Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
i did more than that, I specified why I thought they weren't indicative, and even listed ways to make them become indicative if you had more of them. It's a touch disingenuous to compare a multi-post discussion of the arguments to a fast, paragraph long dismissal.Well, that's pretty much what happened when you dismissed some of my points as "isolated incidents". I listed a small number of things, and you dismissed them as not indicative of a pattern. I'm calling the same here. At least my items were from the public, national stage, not undocumented personal discussions.
Further, I addressed your statement in good faith, here, and showed why I felt that your dismissal wasn't valid -- specifically I addressed where I see such argument (the media), showing that they weren't isolated or limited to my personal sphere. So my items are also public, national stage, and not undocumented personal discussions.
Ah, I see. You're just arguing that I am wrong because there are some people that are irrational in their fear. Sure, I agree, there are irrational people that have an irrational fear of Islam, in which case Islamophobia is appropriate. Granted and agreed.No - stating that insufficient evidence has been given is not an implication that the opposite is true. It merely says the question is still open.
I'm not usually a fan of absolute assertions. I don't think *all* folks criticizing Islam are doing so because they are phobic. However, "not all X!" (Not all men! Not all Republicans! Not all gun owners! Not all Democrats! Not all Christians!) is known to be an informal logical fallacy - a bit of rhetorical judo that attempts to redirect discussion of a problem to the innocence of some subset of the accused (and all too often to how that subset is unfortunately put upon by being accused). I'm saying you have not demonstrated enough folks aren't phobic hat we can safely ignore the phenomenon.
However, I was arguing how it was used here, and in that case, my arguments are valid. In the general, most people concerned with Islam have rational fears. They may fear that people who worship Islam are terrorists. This is incorrect, but not an irrational fear. If you believe that people who worship Islam are terrorist, or harbor terrorist sympathies, then it's very, very rational to fear them. It's also narrowminded, uneducated, and bigoted, but not irrational. If you criticize Islam for their treatment of women, that's also rational -- there's a large body of confirmed evidence that suggests that in many Islam countries women are oppressed. That it's also true that there are Islamic countries where they aren't oppressed doesn't mean that the person only exposed to the former evidence is making an irrational choice to be critical of Islam.
You don't have to agree with the reasons, you don't even have to think they're true, but if there is a held belief, and you are critical of something because of that held belief, then you are being rational. The premise might not be rational, but he logical chain built on that premise can be. Logic is fun that way.
What about the assertion that I was countering -- that people have an irrational fear of Islam because they don't want Sharia law? Shouldn't that have to have some evidence before my refutation is held to an evidentiary standard? I'm all for standards, so long as they're applied evenly.I don't need to. You made an implied assertion. Burden of proof is on you to give support.
Further, I've supported all of my arguments with rationals and descriptions of why I think the way I do. You may disagree, but you can't claim I haven't backed up my arguments.
Yes, I'm noticing that.It is a well-known bit of human psychology that a great many of our opinions and decisions are made on an emotional basis, and the reason given is a rationalization after the fact. And, the speaker usually *believes* the rationalization is the logical reason - that's an unfortunate artifact of how the human mind works. But, when you probe, you find that the speaker will generally resist even after the rational point has been shown to not apply.
Okay, so you can't trust what a person tells you they're thinking, you must use, um, some other technique to glean what they really think because people can't be trusted to even know what it is they're really thinking.Thus, broadly, we cannot automatically trust stated reasons. We need to probe deeper in order to trust that the issue is not one of a more basic emotional response (like fear).
Good luck with that. I prefer to take what people say at face value and only question it if their actions are not in line with their stated beliefs. I don't assume people aren't telling me the truth without evidence to the contrary, cognitive bias notwithstanding.
But I'm now curious. What's your opinion of what my actual reasons for making my arguments here are? You've all but implied I'm suffering from cognitive bias, so I'm curious as to what you think my bias is.