Ultimately, we have a candidate who did say “a complete and total ban on Muslims entering the United States” and a candidate who didn’t say that. If people need anything else to be convinced, then I don’t even know what to say. It has got to be not OK to say that, period.
Ultimately
Clarissa's Blog 
Yup. Anyone claiming to be ‘undecided’ in this election should be presumed to have the consciousness of a potted plant, and thus, be treated like one. By that I mean, they should be turned towards the sun and watered frequently to ensure they reach their full potential.
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Did you know about this?
Click to access FDR_3310_Mexico_Is_Sending.pdf
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No, but it’s good, reasonable advice. Thank you, I will probably use this in class.
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Strange artwork for a serious publication — notice how deliberately sexualized all the women are?
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I don’t know how official it is, but it’s good common-sense advice.
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It was an official document of the Mexican government.
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“notice how deliberately sexualized all the women are?”
!Bienvenido a la cultura mexicana!
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To be a little clearer, Mexico is not really known for having a reading culture (what I call bibliophobia is a recurring theme and problem in many hispanic countries).
On the other hand, various types of picture/comic books were extremely common (I assume they still are). Some of these were photonovels (you probably saw those in Italy) but mostly it’s just comic books (almost all mexican made).
In mexican comic books not matter the general almost all adult women (besides the old and/or sometimes Indian) were hyper-sexualized.
It’s a visual language that all Mexicans are very familiar with so it makes sense that a governmnet publication would use familiar imagery rather than something more…. realistic.
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During my time stationed in Sigonella and Sicily, I remember the pornographic comics books and related fumetti strips quite well, and how Italian television shows would sign off at night, not with the national anthem and a patriotic display of military firepower like on American television, but with a young Italian girl doing obscene things to her body.
After returning to the U.S., I was surprised at how much American Spanish-language television — with its tamed-down T&A compared to full-frontal Italian television programs — mimicked its fellow Romantic-language country in Europe.
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Who was the candidate who called for “a complete and total ban on Muslims entering the United States?” Trump called for a ban until we figure our who’s coming to kill us and who isn’t — of which we are now doing a pretty bad job.
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim reformer, has called for much the same ban as did Trump, although in the video embedded below he seems at first to be confused by the host’s mischaracterization of Trump’s position. Dr. Zasser wants to see all Islamists (advocates of political Islam) banned, permanently. Islamists seek to have America adopt Sharia law and otherwise become Islamic.
Here’s how Dr. Jasser hopes to change Islam.
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More islamophobic garbage again. What about stopping to make the muslim’s lives miserable by bombarding their country and creating Al Qaïda and ISIS like both political parties have done and still do right now?
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Are you suggesting that Dr. Jasser — a Muslim — is “Islamophobic?”
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You people are getting desperate. Dr. Jasser seems to perform the same duties for republicans vis-a-vis muslims as Dr. Carson does with black people.
This is your version of Trump saying ‘Look at my african-american over here’ in his speech yesterday when he found one black man in his audience.
Lol@ you once again, panamahat.
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Absolutely. Like Hirsi Ali in Europe and Benhabib in Québec.
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Hirsi Ali would probably even approve of these horribly blasphemous women. Although mere females should be submissive to men in all respects, they lead Muslim prayer services. Indeed, some don’t cover their hair even though their rightful masters, men, are present. They must be Islamophobes. What would the Council on American-Islamic relations say?
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It’s true that there is nothing specifically Muslim in head coverings or anything anti-Muslim in an absence of head coverings.
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The sermon got a very adverse reaction from many Muslims.
I don’t expect to see a Muslim reformation during my lifetime. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has said that she (much younger than I am) does not. After all, the Protestant reformation took a long time. Still, I am guardedly optimistic and America, with its traditions of freedom of speech and separation of church and state, is a likely place for it to grow.
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This is a good thing that many muslim women decide to not be treated like crap.
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Women imams…this is blasphemous even for catholics.
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I am convinced… To vote for Trump!
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I am convinced… To vote for Trump!
There has been too many murderous and sexual attacks on the US, Europe and other places. Islam is a common denominator. Something is horrible is going on. I don’t see a pattern of Buddhist, Jewish, or Hindu attacks like there is with Islam.
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More islamophobic garbage again. What about stopping to make the muslim’s lives miserable by bombarding their country and creating Al Qaïda and ISIS like both political parties have done and still do right now?
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I am against Iraq, Libya, and going to war with Assad. Blowback doesn’t explain why Germany, Sweden, Belgium, and France have been having so many attacks recently. The Boston bombers were also from Chechnya. As far as I know the US didn’t go to war in Chechnya.
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“The Boston bombers were also from Chechnya. As far as I know the US didn’t go to war in Chechnya.”
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Does that include people that were born after the collapse of the USSR, or shortly before the collapse?
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Once the tradition is broken, there’s no bringing it back. In the US, Christians from families that have been religious forever can’t get their children to practice. How do you imagine getting people who are children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of militant atheists to practice religion in fiercely consumerist, capitalist societies?
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“The Tsarnaevs are Muslim like I’m a ballerina.”
I completely don’t undersand how you determine if a person is a “real” Christian, Muslim or Jew (religion).
What does a person have to do (and for how long) for you to consider them to be a real Muslim, Christian or Jew (religon, not genetics).
IIRC Russian distinguishes between the Jewish (genetically defined) group and those who follow the religion of Judaism. English badly needs a quick convenient way to make that distinction.
Myself, I’m a behaviorist in this regard. I could care less what the holy text says, if a person says “I’m a X” I take them at that word and define the religion as “what people who identify as that religion do” .
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The Russian Orthodox Church has many different fasts of varying duration. The longest is the Great Fast that lasts for several weeks and is very harsh. It ends with an all-night service and the ceremony of carrying the cross around the church. After that, you can come home and finally break the fast by eating all the foods you were not allowed to eat while the fast continued.
Last month I called my mother and she announced happily, “We broke the fast yesterday! Did everything according to the rules! Had an enormous meal.”
“But, Mom,” I said, “you weren’t fasting. You ate whatever you wanted this entire time.”
“Well, duh,” she said, “but we broke the fast according to all the rules.”
This is how post-Soviet people do religion. It’s done, it’s dead, nothing will bring it back. Several generations of happy atheists, and there’s no coming back from that.
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“This is how post-Soviet people do religion. It’s done, it’s dead, nothing will bring it back. ”
I think this is your rigidity acting up. The fasts sound like a tradition and not a belief system as such. Traditions change all the time (the fasts didn’t arise out of nothing or divine revelation).
This is like saying that there are no practicing Catholics anymore because they have breakfast before going to church (it used to be a person wasn’t supposed to eat or drink from after the Saturday evening meal until after mass on Sunday.
“Several generations of happy atheists, and there’s no coming back from that”
Except they obviously weren’t happy atheists or they wouldn’t be going through the trouble of reviving whatever observance they do happen to muster up.
When I was in Romania just before their Easter I couldn’t help noticing that a great many churches were visibly in far better shape and many were under rennovation (the last time I was there there was nothing like that).
For about a week before Easter every day I kept going by churches that were full of people doing Romanian orthodox things (I’d never seen a semandron being played before).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantron
Of course Romania wasn’t the USSR (it was actually worse in many respects) but I’m not going to tell them they’re not ‘real’ Christians because they’re not practicing some pre-communist tradition – traditions are made and maintained and modified as needed.
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It’s all like that, though. It’s consumerist in the extreme. Eating a huge meal, taking a salami to church to have it blessed. It got fashionable to take salamis or jars of pickles to churches, so people do that. Just like in the Soviet time it was fashionable to queue up to gawk at Lenin’s corpse. It’s just a way to pass time. There is neither the content nor the form of any actual religious practice in it.
Another post-Soviet story. A businessman invited an Orthodox priest to come bless his office. The priest asked for a huge amount of money, though. So the businessman refused his services. On the next day, a group of Chechens showed up to beat up the businessman and get him to pay the priest.
“Aren’t you guys supposed to be Muslim?” the businessman exclaimed. “How come you work for a priest?”
“God is one,” the Chechens explained.
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Well, it is complicated… Perhaps you are influenced by your experiences growing up as a child of intelligentsia (more naturally indifferent to religion, or even anti-religious) in a rich apparatchik (more cynical than average) kid school in a relatively large city.
In my class vast majority of kids were baptized… They were not particularly religious, but it is also incorrect to say that they had no religious background whatsoever. And then the Soviet society crumbled… We see people all around the world being scared by life changing too fast, which results in increasing popularity of all kinds of weird brands of conservatism (I am being gentle here). Why does it feel unrealistic to you that many ex-Soviet people, once their tolerance for change was exhausted, genuinely turned to religion for safety? How much they fast is relatively minor detail here…
So I guess I am with Cliff here – if they self-identify as religious, I accept them as such.
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As I said, I find the currently fashionable approach of, “If a petite 18-year-old white girl self-identifies as a tall 50-year-old black man from Kenya, I accept her as such” to be unfortunate and dangerous. Self-identification does not trump reality.
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I am sorry, but your definition of reality in this case is also based not on a direct observation, but on “due to such and such historic reasons it SHOULD (or should not) be so”… IMHO.
Christianity evolves… Mass-product Christianity, so to speak, evolves as well. It being offensive or ridiculous to a more thoughtful Christian does not make it non-christian.
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I highly recommend reading Rod Dreher’s blog to people interested in the evolution of Christianity in consumer societies. Unlike me, he’s an actual practicing Orthodox Christian and he explains the reasons why Christianity is dying a lot better than I do. The fellow has many and numerous flaws – he’s got an issue with women from here to the moon – but his online community is eye-opening in what concerns the Christian opposition to trans toilets and gay marriage.
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More islamophobic garbage again. What about stopping to make the muslim’s lives miserable by bombarding their country and creating Al Qaïda and ISIS like both political parties have done and still do right now?
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And right now, the worst terrorists against Trump are not muslims.
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“If people need anything else to be convinced, then I don’t even know what to say.”
You could say what the NYT said when it went full Godwin’s Law recently.
“President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico criticized Mr. Trump’s plans to build a wall on the border and to bar Muslims from entering the United States. ‘That’s the way Mussolini arrived and the way Hitler arrived,’ he said. The actor George Clooney called Mr. Trump ‘a xenophobic fascist.’ Louis C.K., the comic, said, ‘The guy is Hitler.’ Eva Schloss, the 87-year-old stepsister of Anne Frank, said Trump ‘is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism.’ It got to the point that his wife, Melania Trump, was prompted to say, ‘He’s not Hitler.’”
Personally I think that Trump acts more like a Latin American caudillo.
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I agree completely with the caudillo analogy. For all his,dislike of Hispanics, Trump would be very much at home in a typical Latin American dictatorship.
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“It’s all like that, though. It’s consumerist in the extreme.”
Well in a consumerist world, all organized religion will become consumerist as well.
The hijab is a very modern innovation and all about consumerism (put ‘hijab fashion’ into google).
Would you say that women who wear it aren’t real muslims?
For that matter, how much of Orthodox judaism is about consumerism? Special clothes like the streimel (and kosher sheitels for women) aren’t cheap.
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I just think that religion has got to be something more than one of these postmodern identities where I declare that today I’m a 90-year-old man from Mongolia and everybody has to believe me because it’s all about what I say and not about any actual reality.
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“As I said, I find the currently fashionable approach of, “If a petite 18-year-old white girl self-identifies as a tall 50-year-old black man from Kenya, I accept her as such” to be unfortunate and dangerous. Self-identification does not trump reality.”
But religion is not a question of genetics or verifiable biological reality. Religion has always been a question of self-identification (with the holy texts of various religions only being a rough guide to what those who identify with the religon might believe or do at any given place or time).
Many people acquire, lose, or change religious affiliation while no one can age 32 years just by saying so or change their genetics.
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Neither is being a professor of Hispanic Studies a question of genetics. But if one says “I’m a professor”, we expect this to be borne out by some sort of practice. At the very least, a person needs to speak Spanish.
It is the testament to the collapse of Christianity that people have accepted the idea that Word resides not with God but with human beings so completely. Why do you think Christians are in such a,terror over transcender toilets? It’s precisely because in their worldview, the belief that humans are entitled to create reality by naming it is the greatest blasphemy. But their existential angst is not even understood by the majority, let alone accepted as valid.
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