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The Anti-Imperialism of Fools - a General thread

No really phil. No bait thread, no bare words or fckffdwyr badges. Hand to heart.

You love winding up butchersapron and PM but you ain't stupid.

No honestly, I really am stupid. Trust me on this one.

But I don't mind telling you what I really think about anything, all you have to do is ask.
 
All for it but with medieval rights for its citizens.

A key reason why Islam is seen as such a threat to the neo-liberalism.

Seeking to reduce inequality, accumulation (inc. 'primitive'), speculation, and increase taxes on wealth, and exposure of lenders to risk...this is not a belief system that globalised capital can work with.
 
A key reason why Islam is seen as such a threat to the neo-liberalism.

Seeking to reduce inequality, accumulation (inc. 'primitive'), speculation, and increase taxes on wealth, and exposure of lenders to risk...this is not a belief system that globalised capital can work with.

Which islamic state is seeking to reduce inequality, accumulation, increase taxes on wealth etc? Or have I read your post wrong
 
Mugabe is a. Corrupt tryrant who makes Blair look like hes got clean hands.

Gadaffi well deserved his fate the fat one from best Korea is a cunt the enemy of your enemy is sometimes just the enemy of your enemy.
Is are murderous slavers

Leftists backed the Iranian revolution and got slaughtered for their help.
If you can't treat peope more or less in accordance with the universal declaration of human rights.
Then your the enemy no excuses.

The long and inglorious love affair with the soviet union long after any one sane could see it was an disaster and was only an alternative in the same way as having a collapsed lung is an alternative to breathing did the left no favours.
An alternative has to be better for more people than what we have now not for a different elite or make everyone equally miserable. Just because america hgates someone doesn't make them thge good guys.
 
Seems to be ok to be anti racist and hate Islam now.

No wonder some of us think that even those of you on the Left are all racists when it comes to Muslims and Islam.

I entirely understand why you have that impression.

In my opinion though, it's just ignorance. These people have been trained (not officially, but by dint of growing up in the C20th West) to mock at religion of all kinds. They simply cannot take non-materialist ideas seriously. So that results in the kind of offensive comments they make here. But their hearts are generally in the right place--with a few exceptions--and if they could be persuaded to educate themselves just a little bit, their attitude would be transformed. The problem is getting them to take that first step.
 
And yes it is possible to be anti-racist and hate Islam.

This is your fundamental error. This is why you give offense without realizing it.

It is not possible to "hate" Islam and be anti-racist, because Islam is a culture as well as a religion. I have pointed this out to you before, many times.
 
This is your fundamental error. This is why you give offense without realizing it.

It is not possible to "hate" Islam and be anti-racist, because Islam is a culture as well as a religion. I have pointed this out to you before, many times.
And yet you will find ex-Muslims who will tell you different.
 
You won't find any current Muslims who tell you different though.
Zineb el-Rhazoui is my current go-to on this. I advise you to read the whole of this article. You should pay particular attention to what she says about women's status in Morocco, presumably one of the countries you were referring to on another thread regarding women's position in Muslim countries. Unlike you, she was born and brought up there.

Hard to pick out a single section, but let's start with this (she's addressing a secular, non-Muslim French man, so it feels appropriate for you to read it as addressing you):

You see, Olivier, as a blédarde born in the Maghreb, assigned against my will to a religious pigeonhole, not only by you, but above all by a theocratic state that does not allow me to choose my faith and which governs my personal status by religious laws, I have always wondered why guys like you lie down before Islamist propaganda. The laws of my country do not grant me a quarter of the rights you acquired at birth, and if I were to be attacked or raped in the streets of Casablanca by a barbu, as has been promised in hundreds of emails — never taken seriously by the Morroccan police — the websites that posted your article will definitely say I was asking for it because I don’t respect Islam. And you here in France, in a secularist state, you rehash, without grasping its implications, this whole moralizing discourse about how one must “respect Islam,” as demanded by the Islamists, who do not ask whether Islam respects other religions, or other people. Why the hell should I respect Islam? Does it respect me? The day Islam shows the slightest bit of consideration to women, first of all, and secondly toward free-thinkers, I promise you I will rethink my positions.
 
Is Zineb el-Rhazoui a racist fucking bigot?

No, she is not.

But she makes a very important point in that article - she was assigned a religion by law in Morocco. This also happens in many other countries. Her 'apostasy' (a disgusting concept) would get her into trouble in her native country. Apostasy laws exist across a large number of majority-Muslim countries. So yes, you very much do have to hear about 'ex-Muslims', including the ones in prison across the world for daring to disown the religion their state has assigned to them.
 
Hating religious belief is a different kind of thing from racism.

Hatred is simply not an appropriate response to religious belief.

It is an offensive response: a response calculated to give offense.

Why are you surprised that people are getting offended by it?
 
Hatred is simply not an appropriate response to religious belief.
It can be.

An example: an ex-Catholic brought up to feel guilt about normal everyday feelings. They can ditch the belief but be left with bits of the guilt because they were instilled when they were very young, they have been internalised. Said ex-Catholic may very well, and entirely appropriately, hate Catholicism for what it did to them.
 
It can be.

An example: an ex-Catholic brought up to feel guilt about normal everyday feelings. They can ditch the belief but be left with the feelings because they were instilled when they were very young, they have been internalised. Said ex-Catholic may very well, and entirely appropriately, hate Catholicism for what it did to them.

Blame the church. Blame organized religion by all means. But don't blame religious belief.

Btw, one of the good things about Islam is that it has no equivalent to the church.
 
You can hate the religious belief in just the same way as you can hate Toryism. If you hate the content of the belief and its consequences for the world, why shouldn't you hate it? Who are you to tell people not to?
 
Who are you to tell people not to?

I think the kind of aggressive, populist atheism peddled by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie and their ilk is doing immense damage to the world. I'd like to stop people believing in it (not by force you understand).

I think those who going around shouting their "hatred" of Islam from the rooftops are complicit with that kind of thinking. Often quite openly so.
 
I think the kind of aggressive, populist atheism peddled by Richard Dawkins, Salman Rushdie and their ilk is doing immense damage to the world. I'd like to stop people believing in it (not by force you understand).
Yes. I might say that I don't think that (and are Dawkins and Rushdie equivalent here?), but I'm not going to label you a bigot for thinking it.

My position, politically, is that I would like to persuade everyone that secularism, in which religious freedom is guaranteed but religious belief is not privileged, is part of a means to move forward with social justice (although of course not sufficient in itself). That the idea that authorities can assign a religious affiliation to people is disgusting and to be vigorously opposed wherever it appears. I will form political allegiance with anyone who agrees with this - I won't even ask them about their religious belief. But I will refuse political allegiance with anyone who does not accept it, who believes that their religious belief should receive special protection.
 
Seems to be ok to be anti racist and hate Islam now.

No wonder some of us think that even those of you on the Left are all racists when it comes to Muslims and Islam.

In other words, to borrow your term, "some of you" are as big a bunch of intellectually-challenged dicks as "the left"?
Seems about right to me. If you're stupid enough to make assumptions based only on evidence that fits your preconceived thesis, then you're a dick, whatever belief system (religious and/or political) you follow.
 
"Ex -Muslims"

Why do we always have to hear about "ex-Muslims" and not "ex-Jews", "ex-Christians", "ex- Hindus" and so on?

Because of a bunch of racist fucking bigots that's why.

Or, and I'm taking a punt here, Islam has a widely-publicised injunction about how to deal with apostasy, whereas the others either don't, or keep it quiet.
BTW, if you're a Jew you hear plenty about "ex-Jews", usually not flattering, and what's usually meant is ex-Judaists (i.e. adherents of Judaism) specifically, as opposed to meaning people who've withdrawn from Jewish culture in general.
 
You can hate the religious belief in just the same way as you can hate Toryism. If you hate the content of the belief and its consequences for the world, why shouldn't you hate it?

This is the typical liberal's mistake.

You assume that all belief-systems are, in principle, equal: that they should enjoy equal rights. But I don't think that, and nor do Muslims. I think that some belief-systems are demonstrably superior to others, and that they should therefore enjoy superior rights.

For example I think Islam is superior to Nazism, and that it should enjoy superior rights to Nazism.

So, to answer your question: yes, of course, you should hate those beliefs which are worthy of hatred. But you should be sure to identify them correctly.
 
Homosexuals have good reason to hate a fair few systems of religious belief.

Homosexuals did not exist when the monotheistic Scriptures were composed.

There were homosexual acts of course, but homosexuality was not an identity until the twentieth century. So it is wrong to interpret Scripture's prohibition of sodomy (not homosexuality) as reflecting prejudice or oppression against a group of individuals.
 
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