Interesting is one way to put it, but it’s not the religious leaders that are usually in charge in many of those situations. It’s government/power structure… or maybe someone kind of disguised as a religious leader. I’ve edited this a few times now because I am not sure how to put it… like false religious lead.
Just fyi, I didn’t say Islam is the worst in the world. I made a narrow claim about the extremists and the treatment of human rights in a number of Islamic countries. Thats very different. I understand the reaction and sensitivity, which is why I have gone out of my way to be nuanced in just about every post. My position is pretty much the same as Amnesty International and they get criticized for it as well.
But if the alternative is silence or excusing the murder of women, gay people or turning a blind eye to Islamic terrorism then no, I am not up for that. I made that mistake in my youth during the cold war and I will never do it again. When you see something evil I think it matters to say so. Even if people you despise (Trump in my case) happen to appear to be on the same side. It just appears that way incidentally, Trump doesnt give a shit about human rights.
I get you. Its like Stalin perverted communism (he did). He then used that platform to grab power and use it for evil. Then the platform kind of developed its own intertia. During the great terror for example regular normal people took over and became, almost over night happy to kill their fellow Russians. Stalin started it of course, but the blame can be broadened to many many more people.
Yeah, kind of. I firmly believe, for example, that if we had no religions, like none at all, everyone was just anti-faith to anything of that nature, that we will still have these problems because they’d just use something else to do the same thing. It’s not about religion anymore when those in power use it to keep power or grow. That’s just an excuse they can use, right now, to get what they want.
And of course there are different ranges in there like those in power who pay religion lip service to keep or get what they want and true believers who do what they are told more than understand their religion.
I just don’t subscribe to the idea that if you removed Islam from the world and replaced it with say Christianity we would suddenly have world peace. The religion isn’t really the source of the problem.
Except every independent implementation of communism I’m aware of(*) has ended up going down a similar path - almost like there are essential components of the ideology that mean when it is implemented by flawed humans it goes horrid.
WHERE WE’RE GOING WE DON’T NEED RAILS CHOO CHOO
(*: OK there was at least one that was ended by dodgy American shenanigans before it could go that far.)
And it was plenty screwed up before Stalin grabbed the reins.
For sure! Whether all forms of communism are doomed to be scumbaggery I dont know. I think probably so, but at least when I “read” Marx (lets face it the dude is a fucking awful writer so skimmed and read summaries is more accurate).
I didnt see anything that explicitly said “thou shalt become murderous assholes”.
Oh and I highly reccomend never reading Stalin’s “Short Course”. That I DID try and wade through. Bloody hell its bad.
@vyshka Yes! I should have been more explcit there. Lenin was arguably just as an awful asshat as Stalin. He just didn’t have as much time to develop his awfulness as Stalin did.
So there’s no benefit to secular societies and governments? You sure about that?
Marx’s main error was that he had no coherent process by which to establish the value of goods and services, so none of the economics worked, and a non-functional economy causes problems.
My strategy of droning on so much I bore people to quit doesn’t seem to be working yet :)
On paper Communism sure looks great right up until humans get involved and try and do it.
Even on paper Communism doesn’t look great, because of the inherently flawed labor value theory that Marx suggests. It literally does not make any sense once you think about it more than superficially.
Insightful. Good point.
More like the general idea of common ownership not the actual mechanics, same with free markets even though there are a lot of scenarios where pure free markets don’t exist… I mean we’re going way off base but the general idea. Not much exists in a pure state of anything.
I’ll just comment that if Fox News had the kinds of discussions we’re having here, their level of discourse would certainly be raised.
The French Revolution agrees with you.
Sure, although in America homosexuality was generally regarded with disgust up until a few decades ago.
I personally remember that even back in the late 90s, an accusation of being ‘gay’ in school was basically the absolute worst thing someone could have said about them. I don’t know what it’s like now but that was only 20 years ago.
As someone who grew up in the 90’s, absolutely. “That’s so gay” or “You’re so gay” were the go-to insults. Someone actually being gay? Let’s just say I didn’t know a single gay person in school, because outing yourself would have been really, really, bad.
It was such common vernacular it was part of my vocabulary as well, sadly. I didn’t even have any issue with gay people, I just didn’t even think about letting loose a “that’s so gay”.
I avoided a lot of cringe-inducing memories of my young teenager days, but that’s one that still bothers me!
Ya, but it wasn’t “the worst thing you could say to someone”.
I mean, it was like “that’s retarded”. It didn’t actually have any real relation to gay people. No one was actually accusing anyone of actual homosexuality. It was more of a generic pejorative term.
Yes, I actually made a comment about this in the ‘make Qt3 a more welcoming place’ thread the other day. I definitely remember using those terms, and not really having any implication that the target was actually homosexual or had cognitive difficulties. They were, as you both said, generic pejoratives.
It was something I learned out of.