rationalskepticism.org

Scot Dutchy wrote:

trogs wrote:If the guy had been shouting that he was acting in the name of Jesus, had a Jesus-headband on in stead of a Mohammed-headband on, etc, this thread would have been a lot simpler.

Yep exactly! Cant touch the muslims can we.

Not exactly my point. Rather, there wouldn't be a "left vs right" identity politics element to the discussion. It would just be "crazy vs non-crazy", much the same as if the gunman was an atheist.

When Anders Breivik shot a bunch of people (and yes, he was Christian), not a lot of people came online pretending to make a point by saying "we shouldn't judge all Christians", or all Norwegians, or all males, or all people with ten fingers, based on what Breivik did. If anyone said anything so inane in the case of Breivik, they'd be met with eyebrow-raised incomprehension. There wasn't a (fake) story about somebody giving a nun a hug, or a #-campaign. Atheists on rational skeptic fora didn't spend pages disagreeing about much, because there wasn't anything to disagree about. It was nice and simple.

In this case, the #illridewithyou stuff (and the equally inane anti-muslim stuff) started within hours, done almost entirely by non-muslims, doing identity-politics "debate" with other non-muslims identity politics debaters. And by "debate", I mean soundbite blather, douchebag vs turd sandwich, devoid of content.

Identity politics makes people less able to think.

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:What a retarded thing to say. Making generalisations about Christians based on one christian terrorist is just as stupid.

Not quite what I said, is it?

Whenever you write a post, Rachel... somewhere, a cow farts into the wind.