Quote from: Jackalope;219853I remember radical feminists calling for a UN led military intervention in Afghanistan in 1994, when the Taliban were securing control of the central corridor of Afghanistan, and the whole country was in chaos, to prevent the rise of an oppressive Islamic theocracy.

I find it truly bizarre that 14 years later, the radical feminists I know are the biggest cheerleaders for Islam around, and I've seen people banned from feminist discussion forums for asserting that Islamic theocracies are inherently oppressive of women.

Interesting isn't it?

Quote from: gleichman;219854Interesting isn't it?

Certainly strange.  I take comfort in the fact that conservatives remain a bunch of slack-jawed Useful Idiots for that class of elites that is leading us on the slow death march to a corporate fascist dystopia straight out of the work of William Gibson.

At least someone is being consistent.

Quote from: JackalopeI remember radical feminists calling for a UN led military intervention in Afghanistan in 1994, when the Taliban were securing control of the central corridor of Afghanistan, and the whole country was in chaos, to prevent the rise of an oppressive Islamic theocracy.

I find it truly bizarre that 14 years later, the radical feminists I know are the biggest cheerleaders for Islam around, and I've seen people banned from feminist discussion forums for asserting that Islamic theocracies are inherently oppressive of women.

Quote from: gleichman;219854Interesting isn't it?

Huh?  Gleichman - you just claimed that the people who were calling for intervention in Afghanistan in the nineties were all "radical conservatives".  Are you saying that Jackalope's radical feminists are the same as your radical conservatives?  Maybe we've got a terminology mixup here?

Quote from: Jackalope;219853I find it truly bizarre that 14 years later, the radical feminists I know are the biggest cheerleaders for Islam around, and I've seen people banned from feminist discussion forums for asserting that Islamic theocracies are inherently oppressive of women.

That's because somewhere along the way, multiculturalism became the core value of the left that must not be questioned, but that transition had been in the works for a while.  I was in an online discussion with a feminist in the late-1980s, early-1990s where I raised the issue of female circumcision and she earnestly explained to me how it empowered women in those cultures and so on and that we shouldn't simply judge the practices of another as wrong.  (An older feminist who hadn't lost her mind asked her in amazement if she understood what the practice she was defending entailed.)  So while this has become the mainstream view recently, the seeds for that were sown earlier.

Quote from: jhkim;219867Huh?  Gleichman - you just claimed that the people who were calling for intervention in Afghanistan in the nineties were all "radical conservatives".  Are you saying that Jackalope's radical feminists are the same as your radical conservatives?  Maybe we've got a terminology mixup here?

I was saying the ones I noticed were being called radical conservatives, while the ones you noticed were being called bleeding heart liberals. Thus we both were noticing our people being ignored by the mainstream news and powerbase.


So they're not the same, in fact there's one serious difference. My radical conservatives to a large (but not total extent) stuck with their opinion. The Radical Feminists on the other hand changed theirs.

Quote from: Jackalope;219858Certainly strange.  I take comfort in the fact that conservatives remain a bunch of slack-jawed Useful Idiots for that class of elites that is leading us on the slow death march to a corporate fascist dystopia straight out of the work of William Gibson.

At least someone is being consistent.

I am nothing if not consistent.

Quote from: jhkim;219867Huh?  Gleichman - you just claimed that the people who were calling for intervention in Afghanistan in the nineties were all "radical conservatives".  Are you saying that Jackalope's radical feminists are the same as your radical conservatives?  Maybe we've got a terminology mixup here?

I did a Google Groups search of the Usenet (because those searches can be limited to a date range) from 1992 to 2000 on the words "Iraq" and "Taliban" to see what people were really talking about.  From what I can see, just about everyone had problems with the Taliban but they had different ideas on how to deal with them.  With respect to Iraq, the majority of the "bleeding hearts" seemed to be spending their time arguing that it was US and UK sanctions that were killing Iraqis and they were arguing for an end to sanctions.  Not a scientific sampling, of course, but I think it suggests what people were thinking about at the time.

Quote from: John Morrow;219884That's because somewhere along the way, multiculturalism became the core value of the left that must not be questioned, but that transition had been in the works for a while.  I was in an online discussion with a feminist in the late-1980s, early-1990s where I raised the issue of female circumcision and she earnestly explained to me how it empowered women in those cultures and so on and that we shouldn't simply judge the practices of another as wrong.  (An older feminist who hadn't lost her mind asked her in amazement if she understood what the practice she was defending entailed.)  So while this has become the mainstream view recently, the seeds for that were sown earlier.

I remember my first year in college ('95), taking English 102, and being so disgusted by the by the preachy multiculturalism of the assigned reading that I ended up not doing the final writing assignment, and instead wrote a ten page paper titled "Multiculturalism: The New Face of Racism."    My premise was that multiculturalism was essentially indistinguishable from racism in that it manadate that its adherents see others not as discrete individuals but rather as representatives of culture groups that were invariably divided along ethnographic lines, and that real progress can only be achieved when we stop allowing the accidents of a person's origins define them from cradle to grave.

I got an A on that paper.

Don't even get me started on the subject of genital mutilation.  The hypocrisy of feminists in that area drives me up the wall.  These days pretty much all feminists are oppossed to the practice and won't defend it.  But they'll defend male circumcision to the death.

Did you know that every year more the number male children that are permanently disfigured as a result of botched circumcisions is greater than the number of female circumcisions performed in the world?  12,000 a year vs 6,000 a year.  And of those 6,000, about half are entirely harmless procedure that results in no lasting damage -- in many areas where Islam has begun to supersede older tribal practices, the type 3 and 4 FGM (which is the "carving off the labia and sewing it all shut level") has been replaced by Type 1 female circumcision, which consists of nothing more than a pink prick on the clitoral hood, a purely symbolic gesture.  

Meanwhile, because they're so fucking culturally ignorant and only learn about the outside world from other dogmatic feminists, most feminists are completely unaware that many of the African communities that practice FGM also practice MGM, which goes far beyond medical circumcision and includes carving into the shaft of the penis to leave permanent scars.  These procedures are performed on boys around the age of 13, and can take months to heal.

Yet feminists will insist that male circumcision is not an issue.  They'll claim that girls have an inherent right to genital integrity, but they will simultaneously insist that males have no such right.  Not to sound anti-semitic, but the number of Jewish female feminists I've met who insist they have the right to mutilate their children's genitals for religious reasons but no one has the right to do the same to their daughters for similar reasons is frightening.  More disturbing are the number of American feminists I've met that insist that male circumcision is aesthetically pleasing and therefore acceptable.  You can imagine how they react when similar arguments are put forward to defend FGM.

Fuck.  You got me started.  Sorry.  I'm an ex-feminist, and can be a bit rabid about it.

Quote from: John Morrow;219892I did a Google Groups search of the Usenet (because those searches can be limited to a date range) from 1992 to 2000 on the words "Iraq" and "Taliban" to see what people were really talking about.  From what I can see, just about everyone had problems with the Taliban but they had different ideas on how to deal with them.  With respect to Iraq, the majority of the "bleeding hearts" seemed to be spending their time arguing that it was US and UK sanctions that were killing Iraqis and they were arguing for an end to sanctions.  Not a scientific sampling, of course, but I think it suggests what people were thinking about at the time.

Fair enough.  I'll accept that there were also some conservatives complaining about Iraq and Afghanistan that I simply didn't notice at the time.

As I recall the sanctions discussion, it's true that a number of liberals complained about the economic sanctions -- arguing that they were not doing anything to remove Saddam from power, and they were hurting the innocent people of Iraq.  These arguments were at the time derided by conservatives as being "bleeding heart" -- but conservatives later took up the exact same arguments against the sanctions prior to invasion.  

Incidentally, I don't think it takes "flip-flopping" at all to be opposed to the Taliban's excesses while also defending moderate, mainstream Islam.  In the same way, I find a lot of feminists are liberal Christians, who oppose fundamentalism.  

Quote from: Jackalope;219923Don't even get me started on the subject of genital mutilation.  The hypocrisy of feminists in that area drives me up the wall.  These days pretty much all feminists are oppossed to the practice and won't defend it.  But they'll defend male circumcision to the death.

Did you know that every year more the number male children that are permanently disfigured as a result of botched circumcisions is greater than the number of female circumcisions performed in the world?

Well, fair enough.  I do know many feminists who are vocally opposed to male circumcision, but you're right that it isn't spoken against nearly as forcefully as female circumcision is.  
Though really, this isn't unique to feminists at all.  In the West, male circumcision is an accepted practice and female circumcision is barbarity.

Quote from: jhkim;219971Well, fair enough.  I do know many feminists who are vocally opposed to male circumcision, but you're right that it isn't spoken against nearly as forcefully as female circumcision is.  
Though really, this isn't unique to feminists at all.  In the West, male circumcision is an accepted practice and female circumcision is barbarity.

O.k. My bad but I have to ask, female circumcision? Do you mean a clitorectomy, as in the removal of the clitoris? If so, are you saying this is equivalent to the removal of the male foreskin? Cause, that seems a bit of a harsh trade off for the woman. This is the only way I have heard female circumcision used.

Follow up: Male circumcision as in the removal of the foreskin right? Not the glands or such? Just trying to compare apples to apples here.

Thanks,
Bill

Quote from: walkerp;219740In Gleichman's world, Europe is already politically and culturally dominated by extremist Muslims.

Quote from: BalbinusMy issue isn't being disagreed with, it's that your viewpoint is not one found anywhere within British political debate outside of the racist fringe.

That's because he's a racist fuck.

His response would probably be that Islam is a religion, so it's not racism. By which reasoning the Holocaust was not an act of racism. Which is sort of true, but also fucking stupid.

Quote from: SpikeAt the end of the day this is what I like about the 'blogosphere' [...] we have a return, at the end of the day where you can read news KNOWING the bias is there, and can easily find the exact same news story presented from the opposite side. I think this is a good thing.

I agree completely. Take the same story from two different biased goons, and somewhere in the middle will be the truth.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;219976His response would probably be that Islam is a religion, so it's not racism. By which reasoning the Holocaust was not an act of racism. Which is sort of true, but also fucking stupid.

Is it possible to be critical of a culture or religion without it being tantamount to racism, in your opinion?  At what point does the critique cross the line?

Quote from: John Morrow;219988Is it possible to be critical of a culture or religion without it being tantamount to racism, in your opinion?  At what point does the critique cross the line?

In Kyle's mind? I'm sure it crosses the line whenever he disagrees.

I could point out various Islamic people that I greatly respect, jump through all the hoops about the fact that what I do object to actions justified by religious teaching (flying planes into building, killing film makers or gays in the streets, slaying's one own daughter because she was in a car with a man) and not the color of their skin.

It wouldn't matter. It never does.

By yelling racism, it allows Kyle to hide from the world and feel oh so good about himself. Never having to examine the hard choices, or the outcome of the easy ones he's made.

Quote from: HinterWelt;219974O.k. My bad but I have to ask, female circumcision? Do you mean a clitorectomy, as in the removal of the clitoris? If so, are you saying this is equivalent to the removal of the male foreskin? Cause, that seems a bit of a harsh trade off for the woman. This is the only way I have heard female circumcision used.

Follow up: Male circumcision as in the removal of the foreskin right? Not the glands or such? Just trying to compare apples to apples here.

I assumed that Jackalope meant clitorectomy and removal of the foreskin when he referred to female and male circumcision.  

He stated that opposing female circumcision more strongly was massive hypocrisy on the part of feminists -- I responded that it simply reflected the general attitude outside of feminism in the West, i.e. that removal of the foreskin was accepted and clitorectomy was considered barbaric.  I don't know much about the subject, so I'm not making any claim about what the right way to view either is.

Quote from: HinterWelt;219974O.k. My bad but I have to ask, female circumcision? Do you mean a clitorectomy, as in the removal of the clitoris? If so, are you saying this is equivalent to the removal of the male foreskin? Cause, that seems a bit of a harsh trade off for the woman. This is the only way I have heard female circumcision used.

Female circumicision ranges from Type 1, which is a pinprick on the labia, the symbolic drawing of blood -- this practice is rapidly replacing other forms in communities where Islam is a growing force, due mostly to pressure from Muslim Imans to end the practice -- to Type 4 which involves the removal of the clitoris and outer labia.  The inner labia is then sewn shut to create a small opening.  The woman must be cut back open when she marries, and can never experience sexual pleasure.  Pretty awful stuff.

It's worth noting that Type 4 is not widely practiced, and that the cultures that practice this practice a very wide range of seemingly gruesome body modifications, and that members of these cultures live very different -- harder -- lives than us Westerners, and consequently have a very different conception of pain.

QuoteFollow up: Male circumcision as in the removal of the foreskin right? Not the glands or such? Just trying to compare apples to apples here.

Yes, generally, though as I noted, the same communities that practice female genital mutilation generally also practice male genital mutilation.

The greater issue with male circumcision is this: a) it is completely unnecessary procedure with negligible medical benefit (essentially it is a form of cosmetic surgery) and b) as a result of the wide-spread practice of it, even with a malpractice rate of less than 1%, over 12,000 boys are permanently disfigured and made sexually nonfunctional every year.  Compare this with the less than 6,000 girls who are subjected to FGM each year, and the net result is: male circumcision disfigures more men than woman every year, for reason ranging from the disturbing (aesthetics) to the fantastic (god demands penis blood!).