You are the one making the positive claim that Muhammed's behavior was inconsistent with the time.
I wrote it because it is true.
Bomb#20 said:
Back then did everyone rule by the fear that he'd murder your children?
You are not stupid enough to believe a question is a positive claim. You are also not stupid enough to believe that challenging the hypothesis that EVERYONE [your caps] did what Muhammad did is the same thing as challenging the hypothesis that what he did was consistent with the time. So in order for you to reason from my having written what I wrote to the conclusion that you were in the right when you put those words in my mouth, you had to deliberately turn off your own critical thinking facilities twice over. You are engaged in self-deception.
My point has always been that historical figures need to be judged with consideration of the conditions of their time, instead of anachronistically applying modern sensibilities to them. While your definition of terrorism seems to be 'using fear of violence as a political tool' is a valid definition, which you have indeed used with fair consistency, and I admitted I was wrong to say 'inconsistency', what is the fruit of it? What have we learned from calling Muhammed a terrorist?
We've learned that it is perfectly correct as a matter of objective historical truth to call Muhammad a terrorist, and therefore that making up insulting, abusive, well-poisoning, discussion-torpedoing, unevidenced motivations and imputing them to those who disagree with you about the merits of calling him a terrorist is perfectly wrong.
I gave the example of applying game theory to criminal behavior as producing worthwhile results. What are your results? You haven't made a convincing argument against islam, you haven't increased our knowledge of history by providing a fresh viewpoint, you haven't increased our understanding of current problems by shining a light on history.
So? If you genuinely thought that trumped "He satisfies the definition" then you'd also condemn calling Davis a racist and Roosevelt an imperialist. Instead you defended those labels.
Your definition, while consistent, is imprecise; it is a vague definition, at odds with the way that other people use it.
You appear to be accusing me of using an idiosyncratic definition. There is no "the" -- no single "the way that other people use it" for your assertion to refer to; but the definition you label "Your" as though it were mine alone is in fact about the closest thing there is to a standard. U.S. law defines terrorism as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.", which would be indistinguishable from mine if our government didn't hypocritically give themselves an exemption. Kofi Annan defined terrorism as any action "intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act".
I am willing to accept your definition for the purpose of discussion, but I can't help but suspect that because you are using a vague definition that could be stretched to embrace lots of things, you are applying it to a term already so loaded with the intent to tacitly associate those other definitions with the thing you are defining more benignly. I've been in this business for a long time, and I have seen this trick before.
What's vague here is the charge you're insinuating about me. What the hell is vague about "violence deliberately targeted at noncombatants for political goals" and what the hell other definitions am I supposed to be intending to tacitly associate with it?
Serious scholars tend to avoid loaded terminology for precisely this reason. So yes: Muhammed was a terrorist, according to your definition of the word. Now that I have said that, you can take that quote out of context,
Sarpedon said:
Muhammed was a terrorist,
and post it under my name elsewhere, and say 'look Sarpedon says muhammed was a terrorist' to people who have a different idea of what terrorist means. I don't think that is your actual motive here,
So you brought up the hypothetical purely to plant the image of me doing such a thing in readers' minds?
but for people like the President, it is a very real concern.
I'll have to keep that in mind when Obama joins TFT.
This is why we can't blindly accept the motives of people who are revising the meanings of words and revising history.
So what were your real motives for revising the meaning of "terrorist" to "Arab warrior" and revising the history of the way angelo used the term?
Remember what I said about you being disqualified from accusing others of laziness? You are also not qualified to accuse others of insults.
I let this pass unremarked last time because I still had hope of something interesting coming from this conversation. But I won't let pass now. You have no power to command me. The fact that you think you can make up rules for other people and obviously expect them to follow them demonstrates another one of my premises: That you are arguing not from fact, and not for any scholarly purpose, but purely to support your prejudiced and egotistical view of the world.
Why did you write that? You are not a semiliterate. You cannot seriously believe "You are not qualified" is a
command. It's simply reality. You complaining about others' insults is as absurd as a flat-earther complaining about others' unscientific opinions, as absurd as the Muslims and Christians who used to periodically show up on IIDB to tell us Christianity and Islam are respectively superstitious. I obviously do not expect you to follow any such "rule"; I am simply putting you on notice that when you complain about insults you're making yourself into a joke.
You make up definitions of words and expect everyone to accept them without question. You make up rules for other people which you expect them to follow. You impose your own standards on foreign cultures and distant times in history of which you are clearly ignorant and expect others to go along with it.
Dude, since you're evidently going for proof-by-repetition, the customary standard is "What I tell you three times is true." You don't need to say it the fourth time. In order for you to reason from my having written what I wrote to the conclusion that I expect you or anyone else to go along with it, you had to deliberately turn off your own critical thinking facilities yet again. You have been making staggeringly unreasonable posts in this thread and I fully expect that to continue until you get bored and wander away.
You judge and you declare guilt.
Indeed I do. So do you. The difference is that you appear to do it with double standards and without evidence. By what standard do you judge Jefferson Davis guilty of racism and Muhammad innocent of terrorism? By what evidence do you judge angelo guilty of prejudice against Arabs?
You accept stories that support your conclusions and dismiss what doesn't.
Which stories that don't support my conclusions did I dismiss? The story that nobody thought it was wrong to punish adults by killing children? I'm pretty sure the Jews Muhammad was killing thought it was wrong.
And you produce nothing worthwhile, nothing but propaganda to be used against your fellow human beings, the muslims, my neighbors. Lots of people on this board and other places have been trying to turn me against my neighbors for their own political goals. I am offended that other people think they can command me, manipulate me, cause me to hate and fear and harm my neighbors, for goals that are not my own.
If you're going to judge claims not by the evidence for them but by the motives of the people who advance them, then you really need to work on getting better at figuring out people's motives. What on earth could have led you to imagine that anything I said was intended to be used against Muslims or to turn you against them? You have no logical basis for such a supposition. That their prophet was a terrorist is no more of a reproach against current Muslims than that he deliberately targeted violence at noncombatants for political goals and was an evil man who started a religion for power and sex. And I have no influence with you -- you evidently loathe me. But I don't have a problem with how you treat your neighbors. I have a problem with how you treat your fellow TFT posters. The fellow human being my words are against is you. I'm trying to get you and people who think like you to see the error of your ways; if that fails, I'm trying to expose and refute your revolting ideology of double standards and three-valued true/false/evil logic so that onlookers won't be suckered into it by your rhetoric.
Does calling Muhammed a terrorist serve any purpose other than incitement against muslims? I do not think so. Have you managed to demonstrate otherwise in all your posts defending calling him a terrorist? No.
Of course it serves another purpose. Just as drawing Muhammad serves the purpose of showing that trying to intimidate people out of drawing Muhammad by killing them won't work, likewise, calling Muhammad a terrorist serves the purpose of showing that trying to intimidate people out of calling him a terrorist by calling them racists won't work. It's bad policy to let bullying succeed.
