Except she'll actually be killed, not just relentlessly tormented for lulz.

Do spite donations make you an Islamophobe in this case?

"Relentlessly tormented for lulz" until someone decides they've had enough, or she quits.

Anita may be safer than Mia, but the fact that they both have to contemplate reprisals for their chosen career puts them in territory that I know I have never had to worry about.

I mean this is like 99.99% sexism, with just a pinch of Muslim intolerance for flavor, RIGHT Bort?!?

You seem to have a great deal of trouble with this.

By all means, go after any Muslims who are misogynists or who shoot up cartoonists or whatever. Just don't generalize it to Islam in general, because when you do that, you're saying that all Muslims are that way at least a little, and that is bigotry.

If we were talking about a strain of right-wing Christians who were sending death threats to a porn star, we wouldn't need to be have this discussion, because not even you would be thinking, "yep, that's just Christians being Christians".

You don't have to be an Islamophobe to not approve of the mandates in the Quran for death.

Who's the "we" in your example? The global Ayatolla Fedora shadow cabal?

Your parallel doesn't even begin to make sense, and grossly cheapens Ms. Khalifa's situation.

SONIC AKBAR! SONIC AKBAR! The Grand Fedora WolfxShadow96 has this day issued a glorious fatwa, commanding all True Gamers to destroy the kafir Anita wherever she may be found! Whomever sends her soul to Robotnik shall enjoy an eternity in paradise, surrounded by pink-haired lolis and waterfalls of Mountain Dew!

On a slightly different note: is porn now deemed OK according to the Central Office of Absolutely All Feminism? I hope so, because we'll need something to occupy ourselves now that gaming is evil.

83% of Muslims worldwide (of which there are 1.6 billion) think it's the right thing to do to execute people for apostasy. So fuck you Bort. The actual radical muslims are the 17% who don't wanna do that. The overwhelming majority of Muslims have no desire to get along with anyone else. Fuck em all. We've given them enough chances.

Well it sure is convenient that, in your world, it all boils down to a simple percentage. Unsurprisingly, the reality is more complex.

http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion -politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/

Actually read the damn thing. Notice that your 83% figure is nowhere to be found; notice that the "Penalty for Converting to Another Faith" percentages are among those who have already said that they would like Sharia law to be the law of the land (so they're a percentage of a percentage); note that the fact we're talking percentages of percentages means that you can't just say "Sharia law" and assume that everyone is in agreement about what that means; and note that most Muslims who want Sharia law feel it should apply to Muslims only.

Notice that the great majority of Muslims also support democracy and religious freedom (even for non-Muslims). Support for suicide bombing is very low, though; it peaks in Palestine and Afghanistan at 40%, and then trails off. Lower than 15% is typical.

I sure look forward to continued idiocy from Dr. Robotnik

Whew, what a relief! Fifteen percent is only the TYPICAL support level for suicide bombing. So, if we let 100 muslims into the county, only 15 of them will support suicide bombing...typically. I like those odds!

Islam sucks, Christianity sucks

"Whew, what a relief! Fifteen percent is only the TYPICAL support level for suicide bombing. So, if we let 100 muslims into the county, only 15 of them will support suicide bombing...typically. I like those odds!"

I don't think they're talking about blowing shit up just because they're mad at their neighbor, I imagine they're talking about how to deal with an occupying force. At least that would explain why it's highest in countries that have an actual occupying force to contend with, like Afghanistan and Palestine. Everywhere else, though, the overwhelming opinion seems to be that suicide bombings are not justified.

Does Pew keep statistics on how many secular Westerners are in favour of bombing Muslim countries which aren't being progressive enough?

Not joking, I'm honestly curious about this.

New season of Numberwang sucks.

Just like christianity - the most moral examples of people in Islam are the ones who aren't following their holy book very closely.

Palestine isn't a nation. Time to send the Jordanian refugees in that area back to Jordan.

I'd say "lower than 15%" in support of suicide bombing is not really anything to celebrate.

Also, the cited "threats" seem more concerned with Lebanese nationalism than with Islam. One might argue that these two concepts are tied together, but they are not one and the same.

They're tied together.

Also, the hijab thing was part of the pissoff.

... but not one and the same.

People are free to read the Muslim Menace into this, just keep in mind what the reporter actually says: somewhere on the internet, a handful of random Twitter followers got butthurt over seeing a pornstar with a patriotic tattoo.

"Those people must be Syrians. Lebanese are civilized." -an actual Lebanese person I know.

meant as reply to Bort

You do realize the "not all Muslims" things is starting to take on the ring of the "not all men" defense?

Okay, then consider this. If Muslims on the whole were the monsters that some people want to believe they are, where are the murder squads here in the US? There are enough Muslims around that we ought to read frequent reports of Muslims killing people for no other reason than not being Muslims. But it's not happening, which forces me to call bullshit.

Two Muslims went apeshit in Paris and folks are panicking. Never mind that some of the people they killed were Muslims, and in that kosher grocery store, a Muslim saved several Jewish hostages by hiding them in the walk-in refrigerator. Dude had the choice to side with Muslim extremists or with peaceful non-Muslims, and he made the civilized choice.

Here in the West, the great majority of Muslims play by the same rules the rest of us do. Elsewhere in the world, there are some Muslim hellholes that I would never want to live in, I won't deny it; but even then, some of those hellholes used to be vastly better before the fundamentalists took over (Iran and Afghanistan come to mind). And I hate to take any sort of historical look at any of this -- because God forbid I try to understand why hellholes are hellholes -- but pretty much every nation in the Middle East is still dealing with the aftereffects of Western exploitation, which has set back the cause of self-determination decades or even centuries. So not even the hellholes are Muslims' fault, not entirely. Which doesn't excuse the problems in the Muslim world, but neither is it fair to impose shit on them and then act like we're not a factor.

Most religions are a subset of sexism, designed to promote a paternalistic society directly or indirectly ruled over by the priesthood, who use parlor tricks and guilt to ensure compliance.

"And IF Christians sent more death threats, killed more people over cartoons, jailed and oppressed people for the list of reasons that they do in Islamic countries, then I would start to say "that's Christians being Christians". When it comes to fundamentalist Christians, I already do."


They're called "Congress."

I would hope that other people view this the same way I do:

Obviously not all muslims are bad, but the Quran clearly states muslims who do not partake in killing infidels are less worthy in the eyes of allah. So the muslims who aren't down with all this violence? Technically, as defined by their own faith, they are "bad muslims". Because they aren't violent enough.

Condemning the entire religion is alright, so long as you dont condemn the people who aren't using it as a justification for violence. The religion's main reason for existing was simply an attempt to negate the christian faith - no other faith on the world prefaces itself by condemning the others and talking about hitler-esque "finality" in terms of being the "One True Religious Solution", with a sense of manifest destiny even more diseased than early america.

There are plenty of normal human beings who happen to have been brought up muslim, and some of them realize it's bullshit or at least that the violent parts of the Quran are to be ignored. If they're able to take some spiritual meaning away from the other passages, more power to them. So long as they're not fervently advocating sharia over the entire planet, they aren't bad human beings. The ones who do, are.

I think many Muslim scholars would disagree with you on how to read the parts about killing infidels, but you're not lumping all Muslims together as essentially orcs from LotR, and that's the important part as I see it. Some Muslims are monsters, others are damn fine people, still others are jerks who need some work. And I won't deny that the Muslim world overall has big problems with gender equality, LGBT rights, etc; then again, the West doesn't really have much of a track record either (we're only now getting around to gay marriage and even that is hotly contested).

So the "this is JUST LIKE Anita Sarkessian" crowd are also bigots who paint an entire religion with the same brush?

It's ironic, but not surprising coming from people who desperately need boogie men to hate just to get up out of bed in the morning.

*cough cough cough*

President store is closed. Please check back between 7AM and 6PM.

You don't want a president, you want an area rug.

An aaaaarrrghrrrghllggghhhl raaaaaaaaghhh!!!!!!

I also saw Wiz.

It's a newness thing, Christians acted the same way 50 years ago...while porn hasn't been widely accessable in the middle east until recently (it was banned under Saddam in Iraq, among many others.)

The reality, I think, is that it's easy for some people, hard for some, and impossible for others. A wide variety of people are attracted to porn; they're all, I'd suggest,unusual in one way or another, and some are already damaged.

Hard for some.

It looks like she's already got the horrifying, Lovecraftian breast implants. That's not an auspicious sign.

Lose 3 sanity points for indescribable tits.

Formless Mammary Glands of Tsathoggua.

>>and to mistake religion for politics.

I meant it the other way around.

Getting *you* to agree with me was an accident, yes.

My main point was the one further down: that this story is long on headline, short on news. There's a big difference between a handful of nasty Tweets and what happened to Salman Rushdie, Jyllands-Posten, or Charlie Hebdo. We're invited to make that leap, to read our favorite lurid, scary socio-political commentary into this piece of clickbait fluff, but the connection is just not there.

However, since we're on the topic anyway, warranted or not, it bears pointing out that wishing death upon people you don't like, even in passing, is not the sole purview of Muslims. It's not the sole purview of Christians, either - people from every conceivable group do this, often without even thinking about it. Consider Fred Phelps and the WBC. Westboro Baptist was a universally hated social minority - in all the years since GodHatesFags went live, I have never once encountered anybody who had a single thing nice to say about those clowns. Even their own families hated them.

Now the WBC received *death threats on a daily basis*. Of these threats, most of them were shitposting, some of them could well have been credible... and nearly all of them came from people who, I dare say, would consider themselves to be Liberal, Tolerant, and Progressive. These "Good Americans" justified their behavior by citing their principles, by saying that, through wishing death upon a family whose sole crime was flaunting heresies in public, they were simply "Standing up!" to "Evil!". I ask you: is that so different from what Muslims are doing? If I were, say, a North Korean political commentator, would it be fair for me to point to this behavior as "proof" that liberal Americans are savage, murderous thugs?

P.S. Happy Boxxyversery!

Most of the time, atheists are smart enough to laugh at the religious for generally having absolutely no idea what is in their holy books. Yet all of a sudden, when you feel like justifying your feelings about the Muslims, every last one of them is a goddamn scholar who "runs" the Koran like an operating system?

Only fundamentalists are dumb enough to attempt to take scripture literally. Well, some atheists are that dumb too. For typical practitioners of religions, the question always comes up of how to apply religion to one's culture, and the answer always seems to work out to, make use of the bits that make sense. And as for the parts that run counter to experience -- flying horses and the like -- the usual recourse is to treat it either as a parable or how things were then but are not now.

DQ - assuming what you say is true, then what's the problem here? Is it their *beliefs*? Or is it the *actions* they're willing to take in order to ensure that people outside of their group fall in line?

> ...you really, really need to pick up the Koran and read it sometime, because you know NOTHING about Islam.

And, after you're done reading, you'll still know NOTHING about Islam. Just like you'd be helpless to differentiate between Catholicism and Protestantism after reading the Bible, or between Orthodox or Reform Judaism. Or just like you'd know nothing about federal case law in the United States after reading the Constitution.

I'm actually not a defender of Islam, or Judaism, or Christianity, or Buddhism, or so on.

> they're watered down modernized practitioners who don't actually know the scripture they claim to believe.

Sigh. Here's a thing: Maybe they don't actually claim to "believe" it. Certainly, before American Fundamentalism, the tradition of even Protestant denomination was not one of explicit literalistic "belief," but more like an implicit "reverence" or "hallowing."

You're just going to have to get past this childish idea that religion is precisely "belief in a literal interpretation of a specified text." I would think this would be relatively easy in that that theory can't even explain the existence of denominations, as I talked about above. I mean, if all Christians just "believe the Bible," shouldn't there be just one denomination of Christianity? If all Muslims just "believe the Koran," should there be Shia and Sunnis?

Maybe you should start catching up with the religious, who don't necessarily believe everything they read, by starting to not believe everything you hear about "the religious?" Just a thought.

Well, I have to believe that after reading the Koran, you'll know SOMETHING about Islam.

DairyQueenLatifah, it's not bigotry in their eyes and no doubt there are practices in each religion that current practitioners have abandoned. I dislike the concept of religion because I never understood how it could act beyond culling a sect.

>>Furthermore, saying that assuming all Muslims believe these awful crazy things is "bigotry" is absolutely retarded. It's like saying assuming that Jews and Christians believe homosexuality is wrong is bigotry...um no, no it isn't, because THEIR FUCKING HOLY BOOK SAYS IT GENIUS. Much like if I assume a white nationalist is pro-segregation doesn't make me a bigot.

Where the hell are you going with this? If you're not aware of using a label as a stepping stone then I really don't see how you can say any of what you're saying is anything more than alarmist bullshit. Stop letting the headlines tell you what to think then maybe you'll realize that the bigotry from those cultures isn't reliant on religious dogma. It's reliant from terrible people both in power and in the spot light.

Also worth mentioning, this woman actually works for her money!

I've lost track. Is this empowered because she chooses to do porn, or is she enslaved and objectified by the patriarchy?

Or is it only bad when it's polygons incapable of consent?

yeah, all the losers in gamer gate are 12 year olds...no 30-something losers in that crowd, no sir.

GamerGate has sent at least one SWAT team to a woman they didn't like. Thankfully they were too incompetent to get the address right.

Are 30-something losers dangerous, SolRo?

Not solro, but a lot of 30 (and 40, and 20)-something losers end up on the news for doing horrible shit, so...

lol, OK, OK, I usually hate anything and everything to do with JHMgate, but your OP was funny, Hooker.

I think you have to remember that Mizz Khalifa is Lebanese. Lebanon has been a clusterclop of war and civil violence since well before she was born, so is it any wonder that she's grown up to be far tougher than entitled middle-class Americans? When your idea of hardship and oppression is the student coffeeshop running out of fair trade Yemeni mocca, then potty-mouthed 12yos are kind of a big deal.

Oh goody. More "Dear Muslima" bullshit.

Huh. Apparently GamerGate "12 year olds" have sent SWAT teams after two of their critics (so far):

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/01/gamergate-hits-new-low-with -attempts-to-send-swat-teams-to-critics/comments/

But y'know, keep engaging in the fallacy of relative privation, Homer et al.

Heavens. Calling the police without justifiable cause? GamerGate losers have just moved up to mentally ill significant other on the cream puff to serial killer spectrum.

And who is making a relative privation fallacy? We're not saying the GamerGate assholes aren't only mildly dangerous. We're saying they're not dangerous at all.

Did you even read the link I sent you :/

The one thing I've come to understand is to never trust someone who trivializes things. You know they don't really have good intentions.

the irony is that mia is probably getting more creepy praises from gamergate remnants begging her to tweet #notyourshield #aREALwoman than death threats from muslims at this point.

Oh yeah. You shouldn't fight misogyny in the US because BOKO HARAM.

I didn't know we had an acronym for Female Genital Mutilation. Truly, what a great time to be alive!

And black people in America need to stop whining about cops getting a little rough when black people in Africa have it waaay worse.

Absolutely no one has suggested that we shouldn't fight a given problem if there's a worse problem somewhere else. Which makes SolRo's reply as disingenuously ugly as Bort's first snarky post.

What several people have pointed out already is that the radical Islamic death threats currently being acted on all over the world are VASTLY worse than GamerGate. When you conflate the two, you are insultingly trivializing the victims of genuine horrible violence.

Here, let me rephrase in terms you might just understand:

Bort: I think Gamergate is as bad as the Holocaust.
Everybody Else: Whoa, that's trivializing massive horrible violence by comparing it to a niche culture spat.
SolRo: Oh, so you don't think we should do anything about American police brutality just because it's less bad than the Holocaust?
Everyone Else: Errrmmmm...

tl;dr: Godwin's Law applies to any case of trivializing mass murder, not just Hitler per se

There's nothing worse than being passive aggressive.

Hey Hazelnut, who was it that conflated religious death threats with gamergate death threats (dismissing one of them as not serious)?

I think it was you, but my memory is hazy, could you scroll up half a page and check for me?

Helping SolRo with basic reading comprehension:

Bort: Take note ladies: porn and videogame reviews are out. You'll just need to find some other job that we approve of.

Bort: Anita may be safer than Mia, but the fact that they both have to contemplate reprisals for their chosen career puts them in territory that I know I have never had to worry about.

Nominal: Your parallel doesn't even begin to make sense, and grossly cheapens Ms. Khalifa's situation.

Hooker: If we're going to turn this into another Gamergate / JHM-attention-whore submission, can I point out how funny it is that the women in the Gamergate thing are terrified of death threats by 12-year-olds while this woman is apparently indifferent to death threats from dead serious extremists?

SolRo: yeah, all the losers in gamer gate are 12 year olds...no 30-something losers in that crowd, no sir.


To be clear, I certainly think GamerGate is retarded. But come on. Your armchair conflating of actual religious mass murders with GamerGate's "death threats" is grotesquely insulting.

Bort's offhand joke (which was funny) sure made a bunch of bros salty.

Fight fire with fire you crazy kooks! Fight fire with fire!

Run! Home! Jack! Run! Home! Jack!

Yeah, it's been an emotional week regarding free speech and death threats for some reason.

No! You're emotional!

I lost you hazelnut...are you saying death threats to games journalists is free speech?

"I certainly think GamerGate is retarded. But come on. Your armchair conflating of actual religious mass murders with GamerGate's 'death threats' is grotesquely insulting."

Really? Angry tweets from Lebanon are the same as ISIS or Boko Haram?

"Yeah, it's been an emotional week regarding free speech and death threats for some reason."

Which makes it an especially important time to maintain perspective.

"Godwin's Law applies to any case of trivializing mass murder, not just Hitler per se"

Man, talk about missing the point. Godwin's Law is that, as a conversation drags on, the Hitler comparison is inevitable with enough time. And it's not about trivializing mass murder, it's about connecting/comparing something else to mass murder.

You are literally the Irish Potato Famine. Literally.

"I lost you hazelnut...are you saying death threats to games journalists is free speech?"

Wow, reading comprehension.

that's like going to a strip club with 0 in singles and using them all to buy overpriced beer and wings.

sounds like i'm still getting the better deal, no?