So the Orlando shooter has burial rights? You're shiting me...

"

That is a very long, very sad list.

What's truly tragic is that it's not even remotely comprehensive, either globally or in savagery. Truly heinous, unimaginable acts of grotesque cruelty and exploitation take place everywhere from England (including the Rotherham Muslim rape gangs who systematically exploited well over a THOUSAND little girls) to the Middle East, itself, where entire populations are exterminated or enslaved in the name of this socio-political creed wrapped up in a syncretized jumble of Arabic paganism and hijacked Abrahamic monotheism. =-[.]-=

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Raycheetah wrote:

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DnAngel wrote:

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solwitch wrote:

His entire existence was forfeited when he killed innocent sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, friends... Etc. There is no logic, compassion. My intelligence tells me his fucking molecules should be erraticated from the universe.

Think about the amount of pain someone has to be in for him to think that this is the best way out.

It isn't so much that this guy is a monster, but instead that he needed help for a long time and no one helped him. He could aswell be your best friend in slightly different conditions.

There is no excuse for an act like this the same way there is no excuse for not providing the help this person needed. We're all responsible for it.

"Pain?"

What kind of help do you propose he needed? He committed an act of mass murder in the name of Islam, like the rest of these "suffering" individuals did or attempted:

The Shoe Bomber was a person.
The Beltway Snipers were people.
The Fort Hood Shooter was a person.
The underwear Bomber was a person.
The U.S.S. Cole Bombers were people.
The Madrid Train Bombers were people
The Bafi Nightclub Bombers were people
The London Subway Bombers were people
The Moscow Theater Attackers were people
The Boston Marathon Bombers were people
The Pan-Am flight #93 Bombers were people
The Air France Entebbe Hijackers were people
The Iranian Embassy Takeover, was by a person
The Beirut U.S. Embassy bombers were people
The Libyan U.S. Embassy Attack was by people
The Buenos Aires Suicide Bombers were people
The Israeli Olympic Team Attackers were normal humans
The Kenyan U.S, Embassy Bombers were human
The Saudi, Khobar Towers Bombers were someone's children
The Beirut Marine Barracks bombers were victims of a hateful ideology
The Besian Russian School Attackers were people
The first World Trade Center Bombers were people
The Bombay & Mumbai India Attackers were human
The Achille Lauro Cruise Ship Hijackers were people
The September 11th 2001 Airline Hijackers were community members

...snip...

Didn't know there were so many of these incidents. didja? ='[.]'=

I know it makes us feel better to think of these human beings as fundamentally different than yourself but the reality is they are no different than you, me or anyone you know. They are normal people that have done terrible things.

The underlying common factor that produced these terrible acts isn't that they were muslim but that they were human and humans do untold numerous awful shit to each other and are clever enough to think of a million ways to justify it.

Even the hate you're spouting right now, it's acceptable because 'they' are the 'bad guys' who are different from you. Now it's ok to define their entire existence and the community as a whole by these unfortunate choices they've made, that's the blind leading the blind.

Personally I don't think we heal until we realize that hate can't stop hate.

We humans and our behaviour is just as much a physical process as anything else in nature. Because of this, it's difficult for me to hate even people like Mateen for the same reasons that it's difficult to hate a natural disaster that wiped a villiage somewhere off the map. It's just plain tragic all over, but saying he did it "because evil" is in same ballpark as trying to explain a freak natural occurence with "a wizard did it".

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DalaiLama wrote:

If it were legal, I'd say his burial should be feeding him to pigs.

I suppose that for a muslim, being fed to what is considered a filty animal would be a disgrace of cosmological proportions. But the pigs didn't do no wrong and I'd prefer a greater distance to human flesh in the food chain. Someone might need to eat those pigs someday.

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DnAngel wrote:

Spoiler

Think about the amount of pain someone has to be in for him to think that this is the best way out.

It isn't so much that this guy is a monster, but instead that he needed help for a long time and no one helped him. He could aswell be your best friend in slightly different conditions.

There is no excuse for an act like this the same way there is no excuse for not providing the help this person needed. We're all responsible for it.

While I'm not exactly disagreing with the general sentiment of what you're saying, the last bit sounds dangerously close to victim blaming. "We're all responsible" is not a helpful stance when some influences have far more impact than others in the creation of people like Mateen.

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Raycheetah wrote:

"Pain?"

What kind of help do you propose he needed? He committed an act of mass murder in the name of Islam, like the rest of these "suffering" individuals did or attempted:

Nobody in their right mind commits acts like these. Ergo, these people are not in their right mind; they represent symptoms of a proverbial disease.
Anything that might've steered him away from radical, militant islamism or disrupted the magnitude of it's influence could have averted this. Not likely something just anyone could provide, but maybe someone like this guy:

Rachel Maddow Interviews Gay Ex-Radical Islamist, Sohail Ahmed

We can't ignore the role of fundamental islamism for very obvious reasons.
But straight up, unadultered islamophobia is problematic as it seems more likely to steer muslims on the fence towards radicalism (the idea that the west hates islam is one of their major selling points) when we want them further away from it.

Honestly, it's a corpse. Some of you are too entrenched in some agenda, though.

Another Solwitch thread...

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

I know it makes us feel better to think of these human beings as fundamentally different than yourself but the reality is they are no different than you, me or anyone you know. They are normal people that have done terrible things.

If you want to argue that the average Muslim thinks no worse than the average Christian, I'll agree with you. If you want to argue that being indoctrinated into one brand of magical thinking as a child is not fundamentally different from being indoctrinated into another brand of magical thinking as a child, I'll agree with you.

But as soon as you argue that I, personally, am not fundamentally different from a suicide bomber or spree killer possessed by truly irrational magical thinking, I'm going to stop agreeing with you.

Most people I know do horrifically evil things purely because they were indoctrinated into terrible systems as children and live in cultures that constantly reinforce these awful ideas (please go vegan). Most people I know believe in some flavor of magic. Most people do what they do and believe what they believe for the worst of possible reasons.

Not everyone does, though. We are not all equal.

The people on that list were bottom of the barrel scum. They were not fundamentally different from bottom of the barrel scum in other religions or even from non-religious bottom of the barrel scum. Me, though? I'm not bottom of the barrel scum.

I'm not a religious person at all, but even I firmly believe in a person's right to the most important property of all - one's body. It's not stolen property and should go to next of kin. From my perspective, the idea that his corpse would be denied to his family due to the nature of his crime is just as absurd as saying a vehicle he owned is permanently seized by the state for the same reason. I still think it should be possible to, say, appraise the criminal's estate and levy fines for crimes (after being posthumously found guilty in a court of law), but corpses are a perishable good and probably illegal to sell, so I don't really consider it fair game in that regard.

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Jennik wrote:

If you want to argue that the average Muslim thinks no worse than the average Christian, I'll agree with you.

Although I grew up in a mostly Islamic community and met lots of thoroughly respectable Muslims, there's quite a bit of sociological data - read: surveys - which show that the average Muslim holds opinions we'd generally consider as worse than the average Christian. I don't believe in giving up on Muslims, but there is a real problem with fundamentalist extremism in Islam, regrettably they DO think worse on average, and like all real problems it deserves real solutions, solutions which become more distant the longer we deny the problem. There is a minority of Muslims who are doing it right, where one can feel the phrases "friendly bearded Christian" and "friendly bearded Muslim" are equally interchangeable, where Islam has become a faith of charity and love; it's a matter of replicating that success.

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Jennik wrote:

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

I know it makes us feel better to think of these human beings as fundamentally different than yourself but the reality is they are no different than you, me or anyone you know. They are normal people that have done terrible things.

If you want to argue that the average Muslim thinks no worse than the average Christian, I'll agree with you. If you want to argue that being indoctrinated into one brand of magical thinking as a child is not fundamentally different from being indoctrinated into another brand of magical thinking as a child, I'll agree with you.

But as soon as you argue that I, personally, am not fundamentally different from a suicide bomber or spree killer possessed by truly irrational magical thinking, I'm going to stop agreeing with you.

Most people I know do horrifically evil things purely because they were indoctrinated into terrible systems as children and live in cultures that constantly reinforce these awful ideas (please go vegan). Most people I know believe in some flavor of magic. Most people do what they do and believe what they believe for the worst of possible reasons.

Not everyone does, though. We are not all equal.

The people on that list were bottom of the barrel scum. They were not fundamentally different from bottom of the barrel scum in other religions or even from non-religious bottom of the barrel scum. Me, though? I'm not bottom of the barrel scum.

Again, I know it sucks to think that we're not different. There is comfort in pretending 'they' are not a part of 'my' group. To call them bottom of the barrel scum though is to ignore the reality of what happened and why. These tragedies deserve more than a head in the sand knee jerk reaction, for all sides involved.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Jennik wrote:

If you want to argue that the average Muslim thinks no worse than the average Christian, I'll agree with you.

Although I grew up in a mostly Islamic community and met lots of thoroughly respectable Muslims, there's quite a bit of sociological data - read: surveys - which show that the average Muslim holds opinions we'd generally consider as worse than the average Christian.

I'm not talking about their actual beliefs here. He was referring to fundamental differences, so I was specifically talking about thinking ability. All I meant was that the brain of your average Muslim and the brain of your average Christian are the same.

As far as beliefs go, I think the biggest problem with Muslims today is that too many of them actually believe what's written in their holy book. Most modern Christians (and everyone around them) are lucky that the Christians who came before have slowly shed many of the worst and most harmful ideas from their holy book. We really need Muslims to do the same.

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

Again, I know it sucks to think that we're not different. There is comfort in pretending 'they' are not a part of 'my' group. To call them bottom of the barrel scum though is to ignore the reality of what happened and why. These tragedies deserve more than a head in the sand knee jerk reaction, for all sides involved.

I'm not sure what group you're putting me into or why you're even talking about groups now in the first place. Your initial statements dealt with individuals, not groups. My response dealt with individuals, not groups. I am an individual, just as the the people who committed those atrocities were individuals. I, as an individual, am fundamentally different from those other individuals.

Exactly how am I ignoring the reality of what happened and why it happened when I call these individuals bottom of the barrel scum? What do you even mean by that?