Listen here, folks, the outdoor cats, they’re no good. Very very bad cats, folks. They spread murder, very bad murder, you know have you ever seen a cat go to work, it is amazing really, such skilled hunters, and they toy with their prey, let them think they have a chance, really amazing stuff folks. And people come up to me, and they tell me, if you were an outdoor cat, you would be the greatest outdoor cat, and it’s true folks, I would hunt birds and mice like you wouldn’t believe. Nobody would be able to hunt like me. And that’s why we have to keep the cats in door folks.

To be sure, the republicans have controlled the Supreme Court since 1969, so it’s not like they lost all three branches of government with this election.

In a European coalition, if the minority of the coalition disagree with some law being voted on, does the whole coalition still vote for that law? Or would minority legislators break and vote with the opposition?

I think this is a programming exercise.

Well the reason why I imagine you to be non-religious is because thats a prerequisite for the argument I intended to (and did) give. A (Christian or Muslim) religious person would disagree with my starting premise that there is no truth about a religion out there in the world. And indeed, for a religious person, the question of whether some religion X is Y may very well be a theological question, where sufficient study or faith or practice reveals the truth. This is not the sort of discussion I was interested in having.

I can certainly agree that there may be some core components to a dogma concept such that we would cease to call it that concept without it. And I certainly don’t believe homophobia to be a core concept of the Islamic dogma. (Core concepts would be fairly limited here, like that there is only one God, and Mohammad is the prophet of that God).

The question of what something is, unless specified otherwise, always includes was and will be.

Hmm, I’m not sure that’s correct. But in any event, the way I read the OP’s question, with its reference to post 9/11 Islamophobic claims and the veracity of them seems to be very much a question of how Islam is currently and has been for the past 20 years. Questions of historical Islam and some hypothetical future Islam don’t seem to me to be what’s targeted here.

Sure, so the question presented here is one about “Islam.”

I’m not a religious person, and I imagine you are not either (considering you use this website, I imagine you are a materialist). So, as nonreligious people, I think we should have no issue saying is that there is fundamental “truth” as to what “Islam” is out there in the world. Rather, what the concept/religion of Islam is just what its followers generally believe it to be. Like most concepts, there probably aren’t many super hard-and-fast necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather there is a family resemblance of concepts that exist in the minds of its followers, with some ideas being more core (i.e. believed to be part of the concept by more people) and some more fringe.

So, answering the question of whether Islam is homophobic (rather than was or has been historically) is just a matter of determining what beliefs/values with respect to homosexuality its followers attribute to it. I imagine Mahmoud would attribute his homophobia to the religion.

As you suggest, it could very well be the case that the Muslims who are homophobic have come to those beliefs due to their material conditions of their place of birth rather than the prevailing religion in the region. But then, insofar as such homophobic people consider themselves Muslims, and attribute such beliefs to being a value of such Islam, then Islam becomes/is homophobic.

Your response to me seems more interested in the question of whether Islam “causes” people to be homophobic. But that’s a distinct question from whether Islam is homophobic.

Separately, if you want to argue that Islam is only homophobic if it “causes” people to be homophobic, then I don’t see why it has to be “the more probable cause” for a person’s homophobia in order to be homophobic. Surely there can be many different causes for why some particular person might be homophobic? If the material conditions of their place of birth is the driving cause for their homophobia, but a religion came in with the assist, (that is, it is not the “most probable cause”) I see no reason to say that such religion is not homophobic.

In his first thread here, Mahmoud, a Palestinian hexbear user, in response to a user discussing that it was disheartening that Kamala and Trump were the same with respect to the genocide, wrote “trump is better for America than Kamala, because at least he does not believe in homosexuality. This is a very good thing.”

He has since deleted this message and reposted it without this part. Perhaps this reflected a poor Arabic->English translation, or perhaps he changed his mind later. Take it with a huge grain of salt, too, given that this is a sample size of n=1. But it is also a person with all the intense selection biases of posting here, which would cut quite aggressively against posting such sentiment.

Idk about those other issues, but on the union point, there’s a pretty big difference between what Biden and Trump have done with the NLRB.

Here’s a small post I made about it the other day https://hexbear.net/comment/5553162

You think she would try to run for a third term?

What is the Lebanese army doing? Is it just sitting this out while Hezbollah and Israel fight over southern Lebanon?

Lmao Lenin looks exactly like the smug goat

Yo what’s the scale for the picture here. What appears to be a table leg to the left is throwing me off. Like this pills are enormous, you couldn’t even take one as a suppository if you were dedicated???

This problem is apologia for the 9000lb truck. Even an alert driver couldnt see that baby in a car designed to have worse sight lines than a Sherman tank.

Well thank you for the replies. Suffice it to say, I am flabbergasted.

:(

Oh god oh fuck did anybody check to see if there is a full moon on Election Day?!?

Sorry I couldn’t quite hear that over the sound of my rocket engine as I head to a new planet. But as I was saying, nothing to fear from the centipede.

The size of the centipede is distorted by Mercator projection, it’s not that big, don’t worry.

What? The reason I ask is to try to get a better understanding of the principal backing up the stance you took. I was trying to understand if it was life-maximizing with no qualifiers (i.e. irrespective of whose life was risked), which is how it read to me in your other responses in the thread. But I wasn’t sure, since you also said like 99.99% of the time, the burglar wouldn’t attack you if you announced, which could mean there was a heavily qualified principal.

So, I asked the hypothetical to try to figure out what your underlying motivating principal is here, as it filters out the noise of the 99.99% example. It was in no way meant to “entice fascist sentiment.”

Me personally? No, I would lock my door and call the police. I would not go out and try to confront the burglar, but I wouldn’t also call out to them and say “oh btw I’m here and armed.”