I for one welcome our seat overlords!
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I love these situations that expose the pure ideological background of an reaction. In this case it is almost the perfect gestalt of islamophobia.
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I await the inevitable spate of hate crimes in Norway against bus seats…
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I like that the other article had a tag of (among others) “Islamophobia”, in comparison to this one being “racism”. I finished it thinking “Islam isn’t a race, is it?” There are so many good arguments against racism which I think are much stronger if people are consistent in what it means. Is it because many USians use Islam as a shorthand for “Arabs”? Well, Arab isn’t a race either, that would be ethnocentrism. IMO a clear understanding of the real intersectionality of how bigotry plays out benefits from dealing with the parts as distinct phenomena first - and then how those parts intersect.
With which statement do you disagree?
There is a strong whiff of hypocrisy when Norwegian xenophobes fixate on the threat of Islamist terror attacks.
Well of course, and this is completely consistent with my post.
Oh dear, more category trouble that no one else is having!
Xenophobia sucks big time, no matter what the particular group of people are.
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So, Daesh are the Klingons then? Can’t be… Klingon women are warriors, too.
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I know, right? And then you have those same men who are impersonating women as a ploy to get into their restrooms and locker rooms who are going to start trying to ride these women-only buses, too!
There’s going to be so many men patrolling women’s restrooms and locker rooms to prevent imposters from getting in, there won’t even be enough left to monitor bus stops.
#thinkofthechildren
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#popopedantry
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It would be honest if you were speaking for yourself, rather than everyone else. That much I could respect.
I agree, and suspect that the mechanisms behind the tribalism at play work in much the same way. But the symptoms in society are different, as are the justifications behind them. So if one is going to argue against racism, for instance, it is worthwhile to make that a solid argument. Rather than preaching to the converted with sloppy rhetoric that one’s ideological opponents can easily point out the contradictions of. I.E. religion is racism (Islam), nationalism is racism (Mexico), etc.
If we expect people to give our sloppy argument a pass because they mean well, because they are One Of Us, then we risk falling prey to a form of that insidious tribalism ourselves. So to me, nailing those lame justifications for bigotry matters, even if it feels at times like a form of rhetorical wack-a-mole that one never conclusively wins. I can appreciate if some disagree. But I think people aren’t consistent about this. People make a distinction between racism and sexism rather than lumping it together under a larger umbrella of “bigotry” or “xenophobia” precisely because the differences of identity and rationale matter - except for when they somehow don’t. But maybe should? YMMV. I am genuinely curious why people more seldom make the same distinctions about ethnic and/or religious bigotry as they easily do for race, sex, and class - for example.
But, no, I wouldn’t appreciate being told that the differences were irrelevant, simply because it was me discussing them. As opposed to some academic or other person who anybody actually respected bringing it up. Because competing for attention and influence seems rather gauche.
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I anxiously await the scintillating discussion you’ve initiated on just how to categorize the members of this group of unjustly targeted people.
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It is not my intention to initiate any such discussion. I only remarked upon a difference I noticed about two articles referring to the same event, and extrapolated about people’s perceptions of it. If anybody else has any further thoughts about that, maybe it will be discussed. Otherwise, I said what I had to say, and would prefer not needing to waste verbiage to justify it out of context. One can read an article and have some brief opinion or perspective upon it without it needing to be a controversy for its own sake.
While Arab/Persian/et al might be the default stereotype for a lot of people, there a ton of African and Asian Muslims. Arabs only make up ~20% of the Muslim population. There is pretty robust Somali population in parts of the US, for example. Indonesia has the largest population, which got that way via trade and adopting the culture/religion of those they traded with.
So no, it isn’t really a racist thing, per se. At least not a single race.
Ironically, Islamophobes use the fact that the practitioners are multi-ethic to some how soften their Islamophobia because it isn’t really racists, seeing as how just about all races are included.
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more upstanding, less bystanding. That’s my approach.
#nthworldproblems
(all in fun, popo, all in fun)
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[Dane] That is a nice way of saying INBRED YOKELS. [/Dane]
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Yeah, It seems to me that most members of those sort of groups are people who live outside of the larger (well, Oslo, the capital of Norway only has a population of about 800K, so everything is relative I guess) cities, they are nominally christian and members of the middle or lower social class and they’ve little or no experience with actual immigrants.
Also, for some reason a lot of these posts on social media are all spelled weirdly. Like they’ve all decided to write out their dialects phonetically. And they aren’t especially concerned with being consistent either. I don’t want to imply that they are less intelligent, it feels more like a sort of weird rebellion against some perceived threat against their local (very local) culture.
Well, I think part of the problem is that the people generally being Islamophobes and racists aren’t too big on nuances in the first place.
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Well, of course there’s Norwegian, and there’s Norwegian.(*)
(*) Nynorsk and Bokmål
