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The War ISIS Wants

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201–210 of 228 posts

Re: The War ISIS Wants

#201
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proven not to work by who? By what? The point is, "their reality" is manifestly, obviously wrong.

So you have ferreted all the gods out of all the gaps in human knowledge? That is an amazing accomplishment! Bases for belief are weird, even when they are not based on religion. Many mentalities are based on absolutes, it seems you have replaced god with no-god. I don't think the anti-theist mindset is particularly useful. You cannot use facts to change someone's mind, especially where facts were not used in the fir…

There are plenty of grey areas in the world, yes.

Supernatural claims made by religions are not among those. Those are just self-evidently false.

I'm not denying anyone anything. I'm just saying that the supernatural claims made by religions are obviously false. I don't really care if anyone's feelings are hurt by that.

Re: The War ISIS Wants

#202

How could it be that there are people in the world who, on the one hand, post videos on YouTube, and on the other, believe things about the universe that are manifestly and self-evidently false? (Yes, I'm referring to all religions here.) Religion -- all religion -- is so obviously nonsense, and yet the human race goes on and on and on, having endless tortured discussions about the earthly consequences of religious t…

I agree. But how can you realistically solve this? The majority of adults will never give up their beliefs. Even if we convinced every single child that religion is bullocks, it would still take ~60 years to flush out the adults. Maybe we should just hop on the rocket with Musk and start over on Mars.

Re: The War ISIS Wants

#203
post #200
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't addressing what should be done now, I was only correcting your straw man argument that you used to attack the parent poster.

I made no straw-man; I would actually like to know what the parent was proposing the French should do. The parent proposed that Westerners should be kind to everyone, but that does not address what should be done about the current problems.

Ok, let me make this a little bit more clear then. Taken straight from wikipedia we have the definition of a straw man argument.

A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument which was not advanced by that opponent.

Your reply to the parent poster was "So you are proposing that the French should respond to having over a hundred of their fellow citizens killed, and hundreds more injured by loving the supporters and leaders of ISIS?".

I was correcting you because you suggested that the parent was "proposing that the French..." and leaving the absurdity of the proposition to be its own refutation, when in fact the whole statement was "an argument which was not advanced by [the parent poster]".

Let us be clear that you can still desire to know what the parent was proposing the French do while also attacking his original position with a straw man arguemnt, which is exactly what occurred.

Re: The War ISIS Wants

#204
post #142
post #35

"A July 2014 poll by ICM Research suggested that more than one in four French youth of all creeds between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four have a favorable or very favorable opinion of ISIS . Even if these estimates are high, in our own interviews with young people in the vast and soulless housing projects of the Paris banlieues we found surprisingly wide tolerance or support for ISIS among young people " Despite…

That poll was a joke. It actually polled people about ISIS, using that word, while ISIS isn't used in French at all... We use EI, EIIL or more recently Daesh. The only people who had any idea of what was talked about where those reading the English language media. My guess is that people aither thought about something else, or not wanting to be caught being ignorant stated a random opinion.

Source?

Re: The War ISIS Wants

#205
I am a regular HN user and sometimes commentator. I am Muslim, both by background and choice. I am glad that HN is having a conversation a 100 times more serious and intellectual than I am seeing on popular Western and Muslim media.

First of all Daesh are a bunch of psychopaths and a far greater threat and problem to people like me. Their every move has been against not just non-Muslims or moderate Muslims but also and even more so against mainstream and all major currents of Sunni Islam. If people are interested, I can provide specific sources to support this assertion.

From the Muslim world side, we have a huge mess. I wanted to put in my two cents for Westerners trying to understand WTH is going on with the Muslim world. Basically, the Assad regime, nominally "secular, progressive" tyrants such as the Egyptian and Algerian militaries or Kurdish marxist armies, numerous "radical" Sunni and Shia groups have all been at fault since they could not agree on a set of principles on which disagreeing parties could come to peace. The long Iraqi civil war brutalised already damaged societies. This produced the sort of psychopaths such as Zarqawi and Baghdadi and numerous others. Also, even otherwise somewhat moderate Sunnis have been driven into ISIS's arms and somewhat moderate Nusayrites and Shi'ites have been driven into Ass'ads arms because they don't see another option. The biggest problem now is that while many people are disgusted by all this, there is so much blame to go around that one can be completely justified in blaming everyone else. So the problem is that people sympathetic to Assad (old-style socialists, Shi'ites etc.) sit there blaming the Saudis, Turks and the "West" for the supporting rebels who they say are all Daesh. On the other hand, Assad has killed and driven out many times more refugees than Daesh, and many Syrians and Sunnis find it hypocritical and self-serving to support Assad like Putin is doing while neglecting the plight of the Syrian population being hammered both from Assad and Daesh. The conspiracy theorist streak finds it easy to blame the US, without trying to eliminate the local actors who are instruments of said conspiracy, if they really believe there is one.

Unless all sides are brave enough to not only fight for their principles but more importantly admit their own mistakes it is hard to fix this. But this requires some trust, which only gets harder to find the more precarious your own situation becomes.

Re: The War ISIS Wants

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans. We know why, it's just an inconvenient truth. More women are choosing careers over having more children. To maintain a stable population, each woman has to have an average of two children. But that's the average; many will be infertile or homo…

You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children. Anecdotally, my other half would love to have children but I want to delay it right now because of finances. We live in the south-east of England so this is how things look:- We have a nice 2 bedroom terrace that costs £500,000. I earn a good living but we're hardly living in luxury. The bank of mum and dad aren't r…

> You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children.

The problem is that it's not just one problem. Almost everything is set up to economically discourage two-income families from having more children. After everything you've mentioned, the second income financially disqualifies you from many childcare and other benefits available to single-income families while progressive taxation, sold as targeting the wealthy, instead swallows the money a middle income family could have used to pay for those things out of pocket.

And after the government has laid claim to most of the second income, what's left becomes the baseline for the cost of living. More families now have two incomes so it takes two incomes to afford a home in a good school district.

It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children?

Re: The War ISIS Wants

#207
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what you get following link in the article: An ICM poll on behalf of the Russian news agency Rossiya Segodnya tested the awareness of the group ISIS (previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant), in three European nations; Great Britain, France and Germany. The poll revealed that overall 2% and 7% say they are very favourable and somewhat favourable towards ISIS but a greater 26% and 43% are some…

This is the poll they refer to, if you scroll down to the isis question, it's 27% among french 18-24. http://www.icmunlimited.com/data/media/pdf/New-EU-Comb.pdf

The exact French wording they used isn't mentioned sadly. IIRC is was astonishingly bad, as they used the ISIS word, that isn't used by French media, which went from EIIL (Etat Islamique en Irak et au Levant) to Daesh.

It's very likely that most people that answered misidentified the faction that was talked about.

Re: The War ISIS Wants

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children. Anecdotally, my other half would love to have children but I want to delay it right now because of finances. We live in the south-east of England so this is how things look:- We have a nice 2 bedroom terrace that costs £500,000. I earn a good living but we're hardly living in luxury. The bank of mum and dad aren't r…

> You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children. The problem is that it's not just one problem. Almost everything is set up to economically discourage two-income families from having more children. After everything you've mentioned, the second income financially disqualifies you from many childcare and other benefits available to single-income families while pro…

> It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children.

NRA is a narrow, single-issue lobby, not a general lobby for interests of a broad demographic (which even "middle-class families with children" is.)

And, really, everyone pays sort of vague lip service because its a large demographic, but no more than that because its not a large voting bloc. Particularly, its not a group that has a common set of policy preferences and consistently votes predominantly based on that shared set of preferences.

Its not like there aren't lobbying organizations that promote themselves as promoting the interests of "families with children"; but none of them really represents the majority of that demographic, because there is no clear voting bloc to represent.

Re: The War ISIS Wants

#209
post #204
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That poll was a joke. It actually polled people about ISIS, using that word, while ISIS isn't used in French at all... We use EI, EIIL or more recently Daesh. The only people who had any idea of what was talked about where those reading the English language media. My guess is that people aither thought about something else, or not wanting to be caught being ignorant stated a random opinion.

Source?

http://www.ami-oimc.org/news/un-sondage-affirme-que-15%25-de...

Basically the question used two denomination for Daesh, none of which being widely used by the media... Add to that people too proud to admit their ignorance, and you have the recipe for a totally worthless poll...

Re: The War ISIS Wants

#210
post #179
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever a woman earns -- after taking care of her primary/general responsibility of largely being the minister/secretary of (informal) education, cultural and internal affairs within the realm of a budding family -- remains with her and is not obliged to spend for the basic subsistence of the family. She still gets her inheritances. Besides, as the last of the Abrahamic religions today, Islam presents itself as the…

> [..] as the last of the Abrahamic religions today, Islam [..] I presume you mean "latest" here? The term "last" implies that Christianity and Judaism are no longer practiced today...

And actually that's Mormonism anyways.

They were the last to be visited by god, and had the most-recent prophet, according to whom their mortal leaders speak ex-cathedra. Mormonism is even growing faster than Islam. It is the ultimate(1) Abrahamic religion.

Mormonism is even truly a religion of peace. Its leader was under persecution at the time and he does not speak out for killing and injustice.

1) Judging all religions objectively by the same standard of proof.

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