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I went to the mall, and a little girl called me a terrorist.

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Re: I went to the mall, and a little girl called me a terrorist.

#111

An exercise more people should partake in. Sometimes on HN I find it shocking just how completely clueless some of our prolific commentators are re: prejudice, whether by race, gender, creed, orientation, or anything else. The number of times I've seen people in privileged positions try to downplay, trivialize, and belittle those struggling with prejudice has made me want to quit HN more than once. Walking a mile in…

If you have walked a mile in someone else's shoes, you can then say whatever you like. For one thing, you are now a mile away, and for another, you also have their shoes.

(Not meaning to make light of what was an excellent post. Is just that I read your edit, and I thought you might be cheered up by sillyness.)

Re: I went to the mall, and a little girl called me a terrorist.

#113
post #16
post #9

If wearing a hijab cause people to call you names, throw bad looks or more generally makes you feel discriminated against, what about trying not to wear an hijab?? Maybe I'm clueless and prejudiced and all that but it seems to me that religion was a perfectly "open" choice, ie something you can change at any time. Comparing that in any way to racism is insulting. People do not chose their ethnicity. People can chose…

People don't believe in a religion because it's convenient. If it were simple like that, everybody'd be atheist, there are no rules attached to that whatsoever. People have a belief because they believe. Or perhaps because they think a certain lifestyle is a good one (isn't that what bhuddism is? I know too little about this...).

There are different schools of Buddhism. As it spread through SE Asia local peoples incorporated local customs,etc. For example, the 'laughing buddha,' was a Chinese fertility god, IIRC.

Re: I went to the mall, and a little girl called me a terrorist.

#114
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No there isn't. That's the beauty of a 'utility function' - it _is_ the "what there is to life".

Only from a very narrow set of perspectives. There are many perspectives on life and for many of them a 'utility function' would seem nonsensical at best. Economics is not as all-encompassing a discipline as some people would like to make out.

Would you care to come up with such a "perspective on life"? I bet that for any actual, constructed perspective (rather than an a-priori incompatible one like "a perspective on life such that it doesn't admit a utility function") a utility function can be defined.

Re: I went to the mall, and a little girl called me a terrorist.

#115
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point that I was attempting to convey was that tolerance needs to be a part of both cultures. We as westerners cannot be reasonably expected to treat Islamic culture as equal to Western culture if we treat it with 'kid gloves', or make meaningless accommodations in the name of political correctness. I am not afraid to say that I have a relatively low opinion of the current Islamic culture. Sure it may have been g…

But the person who wrote this article was presumably playing the part of an American Muslim, so what do other countries have to do with this at all? It's OK to be prejudice against Muslims from your own country because some Muslims in other countries aren't nice people?

Did you even read my comment?

It has everything to do with Islam and Islamic culture, which are two different things, both of which have different presences around the world.

For the record, I don't like Islamic culture. I don't judge individual people, but I believe that a religion that was founded by a pedophile [aisha] and murderer [jews and others] should not have any influence on the world today. The best way to get rid of Islam is to stop believing in it, but oddly enough Muslims have a habit of stoning apostates.

Re: I went to the mall, and a little girl called me a terrorist.

#116
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what they would do in one of those countries that attacks and kills people at embassies or sends jihadists off to crash planes into buildings. Probably a little worse than look at you funny or call you a name.

I wonder why you choose to compare your country to "one of those countries" when you clearly indicate you think they are not as good as yours? You are like the coach of a sporting team pointing out all the teams that finished lower than yours on the ladder and saying "We did great compared to them . Good job. Keep it up." Surely, if you were actually interested in improving your team, you would point out the teams th…

"One of those" saved time over naming off each country, considering everyone knows which countries I'm referring to. And is my country better? Um... Yeah. By orders of magnitudes it's better.

Re: I went to the mall, and a little girl called me a terrorist.

#117
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect this may just be a case of lack of religious competition in the area your friends live and work in. I grew up in Utah, so of course few people changed their religions, but Mormonism is fairly successful at converting people outside Utah. They do so best by establishing communities and inviting others to join their fun activities. Sure, in America most conversions are just to a different denomination of "Chr…

44%? That sounds extremely high to me. What sorts of explanation is offered for that?

Here's a link to the survey: http://www.pewforum.org/Faith-in-Flux.aspx

Re: I went to the mall, and a little girl called me a terrorist.

#118
post #46
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us have walked in the others' shoes, at least in this limited case of discrimination based solely on clothing. Guess what? Humans discriminate on clothing! You can drum up the social justice network and try to remove this neural programming without drugs, good luck with that. You can try and fight it, again, sincerely, good luck, I agree that clothing is irrelevant when judging other people, but I don't think…

Terrible analogy. People aren't discriminating because they think hijabs are unfashionable. They're discriminating because they correctly interpret the hijab as a religious marker. Did you notice that your advice basically amounts to "do your best to look like a straight, white, middle-class Christian"? And that you are basically blaming the victim? Both strike me as terrible advice.

I am not blaming the victim, just offering a solution for the victim's discomfort. It is not equivalent to the type of victim-blaming usually done against raped women--precisely because what a woman wears isn't strongly correlated with whether she is raped or not, few decisions on her part could have helped her situation before or after, so she can't reasonably be blamed for failing to e.g. never leave the home. (And discrimination triggered by a piece of clothing is recurring, meaning one's behavior can change before and after.)

I did notice my advice has similar forms, except I wouldn't generalize to middle-class or Christian. Another piece of advice I'd offer anyone in America is to learn how to speak Standard White English if you don't know already. But I'm not nearly the first to offer this:

"In class - in my English class - you will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which we might just as well call "Standard White English" because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people. [RESPONSES at this point vary too widely to standardize.] I'm respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is just How It Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it's racist and unfair and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I'll tell you something - if you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you're going to have to communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself... And [STUDENT'S NAME], you're going to learn to use it... because I am going to make you." -- David Foster Wallace, Authority and American Usage

Another piece of advice I'd offer is: grow a thicker skin. Not always a good piece of advice--I would recommend it to an atheist in the US struggling with discrimination from their family and local community, I wouldn't recommend it to an atheist in Egypt--they should get out as quick as possible.

I'll explain to you the core of where my position on this matter comes from. I'm an engineer, and if I see a problem, I look for a feasible solution. The problem expressed by the submission is "people are being discriminated against--whether they deserve it or not, whether they're even muslim or not--because of a piece of clothing that in American society gives off a bad first impression." There are three obvious solutions: stop wearing the hijab, force away the concept of first impressions (not really a good idea) from human minds, or force everyone who harbors resentment towards muslims in general to stop it and love them. Only one of these is easily accomplished. Furthermore, it opens the door for real cognitive dissonance that can actually change people's minds. "Oh, you're a muslim? But you don't wear the thing!" "Not all of us do, and those that do don't just wear it for religious reasons..." Very few people ever learn to notice themselves completing a cached pattern of thought, and even they don't always notice consistently. People typically have to face with premise-defying reality to really change their minds.

Re: I went to the mall, and a little girl called me a terrorist.

#119
post #50
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us have walked in the others' shoes, at least in this limited case of discrimination based solely on clothing. Guess what? Humans discriminate on clothing! You can drum up the social justice network and try to remove this neural programming without drugs, good luck with that. You can try and fight it, again, sincerely, good luck, I agree that clothing is irrelevant when judging other people, but I don't think…

If I were a muslim girl getting discriminated against for wearing a hijab, I'd stop wearing the hijab. So you would, I guess, also suggest that Sikhs should stop wearing turbans, Jews should stop wearing a kippah, nuns should stop wearing habits, pagans should stop wearing pentangles, etc. Not only is your suggestion frankly both offensive and pretty idiotic, but the world it would lead to would have even more discri…

> So you would, I guess, also suggest that Sikhs should stop wearing turbans, Jews should stop wearing a kippah, nuns should stop wearing habits, pagans should stop wearing pentangles, etc.

Only if said individuals of the group are uncomfortable with their experience of discrimination. Others have thicker skins and ignore it, and some don't face any discrimination at all. Some want to rebel against society like a teenager and knowingly do stuff that gets them disapproval. My advice is an obvious solution to a specific problem, it does not generalize to "all members of X".

Re: I went to the mall, and a little girl called me a terrorist.

#120
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only from a very narrow set of perspectives. There are many perspectives on life and for many of them a 'utility function' would seem nonsensical at best. Economics is not as all-encompassing a discipline as some people would like to make out.

Would you care to come up with such a "perspective on life"? I bet that for any actual, constructed perspective (rather than an a-priori incompatible one like "a perspective on life such that it doesn't admit a utility function") a utility function can be defined.

Just because a utility function can be defined for a given perspective doesn't mean that it automatically makes sense from within that perspective, given that defining a utility function is choosing to view things from an economic perspective and even in economics there is a difference of opinion of what that actually means, with some economists viewing it as something abstract that is only used to discuss more fundamental things and with others saying that utility functions are in themselves fundamental.

Saying that utility functions are the "what there is to life", is a bit like 42 being the answer to life, the universe and everything in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. What meaning you can draw depends totally on what question you are asking, or what perspective you are looking at it from.

For instance, if you are a squirrel, then an economist might be able to calculate a utility function for your behaviour, however the concept of utility functions themselves have no bearing (as far as we know) on "what there is to life" from the squirrel's perspective.

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