeating what you said before. I answered your point about Islam and Muslims being different. See below. Also, Islam is not a "geopolitical force" which you can reasonably anthropomorphize to have it hold the kind of sentiments Trump was talking about, unless by targeting its believers. On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. What you're purporting to do here is read Trump's mind. I am doing my best to read people's words, not their minds. The geopolitical force people refer to when they use a word like Islam, a word that's a huge umbrella covering many things, is not contained within one holy book of the faith. It's like saying the USSR didn't "hate" the West because it wasn't codified in Marx. I am not reading Trump's mind any more than you are reading minds when you say that you know what "it's a smart airplane" means, and that you know the person is not saying it's the actual airplane that is capable of intelligent thought. If you want to be willfully obtuse about it, good for you. Are you saying your qualm is with the word "hate?" So now you're being willfully obtuse about what I'm saying? You said, I'm paraphrasing, that you have no trouble with the 787 example, granting that the word "smart" obviously has a different sense when used in the context of an aeroplane than with a person. Yet when the statement we're looking at is "Islam hates us," rather than wondering whether the word "hate" has any kind of different function in that context, you want to be able to claim the language used only applies to people, not abstractions, and therefore Trump was actually talking about all Muslims, or about Muslims generally in a prejudicial way (because it would supposedly never make sense to anthropomorphize an intangible construction like we do daily when talking about nations). I futilely put the question to you much earlier, for this very reason, as to what your response would have been if Rick Scott had gone on the record saying "Islam loves us." Like another poster mentioned, nations can be anthropomorphized without necessarily referring to their populations because there are other entities within the nation that can be associated with the anthropomorphization -- for example, their governments. In the case of Islam, however, if you are going to claim that it hates the U.S., you can hardly turn elsewhere than to its believers to attribute the origin of the hatred. Last time I checked, the Quran does not mention the U.S. Also, with regards to the use of "smart" about an airplane, it is not a matter of using a different meaning of the word but of understanding where the attribution goes with regards to the smartness we're talking about (it's a smart airplane --> it was smartly designed --> the people responsible for the design did their job smartly). Likewise, the hatred Trump is talking about is attributed to the believers. That is why Trump himself attributed this hatred to "people" in the interview itself. Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
*There are a thousand reasons to criticize Trump. How about torture and the fact that he doesn't understand the internet? He may even be a bigot. But no, his use of simple language (as usual) to talk about the geopolitical divide between Islam and the West is supposed to be the smoking gun. There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. What I said is of course a generalization, but I think we may be living on different planets if you're claiming it's one that holds no water. Like I said: it's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation. Something being a rough generalization doesn't make it ignorant. Similarly, something being stupid doesn't make it bigoted. Being a generalization doesn't make a statement simplistic and ignorant. Your statement was those things, but not by virtue of being a generalization. Similarly, Trump's statement was bigoted, and not only stupid. What would be a more appropriate generalization, if you please - the world is in harmony? Why would denouncing the simplistic and ignorant nature of your initial statement mean that I believe the world in in harmony? There are armed groups waging war in the name of Islam in some regions, and they are opposed by both Western and non-Western powers. This does not make your initial statement accurate.
Wait a minute--do you actually believe there is one unified group that constitutes "Islam"? Like, you don't realize that it has large swaths of sub groups, extremist groups, pacifists groups, and even country specific groups that are all very different from each other?
You're only reason for believing that Trump is being bigoted in that phrase is because you yourself are ignorant about what Trump is being bigoted against.
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The nice thing about trump is that as a trump supporter you can say that he stands on literally every side of every issue ever! Just look at oBlade and Naracs_Duc informing us that Trump doesn't tell it like it is!
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Trump is basically just saying what Paul did in the 08 & 12 campaigns.They hate us because we (USA) are over there, literally destroying their nations.Hardly controversial stuff.First step is to stop funding sides, stop removing leaders no matter how "bad" they are as the situation always deteriorates when the US takes out the leaders (Iraq,Libya)
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On March 11 2016 10:08 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 09:37 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:14 WhiteDog wrote:On March 11 2016 09:04 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:58 WhiteDog wrote:
"on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations."
Debunked, lolz.
I debunked Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction because Obama became a president. The flaws and falsehoods in Huntington's analysis have been pointed out at length in the IR literature (and beyond). Didier Bigo rightly denounced Clash of civilizations as unscientific in the first place and as the product of political/security interests ("Grands débats dans un petit monde"). Theories in social sciences are not refutable, they are always wrong, incomplete abstraction that have no value outside of specific social contexts and that are never free from normatives aspects. Now I ve read Huntington years ago : i remember a theory presented as an hypothesis and nothing more, built to explain a tendancy (kosovo, he forsaw the ukrainian conflict) that were not understandable by the classical models of the moment. His model is grossly simplified (even the term civilization have no value from an historical point of view) much like a model in astrology that would consider the earth to be a perfect ball. There was no need for that attempt at epistemology 101. Huntington did not present a theory, he presented a model and a hypothesis. And like I said, the flaws in the foundations of his model have been pointed out at length in the literature, which is what I referred to in my initial post. My point was exactly that the flaws of the model does not refute it, unless you have another with the same or better results. I love ideological people arguing that there are no "clash of civilisation", and living out of those useless assumptions, when the world at large is plagued by conflict that are largely (and losely) interpreted as cultural. But the manifest destiny of the modern intellectual is to explain us what not to think and not to share some knowledge on a subject. Islam is not a problem - see all those good muslims ! And don't forget, vote Hillary.
Huntington's model was refuted on ontological grounds as well as with regards to the inner inconsistencies of the concepts it relied upon. It is precisely his model which was deeply ideological, not its refutation on scientific grounds.
The cultural affiliation of conflict protagonists the way you use it is one variable among many studied in IR (it's not even the only avenue in terms of approaching cultural factors in conflicts), and it's far from the most important one, even only at the level of foreign policy analysis. I never made a statement about Islam one way or the other -- there is no reason not to take "religion" and everything "in it" as social facts whose impact is to be studied like that any other social facts --, but glad to see you're back to your usual strawmanning of the opposition.
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On March 11 2016 09:59 Naracs_Duc wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 09:52 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:50 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 09:44 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:40 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 09:07 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:04 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 07:30 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
Please, it's painfully obvious that you're jumping through hoops to try to justify the statement and Rick Scott's response. Islam isn't a thinking entity, so when Trump says that it "hates America", he is unambiguously saying that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. He is clearly qualifying the followers of Islam as a hateful group, which is by definition bigoted.
And even if you were right that Trump meant something completely different by "Islam hates America" (which he didn't, so you're wrong), Rick Scott could have easily said so, and responded with "I disagree that Muslims hate America, but I agree that Islam hates America" (which would be a nonsensical statement, but that's where your logic leads). He didn't, because he either agrees with Trump and is bigoted as well, or he disagrees with Trump and he's a coward who doesn't want to stand up against bigotry. I'm seeing that you're hesitant about considering any examples... Is the statement "France hates the US" bigoted? Do you think it's synonymous with the statement "All French people hate the US," or do you think maybe the terms "Islam" and "France" are abstractions? Do you think if I say I hate country music that it means I have a personal loathing for Bob Dylan? You are doing exactly what Joe Scarborough would have done if Rick Scott had been stupid enough to go down that road. The point I am plainly trying to lead you to is that "All Muslims hate us" (the antecedent of "us" was the West, not the USA) is not synonymous with "Islam hates us." I don't care about the truth of what Trump said for this point.* I care very deeply that people don't have the keenness to spot their simple logical mistake. If you make a claim about X, it's not a claim about all the parts or members of X, nor is it a generalization about the parts or members of X. If I say the 787 is a smart aeroplane, nobody would be up in arms saying "what do you mean, aeroplanes can't be smart that doesn't even make sense, so what's so smart about a tire and landing gear and bathroom mirror an-" because you know exactly what the meaning is. I know that bigotry is a touchy subject, but that's not an excuse for conflating statements that aren't the same just to throw Rick Scott under the bus for sport. I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. You didn't respond to my other point, by the way: "even if you were right that Trump meant something completely different by "Islam hates America" (which he didn't, so you're wrong), Rick Scott could have easily said so, and responded with "I disagree that Muslims hate America, but I agree that Islam hates America" (which would be a nonsensical statement, but that's where your logic leads). He didn't, because he either agrees with Trump and is bigoted as well, or he disagrees with Trump and he's a coward who doesn't want to stand up against bigotry." On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
*There are a thousand reasons to criticize Trump. How about torture and the fact that he doesn't understand the internet? He may even be a bigot. But no, his use of simple language (as usual) to talk about the geopolitical divide between Islam and the West is supposed to be the smoking gun. There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. You're speaking like a true fundamentalist. You know that there is nuance in speech, you're just pretty certain that the group of people you disagree with (conservatives) don't have that nuance. That habit you have of making assumptions on what people mean because that is how you believe those people think is the exact reason why we have bigots in society. Nowhere am I talking about conservatives in general. I am specifically talking about Trump, who is using a tactic widely employed by the far-right in Europe to target Muslims: use Islam as a proxy target instead, to avoid mentioning Muslims directly. But go ahead, do tell me what else Trump really meant when he said "Islam hates us" (not "radical Islam" but "Islam"), if he wasn't talking about Muslims. He even specifically mentioned the hatred of those "people". So when listening to an american politician, you make the generalization that he has the same opinions as politicians outside the US? When someone says something as abstract as "Islam Hates Us" Islam could mean a lot of things Us could mean a lot of things and even Hate could mean a lot of things And while he could be saying one thing, his followers could be understanding a different thing, and you could understand a different thing. Islam could mean Muslims, it could mean ISIS, it could mean IS, it could mean Terrorists, it could mean Muslim Americans, it could mean the Middle Easterners, it could mean Africans, etc... Hate could mean "at war with" it could mean "culturally disagreement" it could mean "are defensive of" it could mean "wants to invade" it could mean "wants to brainwash," etc... Us could mean "Americans" it could mean "the West" it could mean "the GOP" it could mean "my fellow birthers" it could mean "America as a nation" it could mean "America as a culture" it could mean "the West as a culture," etc... For the most part, the specific meaning of Muslims hate americans is not the only meaning, it is simply your understanding of what Trump said. You also don't know if *why* Trump said it. -Does he actually fear Muslims? -Does he want to incite his supporters? -Does he want to preach anti-islam ideas? -Does he simply say what he thinks his fans want to hear? -Does he believe what he say? -etc.... When the phrase is so vague, and the circumstance of when he said it so based on entertainment and pandering--you can't really make any concrete statement as to what it means. With respect to Islam, he mentions "people" in general in the interview (not only radicals). It is clear he is talking about Muslims. I'm not making a statement with regards to how his supporters understood it (I'll let you "figure it out", to quote Trump), I'm making a statement with regards to what Trump himself was saying. Why would Trump distinguish between Radicals and Non-Radicals when talking about Muslims to a crowd of conservatives? He is an entertainer after all--he even had his own TV Show. People itself could mean a lot of things and is used as often to define groups within a population as it is used to define the population itself. For example, when my friend sees something on facebook and says "people are stupid" he does not mean "Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists" are stupid nor does he even mean the totality of all human beings are stupid. He means that there are subsections of society, that he cannot specifically define, that do things that he does not agree with. Jumping to a conclusion about what Trump is specifically meaning from such scarce evidence of a few words and phrases in one random speech is absolutely stupid. And being forced to make conclusions that forces you take a side in the issue when the people he is asking about might affect your candidacy during reelection is also stupid. The subsection of society that Trump is talking about is Muslims, and he is being bigoted towards them. Like I said to oBlade, if you're going to be willfully ignorant about it, good for you. Being an entertainer doesn't prevent one from being bigoted or making bigoted statements. There are many things that make Trump a bigot. The phrase "Islam hates us" is not something, on its own, evidence of that. Especially when it doesn't say much. For the same reason my saying to my friend "I love you man" automatically mean I want to marry him/her. You would need a lot more context and a lot more evidence before that conclusion can be made.
The context and the evidence was in the interview. You choose not to see it, we get it.
On March 11 2016 10:16 Naracs_Duc wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 07:30 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
Please, it's painfully obvious that you're jumping through hoops to try to justify the statement and Rick Scott's response. Islam isn't a thinking entity, so when Trump says that it "hates America", he is unambiguously saying that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. He is clearly qualifying the followers of Islam as a hateful group, which is by definition bigoted.
And even if you were right that Trump meant something completely different by "Islam hates America" (which he didn't, so you're wrong), Rick Scott could have easily said so, and responded with "I disagree that Muslims hate America, but I agree that Islam hates America" (which would be a nonsensical statement, but that's where your logic leads). He didn't, because he either agrees with Trump and is bigoted as well, or he disagrees with Trump and he's a coward who doesn't want to stand up against bigotry. I'm seeing that you're hesitant about considering any examples... Is the statement "France hates the US" bigoted? Do you think it's synonymous with the statement "All French people hate the US," or do you think maybe the terms "Islam" and "France" are abstractions? Do you think if I say I hate country music that it means I have a personal loathing for Bob Dylan? You are doing exactly what Joe Scarborough would have done if Rick Scott had been stupid enough to go down that road. The point I am plainly trying to lead you to is that "All Muslims hate us" (the antecedent of "us" was the West, not the USA) is not synonymous with "Islam hates us." I don't care about the truth of what Trump said for this point.* I care very deeply that people don't have the keenness to spot their simple logical mistake. If you make a claim about X, it's not a claim about all the parts or members of X, nor is it a generalization about the parts or members of X. If I say the 787 is a smart aeroplane, nobody would be up in arms saying "what do you mean, aeroplanes can't be smart that doesn't even make sense, so what's so smart about a tire and landing gear and bathroom mirror an-" because you know exactly what the meaning is. I know that bigotry is a touchy subject, but that's not an excuse for conflating statements that aren't the same just to throw Rick Scott under the bus for sport. I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. Yes, I'm saying in any other context you would be able to see the distinction between talking about a geopolitical force and making a universal statement about the adherents to it, except in this specific case you've been conditioned to overreact sharply to anything that could be even perceived as bigotry. You are repeating what you said before. I answered your point about Islam and Muslims being different. See below. Also, Islam is not a "geopolitical force" which you can reasonably anthropomorphize to have it hold the kind of sentiments Trump was talking about, unless by targeting its believers. On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. What you're purporting to do here is read Trump's mind. I am doing my best to read people's words, not their minds. The geopolitical force people refer to when they use a word like Islam, a word that's a huge umbrella covering many things, is not contained within one holy book of the faith. It's like saying the USSR didn't "hate" the West because it wasn't codified in Marx. I am not reading Trump's mind any more than you are reading minds when you say that you know what "it's a smart airplane" means, and that you know the person is not saying it's the actual airplane that is capable of intelligent thought. If you want to be willfully obtuse about it, good for you. Are you saying your qualm is with the word "hate?" So now you're being willfully obtuse about what I'm saying? You said, I'm paraphrasing, that you have no trouble with the 787 example, granting that the word "smart" obviously has a different sense when used in the context of an aeroplane than with a person. Yet when the statement we're looking at is "Islam hates us," rather than wondering whether the word "hate" has any kind of different function in that context, you want to be able to claim the language used only applies to people, not abstractions, and therefore Trump was actually talking about all Muslims, or about Muslims generally in a prejudicial way (because it would supposedly never make sense to anthropomorphize an intangible construction like we do daily when talking about nations). I futilely put the question to you much earlier, for this very reason, as to what your response would have been if Rick Scott had gone on the record saying "Islam loves us." Like another poster mentioned, nations can be anthropomorphized without necessarily referring to their populations because there are other entities within the nation that can be associated with the anthropomorphization -- for example, their governments. In the case of Islam, however, if you are going to claim that it hates the U.S., you can hardly turn elsewhere than to its believers to attribute the origin of the hatred. Last time I checked, the Quran does not mention the U.S. Also, with regards to the use of "smart" about an airplane, it is not a matter of using a different meaning of the word but of understanding where the attribution goes with regards to the smartness we're talking about (it's a smart airplane --> it was smartly designed --> the people responsible for the design did their job smartly). Likewise, the hatred Trump is talking about is attributed to the believers. That is why Trump himself attributed this hatred to "people" in the interview itself. On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
*There are a thousand reasons to criticize Trump. How about torture and the fact that he doesn't understand the internet? He may even be a bigot. But no, his use of simple language (as usual) to talk about the geopolitical divide between Islam and the West is supposed to be the smoking gun. There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. What I said is of course a generalization, but I think we may be living on different planets if you're claiming it's one that holds no water. Like I said: it's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation. Something being a rough generalization doesn't make it ignorant. Similarly, something being stupid doesn't make it bigoted. Being a generalization doesn't make a statement simplistic and ignorant. Your statement was those things, but not by virtue of being a generalization. Similarly, Trump's statement was bigoted, and not only stupid. What would be a more appropriate generalization, if you please - the world is in harmony? Why would denouncing the simplistic and ignorant nature of your initial statement mean that I believe the world in in harmony? There are armed groups waging war in the name of Islam in some regions, and they are opposed by both Western and non-Western powers. This does not make your initial statement accurate. Wait a minute--do you actually believe there is one unified group that constitutes "Islam"? Like, you don't realize that it has large swaths of sub groups, extremist groups, pacifists groups, and even country specific groups that are all very different from each other? You're only reason for believing that Trump is being bigoted in that phrase is because you yourself are ignorant about what Trump is being bigoted against.
Are you purposely misrepresenting what I'm saying or something? Trump is the one grouping the believers in Islam together, not me. That's the entire point.
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On March 11 2016 10:19 Jormundr wrote:
The nice thing about trump is that as a trump supporter you can say that he stands on literally every side of every issue ever! Just look at oBlade and Naracs_Duc informing us that Trump doesn't tell it like it is!
And when he is super clear with his bigotry, they will spend pages dancing around it. What does "hate" even mean?
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
that trumpism is just coarse and crass, irresponsible given his reach. it is worse than bigotry really given the impact
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On March 11 2016 10:26 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:19 Jormundr wrote:
The nice thing about trump is that as a trump supporter you can say that he stands on literally every side of every issue ever! Just look at oBlade and Naracs_Duc informing us that Trump doesn't tell it like it is! And when he is super clear with his bigotry, they will spend pages dancing around it. What does "hate" even mean?
I'll tell you, america is not in the business of hate, hate is a dirty word, a dirty word for Islams and mexican rapists!
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On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 07:30 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 07:18 oBlade wrote:
[quote]
Why is that bigoted? How about if Rick Scott sincerely said "Islam loves the US," how would your response change in that case?
Anyway, you're ignoring the actual MSNBC interview. Joe Scarsborough made the same mistake Plansix did (or rather, Plansix repeated it), which is that he asked whether Scott believed "all Muslims" hate the US and suggested that's what Trump said/meant (which he didn't if you actually listen to the source). That is a misinterpretation of the statement and the context where it originated. And it's probably deliberate. Once an interviewer says something like that, you can't erase it from memory. It poisons the rest of the discussion. There'd be no room for Rick Scott, whatever his views (again I have no idea), to represent an otherwise reasonable position - like taking a stance on the extent religion is a factor in radical Islam - because he'd just get pressed with more bait. There's nothing wrong with not answering a question like that, as we can see folks have already judged him guilty of some kind of bigotry-by-association as they love to do.
If someone said "Pakistan hates India" or "Turkey hates Kurdistan" or "Christianity hates paganism" or "There is a tremendous poverty in the black community," do you believe these are bigoted statements? Or can you at least see they're not synonymous with "All Pakistanis hate India" or "All Turks hate Kurdistan" or "All Christians hate paganism" or "All blacks in the US are poor" respectively, which is good, because those would all clearly not be true statements - am I missing anything? Please, it's painfully obvious that you're jumping through hoops to try to justify the statement and Rick Scott's response. Islam isn't a thinking entity, so when Trump says that it "hates America", he is unambiguously saying that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. He is clearly qualifying the followers of Islam as a hateful group, which is by definition bigoted. And even if you were right that Trump meant something completely different by "Islam hates America" (which he didn't, so you're wrong), Rick Scott could have easily said so, and responded with "I disagree that Muslims hate America, but I agree that Islam hates America" (which would be a nonsensical statement, but that's where your logic leads). He didn't, because he either agrees with Trump and is bigoted as well, or he disagrees with Trump and he's a coward who doesn't want to stand up against bigotry. I'm seeing that you're hesitant about considering any examples... Is the statement "France hates the US" bigoted? Do you think it's synonymous with the statement "All French people hate the US," or do you think maybe the terms "Islam" and "France" are abstractions? Do you think if I say I hate country music that it means I have a personal loathing for Bob Dylan? You are doing exactly what Joe Scarborough would have done if Rick Scott had been stupid enough to go down that road. The point I am plainly trying to lead you to is that "All Muslims hate us" (the antecedent of "us" was the West, not the USA) is not synonymous with "Islam hates us." I don't care about the truth of what Trump said for this point.* I care very deeply that people don't have the keenness to spot their simple logical mistake. If you make a claim about X, it's not a claim about all the parts or members of X, nor is it a generalization about the parts or members of X. If I say the 787 is a smart aeroplane, nobody would be up in arms saying "what do you mean, aeroplanes can't be smart that doesn't even make sense, so what's so smart about a tire and landing gear and bathroom mirror an-" because you know exactly what the meaning is. I know that bigotry is a touchy subject, but that's not an excuse for conflating statements that aren't the same just to throw Rick Scott under the bus for sport. I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. Yes, I'm saying in any other context you would be able to see the distinction between talking about a geopolitical force and making a universal statement about the adherents to it, except in this specific case you've been conditioned to overreact sharply to anything that could be even perceived as bigotry. You are repeating what you said before. I answered your point about Islam and Muslims being different. See below. Also, Islam is not a "geopolitical force" which you can reasonably anthropomorphize to have it hold the kind of sentiments Trump was talking about, unless by targeting its believers. On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. What you're purporting to do here is read Trump's mind. I am doing my best to read people's words, not their minds. The geopolitical force people refer to when they use a word like Islam, a word that's a huge umbrella covering many things, is not contained within one holy book of the faith. It's like saying the USSR didn't "hate" the West because it wasn't codified in Marx. I am not reading Trump's mind any more than you are reading minds when you say that you know what "it's a smart airplane" means, and that you know the person is not saying it's the actual airplane that is capable of intelligent thought. If you want to be willfully obtuse about it, good for you. Are you saying your qualm is with the word "hate?" So now you're being willfully obtuse about what I'm saying? You said, I'm paraphrasing, that you have no trouble with the 787 example, granting that the word "smart" obviously has a different sense when used in the context of an aeroplane than with a person. Yet when the statement we're looking at is "Islam hates us," rather than wondering whether the word "hate" has any kind of different function in that context, you want to be able to claim the language used only applies to people, not abstractions, and therefore Trump was actually talking about all Muslims, or about Muslims generally in a prejudicial way (because it would supposedly never make sense to anthropomorphize an intangible construction like we do daily when talking about nations). I futilely put the question to you much earlier, for this very reason, as to what your response would have been if Rick Scott had gone on the record saying "Islam loves us." Like another poster mentioned, nations can be anthropomorphized without necessarily referring to their populations because there are other entities within the nation that can be associated with the anthropomorphization -- for example, their governments. In the case of Islam, however, if you are going to claim that it hates the U.S., you can hardly turn elsewhere than to its believers to attribute the origin of the hatred. Last time I checked, the Quran does not mention the U.S.
But the governments are populated by people within the nation - so what you're doing sounds like special pleading to me.
You used the Koran line before and it's ineffectual to anyone who understands that Christianity's influence as a force in the modern world is not restricted by what it says in Matthew, communism's influence in the world is not constrained by the words printed by Marx, and so forth. There are power structures in the Muslim world, Muslim countries, Muslim organizations, and so forth which lead us to be able to talk about the religion as a force in the world like any other.
On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:
Also, with regards to the use of "smart" about an airplane, it is not a matter of using a different meaning of the word but of understanding where the attribution goes with regards to the smartness we're talking about (it's a smart airplane --> it was smartly designed --> the people responsible for the design did their job smartly). Likewise, the hatred Trump is talking about is attributed to the believers. That is why Trump himself attributed this hatred to "people" in the interview itself.
That's not what it at all. It means the technology itself is responsive. Like a smartphone. The airplane is good at controlling itself and its systems. It can manage complicated variables by itself with simple inputs.
On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
*There are a thousand reasons to criticize Trump. How about torture and the fact that he doesn't understand the internet? He may even be a bigot. But no, his use of simple language (as usual) to talk about the geopolitical divide between Islam and the West is supposed to be the smoking gun. There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. What I said is of course a generalization, but I think we may be living on different planets if you're claiming it's one that holds no water. Like I said: it's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation. Something being a rough generalization doesn't make it ignorant. Similarly, something being stupid doesn't make it bigoted. Being a generalization doesn't make a statement simplistic and ignorant. Your statement was those things, but not by virtue of being a generalization. Similarly, Trump's statement was bigoted, and not only stupid. What would be a more appropriate generalization, if you please - the world is in harmony? Why would denouncing the simplistic and ignorant nature of your initial statement mean that I believe the world in in harmony? There are armed groups waging war in the name of Islam in some regions, and they are opposed by both Western and non-Western powers. This does not make your initial statement accurate.
It's not even a whole statement. I said "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West" and you jumped in telling me it was fake. I suffer you make a better generalization on that point that's as concise as 7 words. I don't think it's controversial that the two spheres oppose each other's influence.
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On March 11 2016 10:26 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:19 Jormundr wrote:
The nice thing about trump is that as a trump supporter you can say that he stands on literally every side of every issue ever! Just look at oBlade and Naracs_Duc informing us that Trump doesn't tell it like it is! And when he is super clear with his bigotry, they will spend pages dancing around it. What does "hate" even mean?
I don't support Trump. But you can't focus on his incoherent phrases as proof of why he's bad when he has a LOT of concrete and transparent statements that make him bad. Its pointless to attack the portions of someone's argument that are either bad or don't even matter.
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On March 11 2016 10:34 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 07:30 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
Please, it's painfully obvious that you're jumping through hoops to try to justify the statement and Rick Scott's response. Islam isn't a thinking entity, so when Trump says that it "hates America", he is unambiguously saying that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. He is clearly qualifying the followers of Islam as a hateful group, which is by definition bigoted.
And even if you were right that Trump meant something completely different by "Islam hates America" (which he didn't, so you're wrong), Rick Scott could have easily said so, and responded with "I disagree that Muslims hate America, but I agree that Islam hates America" (which would be a nonsensical statement, but that's where your logic leads). He didn't, because he either agrees with Trump and is bigoted as well, or he disagrees with Trump and he's a coward who doesn't want to stand up against bigotry. I'm seeing that you're hesitant about considering any examples... Is the statement "France hates the US" bigoted? Do you think it's synonymous with the statement "All French people hate the US," or do you think maybe the terms "Islam" and "France" are abstractions? Do you think if I say I hate country music that it means I have a personal loathing for Bob Dylan? You are doing exactly what Joe Scarborough would have done if Rick Scott had been stupid enough to go down that road. The point I am plainly trying to lead you to is that "All Muslims hate us" (the antecedent of "us" was the West, not the USA) is not synonymous with "Islam hates us." I don't care about the truth of what Trump said for this point.* I care very deeply that people don't have the keenness to spot their simple logical mistake. If you make a claim about X, it's not a claim about all the parts or members of X, nor is it a generalization about the parts or members of X. If I say the 787 is a smart aeroplane, nobody would be up in arms saying "what do you mean, aeroplanes can't be smart that doesn't even make sense, so what's so smart about a tire and landing gear and bathroom mirror an-" because you know exactly what the meaning is. I know that bigotry is a touchy subject, but that's not an excuse for conflating statements that aren't the same just to throw Rick Scott under the bus for sport. I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. Yes, I'm saying in any other context you would be able to see the distinction between talking about a geopolitical force and making a universal statement about the adherents to it, except in this specific case you've been conditioned to overreact sharply to anything that could be even perceived as bigotry. You are repeating what you said before. I answered your point about Islam and Muslims being different. See below. Also, Islam is not a "geopolitical force" which you can reasonably anthropomorphize to have it hold the kind of sentiments Trump was talking about, unless by targeting its believers. On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. What you're purporting to do here is read Trump's mind. I am doing my best to read people's words, not their minds. The geopolitical force people refer to when they use a word like Islam, a word that's a huge umbrella covering many things, is not contained within one holy book of the faith. It's like saying the USSR didn't "hate" the West because it wasn't codified in Marx. I am not reading Trump's mind any more than you are reading minds when you say that you know what "it's a smart airplane" means, and that you know the person is not saying it's the actual airplane that is capable of intelligent thought. If you want to be willfully obtuse about it, good for you. Are you saying your qualm is with the word "hate?" So now you're being willfully obtuse about what I'm saying? You said, I'm paraphrasing, that you have no trouble with the 787 example, granting that the word "smart" obviously has a different sense when used in the context of an aeroplane than with a person. Yet when the statement we're looking at is "Islam hates us," rather than wondering whether the word "hate" has any kind of different function in that context, you want to be able to claim the language used only applies to people, not abstractions, and therefore Trump was actually talking about all Muslims, or about Muslims generally in a prejudicial way (because it would supposedly never make sense to anthropomorphize an intangible construction like we do daily when talking about nations). I futilely put the question to you much earlier, for this very reason, as to what your response would have been if Rick Scott had gone on the record saying "Islam loves us." Like another poster mentioned, nations can be anthropomorphized without necessarily referring to their populations because there are other entities within the nation that can be associated with the anthropomorphization -- for example, their governments. In the case of Islam, however, if you are going to claim that it hates the U.S., you can hardly turn elsewhere than to its believers to attribute the origin of the hatred. Last time I checked, the Quran does not mention the U.S. But the governments are populated by people within the nation - so what you're doing sounds like special pleading to me. You used the Koran line before and it's ineffectual to anyone who understands that Christianity's influence as a force in the modern world is not restricted by what it says in Matthew, communism's influence in the world is not constrained by the words printed by Marx, and so forth. There are power structures in the Muslim world, Muslim countries, Muslim organizations, and so forth which lead us to be able to talk about the religion as a force in the world like any other. Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:
Also, with regards to the use of "smart" about an airplane, it is not a matter of using a different meaning of the word but of understanding where the attribution goes with regards to the smartness we're talking about (it's a smart airplane --> it was smartly designed --> the people responsible for the design did their job smartly). Likewise, the hatred Trump is talking about is attributed to the believers. That is why Trump himself attributed this hatred to "people" in the interview itself. That's not what it at all. It means the technology itself is responsive. Like a smartphone. The airplane is good at controlling itself and its systems. It can manage complicated variables by itself with simple inputs. Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
*There are a thousand reasons to criticize Trump. How about torture and the fact that he doesn't understand the internet? He may even be a bigot. But no, his use of simple language (as usual) to talk about the geopolitical divide between Islam and the West is supposed to be the smoking gun. There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. What I said is of course a generalization, but I think we may be living on different planets if you're claiming it's one that holds no water. Like I said: it's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation. Something being a rough generalization doesn't make it ignorant. Similarly, something being stupid doesn't make it bigoted. Being a generalization doesn't make a statement simplistic and ignorant. Your statement was those things, but not by virtue of being a generalization. Similarly, Trump's statement was bigoted, and not only stupid. What would be a more appropriate generalization, if you please - the world is in harmony? Why would denouncing the simplistic and ignorant nature of your initial statement mean that I believe the world in in harmony? There are armed groups waging war in the name of Islam in some regions, and they are opposed by both Western and non-Western powers. This does not make your initial statement accurate. It's not even a whole statement. I said "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West" and you jumped in telling me it was fake. I suffer you make a better generalization on that point that's as concise as 7 words. I don't think it's controversial that the two spheres oppose each other's influence.
What you're saying here is largely irrelevant because at the end of the day we all know that Islam did not receive a 'great' rating from Señor Trump.
You're also consistently leaving yuuuuuuuuuuuge gapes in your reasoning that leave much to be desired.
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On March 11 2016 10:25 kwizach wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 09:59 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 09:52 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:50 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 09:44 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:40 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 09:07 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:04 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
[quote]
I'm seeing that you're hesitant about considering any examples... Is the statement "France hates the US" bigoted? Do you think it's synonymous with the statement "All French people hate the US," or do you think maybe the terms "Islam" and "France" are abstractions? Do you think if I say I hate country music that it means I have a personal loathing for Bob Dylan?
You are doing exactly what Joe Scarborough would have done if Rick Scott had been stupid enough to go down that road. The point I am plainly trying to lead you to is that "All Muslims hate us" (the antecedent of "us" was the West, not the USA) is not synonymous with "Islam hates us."
I don't care about the truth of what Trump said for this point.* I care very deeply that people don't have the keenness to spot their simple logical mistake. If you make a claim about X, it's not a claim about all the parts or members of X, nor is it a generalization about the parts or members of X. If I say the 787 is a smart aeroplane, nobody would be up in arms saying "what do you mean, aeroplanes can't be smart that doesn't even make sense, so what's so smart about a tire and landing gear and bathroom mirror an-" because you know exactly what the meaning is. I know that bigotry is a touchy subject, but that's not an excuse for conflating statements that aren't the same just to throw Rick Scott under the bus for sport. I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. You didn't respond to my other point, by the way: "even if you were right that Trump meant something completely different by "Islam hates America" (which he didn't, so you're wrong), Rick Scott could have easily said so, and responded with "I disagree that Muslims hate America, but I agree that Islam hates America" (which would be a nonsensical statement, but that's where your logic leads). He didn't, because he either agrees with Trump and is bigoted as well, or he disagrees with Trump and he's a coward who doesn't want to stand up against bigotry." On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
*There are a thousand reasons to criticize Trump. How about torture and the fact that he doesn't understand the internet? He may even be a bigot. But no, his use of simple language (as usual) to talk about the geopolitical divide between Islam and the West is supposed to be the smoking gun. There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. You're speaking like a true fundamentalist. You know that there is nuance in speech, you're just pretty certain that the group of people you disagree with (conservatives) don't have that nuance. That habit you have of making assumptions on what people mean because that is how you believe those people think is the exact reason why we have bigots in society. Nowhere am I talking about conservatives in general. I am specifically talking about Trump, who is using a tactic widely employed by the far-right in Europe to target Muslims: use Islam as a proxy target instead, to avoid mentioning Muslims directly. But go ahead, do tell me what else Trump really meant when he said "Islam hates us" (not "radical Islam" but "Islam"), if he wasn't talking about Muslims. He even specifically mentioned the hatred of those "people". So when listening to an american politician, you make the generalization that he has the same opinions as politicians outside the US? When someone says something as abstract as "Islam Hates Us" Islam could mean a lot of things Us could mean a lot of things and even Hate could mean a lot of things And while he could be saying one thing, his followers could be understanding a different thing, and you could understand a different thing. Islam could mean Muslims, it could mean ISIS, it could mean IS, it could mean Terrorists, it could mean Muslim Americans, it could mean the Middle Easterners, it could mean Africans, etc... Hate could mean "at war with" it could mean "culturally disagreement" it could mean "are defensive of" it could mean "wants to invade" it could mean "wants to brainwash," etc... Us could mean "Americans" it could mean "the West" it could mean "the GOP" it could mean "my fellow birthers" it could mean "America as a nation" it could mean "America as a culture" it could mean "the West as a culture," etc... For the most part, the specific meaning of Muslims hate americans is not the only meaning, it is simply your understanding of what Trump said. You also don't know if *why* Trump said it. -Does he actually fear Muslims? -Does he want to incite his supporters? -Does he want to preach anti-islam ideas? -Does he simply say what he thinks his fans want to hear? -Does he believe what he say? -etc.... When the phrase is so vague, and the circumstance of when he said it so based on entertainment and pandering--you can't really make any concrete statement as to what it means. With respect to Islam, he mentions "people" in general in the interview (not only radicals). It is clear he is talking about Muslims. I'm not making a statement with regards to how his supporters understood it (I'll let you "figure it out", to quote Trump), I'm making a statement with regards to what Trump himself was saying. Why would Trump distinguish between Radicals and Non-Radicals when talking about Muslims to a crowd of conservatives? He is an entertainer after all--he even had his own TV Show. People itself could mean a lot of things and is used as often to define groups within a population as it is used to define the population itself. For example, when my friend sees something on facebook and says "people are stupid" he does not mean "Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists" are stupid nor does he even mean the totality of all human beings are stupid. He means that there are subsections of society, that he cannot specifically define, that do things that he does not agree with. Jumping to a conclusion about what Trump is specifically meaning from such scarce evidence of a few words and phrases in one random speech is absolutely stupid. And being forced to make conclusions that forces you take a side in the issue when the people he is asking about might affect your candidacy during reelection is also stupid. The subsection of society that Trump is talking about is Muslims, and he is being bigoted towards them. Like I said to oBlade, if you're going to be willfully ignorant about it, good for you. Being an entertainer doesn't prevent one from being bigoted or making bigoted statements. There are many things that make Trump a bigot. The phrase "Islam hates us" is not something, on its own, evidence of that. Especially when it doesn't say much. For the same reason my saying to my friend "I love you man" automatically mean I want to marry him/her. You would need a lot more context and a lot more evidence before that conclusion can be made. The context and the evidence was in the interview. You choose not to see it, we get it. Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:16 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
[quote]
I'm seeing that you're hesitant about considering any examples... Is the statement "France hates the US" bigoted? Do you think it's synonymous with the statement "All French people hate the US," or do you think maybe the terms "Islam" and "France" are abstractions? Do you think if I say I hate country music that it means I have a personal loathing for Bob Dylan?
You are doing exactly what Joe Scarborough would have done if Rick Scott had been stupid enough to go down that road. The point I am plainly trying to lead you to is that "All Muslims hate us" (the antecedent of "us" was the West, not the USA) is not synonymous with "Islam hates us."
I don't care about the truth of what Trump said for this point.* I care very deeply that people don't have the keenness to spot their simple logical mistake. If you make a claim about X, it's not a claim about all the parts or members of X, nor is it a generalization about the parts or members of X. If I say the 787 is a smart aeroplane, nobody would be up in arms saying "what do you mean, aeroplanes can't be smart that doesn't even make sense, so what's so smart about a tire and landing gear and bathroom mirror an-" because you know exactly what the meaning is. I know that bigotry is a touchy subject, but that's not an excuse for conflating statements that aren't the same just to throw Rick Scott under the bus for sport. I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. Yes, I'm saying in any other context you would be able to see the distinction between talking about a geopolitical force and making a universal statement about the adherents to it, except in this specific case you've been conditioned to overreact sharply to anything that could be even perceived as bigotry. You are repeating what you said before. I answered your point about Islam and Muslims being different. See below. Also, Islam is not a "geopolitical force" which you can reasonably anthropomorphize to have it hold the kind of sentiments Trump was talking about, unless by targeting its believers. On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. What you're purporting to do here is read Trump's mind. I am doing my best to read people's words, not their minds. The geopolitical force people refer to when they use a word like Islam, a word that's a huge umbrella covering many things, is not contained within one holy book of the faith. It's like saying the USSR didn't "hate" the West because it wasn't codified in Marx. I am not reading Trump's mind any more than you are reading minds when you say that you know what "it's a smart airplane" means, and that you know the person is not saying it's the actual airplane that is capable of intelligent thought. If you want to be willfully obtuse about it, good for you. Are you saying your qualm is with the word "hate?" So now you're being willfully obtuse about what I'm saying? You said, I'm paraphrasing, that you have no trouble with the 787 example, granting that the word "smart" obviously has a different sense when used in the context of an aeroplane than with a person. Yet when the statement we're looking at is "Islam hates us," rather than wondering whether the word "hate" has any kind of different function in that context, you want to be able to claim the language used only applies to people, not abstractions, and therefore Trump was actually talking about all Muslims, or about Muslims generally in a prejudicial way (because it would supposedly never make sense to anthropomorphize an intangible construction like we do daily when talking about nations). I futilely put the question to you much earlier, for this very reason, as to what your response would have been if Rick Scott had gone on the record saying "Islam loves us." Like another poster mentioned, nations can be anthropomorphized without necessarily referring to their populations because there are other entities within the nation that can be associated with the anthropomorphization -- for example, their governments. In the case of Islam, however, if you are going to claim that it hates the U.S., you can hardly turn elsewhere than to its believers to attribute the origin of the hatred. Last time I checked, the Quran does not mention the U.S. Also, with regards to the use of "smart" about an airplane, it is not a matter of using a different meaning of the word but of understanding where the attribution goes with regards to the smartness we're talking about (it's a smart airplane --> it was smartly designed --> the people responsible for the design did their job smartly). Likewise, the hatred Trump is talking about is attributed to the believers. That is why Trump himself attributed this hatred to "people" in the interview itself. On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
*There are a thousand reasons to criticize Trump. How about torture and the fact that he doesn't understand the internet? He may even be a bigot. But no, his use of simple language (as usual) to talk about the geopolitical divide between Islam and the West is supposed to be the smoking gun. There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. What I said is of course a generalization, but I think we may be living on different planets if you're claiming it's one that holds no water. Like I said: it's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation. Something being a rough generalization doesn't make it ignorant. Similarly, something being stupid doesn't make it bigoted. Being a generalization doesn't make a statement simplistic and ignorant. Your statement was those things, but not by virtue of being a generalization. Similarly, Trump's statement was bigoted, and not only stupid. What would be a more appropriate generalization, if you please - the world is in harmony? Why would denouncing the simplistic and ignorant nature of your initial statement mean that I believe the world in in harmony? There are armed groups waging war in the name of Islam in some regions, and they are opposed by both Western and non-Western powers. This does not make your initial statement accurate. Wait a minute--do you actually believe there is one unified group that constitutes "Islam"? Like, you don't realize that it has large swaths of sub groups, extremist groups, pacifists groups, and even country specific groups that are all very different from each other? You're only reason for believing that Trump is being bigoted in that phrase is because you yourself are ignorant about what Trump is being bigoted against. Are you purposely misrepresenting what I'm saying or something? Trump is the one grouping the believers in Islam together, not me. That's the entire point.
You literally just said that Islam could only mean Muslims and then construe that that means all 1.5 billion muslims. That is just your ignorance being used to contextualize your bad analysis of a bad phrase by someone known for not being clear in what he says.
I am saying the phrase Islam hates Us is relatively meaningless as a phrase and forcing a politician to make a stance on it is unfair to that politician. All that florida guy wants is to make sure he doesn't piss off either side of the voting blocks in his state and there he is being forced to make a stance either for Trump supporters or against trump supporters. That is not a fair position to put anyone in.
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On March 11 2016 10:34 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 07:30 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
Please, it's painfully obvious that you're jumping through hoops to try to justify the statement and Rick Scott's response. Islam isn't a thinking entity, so when Trump says that it "hates America", he is unambiguously saying that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. He is clearly qualifying the followers of Islam as a hateful group, which is by definition bigoted.
And even if you were right that Trump meant something completely different by "Islam hates America" (which he didn't, so you're wrong), Rick Scott could have easily said so, and responded with "I disagree that Muslims hate America, but I agree that Islam hates America" (which would be a nonsensical statement, but that's where your logic leads). He didn't, because he either agrees with Trump and is bigoted as well, or he disagrees with Trump and he's a coward who doesn't want to stand up against bigotry. I'm seeing that you're hesitant about considering any examples... Is the statement "France hates the US" bigoted? Do you think it's synonymous with the statement "All French people hate the US," or do you think maybe the terms "Islam" and "France" are abstractions? Do you think if I say I hate country music that it means I have a personal loathing for Bob Dylan? You are doing exactly what Joe Scarborough would have done if Rick Scott had been stupid enough to go down that road. The point I am plainly trying to lead you to is that "All Muslims hate us" (the antecedent of "us" was the West, not the USA) is not synonymous with "Islam hates us." I don't care about the truth of what Trump said for this point.* I care very deeply that people don't have the keenness to spot their simple logical mistake. If you make a claim about X, it's not a claim about all the parts or members of X, nor is it a generalization about the parts or members of X. If I say the 787 is a smart aeroplane, nobody would be up in arms saying "what do you mean, aeroplanes can't be smart that doesn't even make sense, so what's so smart about a tire and landing gear and bathroom mirror an-" because you know exactly what the meaning is. I know that bigotry is a touchy subject, but that's not an excuse for conflating statements that aren't the same just to throw Rick Scott under the bus for sport. I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. Yes, I'm saying in any other context you would be able to see the distinction between talking about a geopolitical force and making a universal statement about the adherents to it, except in this specific case you've been conditioned to overreact sharply to anything that could be even perceived as bigotry. You are repeating what you said before. I answered your point about Islam and Muslims being different. See below. Also, Islam is not a "geopolitical force" which you can reasonably anthropomorphize to have it hold the kind of sentiments Trump was talking about, unless by targeting its believers. On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. What you're purporting to do here is read Trump's mind. I am doing my best to read people's words, not their minds. The geopolitical force people refer to when they use a word like Islam, a word that's a huge umbrella covering many things, is not contained within one holy book of the faith. It's like saying the USSR didn't "hate" the West because it wasn't codified in Marx. I am not reading Trump's mind any more than you are reading minds when you say that you know what "it's a smart airplane" means, and that you know the person is not saying it's the actual airplane that is capable of intelligent thought. If you want to be willfully obtuse about it, good for you. Are you saying your qualm is with the word "hate?" So now you're being willfully obtuse about what I'm saying? You said, I'm paraphrasing, that you have no trouble with the 787 example, granting that the word "smart" obviously has a different sense when used in the context of an aeroplane than with a person. Yet when the statement we're looking at is "Islam hates us," rather than wondering whether the word "hate" has any kind of different function in that context, you want to be able to claim the language used only applies to people, not abstractions, and therefore Trump was actually talking about all Muslims, or about Muslims generally in a prejudicial way (because it would supposedly never make sense to anthropomorphize an intangible construction like we do daily when talking about nations). I futilely put the question to you much earlier, for this very reason, as to what your response would have been if Rick Scott had gone on the record saying "Islam loves us." Like another poster mentioned, nations can be anthropomorphized without necessarily referring to their populations because there are other entities within the nation that can be associated with the anthropomorphization -- for example, their governments. In the case of Islam, however, if you are going to claim that it hates the U.S., you can hardly turn elsewhere than to its believers to attribute the origin of the hatred. Last time I checked, the Quran does not mention the U.S. But the governments are populated by people within the nation - so what you're doing sounds like special pleading to me. You used the Koran line before and it's ineffectual to anyone who understands that Christianity's influence as a force in the modern world is not restricted by what it says in Matthew, communism's influence in the world is not constrained by the words printed by Marx, and so forth. There are power structures in the Muslim world, Muslim countries, Muslim organizations, and so forth which lead us to be able to talk about the religion as a force in the world like any other.
It's not special pleading at all, it's pointing out that by referring to a nation you can be talking about a state's government and about its population, and that those are two different entities. The fact that the members of a state's government are usually part of its population doesn't change the fact that targeting a government is not the same as targeting a population in its entirety.
I didn't argue that the influence of Islam was limited by the words printed in the Quran -- I was referring to the fact that in this case Islam can hardly be anthropomorphized to be described as hateful of the U.S. unless by referring to the believers themselves. Which, again, Trump does in the interview by attributing the hatred he was referring to to the "people".
On March 11 2016 10:34 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:
Also, with regards to the use of "smart" about an airplane, it is not a matter of using a different meaning of the word but of understanding where the attribution goes with regards to the smartness we're talking about (it's a smart airplane --> it was smartly designed --> the people responsible for the design did their job smartly). Likewise, the hatred Trump is talking about is attributed to the believers. That is why Trump himself attributed this hatred to "people" in the interview itself. That's not what it at all. It means the technology itself is responsive. Like a smartphone. The airplane is good at controlling itself and its systems. It can manage complicated variables by itself with simple inputs.
I was trying to make a different point with the analogy, namely that the attribution of such terms can be obvious beyond a literal reading of the statement.
On March 11 2016 10:34 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
*There are a thousand reasons to criticize Trump. How about torture and the fact that he doesn't understand the internet? He may even be a bigot. But no, his use of simple language (as usual) to talk about the geopolitical divide between Islam and the West is supposed to be the smoking gun. There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. What I said is of course a generalization, but I think we may be living on different planets if you're claiming it's one that holds no water. Like I said: it's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation. Something being a rough generalization doesn't make it ignorant. Similarly, something being stupid doesn't make it bigoted. Being a generalization doesn't make a statement simplistic and ignorant. Your statement was those things, but not by virtue of being a generalization. Similarly, Trump's statement was bigoted, and not only stupid. What would be a more appropriate generalization, if you please - the world is in harmony? Why would denouncing the simplistic and ignorant nature of your initial statement mean that I believe the world in in harmony? There are armed groups waging war in the name of Islam in some regions, and they are opposed by both Western and non-Western powers. This does not make your initial statement accurate. It's not even a whole statement. I said "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West" and you jumped in telling me it was fake. I suffer you make a better generalization on that point that's as concise as 7 words. I don't think it's controversial that the two spheres oppose each other's influence.
It is controversial. It completely masks the reality of the relations between the powers which belong to the two spheres you arbitrarily defined.
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On March 11 2016 10:40 Naracs_Duc wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:25 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:59 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 09:52 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:50 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 09:44 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:40 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 09:07 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:04 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said.
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious.
You didn't respond to my other point, by the way: "even if you were right that Trump meant something completely different by "Islam hates America" (which he didn't, so you're wrong), Rick Scott could have easily said so, and responded with "I disagree that Muslims hate America, but I agree that Islam hates America" (which would be a nonsensical statement, but that's where your logic leads). He didn't, because he either agrees with Trump and is bigoted as well, or he disagrees with Trump and he's a coward who doesn't want to stand up against bigotry."
[quote]
There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. You're speaking like a true fundamentalist. You know that there is nuance in speech, you're just pretty certain that the group of people you disagree with (conservatives) don't have that nuance. That habit you have of making assumptions on what people mean because that is how you believe those people think is the exact reason why we have bigots in society. Nowhere am I talking about conservatives in general. I am specifically talking about Trump, who is using a tactic widely employed by the far-right in Europe to target Muslims: use Islam as a proxy target instead, to avoid mentioning Muslims directly. But go ahead, do tell me what else Trump really meant when he said "Islam hates us" (not "radical Islam" but "Islam"), if he wasn't talking about Muslims. He even specifically mentioned the hatred of those "people". So when listening to an american politician, you make the generalization that he has the same opinions as politicians outside the US? When someone says something as abstract as "Islam Hates Us" Islam could mean a lot of things Us could mean a lot of things and even Hate could mean a lot of things And while he could be saying one thing, his followers could be understanding a different thing, and you could understand a different thing. Islam could mean Muslims, it could mean ISIS, it could mean IS, it could mean Terrorists, it could mean Muslim Americans, it could mean the Middle Easterners, it could mean Africans, etc... Hate could mean "at war with" it could mean "culturally disagreement" it could mean "are defensive of" it could mean "wants to invade" it could mean "wants to brainwash," etc... Us could mean "Americans" it could mean "the West" it could mean "the GOP" it could mean "my fellow birthers" it could mean "America as a nation" it could mean "America as a culture" it could mean "the West as a culture," etc... For the most part, the specific meaning of Muslims hate americans is not the only meaning, it is simply your understanding of what Trump said. You also don't know if *why* Trump said it. -Does he actually fear Muslims? -Does he want to incite his supporters? -Does he want to preach anti-islam ideas? -Does he simply say what he thinks his fans want to hear? -Does he believe what he say? -etc.... When the phrase is so vague, and the circumstance of when he said it so based on entertainment and pandering--you can't really make any concrete statement as to what it means. With respect to Islam, he mentions "people" in general in the interview (not only radicals). It is clear he is talking about Muslims. I'm not making a statement with regards to how his supporters understood it (I'll let you "figure it out", to quote Trump), I'm making a statement with regards to what Trump himself was saying. Why would Trump distinguish between Radicals and Non-Radicals when talking about Muslims to a crowd of conservatives? He is an entertainer after all--he even had his own TV Show. People itself could mean a lot of things and is used as often to define groups within a population as it is used to define the population itself. For example, when my friend sees something on facebook and says "people are stupid" he does not mean "Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists" are stupid nor does he even mean the totality of all human beings are stupid. He means that there are subsections of society, that he cannot specifically define, that do things that he does not agree with. Jumping to a conclusion about what Trump is specifically meaning from such scarce evidence of a few words and phrases in one random speech is absolutely stupid. And being forced to make conclusions that forces you take a side in the issue when the people he is asking about might affect your candidacy during reelection is also stupid. The subsection of society that Trump is talking about is Muslims, and he is being bigoted towards them. Like I said to oBlade, if you're going to be willfully ignorant about it, good for you. Being an entertainer doesn't prevent one from being bigoted or making bigoted statements. There are many things that make Trump a bigot. The phrase "Islam hates us" is not something, on its own, evidence of that. Especially when it doesn't say much. For the same reason my saying to my friend "I love you man" automatically mean I want to marry him/her. You would need a lot more context and a lot more evidence before that conclusion can be made. The context and the evidence was in the interview. You choose not to see it, we get it. On March 11 2016 10:16 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. Yes, I'm saying in any other context you would be able to see the distinction between talking about a geopolitical force and making a universal statement about the adherents to it, except in this specific case you've been conditioned to overreact sharply to anything that could be even perceived as bigotry. You are repeating what you said before. I answered your point about Islam and Muslims being different. See below. Also, Islam is not a "geopolitical force" which you can reasonably anthropomorphize to have it hold the kind of sentiments Trump was talking about, unless by targeting its believers. On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. What you're purporting to do here is read Trump's mind. I am doing my best to read people's words, not their minds. The geopolitical force people refer to when they use a word like Islam, a word that's a huge umbrella covering many things, is not contained within one holy book of the faith. It's like saying the USSR didn't "hate" the West because it wasn't codified in Marx. I am not reading Trump's mind any more than you are reading minds when you say that you know what "it's a smart airplane" means, and that you know the person is not saying it's the actual airplane that is capable of intelligent thought. If you want to be willfully obtuse about it, good for you. Are you saying your qualm is with the word "hate?" So now you're being willfully obtuse about what I'm saying? You said, I'm paraphrasing, that you have no trouble with the 787 example, granting that the word "smart" obviously has a different sense when used in the context of an aeroplane than with a person. Yet when the statement we're looking at is "Islam hates us," rather than wondering whether the word "hate" has any kind of different function in that context, you want to be able to claim the language used only applies to people, not abstractions, and therefore Trump was actually talking about all Muslims, or about Muslims generally in a prejudicial way (because it would supposedly never make sense to anthropomorphize an intangible construction like we do daily when talking about nations). I futilely put the question to you much earlier, for this very reason, as to what your response would have been if Rick Scott had gone on the record saying "Islam loves us." Like another poster mentioned, nations can be anthropomorphized without necessarily referring to their populations because there are other entities within the nation that can be associated with the anthropomorphization -- for example, their governments. In the case of Islam, however, if you are going to claim that it hates the U.S., you can hardly turn elsewhere than to its believers to attribute the origin of the hatred. Last time I checked, the Quran does not mention the U.S. Also, with regards to the use of "smart" about an airplane, it is not a matter of using a different meaning of the word but of understanding where the attribution goes with regards to the smartness we're talking about (it's a smart airplane --> it was smartly designed --> the people responsible for the design did their job smartly). Likewise, the hatred Trump is talking about is attributed to the believers. That is why Trump himself attributed this hatred to "people" in the interview itself. On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. What I said is of course a generalization, but I think we may be living on different planets if you're claiming it's one that holds no water. Like I said: it's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation. Something being a rough generalization doesn't make it ignorant. Similarly, something being stupid doesn't make it bigoted. Being a generalization doesn't make a statement simplistic and ignorant. Your statement was those things, but not by virtue of being a generalization. Similarly, Trump's statement was bigoted, and not only stupid. What would be a more appropriate generalization, if you please - the world is in harmony? Why would denouncing the simplistic and ignorant nature of your initial statement mean that I believe the world in in harmony? There are armed groups waging war in the name of Islam in some regions, and they are opposed by both Western and non-Western powers. This does not make your initial statement accurate. Wait a minute--do you actually believe there is one unified group that constitutes "Islam"? Like, you don't realize that it has large swaths of sub groups, extremist groups, pacifists groups, and even country specific groups that are all very different from each other? You're only reason for believing that Trump is being bigoted in that phrase is because you yourself are ignorant about what Trump is being bigoted against. Are you purposely misrepresenting what I'm saying or something? Trump is the one grouping the believers in Islam together, not me. That's the entire point. You literally just said that Islam could only mean Muslims and then construe that that means all 1.5 billion muslims. That is just your ignorance being used to contextualize your bad analysis of a bad phrase by someone known for not being clear in what he says. I am saying the phrase Islam hates Us is relatively meaningless as a phrase and forcing a politician to make a stance on it is unfair to that politician. All that florida guy wants is to make sure he doesn't piss off either side of the voting blocks in his state and there he is being forced to make a stance either for Trump supporters or against trump supporters. That is not a fair position to put anyone in.
First of all, you're partly confusing my posts and Plansix'. Second, in the context of what Trump was saying, yes, Islam was referring to Muslims in general as believers in Islam. You're the one who's being willfully ignorant of his statements, not me.
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Cringeworthy introduction by Reince Priebus. As if he was fooling anyone.
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On March 11 2016 10:09 On_Slaught wrote:
Rubio is more dead in the water than he was last week.
My guess is he just falls on his sword for the party and tries to drag Trump down with him. He knows that no matter how badly Trump wants to seem Presidential, all you have to do is throw a few insults Trumps way and he won't be able to help himself.
That's the problem though. Trump isn't damaged by insults - everyone already knows he is a clown with generic "hedonistic billionaire" tendencies. When you attack someone, you also make yourself look worse, and since it doesn't really hurt Trump it hurts the other candidate only. Also Cruz may not be a better option and Kasich's campaign hasn't really taken off.
As I've said and as Fox has proven, if you really want to attack Trump, you do it by calling him out on the issues.
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On March 11 2016 10:40 Naracs_Duc wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:25 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:59 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 09:52 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:50 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 09:44 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:40 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 09:07 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:04 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said.
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious.
You didn't respond to my other point, by the way: "even if you were right that Trump meant something completely different by "Islam hates America" (which he didn't, so you're wrong), Rick Scott could have easily said so, and responded with "I disagree that Muslims hate America, but I agree that Islam hates America" (which would be a nonsensical statement, but that's where your logic leads). He didn't, because he either agrees with Trump and is bigoted as well, or he disagrees with Trump and he's a coward who doesn't want to stand up against bigotry."
[quote]
There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. You're speaking like a true fundamentalist. You know that there is nuance in speech, you're just pretty certain that the group of people you disagree with (conservatives) don't have that nuance. That habit you have of making assumptions on what people mean because that is how you believe those people think is the exact reason why we have bigots in society. Nowhere am I talking about conservatives in general. I am specifically talking about Trump, who is using a tactic widely employed by the far-right in Europe to target Muslims: use Islam as a proxy target instead, to avoid mentioning Muslims directly. But go ahead, do tell me what else Trump really meant when he said "Islam hates us" (not "radical Islam" but "Islam"), if he wasn't talking about Muslims. He even specifically mentioned the hatred of those "people". So when listening to an american politician, you make the generalization that he has the same opinions as politicians outside the US? When someone says something as abstract as "Islam Hates Us" Islam could mean a lot of things Us could mean a lot of things and even Hate could mean a lot of things And while he could be saying one thing, his followers could be understanding a different thing, and you could understand a different thing. Islam could mean Muslims, it could mean ISIS, it could mean IS, it could mean Terrorists, it could mean Muslim Americans, it could mean the Middle Easterners, it could mean Africans, etc... Hate could mean "at war with" it could mean "culturally disagreement" it could mean "are defensive of" it could mean "wants to invade" it could mean "wants to brainwash," etc... Us could mean "Americans" it could mean "the West" it could mean "the GOP" it could mean "my fellow birthers" it could mean "America as a nation" it could mean "America as a culture" it could mean "the West as a culture," etc... For the most part, the specific meaning of Muslims hate americans is not the only meaning, it is simply your understanding of what Trump said. You also don't know if *why* Trump said it. -Does he actually fear Muslims? -Does he want to incite his supporters? -Does he want to preach anti-islam ideas? -Does he simply say what he thinks his fans want to hear? -Does he believe what he say? -etc.... When the phrase is so vague, and the circumstance of when he said it so based on entertainment and pandering--you can't really make any concrete statement as to what it means. With respect to Islam, he mentions "people" in general in the interview (not only radicals). It is clear he is talking about Muslims. I'm not making a statement with regards to how his supporters understood it (I'll let you "figure it out", to quote Trump), I'm making a statement with regards to what Trump himself was saying. Why would Trump distinguish between Radicals and Non-Radicals when talking about Muslims to a crowd of conservatives? He is an entertainer after all--he even had his own TV Show. People itself could mean a lot of things and is used as often to define groups within a population as it is used to define the population itself. For example, when my friend sees something on facebook and says "people are stupid" he does not mean "Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists" are stupid nor does he even mean the totality of all human beings are stupid. He means that there are subsections of society, that he cannot specifically define, that do things that he does not agree with. Jumping to a conclusion about what Trump is specifically meaning from such scarce evidence of a few words and phrases in one random speech is absolutely stupid. And being forced to make conclusions that forces you take a side in the issue when the people he is asking about might affect your candidacy during reelection is also stupid. The subsection of society that Trump is talking about is Muslims, and he is being bigoted towards them. Like I said to oBlade, if you're going to be willfully ignorant about it, good for you. Being an entertainer doesn't prevent one from being bigoted or making bigoted statements. There are many things that make Trump a bigot. The phrase "Islam hates us" is not something, on its own, evidence of that. Especially when it doesn't say much. For the same reason my saying to my friend "I love you man" automatically mean I want to marry him/her. You would need a lot more context and a lot more evidence before that conclusion can be made. The context and the evidence was in the interview. You choose not to see it, we get it. On March 11 2016 10:16 Naracs_Duc wrote:On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. Yes, I'm saying in any other context you would be able to see the distinction between talking about a geopolitical force and making a universal statement about the adherents to it, except in this specific case you've been conditioned to overreact sharply to anything that could be even perceived as bigotry. You are repeating what you said before. I answered your point about Islam and Muslims being different. See below. Also, Islam is not a "geopolitical force" which you can reasonably anthropomorphize to have it hold the kind of sentiments Trump was talking about, unless by targeting its believers. On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. What you're purporting to do here is read Trump's mind. I am doing my best to read people's words, not their minds. The geopolitical force people refer to when they use a word like Islam, a word that's a huge umbrella covering many things, is not contained within one holy book of the faith. It's like saying the USSR didn't "hate" the West because it wasn't codified in Marx. I am not reading Trump's mind any more than you are reading minds when you say that you know what "it's a smart airplane" means, and that you know the person is not saying it's the actual airplane that is capable of intelligent thought. If you want to be willfully obtuse about it, good for you. Are you saying your qualm is with the word "hate?" So now you're being willfully obtuse about what I'm saying? You said, I'm paraphrasing, that you have no trouble with the 787 example, granting that the word "smart" obviously has a different sense when used in the context of an aeroplane than with a person. Yet when the statement we're looking at is "Islam hates us," rather than wondering whether the word "hate" has any kind of different function in that context, you want to be able to claim the language used only applies to people, not abstractions, and therefore Trump was actually talking about all Muslims, or about Muslims generally in a prejudicial way (because it would supposedly never make sense to anthropomorphize an intangible construction like we do daily when talking about nations). I futilely put the question to you much earlier, for this very reason, as to what your response would have been if Rick Scott had gone on the record saying "Islam loves us." Like another poster mentioned, nations can be anthropomorphized without necessarily referring to their populations because there are other entities within the nation that can be associated with the anthropomorphization -- for example, their governments. In the case of Islam, however, if you are going to claim that it hates the U.S., you can hardly turn elsewhere than to its believers to attribute the origin of the hatred. Last time I checked, the Quran does not mention the U.S. Also, with regards to the use of "smart" about an airplane, it is not a matter of using a different meaning of the word but of understanding where the attribution goes with regards to the smartness we're talking about (it's a smart airplane --> it was smartly designed --> the people responsible for the design did their job smartly). Likewise, the hatred Trump is talking about is attributed to the believers. That is why Trump himself attributed this hatred to "people" in the interview itself. On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. What I said is of course a generalization, but I think we may be living on different planets if you're claiming it's one that holds no water. Like I said: it's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation. Something being a rough generalization doesn't make it ignorant. Similarly, something being stupid doesn't make it bigoted. Being a generalization doesn't make a statement simplistic and ignorant. Your statement was those things, but not by virtue of being a generalization. Similarly, Trump's statement was bigoted, and not only stupid. What would be a more appropriate generalization, if you please - the world is in harmony? Why would denouncing the simplistic and ignorant nature of your initial statement mean that I believe the world in in harmony? There are armed groups waging war in the name of Islam in some regions, and they are opposed by both Western and non-Western powers. This does not make your initial statement accurate. Wait a minute--do you actually believe there is one unified group that constitutes "Islam"? Like, you don't realize that it has large swaths of sub groups, extremist groups, pacifists groups, and even country specific groups that are all very different from each other? You're only reason for believing that Trump is being bigoted in that phrase is because you yourself are ignorant about what Trump is being bigoted against. Are you purposely misrepresenting what I'm saying or something? Trump is the one grouping the believers in Islam together, not me. That's the entire point. You literally just said that Islam could only mean Muslims and then construe that that means all 1.5 billion muslims. That is just your ignorance being used to contextualize your bad analysis of a bad phrase by someone known for not being clear in what he says. I am saying the phrase Islam hates Us is relatively meaningless as a phrase and forcing a politician to make a stance on it is unfair to that politician. All that florida guy wants is to make sure he doesn't piss off either side of the voting blocks in his state and there he is being forced to make a stance either for Trump supporters or against trump supporters. That is not a fair position to put anyone in.
Just to be clear here, if i say "americans are dumb as shit", that's fine because you assume that i don't mean literally every single american, but certain groups (which you specify for yourself)?
That's not how it works. And no, it's certainly not unfair to a politician to force him to make a clear stance. It's what makes you fricking decide if you vote him, wtf. "Ima do whatever, maybe less or something else" is hardly a statement that someone gets elected on.
edit: someone mentioned nuances btw, trump is not someone who gives a shit about nuances. Every. Single. Statement. is. Absolute. Every single time. Ffs, he might have words, even the best words, but he still argues like a 12 year old. Most of them can't even pronounce nuance, let alone use them.
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On March 11 2016 10:36 Jormundr wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:34 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
[quote]
I'm seeing that you're hesitant about considering any examples... Is the statement "France hates the US" bigoted? Do you think it's synonymous with the statement "All French people hate the US," or do you think maybe the terms "Islam" and "France" are abstractions? Do you think if I say I hate country music that it means I have a personal loathing for Bob Dylan?
You are doing exactly what Joe Scarborough would have done if Rick Scott had been stupid enough to go down that road. The point I am plainly trying to lead you to is that "All Muslims hate us" (the antecedent of "us" was the West, not the USA) is not synonymous with "Islam hates us."
I don't care about the truth of what Trump said for this point.* I care very deeply that people don't have the keenness to spot their simple logical mistake. If you make a claim about X, it's not a claim about all the parts or members of X, nor is it a generalization about the parts or members of X. If I say the 787 is a smart aeroplane, nobody would be up in arms saying "what do you mean, aeroplanes can't be smart that doesn't even make sense, so what's so smart about a tire and landing gear and bathroom mirror an-" because you know exactly what the meaning is. I know that bigotry is a touchy subject, but that's not an excuse for conflating statements that aren't the same just to throw Rick Scott under the bus for sport. I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. Yes, I'm saying in any other context you would be able to see the distinction between talking about a geopolitical force and making a universal statement about the adherents to it, except in this specific case you've been conditioned to overreact sharply to anything that could be even perceived as bigotry. You are repeating what you said before. I answered your point about Islam and Muslims being different. See below. Also, Islam is not a "geopolitical force" which you can reasonably anthropomorphize to have it hold the kind of sentiments Trump was talking about, unless by targeting its believers. On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. What you're purporting to do here is read Trump's mind. I am doing my best to read people's words, not their minds. The geopolitical force people refer to when they use a word like Islam, a word that's a huge umbrella covering many things, is not contained within one holy book of the faith. It's like saying the USSR didn't "hate" the West because it wasn't codified in Marx. I am not reading Trump's mind any more than you are reading minds when you say that you know what "it's a smart airplane" means, and that you know the person is not saying it's the actual airplane that is capable of intelligent thought. If you want to be willfully obtuse about it, good for you. Are you saying your qualm is with the word "hate?" So now you're being willfully obtuse about what I'm saying? You said, I'm paraphrasing, that you have no trouble with the 787 example, granting that the word "smart" obviously has a different sense when used in the context of an aeroplane than with a person. Yet when the statement we're looking at is "Islam hates us," rather than wondering whether the word "hate" has any kind of different function in that context, you want to be able to claim the language used only applies to people, not abstractions, and therefore Trump was actually talking about all Muslims, or about Muslims generally in a prejudicial way (because it would supposedly never make sense to anthropomorphize an intangible construction like we do daily when talking about nations). I futilely put the question to you much earlier, for this very reason, as to what your response would have been if Rick Scott had gone on the record saying "Islam loves us." Like another poster mentioned, nations can be anthropomorphized without necessarily referring to their populations because there are other entities within the nation that can be associated with the anthropomorphization -- for example, their governments. In the case of Islam, however, if you are going to claim that it hates the U.S., you can hardly turn elsewhere than to its believers to attribute the origin of the hatred. Last time I checked, the Quran does not mention the U.S. But the governments are populated by people within the nation - so what you're doing sounds like special pleading to me. You used the Koran line before and it's ineffectual to anyone who understands that Christianity's influence as a force in the modern world is not restricted by what it says in Matthew, communism's influence in the world is not constrained by the words printed by Marx, and so forth. There are power structures in the Muslim world, Muslim countries, Muslim organizations, and so forth which lead us to be able to talk about the religion as a force in the world like any other. On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:
Also, with regards to the use of "smart" about an airplane, it is not a matter of using a different meaning of the word but of understanding where the attribution goes with regards to the smartness we're talking about (it's a smart airplane --> it was smartly designed --> the people responsible for the design did their job smartly). Likewise, the hatred Trump is talking about is attributed to the believers. That is why Trump himself attributed this hatred to "people" in the interview itself. That's not what it at all. It means the technology itself is responsive. Like a smartphone. The airplane is good at controlling itself and its systems. It can manage complicated variables by itself with simple inputs. On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
*There are a thousand reasons to criticize Trump. How about torture and the fact that he doesn't understand the internet? He may even be a bigot. But no, his use of simple language (as usual) to talk about the geopolitical divide between Islam and the West is supposed to be the smoking gun. There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. What I said is of course a generalization, but I think we may be living on different planets if you're claiming it's one that holds no water. Like I said: it's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation. Something being a rough generalization doesn't make it ignorant. Similarly, something being stupid doesn't make it bigoted. Being a generalization doesn't make a statement simplistic and ignorant. Your statement was those things, but not by virtue of being a generalization. Similarly, Trump's statement was bigoted, and not only stupid. What would be a more appropriate generalization, if you please - the world is in harmony? Why would denouncing the simplistic and ignorant nature of your initial statement mean that I believe the world in in harmony? There are armed groups waging war in the name of Islam in some regions, and they are opposed by both Western and non-Western powers. This does not make your initial statement accurate. It's not even a whole statement. I said "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West" and you jumped in telling me it was fake. I suffer you make a better generalization on that point that's as concise as 7 words. I don't think it's controversial that the two spheres oppose each other's influence. What you're saying here is largely irrelevant because at the end of the day we all know that Islam did not receive a 'great' rating from Señor Trump. You're also consistently leaving yuuuuuuuuuuuge gapes in your reasoning that leave much to be desired.
My reasoning, okay, first off, just so you know, and it's not just me, I get many private messages, complimenting my reasoning, saying what a great job, and many of them, not all, but many of them, they come to me and they say "thank you," but we have a tremendous problem, in this thread, with snark, and let me tell you, I'm a unifier, I'm great at bringing people together, it's what I do, and we're going, temporarily, we're going to have a temporary ban, on snark, we're going to find out what the problem is, it's very hard, when you look, to separate the snark, but we have a tremendous hatred of reasoning, we have to find out what's going on, we have to figure out how to bring people together, you have to be flexible, and it might be the hardest but I'll tell you something, and you have to be flexible, otherwise you're not going to learn anything, and I'm great at learning, it's what I do, but just, let me just, because I've done very, very well for myself, when it comes to reasoning, I've done really well, and when it comes to snark, I don't want that to happen, call it what you want, we're not going to have snark in any page in this thread, we're going to make the General forum, great, again.
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On March 11 2016 10:36 Jormundr wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:34 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
[quote]
I'm seeing that you're hesitant about considering any examples... Is the statement "France hates the US" bigoted? Do you think it's synonymous with the statement "All French people hate the US," or do you think maybe the terms "Islam" and "France" are abstractions? Do you think if I say I hate country music that it means I have a personal loathing for Bob Dylan?
You are doing exactly what Joe Scarborough would have done if Rick Scott had been stupid enough to go down that road. The point I am plainly trying to lead you to is that "All Muslims hate us" (the antecedent of "us" was the West, not the USA) is not synonymous with "Islam hates us."
I don't care about the truth of what Trump said for this point.* I care very deeply that people don't have the keenness to spot their simple logical mistake. If you make a claim about X, it's not a claim about all the parts or members of X, nor is it a generalization about the parts or members of X. If I say the 787 is a smart aeroplane, nobody would be up in arms saying "what do you mean, aeroplanes can't be smart that doesn't even make sense, so what's so smart about a tire and landing gear and bathroom mirror an-" because you know exactly what the meaning is. I know that bigotry is a touchy subject, but that's not an excuse for conflating statements that aren't the same just to throw Rick Scott under the bus for sport. I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. Yes, I'm saying in any other context you would be able to see the distinction between talking about a geopolitical force and making a universal statement about the adherents to it, except in this specific case you've been conditioned to overreact sharply to anything that could be even perceived as bigotry. You are repeating what you said before. I answered your point about Islam and Muslims being different. See below. Also, Islam is not a "geopolitical force" which you can reasonably anthropomorphize to have it hold the kind of sentiments Trump was talking about, unless by targeting its believers. On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. What you're purporting to do here is read Trump's mind. I am doing my best to read people's words, not their minds. The geopolitical force people refer to when they use a word like Islam, a word that's a huge umbrella covering many things, is not contained within one holy book of the faith. It's like saying the USSR didn't "hate" the West because it wasn't codified in Marx. I am not reading Trump's mind any more than you are reading minds when you say that you know what "it's a smart airplane" means, and that you know the person is not saying it's the actual airplane that is capable of intelligent thought. If you want to be willfully obtuse about it, good for you. Are you saying your qualm is with the word "hate?" So now you're being willfully obtuse about what I'm saying? You said, I'm paraphrasing, that you have no trouble with the 787 example, granting that the word "smart" obviously has a different sense when used in the context of an aeroplane than with a person. Yet when the statement we're looking at is "Islam hates us," rather than wondering whether the word "hate" has any kind of different function in that context, you want to be able to claim the language used only applies to people, not abstractions, and therefore Trump was actually talking about all Muslims, or about Muslims generally in a prejudicial way (because it would supposedly never make sense to anthropomorphize an intangible construction like we do daily when talking about nations). I futilely put the question to you much earlier, for this very reason, as to what your response would have been if Rick Scott had gone on the record saying "Islam loves us." Like another poster mentioned, nations can be anthropomorphized without necessarily referring to their populations because there are other entities within the nation that can be associated with the anthropomorphization -- for example, their governments. In the case of Islam, however, if you are going to claim that it hates the U.S., you can hardly turn elsewhere than to its believers to attribute the origin of the hatred. Last time I checked, the Quran does not mention the U.S. But the governments are populated by people within the nation - so what you're doing sounds like special pleading to me. You used the Koran line before and it's ineffectual to anyone who understands that Christianity's influence as a force in the modern world is not restricted by what it says in Matthew, communism's influence in the world is not constrained by the words printed by Marx, and so forth. There are power structures in the Muslim world, Muslim countries, Muslim organizations, and so forth which lead us to be able to talk about the religion as a force in the world like any other. On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:
Also, with regards to the use of "smart" about an airplane, it is not a matter of using a different meaning of the word but of understanding where the attribution goes with regards to the smartness we're talking about (it's a smart airplane --> it was smartly designed --> the people responsible for the design did their job smartly). Likewise, the hatred Trump is talking about is attributed to the believers. That is why Trump himself attributed this hatred to "people" in the interview itself. That's not what it at all. It means the technology itself is responsive. Like a smartphone. The airplane is good at controlling itself and its systems. It can manage complicated variables by itself with simple inputs. On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 08:23 oBlade wrote:
*There are a thousand reasons to criticize Trump. How about torture and the fact that he doesn't understand the internet? He may even be a bigot. But no, his use of simple language (as usual) to talk about the geopolitical divide between Islam and the West is supposed to be the smoking gun. There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. What I said is of course a generalization, but I think we may be living on different planets if you're claiming it's one that holds no water. Like I said: it's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation. Something being a rough generalization doesn't make it ignorant. Similarly, something being stupid doesn't make it bigoted. Being a generalization doesn't make a statement simplistic and ignorant. Your statement was those things, but not by virtue of being a generalization. Similarly, Trump's statement was bigoted, and not only stupid. What would be a more appropriate generalization, if you please - the world is in harmony? Why would denouncing the simplistic and ignorant nature of your initial statement mean that I believe the world in in harmony? There are armed groups waging war in the name of Islam in some regions, and they are opposed by both Western and non-Western powers. This does not make your initial statement accurate. It's not even a whole statement. I said "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West" and you jumped in telling me it was fake. I suffer you make a better generalization on that point that's as concise as 7 words. I don't think it's controversial that the two spheres oppose each other's influence. What you're saying here is largely irrelevant because at the end of the day we all know that Islam did not receive a 'great' rating from Señor Trump. You're also consistently leaving yuuuuuuuuuuuge gapes in your reasoning that leave much to be desired. Pretty much the blubbering we hear from so many in this thread and the media. "My reasoned argument against Trump is, "All you've just said is irrelevant and there as so many gaps (or gapes if you want) I don't even want to list them all." I need to check if MSNBC is hiring because this kind of response qualifies you for their analyst department.
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On March 11 2016 10:56 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2016 10:36 Jormundr wrote:On March 11 2016 10:34 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
I don't think you realize that you inadvertently agreed with me there. When you say that "you know exactly what the meaning is" when you say "the 787 is a smart aeroplane" -- that's the point: you should know exactly what the meaning is when Trump says "Islams hates America", and that meaning is that the people who believe in Islam, namely Muslims, hate America. There is no logical mistake whatsoever; it's simply a matter of not being completely oblivious to what is actually being said. Yes, I'm saying in any other context you would be able to see the distinction between talking about a geopolitical force and making a universal statement about the adherents to it, except in this specific case you've been conditioned to overreact sharply to anything that could be even perceived as bigotry. You are repeating what you said before. I answered your point about Islam and Muslims being different. See below. Also, Islam is not a "geopolitical force" which you can reasonably anthropomorphize to have it hold the kind of sentiments Trump was talking about, unless by targeting its believers. On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
With regards to your fallacious analogies, I know very well that Islam and Muslims are different -- one is a faith, the other is a group of people. One can very well honestly criticize Islam as a faith and social institution, or any other religion for that matter, without targeting believers per se. The point is that Trump is not doing that -- he's explicitly using Islam as a proxy to make a statement about Muslims, which is a tactic employed by the far-right everywhere. It would make zero sense to argue that Islam itself hates America (do tell me if you've discovered a mention of America somewhere in the Quran), and it's easily understandable that he's talking about the people who believe in Islam, who are the ones with agency and the knowledge of America's existence. In short, you're being deliberately obtuse, while Trump's bigotry in targeting Muslims through Islam could not be more obvious. What you're purporting to do here is read Trump's mind. I am doing my best to read people's words, not their minds. The geopolitical force people refer to when they use a word like Islam, a word that's a huge umbrella covering many things, is not contained within one holy book of the faith. It's like saying the USSR didn't "hate" the West because it wasn't codified in Marx. I am not reading Trump's mind any more than you are reading minds when you say that you know what "it's a smart airplane" means, and that you know the person is not saying it's the actual airplane that is capable of intelligent thought. If you want to be willfully obtuse about it, good for you. Are you saying your qualm is with the word "hate?" So now you're being willfully obtuse about what I'm saying? You said, I'm paraphrasing, that you have no trouble with the 787 example, granting that the word "smart" obviously has a different sense when used in the context of an aeroplane than with a person. Yet when the statement we're looking at is "Islam hates us," rather than wondering whether the word "hate" has any kind of different function in that context, you want to be able to claim the language used only applies to people, not abstractions, and therefore Trump was actually talking about all Muslims, or about Muslims generally in a prejudicial way (because it would supposedly never make sense to anthropomorphize an intangible construction like we do daily when talking about nations). I futilely put the question to you much earlier, for this very reason, as to what your response would have been if Rick Scott had gone on the record saying "Islam loves us." Like another poster mentioned, nations can be anthropomorphized without necessarily referring to their populations because there are other entities within the nation that can be associated with the anthropomorphization -- for example, their governments. In the case of Islam, however, if you are going to claim that it hates the U.S., you can hardly turn elsewhere than to its believers to attribute the origin of the hatred. Last time I checked, the Quran does not mention the U.S. But the governments are populated by people within the nation - so what you're doing sounds like special pleading to me. You used the Koran line before and it's ineffectual to anyone who understands that Christianity's influence as a force in the modern world is not restricted by what it says in Matthew, communism's influence in the world is not constrained by the words printed by Marx, and so forth. There are power structures in the Muslim world, Muslim countries, Muslim organizations, and so forth which lead us to be able to talk about the religion as a force in the world like any other. On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:
Also, with regards to the use of "smart" about an airplane, it is not a matter of using a different meaning of the word but of understanding where the attribution goes with regards to the smartness we're talking about (it's a smart airplane --> it was smartly designed --> the people responsible for the design did their job smartly). Likewise, the hatred Trump is talking about is attributed to the believers. That is why Trump himself attributed this hatred to "people" in the interview itself. That's not what it at all. It means the technology itself is responsive. Like a smartphone. The airplane is good at controlling itself and its systems. It can manage complicated variables by itself with simple inputs. On March 11 2016 10:12 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:58 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:47 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:42 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 09:31 kwizach wrote:On March 11 2016 09:12 oBlade wrote:On March 11 2016 08:46 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
There is no such thing as a "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West". It's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation, on par with Huntington's repeatedly debunked Clash of civilizations. What I said is of course a generalization, but I think we may be living on different planets if you're claiming it's one that holds no water. Like I said: it's a ridiculously simplistic and ignorant depiction of the situation. Something being a rough generalization doesn't make it ignorant. Similarly, something being stupid doesn't make it bigoted. Being a generalization doesn't make a statement simplistic and ignorant. Your statement was those things, but not by virtue of being a generalization. Similarly, Trump's statement was bigoted, and not only stupid. What would be a more appropriate generalization, if you please - the world is in harmony? Why would denouncing the simplistic and ignorant nature of your initial statement mean that I believe the world in in harmony? There are armed groups waging war in the name of Islam in some regions, and they are opposed by both Western and non-Western powers. This does not make your initial statement accurate. It's not even a whole statement. I said "geopolitical divide between Islam and the West" and you jumped in telling me it was fake. I suffer you make a better generalization on that point that's as concise as 7 words. I don't think it's controversial that the two spheres oppose each other's influence. What you're saying here is largely irrelevant because at the end of the day we all know that Islam did not receive a 'great' rating from Señor Trump. You're also consistently leaving yuuuuuuuuuuuge gapes in your reasoning that leave much to be desired. Pretty much the blubbering we hear from so many in this thread and the media. "My reasoned argument against Trump is, "All you've just said is irrelevant and there as so many gaps (or gapes if you want) I don't even want to list them all." I need to check if MSNBC is hiring because this kind of response qualifies you for their analyst department.
It's hardly surprising considering the gaps trump himself leaves, no? Look at this discussion that's happening right now. Trump states: Islam hates US. Over a couple of pages people bend over backwards to try and justify how he actually didn't mean that, accusing others of being "mind readers" while apparently knowing what he thought when he said it, talking about how you'd need to read between the lines, nuances etc etc - all in regards to a sentence that couldn't be clearer.
There doesn't even need to be a discussion.
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EPT
