RoR: Forum

Post 0

Wednesday, March 19 - 11:58am

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In the recent US News & World Report (14), 50,000 Muslims were surveyed. Here are some of the results ...

--Muslims admire our technology
--Muslims resent our democracy
--Muslims disliked their perceptions of our moral laxity
--7% of all Muslims (~100 Million Muslims) thought 9/11 was completely justified
--none of this 7% offered a "religious justification" for that attitude
--24% said that attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are at least sometimes justified

What do you think of these things?

Ed

Post 1

Wednesday, March 19 - 12:03pm

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Later on in this issue (33), there's a report on Iranian rap music. Here are some of the points made ...

--Rap is forbidden in Iran
--so is any group that fails to obtain a recording license from Iran's Culture Ministry
--satellite TV is illegal in Iran
--women can't sing in public
--concerts at private gatherings get cancelled because of threats from ad hoc neighborhood Islamic vigilantes
--an arrested Iranian rapper (age 27) was released on bail, but only after his father posted his house as security

What do you make of that?

Ed

Post 2

Wednesday, March 19 - 4:41pm

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--Rap is forbidden in Iran

I think they're on to something... ;) No doubt those explosive, booming bass car speakers are banned as well, right? (Listening to one droning on down the street as I type this)

None of the stuff in post 0 surprises me. They're all cheerleaders for terror in one way or another.

Post 3

Thursday, March 20 - 9:41am

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None of the stuff in post 0 surprises me. They're all cheerleaders for terror in one way or another.

Not sure I understand you... To put those stats in other words:

--93% of all Muslims (~100 Million Muslims) thought 9/11 was not completely justified
--76% said that attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are never justified

Post 4

Thursday, March 20 - 5:42pm

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Don't try to understand, Jon. I simply misread Ed's post. Aside from that, I don't believe your stats either.

Post 5

Thursday, March 20 - 6:20pm

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From Southern California InFocus (The largest Muslim newspaper in California)

A tale of three self-proclaimed Ex-terrorists
By ABDUSSALAM MOHAMED, Senior Staff Writer
�Why haven�t they been arrested or deported?� critics ask.
For self-proclaimed "former terrorists" Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani, all with a history of alleged blood and murder, nothing even close to legal action has ever been taken against them. On the contrary, the trio has, for the past few years, actively been appearing on TV shows across the nation, speaking at conferences and fund-raisers in churches and synagogues and openly proclaiming their so-called bloody past to anyone who is willing to listen.
http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/20827/135/

And this about one of our favorite people...

WAFA SULTAN: Reformist or opportunist?
By Abdussalam Mohamed, Staff Writer
Unlikely journey from obscurity to fame, rags to riches.
Reformist or opportunist, Sultan continues to enjoy the spotlight as she routinely figures prominently as a guest speaker at many functions and fundraisers across the country. As her fame grows, so do her admirers and detractors.
http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/4009/135/

Post 6

Thursday, March 20 - 8:07pm

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For the record ...

--7% of all Muslims (~100 Million Muslims) thought 9/11 was completely justified

... which means that ~900 million didn't think that it was completely justified (assuming we can generalize from that survey of 50,000 of these Allah-worshipping religionists).

Of course, there could still be 800+ million of these mystics who believe that 9/11 was justified i-n-c-o-m-p-l-e-t-e-l-y ...

Ed

Post 7

Thursday, March 20 - 9:48pm

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Or 800 million non-Muslims who disbelieve that 9/10 and 9/12 were incompletely unjustified. ..
Or 800 million non-Japanese who incompletely disbelieve that non-Hiroshima and non-Nagasaki were not unjustified to a greater or lesser degree.

Or 8 Irishmen who want to celebrate St. Patrick's Day right now, but who have decided to wait for Lent to be over with... even though... there is nothing in the Bible about Lent...

And over on ObjectivistLiving, Neil Parille said that James Valiant has said that the surprise party to celebrate the publication of Atlas Shrugged was thrown by Random House (the novel's publisher), but this contradicts the Brandens' accounts, which say they or the Collective threw the party.

Reliable public opinion polls from Harris Surveys and the Gallup Organization reveal that very small percentages of Americans admit to complete disbelief in God. The actual numbers can vary widely from 15% down to 0.3% depending on the nature of the survey. Open-ended online surveys tend to harvest larger numbers than telephone interviews on specific statements . Nonetheless, the numbers are small.
And yet, they are large. Only 1% to 2% of all Americans identify themselves as �Jewish.� The same range applies to Mormons and Muslims. The number of self-identified nonbelievers (�atheists� plus �agnostics�) is at least equal to this and perhaps ten times larger. However, the nonreligious do not receive the social deference, political attention or academic investigation that the other groups do.
-- Atheists: Overlooked by Sociology? by Michael E. Marotta

In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer said that a mass movement can be successful without God, but no mass movement can be successful without a Devil.

The nice thing about Islam is that now Objectivists have a target other than Christians. It would be so inconvenient for Objectivists to attack Christians...

Post 8

Friday, March 21 - 8:38am

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Mike, see below ...

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Or 800 million non-Muslims who disbelieve that 9/10 and 9/12 were incompletely unjustified. ..
Or 800 million non-Japanese who incompletely disbelieve that non-Hiroshima and non-Nagasaki were not unjustified to a greater or lesser degree.

Or 8 Irishmen who want to celebrate St. Patrick's Day right now, but who have decided to wait for Lent to be over with... even though... there is nothing in the Bible about Lent...
=========

I laughed but then I cried. I can see what you are trying to do here -- but that's self-defeating. In the short run, what you are trying to do is to show the folly that can be had with surveys and statistics. In the long run, this reasoning leads to solipsism.

Let me guess: You didn't want to have to deal with the long run, you just wanted to be able to get away with thinking a certain way, just for right here, and just for right now. Is that an accurate portrayal of your pscyho-epistemological dynamics, Mike?

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In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer said that a mass movement can be successful without God, but no mass movement can be successful without a Devil.
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I truly believe this. Take altruists (and keep them!) ...

Do you want to make the world a better place? Well, then you are going to have to be prepared to take-down altruists and their evil promotion of the idea. The idea of altruism, when pushed forward by men, is destructive of the good (i.e., it's evil).

What would happen if you tried to make the world a better place WITHOUT first harming the altruistic movement? Your efforts would be in vain -- knocked-down and stomped into "unrecognizability" by the trampling herd. That's what would happen. There's a reason that RoR magnate J. Rowlands created a War Room here at RoR. It's because it's war out there -- and you can't win a war by appeasement.

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The nice thing about Islam is that now Objectivists have a target other than Christians. It would be so inconvenient for Objectivists to attack Christians...
=========

I don't really know what you are getting at here ...

One interpretation of these words is that Objectivists are unproductive "haters" (that that's just what they "do") -- pointing their hate out into the world in a purely destructive manner.

Another interpretation of these words is that attacking Christians is self-defeating, because too many of them hold too many positions of power -- or some such reasoning.

Still another interpretation of these words is that avoiding the attacking of Christians is evasion on the part of Objectivists -- because too many of them hold too many positions of power to be ignored for an "easier" target, such as people who used to wear towels on their heads, and who mutilate "their" women.

Which is it, Mike? Please explain yourself.

Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 3/21, 8:41am)

Post 9

Friday, March 21 - 12:55pm

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Ed, I am an Objectivist because I am a metaphysical and epistemological rational-empiricist. Objectivism is a largely successful attempt at a thoroughly integrated and non-contradictory philosophy for living.

As Jonathan Fauth pointed out, that seven per cent of Muslims polled believe something means that 93% do not.

I have no patience with the Islam-bashing in rightwing circles, especially when it comes from Objectivists. I can understand that Christians are confused about basic principles. So, they read someone else's holy book and argue about how many angels really can fit on a pin -- and are willing to kill or die over the answer. I am truly not overly surprised that Objectivists make the same mistake because for many, Objectivism is a religion, complete with holy books and an infallible (also dead and therefore immutable) authority to be quoted. These neo-conservatives of the God-Gold-and-Guns movement are attracted to the individualism and the pioneering ethos and the enterprise spirit of Objectivism, but they are firmly attached to the Writ and the Word, which -- like hate-filled Muslims, Christians, and Hindus, among many others -- they use to justify whatever is inside themselves in the first place.

You cite female genital mutilation as an attribute of Islam. It is not. It is part of many cultures, most of them located in a broad geographic band. I don't think you will find it in the Qu'ran. However, you will find male circumcision among Jews and Christians and Muslims -- and we Objectivists do not attack life-hating, self-hating Jews for their culture which includes infant male mutilation and infant sacrifice. God's sacrifice of his Son was only echoic of Abraham and Isaac, or Abraham and Ishmael in the other version. (Among the Nue people of Africa, the males "volunteer" for circumcision between the ages of 14 and 21 as a rite of passage. Also, in some cultures, female surgery is a "voluntary" rite of passage. It has nothing to do with Islam, per se.) And lest this all focus entirely on sex, just what, I ask, is a haircut or shaving? How much of our culture is "rational" and how much is based on the irrational?

I take my cue from Ernst Samhaber, who in Merchants Make History, wrote: "A good merchant does not argue religion with his client."

One time about 30 years ago, I was at an aeronautics conference where I gave a paper and at teh buffet, I was standing next to this Air Force colonel whose nametag said he was probably as Jewish as he looked prima facie and he was building up a pretty good ham and swiss on rye and he saw me watching him out the side of my eye and he said, "It's government inspected, Mike. It's clean, right?" So, to me, if you want to defeat Islam, get them to try ham and swiss on rye. Killing them is not going to do the trick -- and there is no profit in that for anyone.

You are right about the fact that attacking Christianity always been difficult for Objectivists. Attacking Islam has been much easier. I dont' see any profit in either.

Let me ask this: What does it mean "to live for the sake of"? If you dedicate your life to "fighting evil" do you not live for the sake of that? To me, that is not the same thing as doing good and not even the same thing as preventing evil.

The dangers of bad government and malevolent religionists are not one-tenth of what we do to ourselves. So said Poor Richard.

Post 10

Friday, March 21 - 3:37pm

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The problem:

The solution:

Post 11

Friday, March 21 - 3:51pm

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At last! Someone who thinks as I do!

Thank you sir.

Bob Kolker

Post 12

Friday, March 21 - 3:57pm

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As Jonathan Fauth pointed out, that seven per cent of Muslims polled believe something means that 93% do not.

Michael,

I know that's what Jon was trying to point out, but there's a problem with getting 93% of 100+ million from a meager 50,000 sampling. I'm even willing to call it dubious to make such a claim. Where did the 50,000 come from? What country and culture? Were they all American? Were they Western?

They'd have to sample, or poll, at least a couple of million people, from a huge cross section of cultures to avoid at least my own balking criticism, and actually make anything resembling a valid point.

This poll is disingenuous and biased, an attempt to move the readers into Muslim hugging mode without sufficient proof. I'm not moved.

When the US News and World Report has film coverage of Muslims marching in the streets protesting all of the fatwas, jihads, be-headings, bombings, and general mayhem against the U.S. and the rest of the Western world, then my heart will warm up a little, but until then, they're all cheerleaders for terror to me.

I wonder how tolerant that 50,000 would be to some Muhammad jokes? How quickly would any of them turn from peace loving citizen to effigy burning, window breaking, cocktail throwing "protesters." Now that would be an interesting poll.

Call such a test their first "ham and swiss sandwich."

Post 13

Friday, March 21 - 8:06pm

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TSI cogently asked: "... but there's a problem with getting 93% of 100+ million from a meager 50,000 sampling. I'm even willing to call it dubious to make such a claim. Where did the 50,000 come from? What country and culture? Were they all American? Were they Western? "

You can find out more below. However, from basic statistics, if your sample is truly random and the population is truly arbitrarily "large", then all you need is 1054 to be 95% confident that you are within +/-3%. I think that if you look at USA Today print edition polls on the front page, they give their sample sizes and confidence levels. So, that's an easy check. Anyway, here is the link that Ed Thompson did not provide:

U.S. News and World Report
What Muslims Think
New book examines what the more than 1 billion Muslims think about gender, race and terrorism
By Alex Kingsbury Posted March 14, 2008

Determining what more than 1 billion people think is an ambitious project by any standard. But Georgetown University Prof. John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, helped organize just such a survey and managed to condense their findings into a mere 204 pages. Their new book, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, is based on a Gallup Poll, the largest of its kind, which surveyed some 50,000 Muslims in more than 35 countries. It asked questions about gender, race, terrorism, the separation of church and state, and the prospects of peace with the West. U.S. News spoke with Mogahed about the findings.

Also -- and more to the point for rational-empiricist egoists living within a mystical altruist culture:

Asked what they most admired and most resented about the West, they answered first technology and second, democracy. People would mention their support for freedom of speech, the rule of law, and the transparency of government. What they most disliked was the perceived moral laxity and libertinism of the West, which, interestingly, is exactly what Americans said when we polled them on those two questions. There is common ground on that issue.

In other words Muslims hate the same things about America that everyone else (including many Objectivists) hates about America. So... We have plenty of work here at home...

The link above points here:
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/world/2008/03/14/inside-the-minds-of-muslims+.html

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 3/21, 8:12pm)

Post 14

Saturday, March 22 - 6:30am

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Thank you for the link, Mike. The information there was helpful.

You can find out more below. However, from basic statistics, if your sample is truly random and the population is truly arbitrarily "large", then all you need is 1054 to be 95% confident that you are within +/-3%.

Wow. One certainly doesn't have to be very objective if general truths can be determined this way. I don't know anything about statistics, but this just doesn't seem right to me at all.

1054 is representative of 1 billion?? I don't believe it. Or maybe that isn't what you meant to say here.

5% of 1 billion is 50 million, not 50,000. 50,000 is .005% of 1 billion. So seven percent or 93 percent of that tiny .005 sampling doesn't seem very impressive to me, and it certainly doesn't equal 7 or 93 percent of 1 billion! Please! But that's what the authors are trying to sell here.

I'm wondering how a small percentage like this can objectively be viewed as genuinely representative of the vast majority of a group? Is it really satisfying to some scientific standard? I have to wonder. If a medicine was only effective .005% of the time, no one would take it.

...surveyed some 50,000 Muslims in more than 35 countries.

I see that they claim to have gotten single digit outcomes in Iran and Saudi Arabia, but the devil is always in the details, which are left out of the article in this case. Assuming they took the survey from 1429 people in each of the 35 countries, I'm left to wonder how these individuals were chosen, and if the choice was truly random. Taking into account that the authors of the study are trying to make .005% representative for 1 billion, well, it just doesn't add up.

This is what the article is really all about (along with trying to make Americans out to be ignorant dorks):

How can we bridge these gaps?
Public diplomacy is important. It's not just about Muslims admiring us and respecting us; what's more important to them is that we admire and respect them. Muslims give us a long list of things they admire about the West, yet when asked what we can do to improve things, they want us to respect them and stop looking down on them. Our public diplomacy needs to move from selling America to affirming other cultures for what they are.
(Mine)

If that's what they really want, they're going to have to actually do and be something admirable and respectable, like marching in the streets for the rights of women against brutal sharia law. They're going to have to come up to speed regarding rights, period.

In other words Muslims hate the same things about America that everyone else (including many Objectivists) hates about America.

Context matters. They don't hate them for the same reasons, and you know it. I'm not going to be fooled into relativist thinking about this, Mike. Sorry.

Post 15

Saturday, March 22 - 11:47am

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Mike,

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I have no patience with the Islam-bashing in rightwing circles, especially when it comes from Objectivists.
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I can see where there might be a measure of futility in "bashing" something or anything. "Bashing" is, by nature, a destructive act. It is not directly productive of anything. If there were only a bashing of something, and no superior alternative (to that thing bashed) offered, then the whole enterprise would be for naught.

Also, religion isn't merely some abstract castle-in-the-sky, untied to any living, breathing, feeling humans -- such a castle could be destroyed without harming the humans tied to it by their deeply emotional apron-strings. A wrecking-ball of reason will necessarily "hurt the feelings" of others (as it destroys the counterfeit sources of value that many folks hold dear).

Your theme seems to be to go along to get along, after all, there's so much tied-up wealth owned by religionists -- you'd be a fool not to pander to them in trade. At the end of the day, you say, you'll be richer for having looked the other way -- and under your view, the richer guy is the winner (no matter how he earned his wealth).

I politely disagree. Faith and force are corollaries and feed off of each other. If you benefit one, then you forward the principles of the other. It's a matter of feeding crocodiles, with the false hope that that will make you the last one to be eaten.

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You cite female genital mutilation as an attribute of Islam. It is not.
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This is rhetorical word-jousting. Female genital mutilation is common in Muslim countries, and Islam has been used in order to justify the damned practice. The mistreatment of women is the real issue at hand. You winning the argument of whether female genital mutilation existed before Islam did doesn't help your position in this debate -- or hurt mine, for that matter. It is a simple matter of fact that Islam is sexist and that that's not good enough for humans living on earth. Why in Allah's name did this show up ...

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The Bill of Rights

1. Women have an Islamic right to respectful and pleasurable sexual experience.
2. Women have an Islamic right to make independent decisions about their bodies, including the right to say no to sex.
3. Women have an Islamic right to make independent decisions about their partner, including the right to say no to a husband marrying a second wife.
4. Women have an Islamic right to make independent decisions about their choice of a partner.
5. Women have an Islamic right to make independent decisions about contraception and reproduction.
6. Women have an Islamic right to protection from physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
7. Women have an Islamic right to sexual privacy.
8. Women have an Islamic right to exemption from criminalization or punishment for consensual adult sex.
9. Women have an Islamic right to exemption from gossip and slander.
10. Women have an Islamic right to sexual health care and sex education.
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wiki/Islamic_Bill_of_Rights_for_Women_in_the_Bedroom

... if Islam wasn't first categorically mistreating "it's" women?

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However, you will find male circumcision among Jews and Christians and Muslims -- and we Objectivists do not attack life-hating, self-hating Jews for their culture which includes infant male mutilation and infant sacrifice.
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Don't speak for me. Don't make the collectivist error of speaking for "we Objectivists." I have spoken out against infanticide, for instance. If and when I am made aware of its practice by any religious or otherwise-wrong group or sect on planet Earth -- then I will denounce them in a heartbeat. What's wrong is wrong, no matter who's doing it.

The subtle point here is to pick your battles. The goal -- of living the life you want in the world you want -- is the same. The means and methods to this same goal will be different for people (or Objectivists even) in relation to their own personal attributes and powers. Some will fight evil harder. Some will fight evil differently. Some will try to "free ride" and let others fight evil -- while they (thinking themselves "good men") -- do nothing.

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Also, in some cultures, female surgery is a "voluntary" rite of passage. It has nothing to do with Islam, per se.) And lest this all focus entirely on sex, just what, I ask, is a haircut or shaving? How much of our culture is "rational" and how much is based on the irrational?
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Don't try to use the dissemble of a linguistic analyst on me -- because I'll just keep calling-you-out on that behavior.

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So, to me, if you want to defeat Islam, get them to try ham and swiss on rye. Killing them is not going to do the trick -- and there is no profit in that for anyone.
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I agree that there are better ways folks can use to get the life they want in the world they want.

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Let me ask this: What does it mean "to live for the sake of"? If you dedicate your life to "fighting evil" do you not live for the sake of that? To me, that is not the same thing as doing good and not even the same thing as preventing evil.
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Teaching is the best way to fight evil. It's an appeal to the human mind as the answer to life's problems. If and when my reactions to evil on this planet do not result in the teaching of someone somewhere (including myself) then, perhaps, my energy was wasted.

There is also the sense of life issue or the underlying current of coming alive. There's a good quote that says don't ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive -- because what the world needs is folks who come alive. If it makes me come alive to exercise my exceptional talents in "bashing" the wrong thinking on this planet, then it has inherent value for me.

The trick is to balance my energies between an appropriate level of destruction and creation, what Schumpeter called "Creative Destruction." In order to lay a new foundation, sometimes existing things need first be destroyed. I would say that an appropriate balance for one of my caliber of talent would be to apportion approximately 60% of my skills toward destruction (to "make room" for the good) and about 40% of my skills toward creation.

You may apportion your skills differently based on your attributes, but don't pretentiously presume to sit there and sell me on some kind of a Utopian fantasy that there should be 0.0% destruction going on in the world.

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The dangers of bad government and malevolent religionists are not one-tenth of what we do to ourselves.
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True.

Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 3/22, 11:48am)

Post 16

Saturday, March 22 - 12:18pm

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Teresa,

You bring up good points about how key issues -- such as randomization -- relate to what it is that statistics actual mean in the world. This point that you make can be made too strongly, however -- which results in epistemological nihilism and science-hate. I'm not saying that you're going that far, only that what you are saying can be taken that far.

Here's a primer on what you need from statistics (i.e., 95-99% confidence level) in order to reliably estimate the reality of a sampled situation ...

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The confidence interval is the plus-or-minus figure usually reported in newspaper or television opinion poll results. For example, if you use a confidence interval of 4 and 47% percent of your sample picks an answer you can be "sure" that if you had asked the question of the entire relevant population between 43% (47-4) and 51% (47+4) would have picked that answer.

The confidence level tells you how sure you can be. It is expressed as a percentage and represents how often the true percentage of the population who would pick an answer lies within the confidence interval. The 95% confidence level means you can be 95% certain; the 99% confidence level means you can be 99% certain. Most researchers use the 95% confidence level.

When you put the confidence level and the confidence interval together, you can say that you are 95% sure that the true percentage of the population is between 43% and 51%.

The wider the confidence interval you are willing to accept, the more certain you can be that the whole population answers would be within that range.
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http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm

The example above uses the most popular confidence level: 95%. The confidence interval is simply stipulating how far to either side of the observed (surveyed) results that it would still make a difference to you. For ultra-important issues, one might argue for the 99% level and, to keep it simple, let's assume that results would matter to us if they were restricted to plus or minus 4% of whatever was observed (surveyed).

If we do this with the above example -- i.e., if we ask what it would take to be "99% sure that the true percentage of the [billion Muslim] population is between 43% and 51% [on an issue] -- then we'd need a random sample of about 1040 to be 99% confident that the sum of all billion answers would be within 4% of those (50,000) surveyed.

In contrast, with a random sample of 50,000 from a billion folks, you can be 99% sure that the whole population (if they were all allowed to answer) would answer the questions similarly to within just under plus or minus 0.5% of the what the surveyed percentage was.

Ed

Post 17

Saturday, March 22 - 12:22pm

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You're still postulating the mythology of human peas....

Post 18

Saturday, March 22 - 12:30pm

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Teresa,

Your quote and consequent appraisal of the US News/World Report writer (Alex Kingsbury) -- the one where he tells us that we should all admire the human error that is Islam -- correctly repudiates him as a straight and clear thinker. Even still, that does not necessarily refute the research that he is interpreting within his wrong worldview (it's simply shows how out of touch with reality he is, in general -- as a human being living on planet Earth).

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 3/22, 12:40pm)

Post 19

Saturday, March 22 - 12:58pm

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The confidence interval is the plus-or-minus figure usually reported in newspaper or television opinion poll results. For example, if you use a confidence interval of 4 and 47% percent of your sample picks an answer you can be "sure" that if you had asked the question of the entire relevant population between 43% (47-4) and 51% (47+4) would have picked that answer.

I'm speechless. This formulation seems so reckless to me. Is this sort of thing really accurate? How is a confidence level determined?

I still won't be embracing much of Islam any time soon, and prefer to take people as they come, but, wow, Ed. Thanks for the lesson.

Islam Update