http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yngXlIZLjNk&feature=watch_response
Lately, in my videos, I’ve had something of a tendency to come down pretty hard on Christian practices. Here, I’ll be coming down on a certain Muslim practice and several related Muslim practices instead.
You see, it annoys me a bit when a Christian says, “You just need to read the Bible,” relying on this as a handy excuse to discount all my arguments. “Don’t bother me with these feats of reasoning, but instead, let me dictate how you spend your free time but don’t even think about telling me how to spend mine.”
Whoops. I thought about it. Sorry.
But instead, when a Muslim says, “You just need to read the Quran,” this takes on a whole extra dimension of compound annoyance because of a certain dishonest omission.
You see, when a Christian says, “You just need to read the Bible,” he or she means in any language you happen to understand. But apparently, being in Arabic is a defining characteristic of the Quran. Apparently, translations of the Quran are not the Quran. Apparently, the Quran cannot be translated into any other language without losing meaning. Apparently, the words “English Quran” or “Spanish Quran” or “Chinese Quran” are contradictory. This doesn’t count, or so I’m told, since God is monolingual. When a Muslim says, “You just need to read the Quran,” he or she is saying, “You just need to learn Arabic. That’s all.”
I give you the Lie by Omission; the Muslim favorite.
Now one detail I find especially amusing about this particular part is that one country which claims to be Muslim is Iran
Going on to another example, many a Muslim is very quick to point to verses in the Quran which condemn violence against the innocent, but neglect to point to any verses which define this term (innocent). Innocent of what? What kind of person gets to be called “innocent?” What kind of person gets to receive the protection of these verses?
Most of us in the west tend to define “innocent” a certain way, and so we tend to make the assumption that others, including Muslims categorically define it the same way. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that most of them do. Most of the ones I’ve known certainly have. The problem is the highly vocal minority who define it differently.
To these Muslim demographics, a guilty person is someone who is guilty of denying the will of God as it is presented exclusively in Islam. This definition encompasses all non-Muslims. We’re all guilty. We don’t get to be called innocent. For these demographics, when they condemn violence against the innocent, they refer exclusively to violence against Muslims. The demographics in question have no objection whatsoever to violence against non-Muslims. That’s another handy omission.
I once saw a video of a Muslim woman arguing that Islam is much more progressive than it is often made out to be. As evidence of this, she claimed that most Muslim nations granted women the right to vote centuries before any western nation did. Now I don’t know for certain whether this is the case, but I’ve read that, in a number of Muslim nations in which women are allowed to vote, that vote does not carry equal weight to a man’s.
I predict that someone is going to ask me to point to evidence that this is the case. My response to this is a call for evidence that what this woman claims is the case.
While we’re at it, can anyone point to a Muslim nation where men are subjected to some combination of state mandate and social pressure to keep their hair and faces covered?
And while I’m on that subject, in the comments on one of my videos, a Muslim woman actually defended the practice of wearing the Burka on the grounds that, well, you can’t guarantee that every man you come into contact with is not having sexual thoughts about you (Scare tactic!). Well if that manner of guarantee is in fact impossible, then why are you defending the Burka as if it has precisely that effect? By the same token, how come you aren’t making the argument to men that they can’t guarantee that every woman they come into contact with isn’t having sexual thoughts about them? What about changes in sexual orientation?
This argument targets a woman’s fear of rape; a fear greatly amplified by ignorance of one simple fact: the rapist is not driven by sexual desire. He is driven by the need to dominate someone. Now we are talking about a part of the world in which, when a woman is raped, it is assumed that she did something to bring it on herself and she is therefore blamed for it (another handy omission). This makes the women in that part of the world who fall victim to this heinous crime especially inclined not to come forward about it, and as a result, one can be sure that the reported occurrence of rape is lower than the actual occurrence.
So given the fact that the average rapist is male and driven by the need to dominate someone, and since women are typically smaller and weaker than men, and since any woman in the Islamic world who is raped is likely not to come forward about it, all these factors conspire to make the women in that part of the world especially easy to dominate, and therefore especially inclined to fall victim to this crime.
In the west, the reported occurrence is much more accurate, because in the west, we blame the party who commits the crime, not the party who falls victim to it.
I once also saw a brief clip from a debate about law and policy in Muslim nations. Apparently, in the Muslim nation in question, women are not allowed to drive. The Muslim fellow arguing in defense of this policy actually said that women don’t want to drive.
Hello!! You are talking to a woman! You are talking to a woman and presuming to tell her what she doesn’t want!
I’ll tell you what. Let’s assume for a moment that that’s true beyond dispute; that women don’t want to drive. What reason, then, could you possibly have for making laws against it? If it’s legal for women to drive, but they don’t want to, then they won’t.
Ah, but wait a minute. Perhaps you’re concerned about women being coerced into driving in the event that it’s legal. Well if that’s the case, then what you need are laws against that coercion; not the act of driving itself. Furthermore, if that is indeed your concern, then how come you’re not worried about men being coerced into it?
The very fact that this law exists anywhere proves that that claim cannot be true.
A youtuber with the username DiscussIslam is a post-Muslim agnostic. He recently had a video up on his channel about a post-Muslim living in a western nation whose official permission had just expired and he was in danger of being sent back to his country of origin. As someone who has left Islam, and publically abandoned Islamic belief, he faced the death penalty upon his return.
The penalty for leaving Islam, for apostasy, is death, but you can be sure, the next time someone tries to talk to you about what a wonderful, peaceful, progressive religion this is, this individual is going to try to give you all manner of convenient reasons to convert to it, but is going to omit that inconvenient little detail.
Now that I’ve come down on a favorite Muslim practice, I’m next going to come down on Republican practices. Now don’t get me wrong. I hear Republicans say a lot of things that make sense, but usually, it’s because they’re strawmanning Democrats. That is, instead of disputing an argument the Dems have actually made, they surreptitiously accuse them of making a fundamentally-different-though-cosmetically-reminiscent argument and dispute that. This is a classical strawman.
It never fails. Every election in the United States, whether general or mid-term, widely circulated are Republican efforts to repackage Trickle-Down Economics and sell it like some radical, revolutionary new policy. There are two fallacies at work here: weasel words and lie by omission. They neglect to mention—they omit—that it’s called “Trickle-Down Economics” and that it has been tried several times already.
Here’s how it works; or rather, how it’s supposed to work. The idea is that, if you concentrate the tax cuts among the wealthy, big-business magnates, they will use these savings to expand their operations, creating jobs.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, but here’s the reason it doesn’t: if you want a certain party to take a certain action, you must grant that party both the opportunity and the motive. Granting the parties in question all these tax cuts provides them with the one but not the other, unless the economy is already doing well. But if economic conditions are such that everyone is compelled to pinch their pennies, then these magnates have no reason to believe that expanding their operations will be profitable, and therefore, have no reason to do it. As a result, the only way this adds jobs is if these parties use their new-found savings to buy themselves more mansions, limos and yachts and hire people to help maintain them.
The truth is that economic prosperity does not trickle down; it bubbles up. It seems to me that this is probably the case in other countries as well, though I can’t say for certain, but the demographics in the U.S.
Ah, but wait. Someone, no doubt, is going to ask, “Well how do you know they will respond that way? How do you know they won’t just take their new-found savings and put them in their pockets?” That’s a good question. No doubt, many of them will, but let’s think about it for a moment.
What compels people to save anything at all? The fact that that something has value, at least to them. What is it that gives money enough value to make it worth saving? What you can do with it. What you can buy with it. The only reason anyone saves money is for the hope of spending it later. If not for that hope, the money would not be valuable enough to bother holding on to. So if these people react by putting this money in savings instead, that just means that they’re hoping to spend it later.
So at worst, we are looking at a delay in spending. We can bank on the desire of people to spend money at some point. Therefore, those who don’t have to spend as much on taxes are going to spend more on goods and services, which is going to profit the firms which provide those goods and services, which is going to profit the people who run those firms as well as the people who own them. This gives them the increased revenue, and therefore the opportunity to expand their operations and create jobs.
But what about the motive? Well I’m getting to that. Now if middle-class taxes are cut enough for the resulting increase in demand for goods and services to exceed what a given firm and its competitors are equipped to provide, then that firm and its competitors are compelled to increase their capacity to provide those goods and services, and to do that, you have to hire more people, or you have to change your infrastructure, but for that, you also have to hire more people.
A government can also greatly help this process along by increasing its spending on goods and services which depend on middle-class skills, thereby increasing the number of people in the middle class who can afford to buy goods and services.
Of course, all this depends on competition, so to ensure that, one must likewise grant tax cuts to small businesses trying to begin in the industry in question. One must proactively combat any trend toward monopoly.
Now it seems to me that, really, only one party stands to lose out in such an approach: firms whose main source of revenue is government contracts. When the government isn’t bringing in as much in taxes, it can’t afford to pay out as much to contractors, so it’s a little less likely to sign and renew contracts. But this just means that those contractors have a vested interested in branching out into the public market. They really should know better than to put all their eggs in one basket.
Well anyhow, so once you have the firms in a certain industry expanding their operations and adding jobs, then you have more people earning income, which means more people who can afford to buy goods and services, which increases the demand for those goods and services, which gives those firms a reason to further increase their capacity to provide them, thereby having to add even more jobs, and here we have a beneficial, self-feeding cycle. This gives those firms a vested interest in competing. They have to compete over customers which pushes them to make the most of the goods and services they provide while simultaneously pushing them to make the least of their prices, and they have to compete over employees which pushes them to make the most of employee wages, benefits packages, and working conditions.
So then you have more people in the middle class holding down decent jobs and earning decent wages and you have more quality goods and services marketed to the middle class which more and more of them can now afford to buy. So you see, economic prosperity really does bubble up instead of trickling down.
I know. I’ve digressed. But my point here is simply to beware the lie by omission. Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment