Heh. My first attempt at replying to your comment got so tl;dr it became three separate posts, but I will try to be succinct, for more extended arguments see those posts :D
See, I agree that it's wrong to say "muslim" when you mean "middle eastern" and vice versa, because the two are not the same. But given that people often say "muslim" as code for being racist/culturally intolerant of middle eastern people (which makes no sense, but they do it anyway) etc I think that if you're going to look at racism you have to look at religious intolerance too. It is important to be precise, which is something I totally and utterly suck at :)
Anyway, as I said in my tl;dr post I do think it's totally ok to be against the death penalty etc, but it's the way people talk about it that bothers me: not considering the context or complexity of changing things and making blanket condemnations of entire cultures/countries based on very limited and distorted information. There's a difference between "I don't understand why more americans aren't opposed to the death penalty" and "All saudi Arabians are a bunch of ignorant savages who enjoy killing people for no reason"
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
See, I agree that it's wrong to say "muslim" when you mean "middle eastern" and vice versa, because the two are not the same. But given that people often say "muslim" as code for being racist/culturally intolerant of middle eastern people (which makes no sense, but they do it anyway) etc I think that if you're going to look at racism you have to look at religious intolerance too. It is important to be precise, which is something I totally and utterly suck at :)
Anyway, as I said in my tl;dr post I do think it's totally ok to be against the death penalty etc, but it's the way people talk about it that bothers me: not considering the context or complexity of changing things and making blanket condemnations of entire cultures/countries based on very limited and distorted information. There's a difference between
"I don't understand why more americans aren't opposed to the death penalty" and
"All saudi Arabians are a bunch of ignorant savages who enjoy killing people for no reason"