patrick.net

wow, i thought that was just photoshopped, but it's real: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/02/19/new-york-post-unveils-brutal-front-page-targeting-obama-islamic-terror-i-just-dont-see-it/

i'm now more impressed with the new york post than the new york times. which is sad. i loved the times until i concluded that they value PC platitudes above the truth.

i thought that was just photoshopped, but it's real

What makes you think it's real? Rupert Murdoch's NY Post has run altered photos of President Obama in the past, and there appear to be no other sources of this image besides the Post. Are you suggesting the Post used different software other than PhotoShop(tm), and you prefer whatever software was used?

I think he is referring to the text...

curious2 says

i thought that was just photoshopped, but it's real

What makes you think it's real?

SoftShell says

I think he is referring to the text...

Do you mean those letters appeared there in front of the President, magically or by divine intervention, along with the blindfold? Why would the NY Post, a paper with a long history of altering photos of the President, be favored with the sole divine revelation of this particular image?

The whole photo seems obviously altered, but Patrick says that "it's real." Some leftover mushrooms in the coffee today, methinks.

It appears to be sarcasm based on the fact at one time it was not believable that Obama did not see 'islamic terror', he only saw 'criminal behavior'.
Now it is believable.

curious2 says

The whole photo seems obviously altered, but Patrick says that "it's real."

curious2 says

What makes you think it's real?

i'm just saying that the ny post did actually run that cover.

i loved the times until....

I've given up on finding a truly objective source to report comprehensively what is happening.

All of the commercial sources have expressly a commercial agenda: they are getting paid to say what they say, and who pays the piper calls the tune. The NY Times supported the Iraq war and Obamneycare, but the Murdoch sources (Faux Noise, NY Post, etc.) drive their cult with even worse misinformation. I saw recently a surprising headline and read the article, then looked for corroboration, and found that only the Murdoch papers had the story; I searched using a witness quote, and found that the Murdoch papers had spun a story first reported in a different paper: the Murdoch version was so distorted as to be almost unrecognizable, quoting out of context to reflect a funhouse mirror opposite.

Then on the non-profit side, I saw this, not just once but deliberately repeated, so essentially the same falsehood ran on three different broadcasts and remains uncorrected on the website.

I keep trying to follow facts, but it's like looking for needles in haystacks spewed out by self-interested sources on all sides.

curious2 says

I keep trying to follow facts, but it's like looking for needles in haystacks spewed out by self-interested sources on all sides.

maybe there's an opportunity for a kind of snopes.com for the daily news every day, some service which simply correlates stories across different news sources to expose the spin and differences in reporting.

but it's a lot of work. who would do it?

i used to sort-of do that for housing news, but it was too damn much work every day.

who would do it?

Pierre Omidyar funded The Intercept, and it reports very diligently on some topics, but I think the authors tend to overestimate the risk from NSA et al. and underestimate the risk from Islam. For example, Glenn Greenwald is brilliant, but he seems more upset about people allegedly trying to read his e-mail than about people who are expressly trying to kill him.

curious2 says

Pierre Omidyar funded The Intercept, and it reports very diligently on some topics, but I think the authors tend to overestimate the risk from NSA et al. and underestimate the risk from Islam. For example, Glenn Greenwald is brilliant, but he seems more upset about people allegedly trying to read his e-mail than about people who are expressly trying to kill him.

well, i checked out The Intercept, and am disappoint. damn near violates godwin's law right on the home page:

Donald Trump’s neo-fascist campaign has been facilitated by many quarters of the U.S. media.

for those who do not know about godwin's law:

For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.[8] This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin's law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_Law

seems to be another example of ultra-PCness blinding people to how quickly islam would have them killed. Glenn Greenwald is both gay and jewish. he'd be murdered in less than 20 minutes in any islamic state.

curious2 says

Pierre Omidyar funded The Intercept, and it reports very diligently on some topics, but I think the authors tend to overestimate the risk from NSA et al. and underestimate the risk from Islam. For example, Glenn Greenwald is brilliant, but he seems more upset about people allegedly trying to read his e-mail than about people who are expressly trying to kill him.

Greenwald - and I'm a fan - also spends alot of time attacking Sam Harris, Dawkins, Ayaan, and many ex-Muslim Whistleblowers.

Of interest:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sam-harris-the-salon-interview

The profundity of this moral blindness seems to have achieved an almost crystalline form in the person of Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is a gay, Jewish atheist who would be murdered three times over in scores of Muslim communities for reasons that are unambiguously religious. And yet, he considers any focus on this particular brand of theocracy—even by someone who has suffered under its shadow as much as Ayaan has—to be a sign of malice toward innocent people.When cartoonists get butchered in Paris to shouts of “We have avenged the Prophet!” Greenwald races to his keyboard to castigate the dead, liberal cartoonists for their (nonexistent) bigotry. He allies himself with a group like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and works tirelessly to blur the line between legitimate civil rights concerns and theocratic bullying. These are the people who get Ayaan blacklisted from speaking at universities, and Greenwald has publicly stated that there is no group he is prouder to have collaborated with.

According to Greenwald and the rest of the regressive Left, one can criticize religion in general, but any special focus on Islam must be motivated by bigotry or “Islamophobia.” And on that assumption, many of these people think it’s fair to slander and demonize anyone who does focus on Islam—even a true Muslim reformer like Maajid Nawaz. Maajid is a former Islamist, who now runs a counter-extremist think tank in the UK. And yet for merely entering into a dialogue with me about the prospects of spreading secular, liberal values in the Muslim world, he was branded a “native informant” and a “porch monkey” by Greenwald’s colleague at The Intercept, Murtaza Hussain, and a “lapdog” by Reza Aslan’s employee, Nathan Lean. These people are simply desperate to shut down dialogue on what is fast becoming the most important political and moral question of our time. Everything they do in this area is dishonest and destructive.

thunderlips11 says

Of interest:

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sam-harris-the-salon-interview

Wow. Thanks for letting me know about that. It reminds me of an interview where Noam Chomsky was asked about supporting BDS and then getting excoriated unfairly for having questioned a particular tactic:

"One of the oddities of what’s called the BDS movement is that they can’t—many of the activists just can’t see support as support unless it becomes something like almost worship: repeat the catechism.
***
Unfortunately, the Palestinian solidarity movements have been unusual in their unwillingness to think these things through. That was pointed out recently again by Raja Shehadeh...the Palestinian leadership has tended to focus on what he called absolutes, absolute justice—this is the absolute justice that we want—and not to pay attention to pragmatic policies."

Chomsky quotes the phrase "absolute justice," but I think a more accurate phrase would be absolute submission. Islamic "justice" seems to have a different meaning compared to western expectations:

Saudi Arabia's justice system is based on Islamic Sharia law, and its judges are clerics from the kingdom's ultra-conservative Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam. In the Wahhabi interpretation of Sharia, religious crimes, including blasphemy and apostasy, incur the death penalty.
***
"Questioning the fairness of the courts is to question the justice of the Kingdom and its judicial system based on Islamic law, which guarantees rights and ensures human dignity", Al-Riyadh quoted the justice ministry source as saying.

According to the Koran, apostates, blasphemers, and infidels get "justice" from a sword smiting the neck.

PS He was also dead on about Salon, it's the Newsmax for "Regressive" Identitarian Liberals. The people who say "Outsourcing/Insourcing is Great, screw the Rust Belt Regaan Democrats" then drop tons of ink on bemoaning catcalling or microagressions or other first world problems.

indianguybayarea says

The bible which almost entirely deals with spiritualism still causes contention in american politics because it conflicts with gay rights , women's rights ...etc. now imagine , if it had everything from law and order to how to elect the president in it ?

brilliant comment.

he's talking about sharia of course.

btw, how many muslims has obama imported so far? it's still going on right now, and odds are damn high that some of the imports will massacre random americans again.

I wouldn't let any Muslim refugees in.
I'd be down for sending aid to camps that are housing them, in Muslim nations. That's the Christian thing to do, to be kind to those that mistreat you.
But God doesn't mandate that we put ourselves in danger by inviting in a bunch of people who religiously believe in our destruction.

sorry, but this is unacceptable. islam is utterly incompatible with democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion.

I would argue that religion is utterly incompatible with freedom of speech and to a large extent democracy. Religions simply cannot tolerate some behaviors like abortion even if the majority of the people are in favor of legal first-trimester abortions. Religions also cannot tolerate speech that is irreverent to the religion. Think about all the anti-obscenity laws. Think about the teen arrested for offending Christians by posing for this picture. How the hell does an arrest, nonetheless a prosecution like this take place in a country that has freedom of speech and freedom of religion? The answer: it doesn't. Our country has neither freedom of speech nor freedom of religion.

True freedom of religion is utterly impossible because most religions are intolerant of other religions and cannot coexist. So why should the state favor some religions over others instead of treating them all the same, as privileges that may be tolerated but only to the extend that they do not interfere with the rights of others, or as the destructive agents they are and ban them all?

You will never have any real freedom of religion in any country including the United States. Imagine if your religious beliefs demanded that you did not register with the selective service or did not allow the police to take your photograph or fingerprints or if smoking pot or using other mind-altering drugs was a religious sacrament to you, or if paying taxes violated your religion. The state would not make any of these concessions, so why should any concessions be made for religion?

Even in principle giving religion special privileges that the rest of society does not have is a grave injustice. If a religious person could object to participating in war in any capacity, including as a cook or a janitor, because of his religion, then why shouldn't a non-religious person or an atheist be able to make the same objection on purely moral grounds that have nothing to do with religion. Why should a moral objection not related to religious doctrine carry less weight than one mandated by a religious doctrine?

All protections of religions should be removed. Having the law not apply to you as it does to everyone else because of your delusions should not be a right. Not having your delusions challenged should not be a right. Brainwashing children into believing false things should not be a right.

Islam is worse than Christianity today, but fundamentally, they are both wrong and dangerous for the exact same reasons. Neither should be tolerated, nonetheless receiving preferential treatment from the state. And ultimately, the best way for the western world to prevent an Islamic takeover, which is starting, is to make the secular world rationalist, naturalist, and atheistic.

zzyzzx says

Maybe he doesn't see it because he killed bin Laden and had his body sunk to the bottom of the ocean where sunlight doesn't reach.

This guy literally pulled a mafia hit on the lead terrorist and had him "swim with the fishes".

There are many problems with Obama. Being soft on terrorist isn't one of them.

Doesn't really matter because American Muslims are having more kids than other groups of Americans.
So the Muslim Population of America has reached Escape Velocity anyways.

msm creates muslim bogeyman, Donald "Adolf" Trump wins by by a landslide, vice president takes the reigns just after she witnesses horrific assasination... rinse repeat

watchman says

msm creates muslim bogeyman, Donald "Adolf" Trump wins by by a landslide, vice president takes the reigns just after she witnesses horrific assasination... rinse repeat

could happen that way, sort of, but the msm is not the one shooting down random people in the streets. only super-devout muslims do that. the msm just reports on it.

but yes, every massacre of random civilians by muslims helps the donald, because no one else in the race will even state the words "islamic terrorism", as bill maher so aptly noted.

kind of surprised that the donald has lived this long, since he is clearly threatening to the entrenched parties on both sides.

and yes, he's fairly likely to pick a woman vp because it's politically smart.

i'm now more impressed with the new york post than the new york times. which is sad. i loved the times until i concluded that they value PC platitudes above the truth

Most of us know the truth Patrick. We just don't limit ourselves to the narrow minded and hateful version of it that you do. It's not about being PC for PC sake.

I've never heard you answer the tough questions about this. Such as, what does the world you want look like ?

What does the world where most western countries agree Islam is evil and that Muslims are our enemy (and therefore ostracized to go live in some desolate corner in poverty until they can learn to play nice) look like ?

What does the world where billions of people are ostracized from participating in the family of nations look like ?

Is it a safer world ?

How about this question. IS there a potential reward for risking a small number of murders in the west in exchange for helping Islam evolve out of their dark ages ?

Yes, I understand that risking those murders means that some will happen.

How do we help Muslims to evolve ?

Are you sure that the best way is telling them to fuck off until they learn how to play well with others ?

How are you so sure ? IT's the opposite of what my intuition tells me. And what my intuition tells me, based partly on evidence, doesn't have a single fucking thing to do with being PC for the sake of being PC.

marcus says

How do we help Muslims to evolve ?

speak out, tell the truth about what islam really teaches. they certainly do not hear it in their own countries.

this article is pretty good: http://patrick.net/Islam

Ironman says

Dan8267 says

Maybe he doesn't see it because he killed bin Laden and had his body sunk to the bottom of the ocean where sunlight doesn't reach.

Weren't those pictures and videos of the raid, his dead body and the burial at sea amazing??

Oh wait, there weren't any...

Yes, it's all a conspiracy, just like global warming. You're not a paranoid, delusional fuck. Not at all. You know you could stop the CIA from spying on you by using the microwave oven on your head. It fries the chips they implant in your brain.

AS I thought. Not only no answers, a bunch of dogma and an unwillingness to think about the questions his point of view raises.

Why do you want enemy invaders in your country Marcus? Are you a masochist, or do you just feel safe from them and hate the rest of us? Which is it?
It's not a "Race" thing. It's a culture thing. I say we welcome Arabs/pakis who denounce their horrible Islamist religion and embrace another religion. That's all it will take. Just renounce Islam and we will take you.
Otherwise, feel free to die for your beliefs IN YOUR OWN DAMN COUNTRY!!!! Don't bring that shit over here and expect US to die for your beliefs as well (in explosions).

Until the whole world recognizes that Islam is a horrible religion that is not to be tolerated, but quarantined like a deadly infectious disease, we will have no peace.

Well, there is no way to vet such a thing, there are no records, no papers, just bunch of people who simply "show up". But it doesn't stop political posturing by the left. Left really hates America.

FortWayne says

Well, there is no way to vet such a thing, there are no records

you could check the tax records in beverly hills

in other words , the theory is that these 10,000 are not tired huddled masses, but rather rich enough to afford a get out of hell free card. just a guess, mind you.

Quigley says

Why do you want enemy invaders in your country Marcus? Are you a masochist, or do you just feel safe from them and hate the rest of us?

More thoughtful answers to my questions.

marcus says

What does the world where most western countries agree Islam is evil and that Muslims are our enemy (and therefore ostracized to go live in some desolate corner in poverty until they can learn to play nice) look like ?

Like Britain or Germany circa 1975.

marcus says

What does the world where billions of people are ostracized from participating in the family of nations look like ?

Not at all different. Islamic Literary, Scientific, Artistic, etc. contributions to the world in the past few centuries have been negligible. I seem to recall - I've posted it somewhere on this forum - that the only three categories where academics from Muslim nations have the most cited papers are in Camel Breeding (no joke, a Vet Researcher from Cairo), Desalination Plant Engineering, and (imagine this) Islamic Theology. You'd never know they were gone.

marcus says

Is it a safer world ?

YES! Most of the world's current conflicts involve Islam. From Nigeria's Boko Haram to Uighurs in Xiang province of China.

marcus says

How about this question. IS there a potential reward for risking a small number of murders in the west in exchange for helping Islam evolve out of their dark ages ?

The primary responsibility of any state is to protect it's citizens, not engage in social engineering - especially not outside it's own borders. Isn't engaging in social engineering outside your own borders the very definition of IMPERIALISM?

marcus says

How do we help Muslims to evolve ?

The Security Council should confirm an Islamic-Civilization wide ban on arms and weapons platforms, then let them hash it out.

marcus says

Are you sure that the best way is telling them to fuck off until they learn how to play well with others ?

Yes. It works in Star Trek. Prime Directive: Primitive Civilizations should not be contacted.

thunderlips11 says

marcus says

Is it a safer world ?

YES! Most of the world's current conflicts involve Islam. From Nigeria's Boko Haram to Uighurs in Xiang province of China.

Ostracizing them from most developed countries of the world countries does nothing to address this.

thunderlips11 says

marcus says

Are you sure that the best way is telling them to fuck off until they learn how to play well with others ?

Yes. It works in Star Trek. Prime Directive: Primitive Civilizations should not be contacted.

I guess if we were talking about leaving them on another planet that might make sense.

WOuld we even be civilized, if we hadn't had the chance to be somewhat prosperous ?

DOn't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that people living in inhospitable countries where there are not good opportunities and where the wealth is even more narrowly held in the hands of a few, and bullshit propaganda is used toward even worse ends than it is here, are our problem.

I don't claim to know the solution to all of this. But the current mania is far out of proportion to what history tells us about the ability of Muslims to live in countries they do not dominate, side by side with other people of other religions.

The wacko extremist beliefs have been pumped up in recent decades by the Saudis and maybe others, for reasons I don't understand. That is where our anger (or the UN's) should be directed. Not at all of Islam.

marcus says

om most developed countries of the world countries does nothing to address this

Sure it does! Just like quarantining a colony of lepers addresses the leper problem. If one is cured, miraculously, then maybe they can leave the colony.
In fact, it's the easiest thing: just make a choice not to follow the teachings of an insane, pedophiliac, war-mongering camel jockey and you're "cured!"

The Islamic world is far too large to quarantine.

That kind of thinking is an example of American arrogance.

Quigley says

just make a choice not to follow the teachings of an insane, pedophiliac, war-mongering camel jockey and you're "cured!"

and then the others will try to kill you, since it is islamic law that anyone who attempts to leave must die, preferably in public, as an example to the others.

marcus says

That kind of thinking is an example of American arrogance.

And thinking the Muslims - esp. the Somalis - are going to be instantly transformed into secular normal people simply by moving to the US isn't arrogance?

Retarded strawman.

Btw, I never suggested that there shouldn't be substantial vetting.

marcus says

Btw, I never suggested that there shouldn't be substantial vetting.

How do you vet in a refugee camp, with real but bribed (ie indistinguishable from the real thing, on the right paper with the right stamps after slipping a Syrian Bureaucrat $50) documents? FBI Agents are going to go into Aleppo dodging bullets and artillery fire to interview neighbors and ex-employers cowering in basements - if they're still there are all?

How much will it cost?

Vetting refugee claimants in a civil war is totally impractical.

Daddy Tsarnev's brothers and relatives laughed at his claim they were oppressed. They said Tsarnev watched a lot of Baywatch and thought by moving to the US, he'd get a red sportscar and be famous. The Immigration Service believed his bullshit.

Finally, if they are "Moderate Muslims", wouldn't the worst thing to do would be to send all the non-crazies out to Europe, Canada, and the USA? Then the only people left in Syria would be the Fundamentalists.

Quigley says

Until the whole world recognizes that Islam is a horrible religion that is not to be tolerated, but quarantined like a deadly infectious disease, we will have no peace.

Well said. Thanks.

thunderlips11 says

How do you vet in a refugee camp,

If they believe in the sharia laws, they are terrorists.