A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
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Right? If someone is in the subway NOT walking briskly, staring straight ahead, THAT is suspicious!
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With “idiot” I’m just ribbing OM about PC laguage. Pedantry can go both ways, as you allude to. However, religion is not, in fact, a race, whereas writing fictional accounts does fit some definitions of lying, eg. Wikionary:
[Quote]liar…
(intransitive) If you lie, you say or write something that you know is not true.
[/quote]
Great. Now my other question?
Edit: Although I do like the way you’re willing to accept “some definitions” of lying, but only one definition of racial profiling.
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I’m actually against France’s attempts to make everyone wear skimpy swimsuits. But I think full face mask bans that are evenly applied to all people of all religions and none, are a justifiable line to draw in the balance of rights.
Yes but why draw the line at all? What good will that do? It’s a stupid idea and it makes us less safe, not more.
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How does it make us less safe?
Thanks for reading.
You might as well have your officers on the lookout for this guy:
Not to mention that deprivation of religious freedom is often a stated reason for terrorist attacks in the first place. Dressing the law up as “all facial coverings” doesn’t change that it persecutes Muslims, either.
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It isn’t “dressing up” at all. Laws banning full face masks pre-date this current spate of niqab and burka wearing women in the US. Many of the laws were instituted to help protect minorities from the violence and oppression met out by hooded KKK members. If you want the law to apply to the Klan you have to apply it evenly to all people, of all religions and no religion.
So, simple question. Should KKK members be able to wear full face mask hoods in public with impunity? Yes or no?
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Careful. When islamic extremist terrorists say that, they’re typically meaning things like the freedom to amputate baby girls’ clitorises and the freedom to throw rocks at adulterers until they’re a bloody spot on the street. Not the freedom to wear what they want or the freedom to pray however many times a day. That’s what makes them extremists.
Which isn’t to say it’s a good idea to ban the niqab. It’s moronic and insecure to care that much about how anyone else dresses. I’m saying it’s not a great idea to take islamic terrorists at the arbiters of rationally explaining what they did in terms that we can assume the best intentions of.
I don’t.
I think that anonymity is necessary for free speech laws to have their full effect.
I think that anonymity is an important part of being able to protest against your government.
I think that there are dozens of legitimate reasons to cover your face other than deliberate concealment of identity (ranging from weather protection, to hazard protection, to cosplay, to health reasons, and beyond).
I think that laws that criminalize more harmless behavior than harmful behavior are stupid by definition.
I think that people committing crimes are less likely to hide their faces, as doing so draws attention to them.
What clothing I wear is part of my freedom of expression. Depending on what clothing it is, it could also be freedom of speech, or freedom of association, or freedom of religion, or all three at once. It also invokes the freedom to do whatever I want to my own body, so long as I don’t violate anyone else’s rights.
That’s a whole bunch of my rights that you want to infringe upon by banning full face masks. You say that doing so would be a good “balance of rights.”
Exactly what rights are you “balancing” the loss of those rights against?
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I can respect a consistent position. Your post means you support the right of the KKK to wear full face mask hoods in public. That’s one of the trade offs. We are each drawing a line where we are comfortable with the balance of rights. I draw the line on the side that prohibits the KKK from being completely covered in public. But do concur that drawing a line there does have some trade-offs for legitimate privacy conserns.
for some reason your post reminds me of a line from anatole france-- the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
i think the designation you’re really looking for is trolley not idiot. it’s a better fit.
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Right, because full face masks are the equvililent of food and shelter.
/s
You are a poor listener. You focus on the parts of people’s arguments that suit you and you interpret them in the fashion that you think will be easiest to beat, rather than making the effort to see them in their best forms.
I’m still waiting for responses from you about the parallels between facial coverings and opaque sacks, your inconsistencies in the definitions of words that you choose to accept, the assertion that your proposed law would fail to make anyone safer, or any kind of justification at all for behavioural profiling based on expressions or body language, and just one example of a recent terrorist who bothered to wear a mask.
I feel foolish for engaging you. I’m going on holiday.
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They’re dead-set on a technical win in the worst way. I’m guilty of it often enough to recognize it. Too bad the thread’s ranged so far afield that any victory at all for any participant would be pyrrhic and generally meaningless at this point.
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That’s a lot of words to avoid answering my simple question about whether you support the right of the KKK to wear full face masks in public with impunity.
Do you? Yes or no?
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they kept working over the concept of the coercion inherent in the hijab in this comment thread – Muslim-American woman kicked out of Family Dollar store for wearing hijab and niqab
they seem to have abandoned that line of excreta in favor of straight up discrimination against muslim women in this thread.
although quibbling over minutiae was part of their approach in both threads.
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If you actually read my posts you’ll find that isn’t true. I conceed that my position has trade offs.
Listen, we’re too alike for me to go back on what I said. You’ve conceded a few points, but you’re still battling the wrong thing here, and I wish that you’d had the grace or tact to just say something like “while I don’t agree it’s ‘race’…”
Instead you decided to get into an argument about linguistics, law, personal identification, socially acceptable behavior, individual choice of clothing, semantics, and irrelevant psychology from a century or so ago.
You’ve chosen to change the topic to something tenuously related every time someone else has rebutted your claim and you yourself have been moving goalposts. For shame, @skeptic. We all fall down sometimes, but you don’t have to fish-flop down the stairs. I’m trying to be kind here, but you’ve decided to change topics as often as you lose on the specific point. I’ve done it too. My history here is public, you can see for yourself. It feels bad losing the fight, but at this point you might as well either try to get back on topic, or peace-out. I’m not telling you to leave. By all means stay. But you’ve stopped contributing value to the conversation long ago.
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