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Originally Posted by Do0rDoNot
It depends how you define terrorism, I guess.
Here
is a database tracking US domestic terrorism from 2008-2016. It counts 63 Islamic-based terrorist plots of which 76% were foiled leading to 96 fatalities. During that same time it counts 115 right-wing extremist plots of which 35 were foiled leading to 79 fatalities and 17 left-wing extremist plots with 7 fatalities.
You're all over the place in your reply, so I'll try to cover the main points.
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Originally Posted by Do0rDoNot
The United States was 90%+ white until the mid-1960s. It has been historically a white Judeo-Christian melting pot, not a multi-ethnic, multicultural society. The historical base population do not want multiculturalism anymore. They don't just not like it, they hate it so much that they will vote a former reality TV star into power because he's the only person in recent memory to have hit anywhere near this vein.
I claimed that America's relatively open society, which includes but is not limited to accepting lots of immigrants and allowing them to become citizens, is one of the primary drivers of our success historically. Do you disagree with this claim? I'm not asking about bans or moratoriums, or even the demographics of immigrants here. Just as a baseline, do you agree that historically our high immigration rates, entrepreneurial business culture, basic human rights, etc have helped the US become successful?
Of course, this is only a relative claim. For instance, at the same time that the US first has a huge population of black slaves and then a legally-enforced subclass of black citizens. Furthermore, as you point out, the US has discriminated against specific groups in their immigration policies.
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Originally Posted by Do0rDoNot
You cannot be serious. Moratoriums on immigration, both specific and general, into the US are the norm historically, rather than the exception.
However, I do not consider this the norm. Probably the most important such ban was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and related policies that limited immigration from Japan and other Asian countries during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century for largely racist and anti-competitive reasons. Is this what you want to use as a precedent (I'll note that in 2011-12 the
2011-12 the US Congress passed an unanimous resolution apologizing for these policies).
I'm not aware of any example of the US banning members of a specific religion from immigrating to the US. I do take religious freedom as integral to the American ideal, especially since so many of our national myths are about religious dissidents fleeing persecution to come to America.
You also argue that the US should be understand as a white Judeo-Christian nation that shouldn't let in too many outsiders as it would then become a multi-ethnic multicultural society.
So, first, insofar as you are concerned about preserving a white Judeo-Christian society, focusing on Muslims is misplaced. As of 2017, there are over 4.7 million Chinese and Indians living in the US. The largest number of immigrants from a Muslim-majority country is 400,000 from Iran. There are also over 2 million from the Phillipines, 1.4 million from Vietnam, 1.2 million from South Korea, and so on. Of course, this is swamped by the almost 13 million Mexicans living in the US.
In general, the number of Muslims in the US is quite small, around 1.1%.
They're growing - projected to increase to 2% of US population by 2050. Scary. This is why I don't regard concerns about preserving America's Christian heritage as a serious argument for a Muslim ban policy. It clearly doesn't match means to ends.
In this same vein, again, taking into account your concerns about preserving America's whiteness and Judeo-Christian nature, I also think it is misplaced to focus on Islam, and especially Arabian and Persian versions of Islam as the biggest threat. "Judeo-Christian" is a popular term these days, but the term you use earlier ITT "Abrahamic religions" makes more taxonomic sense. Islam is generally fairly similar to both Christianity and Judaism, having had a a great deal of impact on the theology and history of both, certainly much more so than Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, or Shinto.
Furthermore, unlike with the Far East, the Middle East and Northern Africa have always been part of the culture of Europe. The Eastern Roman Empire was based in modern-day Turkey and the Ottoman Empire had a profound effect on Europe's history. The cultural exchange between these civilizations has always been quite strong and draw from the same original sources.
Anyway, Europeans are not all of the same ethnicity - they speak different languages, have different cultural norms, different religious denominations, histories, etc. The US has always been home to different ethnicities, even if they were relatively closely related (and note also the inaccurate estimates of historic non-white US populations as already noted by Aaron). Also, to be blunt, Iranian and Arabians are pretty pale-skinned so, uh, you got that going for you I guess.
Okay, so leaving that argument aside, you also claim that Muslims hate American culture and don't accept American values and so shouldn't be allowed to immigrate to the US.
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Originally Posted by Do0rDoNot
They state they believe in them. No inferences can be made here. If you interviewed people in Nazi Germany in 1942 what do you think the prevalence of stated Jew-hatred would be? Pretty high right? But not accurate.
When juxtaposed with other evidence, that the higher the per capita concentration of muslims in a country, the more of the population states they believe in the repressive moral virtues embedded in the religion (including the UK and europe), I think we are done with this.
Now, it is pretty difficult to argue against an unfalsifiable belief like your view about Muslim values. For instance, you claim that we can't infer anything about the actual values of US Muslims from their stated values because the US is comparable to a totalitarian dictatorship with a secret police enforcing party ideology aka Nazi Germany. Nope, not buying it.
You also appeal to a survey of UK Muslims as evidence of this:
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Originally Posted by Do0rDoNot
This just shows how ignorant you are of what Islam actually is. Islam is at once a legal, political, moral, and theological system of thought. Actual muslims don't want them separated. They do not believe in separation of church and state. They want their church to be their state. There were mechanisms in Christianity that both exposited and supported separation of church and state (render unto Caesar). There is no such differentiation in Islam, and the data bears it out.
https://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2...-of-sharia-law
Unfortunately for you, this is another example of you not bothering to read your sources. That same survey shows 56% of UK Muslims say they feel very strongly that they belong to Britain and 37% who say they feel this "fairly strongly." On the other hand, less than half of UK Muslims say they either tend to support or strongly support the introduction of aspects of Sharia law into Britain. How is this possible when according to you "actual Muslims" don't want them separated? Even your own data bears out
my view, that there is much more variety among Muslims on these topics than you assume. Again, I don't take a collectivist approach to Muslims, but rather assume that just as with all religions, individual Muslims understand and emphasize their religions in different ways, typically so as to make it more compatible with their local culture.
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Originally Posted by Do0rDoNot
That's not all I see. I'm just pointing out how ludicrous of an argument it is that people that explicitly express their hatred for our consumerist, individually free culture would somehow be swayed to accepting it if they could only see how great it is from the inside. The facts are not with you here. The vast majority of evidence shows that extremism is facilitated by our culture, not anesthetized by it.
That view is false. Extremists are radicalized by our culture.
What facts? What evidence? What people? Also, you still don't get it. Let's say that only 20% of Muslims in Iran support liberal values. Should the US ban them from coming here if they want because the other 80% don't have liberal values? Collectivist nonsense imo.
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You have a nasty habit of assuming you already know what other people believe and why. Here is a list of where you are wrong:
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Can't you see the difference between anti-sodomy laws punishable by prison or fines and throwing people off of ****ing rooftops? I'm not claiming that the justice system in the West has not recently treated homosexuals poorly. That's obvious. We haven't treated them with the savagery and barbarism common to muslim countries for a long, long time.
I clearly said this was in Christianiy's past as well.
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Yet people like you argue that the amount of terrorism will not likely increase if we increase the concentration of muslims here. How ignorant do you have to be to believe something like this?
I don't know since I've not argued this.
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This argument makes no sense. If all men are pretty much equal, then diversity of ethnicity and culture should have no factor in anything.
However equality isn't true, is it? The fact of the matter is that some cultures are more apt to integrate with our own, and some are less apt. Some cultures are objectively worse than the one we have. The cultures that cut off women's clitorises, veil women, throw homosexuals from rooftops, and publicly execute apostates are not the populations we should be bringing new people here from. The cultures that have similar orders to our own, similar literacy and education levels, similar values and similar histories to our own would be better groups to bring people here from.
This is so obvious that it blows my mind anyone could disagree.
Making up arguments and claims about equality that I neither claimed nor accept.
Why is it that in all our conversations you feel the need to assume I'm going to make some argument or have some position before I state it? It speaks to your own arrogance and lack of respect for the people you speak with since you always describe these views and arguments as ridiculous and obvious wrong. This is why you can barely go three sentences in your post here without claiming p is obviously wrong. If it is so obvious, then why am I disagreeing with you? Let me guess:
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Ya, there is no amount of evidence or reason that could sway you from your beliefs about equality. That proves you are the ideologue.
Hmmm...
Last edited by Original Position; 02-17-2019 at 08:24 PM.
Reason: grammar