Look at this guy getting his feelings hurt because he thinks someone is shouting at him.

In your safe place other forum this would be considered shouting!

I'm simply reporting the facts!

People like him only drive people further left.

The sound of the swamp draining is beautiful!!!

I was prepared to listen to what QuickBen has to say, but all this hostility and name calling has turned me away.

Yes there is hypocrisy and a double standard. I happen to think the hypocrisy and double standard applies to both sides and much of the core reason for addressing racial issues is vote grabving and excercising control.

It would be a real shame if all it took was one easily ignorable poster to stop good discussion.

(my irony meter is usually non functioning)

You guy's can talk in the other forum😃 it's obviously too rough in here for ya.

I would invite you to read all my posts. You will find excellent content and may possibly learn something.

The noise filtering is too difficult but you are always welcome to restart posting excellent content.

I don't see the Muslim world liberalizing and relations between them and the west improving anytime soon. With a lot of help from the West the fundamentalists have done a very good job controlling the narrative. Basically anytime things start getting better and if looks like peace and tolerance has a chance all they have to do is execute some suicude bombings and we are back to square zero.

Basically the only chance for peace is a complete revolution in the Muskim world where the people rise up and overthrow the fundamentalists, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Well named,

I am not ignoring your last post. I just don't disagree with anything you said, so I can't argue against it.

Shifting goal posts a little to the topic of racism in general, and specifically white racism against minorities, my problem with just dismissing uneducated lower white class persons as racists is that given their environmental inputs it is entirely natural and predictable they would Have the viewpoints they have, just as it is entirely natural and predictable urban black people would have the socio economic problems they have given their tragic history in this country.

And it is entirely unfair to say the former group is evil and the latter victims. Whether they are right or wrong, the poor working class white believes that immigrants are lowering their wages by offering to do the same job for less and taking their jobs. Given this their xenophobia is entirely predictable and reasonable.

The educated skilled beorgioise capitalist on the other hand does not have this concern, and in fact globalization and immigration and depressing workers wages helps his bottom line, so he has the luxury of saying that racism and xenophobia is wrong and decrying it. And in fact it is in his economic best interest to so so.

Of course the rich top 1% rationalize their hoarding of resources by saying it supports growth and trickes down. Except for the truth that it really doesn't and the this why every year the resource gap between the haves and the have nots widens.

If their is a true "devil" in this equation I would argue it is not the xenophobic poor working class white, but the educated upper class capitalist who is the true beneficiary of immigration and globalization, and so has the luxury of supporting this agenda in the name of liberalism and social progress, and decrying the racism of the poor uneducated person (whose main motivation whether they even realize it or not) is their economic self interest.

And given our whole society is structured so that the wealthy can look after their own economic self interest, it is hugely hypocritical ro tell poor people they shouldnt and instead should take one for the team in the name of progress.

Here you are demanding nuanced treatment of Trump voters, then you post something displaying no recognition that there are a billion Muslims with immense variety from person to person and country to country.

It's a shockingly lazy post. But dang, nobody better say all Trump voters are racist when it's only most of them.

Note the irony of saying jihadis control the narrative, because that includes you. Way to go, letting the terrorists win.

That works for me

To the extent that the individual people in question hold to racist ideologies or xenophobic explanations of their problems, I'm not sure I can agree that this is entirely natural and predictable, at least if that is supposed to mitigate responsibility. When I said it was easier to sympathize with black people holding anti-white sentiments than white people holding anti-black sentiments, that is entirely due to making an evaluation of the correctness of the perceptions which underlie those sentiments, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to take into account whether each group is right or wrong in their perceptions of the world.

When you say "whether they are right or wrong", I think it leads to a false equivalence and too relativistic of a view. Xenophobic beliefs about immigrants and beliefs that the criminal justice system is racially biased are not equivalently justified. We can say that in-group/out-group dynamics are probably basic to human social life and we may keep that in mind before judging the beliefs and actions of others, but individuals do bear some responsibility for the fact that their view of the world is based on false premises. If politics is persuasion, than I'm willing to also embrace the idea that good politics involves actually trying to persuade those people that they are wrong, but it doesn't obviate their responsibility.

On the other hand, I tried to make clear before that talking about racism doesn't (or shouldn't) necessarily reduce to talking about individual moral culpability, and while there is certainly debate even between liberals (including on this forum) about how best to talk about racism, the point I raised before that calling Trump voters "racist" is about outcomes and not intentional malice is still useful. On this topic, I highly recommend the book Racism without Racists. An earlier edition (2006) is available for free in PDF.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to this, although it seems likely I have less of an anti-globalization/anti-free-trade/nationalist view than you. But I also don't think that advocating for social justice for minorities necessarily entails demonizing poor white people. It does mean recognizing how racial ideologies perpetuate structural inequality, but it's not clear to me that this is uniquely a problem among poor whites. If Trump support is a proxy for some of these views, his support wasn't limited to the poor. Obviously it's also true that racial ideologies aren't the only problem in this country, but there's no reason why we can't criticize parts of elite culture and dominant racial ideologies among whites at the same time.

I would counter your reading of my post is much lazier than the post itself. Your critique doesn't even address my post at all. You are just making up what I said and then telling me why it is wrong.

Yes, the Muslim world is heterogenous (I am sure there is a better word for this). Then when Bombs start going off everyone on both sides starts worrying more for their own personal safety over all other concerns and "circles the wagons" (which is a perfectly natural human reaction) and the fundamentalists get to control the narrative, even if they were the ones that dropped the bombs on the first place.

I don't think anyone is demanding nuanced treatment of Trump voters or conservative posters in general.

People are just asking for fair or balanced treatment. That is not what they got in the main politics forum because of the blatantly biased modding especially pre-election.

I did not misread your post.

You wrote that Islam is uniformly controlled by fundamentalists. But there are discos in Beirut and bikinis at the beach -- this is kindergarten stuff. "only chance for peace" -- you understand we are not at war with Indonesia, right, the US does not need a chance for peace with a country we are not at war with, the most populous Muslim nation. You know Turkey is a member of Nato, right? Turkey has not started circling wagons against the west.

You start the thread off asking not to be jumped on, then you cling to statements that just leave me slack jawed. It's hard to engage with what you say is the substance of your post when I have to stop and point out that Muslims lead quotidian lives.

Well, I'll remain open to the possibility you've been subjected to abusive modding, though I'll also entertain the possibility that people just don't want to be called out on alt-right views.

Your second sentence in the highlighted post is complete fabrication. Since you insist on making up what I said, lets just agree we are not going to be able to have a meaningful debate and move on.

Is it the word "uniformly" you are objecting to? I thought it was a fair paraphrase because the following sentences suggest blanket thinking to me:

When I read stuff like that I genuinely doubt the person knows that Turkey is a member of Nato or how much interaction with Europeans is utterly mundane, or what variety there is. As Ronald Reagan said on a tour of Latin America, "You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries."

If I said something was happening in the western world would that suggest blanket thinking?

The President Elect just settled a suit where he allegedly defrauded thousands of working class men and women. As someone who is concerned about corruption does that worry you?

That would of course depend on what you said, right?

If you looked up from an article about a drone strike in Somalia and said the western world does not want good relations with Muslims, yes that would be blanket thinking.

And of course, he said something entirely different from "there's an illiberal happening in Addis Ababa."

What would be the point of answering this? Every single time this gets asked, the Trumper asking it has already decided they're going to handwave away any answer they're given, right?

For example, the Twitter incident in which he retweeted a white-supremacist-originated meme with fake crime statistics, none of which were close to being accurate, all of which indicated blacks commit almost all the violent crime in the country. You've obviously already got a deflection to this in mind, which is the problem with you people: you refuse to acknowledge anything bad he's done.

At least you're honest about your family. I'm sure many of his +/- 62 million backers voted for him for this very reason. However, being selfish and thinking solely in terms of money is not an attractive quality. The rights and treatment of people other than oneself matter, too.

Anyone know what a decent O/U line is for Pats Niners?

This might be true and I appreciate that you produced a complete narrative instead of dismissing the idea. I suppose "evolve" might not accurately describe the maturing and liberalizing of a religion, but I'll continue to use it here...I believe that religions evolve when the basic needs of society are met. History is full of violent religious acts by many religions. Presently, we can still point to varying levels of fundamentalism and radicalism all over the world in any number of religions including Christianity (ie there will always be people here who prepare for Armageddon).

I don't presume that a requirement for change is revolution. It may take a revolution, again I don't know, that said, I think the Islam world is learning to identify the ways in which they are incompatible with the West, and we need to give them time to assimilate before we conclude where Islam ends up. Notably, within Islam, there is a strain called Salafi that is currently banned from many regions. No greater Islamophobe than Mike Flynn has suggested there is a, "core Al Qaeda’ wasn’t actually comprised of human beings, but rather it was an ideology with a particular version of Islam at its center." Hopefully things will get better and Islam can better define itself by its similarities with typical Judeo-Christian values after the world banishes the Salafi.