Gyroscopic Investing

EDIT: never mind, MangoMan posted it already. Apparently there is a whole second page here that I overlooked.

So what was your previous name?

Possible?
http://gyroscopicinvesting.com/forum/ht ... 0#msg25990

Jackely, hmm.
I think that would fit with Amazon reviewer Jack H. (I happened to be browsing the pp book reviews this morning).
Although, I mixed up Reub's and Notsheigetz' details early on, and I've never been able to fix it in my mind.
But, I think there's a Florida connection here between this pair of Jacks.

dualstow wrote: EDIT: never mind, MangoMan posted it already. Apparently there is a whole second page here that I overlooked.

So what was your previous name?

Possible?
http://gyroscopicinvesting.com/forum/ht ... 0#msg25990

Jackely, hmm.
I think that would fit with Amazon reviewer Jack H. (I happened to be browsing the pp book reviews this morning).
Although, I mixed up Reub's and Notsheigetz' details early on, and I've never been able to fix it in my mind.
But, I think there's a Florida connection here between this pair of Jacks.

Good detective work but like I said in a modified post above, I'm flattered that anybody really cares. If any of you are ever in the Tampa area let me know and we can have a beer.

moda0306 wrote: His lamenting about a mosque in Manhattan near the World Trade Center site,

1. If I opened a rib stand (pork) in front of a mosque, the uproar from the usual suspects e.g.
ny times, would be amusing. 

2. Published cartoons about Al...h results in murder

3. And you think it is wrong to be upset/think it is wrong to put a mosque near where thousands of people were killed.

Benko wrote: 1. If I opened a rib stand (pork) in front of a mosque, the uproar from the usual suspects e.g.
ny times, would be amusing. 

3. And you think it is wrong to be upset/think it is wrong to put a mosque near where thousands of people were killed.

That's hardly a fair comparison.  The closest of the three planned mosques was a couple of blocks away from WTC site, not in front of it.  At what point does the American liberal traditional for radical tolerance cross over into bigotry?  Now, maybe if any of those mosques were part of the Wahhabi sect, I would be rightfully concerned, otherwise conflating Islam with Wahhabism is like conflating Christianity with Jehovah's Day Witnesses.

Benko wrote:

moda0306 wrote: His lamenting about a mosque in Manhattan near the World Trade Center site,

1. If I opened a rib stand (pork) in front of a mosque, the uproar from the usual suspects e.g.
ny times, would be amusing. 

2. Published cartoons about Al...h results in murder

3. And you think it is wrong to be upset/think it is wrong to put a mosque near where thousands of people were killed.

Certain branches of Islam and some  liberals have plenty of their own problems that are worth debating separately from engaging in a public outcry against a mosque. This should not give politicians free passes to be bigots. If the particular branch of Islam trying to open this mosque had certain extreme background, I could understand the backlash. But the reaction to simply building a mosque near ground zero wreaked of immaturity IMO.

Simonjester wrote: the mosques were inside the circle of the area damaged (the outer edge of, but still within) and Islam has a long tradition of building "victory" mosques in the places they have conquered, perhaps building a mosque in that area of NY was innocent of ulterior motive, but given those two things it was in poor taste..

Simon

Your post assumes that domestic Muslims building that mosque see 9/11 more as a legitimate battle cry of Islam than a horrible tragedy committed by extremists. Surely Christians see no problem building churches in areas that certain Christian extremists committed atrocities in the past.  While I think Islam has plenty of things to work on within its religion, I don't think anyone should interpret 9/11 as a battle between Islam and Christianity.  If we ask Muslims to do so and ask them not to do things in "poor taste" it implies we are doing the same. 

I think it's in much worse taste to imply that we are at war with Islam than to build a mosque near ground zero. 

Btw, wasn't the guy who called in the failed time square truck bomb a Muslim?  And didn't dozens of innocent Muslims die on 9/11?  This wasn't a war on Christians by Muslims. This was a war on civilized US society, including muslims, by Muslim extremists.  Treating it like the former is inappropriate.

I don't know if it's been mentioned yet, but Park 51 is not exactly a mosque, right? It's a building with a Muslim community center, a prayer room, etc. Supposedly, interfaith dialogue is being promoted.
I admit I felt a little strange when I first heard about it, but that's because some talking heads were calling it the "Ground Zero Mosque", either erroneously or to foment an angry protest. Once the detailed facts came to light, I got it.

Typing up the above, I remembered once reading that the building was strongly influenced by a Jewish Community Center. If I remember right, the female half of the couple who spearheaded the project had a close friend who was responsible for the JCC in New York.

Simonjester wrote: i assume i don't know the motives of the mosque builders  but i am also certain they knew the reaction it would get, and the media fallout it would generate.  i don't view it as a war between them and Christianity or between us and Islam the religion. the problem in discussing Islam isn't a religion vs religion thing it is that Islam is also a political philosophy and one that is in conflict with ours, and one that is also either tactically approved of by mainstream Muslims or at least seldom openly apposed..

people who view and practice Islam as a religion of peace could have protested the mosque and created a lot of good will for Islam (the religion), but the (political) ideology scores points when they don't and unsurprisingly ...they didn't....

There a lot of things that a lot of groups could protest to create "goodwill" with opposing groups.  Things like taking confederate flags off of state flags comes to mind.  Let's focus on things that should be expected or hoped for, not appeasing our prejudices by protesting a perfectly legitimate will to build a community/prayer center.  If it's truly as "interfaith" as dualstow's instinct indicates, then I think this is a great thing to have exist within blocks of a tragedy that unfortunately alienated many Americans to muslims.  If Muslims want to create goodwill with me, there are plenty of things I can easily think of that their leaders could do (and in some cases have done) before protesting a Muslim community center near ground zero.

First, let's decide whether it's fair or mature to protest or even ask them to not build this entity (it's not), then that will help us decide whether we should expect or hope for Muslims to join the yahoos doing so. 

moda0306 wrote:
First, let's decide whether it's fair or mature to protest or even ask them to not build this entity (it's not),

And expecting the rest of the world to curtail their free speech i.e. not create certain kinds of cartoons lest it offends muslims is perfectly fair?  What do you think Salamon Rushdie would think of Muslim fairness?

And you've got me doing the fairness thing.  Fairness is not an appropriate test for anything (aside from you might be a lefty if...).  If you were a caring person, and you knew someone who had had relatives killed on 9/11 you would not wish a muslim anything near where that person's relatives were killed.  Putting anything muslim near there is callous.

It would really be nice if people treated everyone with caring and humanity no matter what their sex, sexual orientation, religion, age race, etc etc.  But that sure aint where we are now (nor does it appear to be the desire of progressives).

Benko wrote:

moda0306 wrote:
First, let's decide whether it's fair or mature to protest or even ask them to not build this entity (it's not),

And expecting the rest of the world to curtail their free speech i.e. not create certain kinds of cartoons lest it offends muslims is perfectly fair?  What do you think Salamon Rushdie would think of Muslim fairness?

And you've got me doing the fairness thing.  Fairness is not an appropriate test for anything (aside from you might be a lefty if...).  If you were a caring person, and you knew someone who had had relatives killed on 9/11 you would not wish a muslim anything near where that person's relatives were killed.  Putting anything muslim near there is callous.

It would really be nice if people treated everyone with caring and humanity no matter what their sex, sexual orientation, religion, age race, etc etc.  But that sure aint where we are now (nor does it appear to be the desire of progressives).

I'm vehimently against illegalizing "hate speech" or religious cartoons (though if it bridges into overt incitement of violence I think a line has been crossed).  If you're trying to argue against someone that things Islam is flawless then I'm not him.  And let's not forget that as respecters of at least the principal of individuality and individual sovereignty, any attempt to create a collective conscious out of many individuals is probably starting with the false premise that we have a collective conscious.  Every muslim is their own human being, just as we are.

Why should a family member of someone who died on 9/11 care about a Muslim community center near Ground Zero?  Answer: Prejudice.  These family members aren't evil or bad people.  I empathize with their situation.  However, we shouldn't feed into it by reinforcing prejudice.  I don't blame my aunt for being racist because she was raped by a black guy.  I can't imagine what that would do to color your view of a group of people.  However, I'm not going to join in her bitterness because it's driven by prejudice.

Building a muslim community center near Ground Zero, if it's an open and healthy environment, sends a message to the surrounding community of nothing other than "we want a place for our people and others to congregate, pray, play and talk in a peaceful way."  This should be encouraged, not be seen as "dancing on the graves" of 9/11 victims.  However, equating the building of that community center with "dancing on the graves" of victims, or some kind of insulting slap in the face to the victims families, sends the message that we view these people as partially responsible for 9/11.  Dozens of innocent Muslims died on 9/11.  Should their families be labelled as being complicit in their own family member's murder?  How about the Muslim shop owner that called in the suspicious truck in Time Square with tons of explosive in it?  Is he "dancing on the graves of 9/11 victims" by going to pray near Ground Zero?

Looking at this objectively, the latter is much, much more offensive.  Forget about "fairness" then... let's encourage the "peaceful" aspects of Islam while condemning the "violent" aspects of Islam.

And Islam is not a political ideology any more than Christianity is.  Are there a lot of Muslims with beliefs incompatible with liberty?  Yes.  There are a lot of Christians that way as well.  Far fewer, probably, but that's where looking at people as individuals, and not lumping them into groups while we encourage individualism for ourselves, comes into play.  Religion, almost by definition, is a set of rules backed by an entity that we deem to be greater than everything else in the universe.  Naturally, people that believe in this guy are going to try to control the world around them.  Some do it uglier and more-so than others.

Simonjester wrote: the problem is separating legitimate complaints from prejudice, ask a liberal and anything said against Islam is prejudiced and wrong, ask a conservative and anything said for Islam is supporting or appeasing an enemy.

Islam isn't just a bunch of "love in their hearts" do good religious folks, it is also an evil ideology that is at war with us. i don't know which part of Islam built the center or what their motives were, but building it and the "in the media fight" that ensued furthered the interests of the ideology in addition to building a community center (which given the impossible to sort out mix and match of religion and ideology is likely to continue serving both).

the way i see it is there are three groups of Muslims.
one. a small group of religious and political radicals who are fighting us (at War with us using every tactic at their disposal including accusations of prejudice),
two. the vast majority of Muslims who are some mixture of..
-agreeing in-part with the radical political ideology
-afraid of the radicals and wont speak against them
-to busy living their lives in peace and don't want to get involved
-those that will speak out against bad ideology sometimes
and the third group are another small minority who do stand up for the religion of peace and speak out against the first group.

all of this makes both blindly opposing Islam and blindly supporting it indefensible positions. not all resistance is prejudiced and not all support is appeasing an enemy.
if i cant speak out against building a mosque that quite likely serves both religion and ideology, in the damage zone of a terrorist attack by Muslims because i would be prejudiced if i did... then it needs to be the Muslims that speak out against it, who else can?...

I don't really disagree that much with this.  I think in the end, though, it's easy in the U.S. for us to each see ourselves as a Thomas Jefferson, with guns in our basement, ready to take up arms against tyranny, but in the end we just complain a lot about what we may see as government tyranny and then we go back to eating dinner and hanging out with our kids.

I have no problem with limiting Muslim immigration into the U.S. based on the risk that applies to them as a group, but when they're here, I believe they should be treated with respect and dignity, regardless where in that second group they might have fallen.  There are a lot of Americans that would rather we just turn the middle east to glass with a few dozen nukes as anything else, so I don't think our ratios are that much different:  A few war mongers, a bunch of people semi-supportive of them or that have too much going on in their lives to actively oppose them, and a few willing to call them out actively.

So all we can do with the Muslims here is encourage the best of them and discourage the worst ideas and people that they put forth.  A muslim community center near Ground Zero, especially if inclusive to other cultures, is a very good step in the right direction.  We should be encouraging things like that, not using it as a back-handed way to partially blame this group for 9/11.

"Are there a lot of Muslims with beliefs incompatible with liberty?  Yes.  There are a lot of Christians that way as well. "

As rational as I remember you being on certain topics, this reply including the above comment is not your finest hour.  Their are no Christians inciting lethal violence over cartoons.  This is reality in 2013.  But theory, avoiding imagined prejudice, are all more important than being callus to real people.  If a person's relative was killed by a red headed person, it would not be humane to let someone build a giant shrine to red headed people nearby.  Of course if that happened to one person we would probably never know it had haopened.  But it happened to thousands, and their natural reasonable reaction has to be prejudice to you, and you cannot allow the appearence of prejudice.  A mosque has to be built nearby to prove we are not prejudice. 

Meanwhile somewhere an Imam is laughing their ass off on how stupid we are (see my signature).

Many/most moslems (best I can tell) are peaceful people. 

Benko wrote: "Are there a lot of Muslims with beliefs incompatible with liberty?  Yes.  There are a lot of Christians that way as well. "

As rational as I remember you being on certain topics, this reply including the above comment is not your finest hour.  Their are no Christians inciting lethal violence over cartoons.  This is reality in 2013.  But theory, avoiding imagined prejudice, are all more important than being callus to real people.  If a person's relative was killed by a red headed person, it would not be humane to let someone build a giant shrine to red headed people nearby.  Of course if that happened to one person we would probably never know it had haopened.  But it happened to thousands, and their natural reasonable reaction has to be prejudice to you, and you cannot allow the appearence of prejudice.  A mosque has to be built nearby to prove we are not prejudice. 

Meanwhile somewhere an Imam is laughing their ass off on how stupid we are (see my signature).

Many/most moslems (best I can tell) are peaceful people.

I understand why you feel that way, but to actually codify and put your thoughts into law strikes me as extremely un-American and it goes against the basic principles that this country was founded on. Most namely the separation of church and state.

Benko wrote: "Are there a lot of Muslims with beliefs incompatible with liberty?  Yes.  There are a lot of Christians that way as well. "

As rational as I remember you being on certain topics, this reply including the above comment is not your finest hour.  Their are no Christians inciting lethal violence over cartoons.  This is reality in 2013.  But theory, avoiding imagined prejudice, are all more important than being callus to real people.  If a person's relative was killed by a red headed person, it would not be humane to let someone build a giant shrine to red headed people nearby.  Of course if that happened to one person we would probably never know it had haopened.  But it happened to thousands, and their natural reasonable reaction has to be prejudice to you, and you cannot allow the appearence of prejudice.  A mosque has to be built nearby to prove we are not prejudice. 

Meanwhile somewhere an Imam is laughing their ass off on how stupid we are (see my signature).

Many/most moslems (best I can tell) are peaceful people.

Are christians calling for death over Cartoons?  Probably not. However, I have heard more than one Christian suggest we should nuke the entire Middle East, or close to it.  So the children there didn't even have to make offensive cartoons to earn that treatment.

Let's be honest about what a lot of Christians believe.  A lot wouldn't want to get their hands dirty, but have no qualms about suggesting we send a bomber to do some very dirty work to the Middle East.

Racism and prejudice is far more callous, to me, than building an Islamic community center near ground zero.  I was truly surprised, as I'm sure local Muslims were, that there would be such a backlash. There were Muslim victims of 9/11 as well. Their voices should count just as much as others. But in the end this shouldn't even have made the news.  The first I would have loved to hear about it would be news coverage a few years after the fact about its positive impact on the community.

Why are we even discussing Muslims' cartoon preferences? It's completely surreal to me. When they try to kill us, okay, let's try to kill them right back--harder, and better. Let's kill the crap out of them with the biggest, meanest, baddest weapons we have. Let's blast them into tiny pieces and dump the remains in a shark tank.

But until then, who cares where they want to build a mosque? If they're not training terrorists in it, what's the big deal? And if they are then we're back to "kill the crap out of them." Nice and simple. What am I missing here?

I just don't see why this is something the government ought to be interested in. Don't they have better things to do than peer into people's private lives and hyper-regulate private plans for building private buildings on private property? Especially buildings that house an activity explicitly protected by the first amendment of our constitution!

Pointedstick wrote: Why are we even discussing Muslims' cartoon preferences? It's completely surreal to me. When they try to kill us, okay, let's try to kill them right back--harder, and better. Let's kill the crap out of them with the biggest, meanest, baddest weapons we have. Let's blast them into tiny pieces and dump the remains in a shark tank.

But until then, who cares where they want to build a mosque? If they're not training terrorists in it, what's the big deal? And if they are then we're back to "kill the crap out of them." Nice and simple. What am I missing here?

I just don't see why this is something the government ought to be interested in. Don't they have better things to do than peer into people's private lives and hyper-regulate private plans for building private buildings on private property? Especially buildings that house an activity explicitly protected by the first amendment of our constitution!

I know there were some that probably wanted the NYC government to find a way to strike down the permit or something, but I think the question is more one of whether we "should" be upset about it.  Whether it's a "slap in the face" to build a mosque in terms of decency. And further, whether it's decent to protest the building of t.  This is the much more interesting question, to me.  Just like I have the right to call anyone I want an "ugly prick," but the debate is whether that makes me a jackass or not.  For guys like us who like to keep our debates grounded in objective realities, it can be tough to talk about what is "rude," or "decent" of us to do, but talking about politicians and Rand Paul unfortunately brings up some subjective issues of "classiness."

To me, while I understand prejudice, especially if you've been directly hit like the 9/11 families, I think the people trying to reinforce that prejudice and make the Muslims feel like bad people for "dancing on the graves" of 9/11 victims are the jack-asses in this story.  Even if they're not calling for the NYC government to strike down the permit, it's a softer equivalent to going to a Muslim shop-owner in the area and saying "I think you were partialy responsible for 9/11, and resent your presence in my city."  It just wreaks of sleaze, IMO.  The mosque has as much legal right to exist as the people have a legal right to protest, but I think at this point it's important to focus on who's really being a prick in this instance.  I don't blame some of the 9/11 families for feeling uneasy about anything related to Islam, but I think it's classless to use them as vessels to make our own unreasonable prejudices seem more digestible, especially when some of those very families were Muslims themselves.

Pointedstick wrote: Why are we even discussing Muslims' cartoon preferences? It's completely surreal to me. When they try to kill us, okay, let's try to kill them right back--harder, and better. Let's kill the crap out of them with the biggest, meanest, baddest weapons we have. Let's blast them into tiny pieces and dump the remains in a shark tank.

Two blasts. Biden style.



;-)

PS,

Mr. archtypical liberal was equating moral equivalence of blowing people up over cartoons so yes it is damn relevant.

"Let's be honest about what a lot of Christians believe."
Omniscience must be nice.

Benko wrote: PS,

Mr. archtypical liberal was equating moral equivalence of blowing people up over cartoons so yes it is damn relevant.

"Let's be honest about what a lot of Christians believe."
Omniscience must be nice.

Who needs omniscience when I've heard it from their own mouths.

Moda, I understand what you mean, but playing the "who's-the-bigger-jackass" game seems futile to me because in politics, everybody's a jackass at some time or other, and rights were invented to project jackass behavior in the first place.

Do I think that conservatives who want to use government power to prevent mosques from being built in certain locations are being jackasses? Yes, absolutely. But on the other hand, it's damned insensitive to want to build that mosque near ground zero in the first place. It doesn't bother me, but there are a heck of a lot of people who it does bother, and ignoring their feelings is jackass behavior too in my mind.

Now, do the Muslims have the right to build mosques where they want? Yes. Do conservatives have the right to bitch about it? Yes. They're both expressing their first-amendment rights to be jackasses. That's the point of rights. If they protected popular behavior, there would be no need to codify them as rights in the first place.

notsheigetz wrote: I'm putting the odds at about 100:1 in favor of Ms. Clinton.

I'll take those odds.  I'll bet $100 against Clinton, as long as you're willing to pony up $10K if she does not become our next president.  (I accept PayPal and Amazon Payments). 

doodle wrote:

China Bull wrote: Hopeless  and Clueless ver 2 ? She could possibly win (never underestimate the stupidity of the sheeple in the US)  but after the utter destruction this country will be left behind by Buck Ofama and congress, not sure any sane person would want the job of the next POTUS. 

Utter destruction....thats a little hyperbolic dont you think? Is there another country in the world that is better off presently?

Let's see how we stack up...

#3 in "Human Development"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... ment_Index

#4 in "Ease of Doing Business"
http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings

#6 in "Quality of Life"
http://www.aneki.com/quality.html

#7 in "Global Competitiveness"
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/CSI/2012-1 ... 012-13.pdf

#10 in "Economic Freedom"
http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

#18 in "Most Generous Countries"
http://tinyurl.com/bmxg3v4

#33 in "Highest Life Expectancies"
http://tinyurl.com/d6aarsp

#193 in "Net Trade in Goods & Services"
https://www.cia.gov/library/publication ... 7rank.html

Pointedstick wrote: Moda, I understand what you mean, but playing the "who's-the-bigger-jackass" game seems futile to me because in politics, everybody's a jackass at some time or other, and rights were invented to project jackass behavior in the first place.

Do I think that conservatives who want to use government power to prevent mosques from being built in certain locations are being jackasses? Yes, absolutely. But on the other hand, it's damned insensitive to want to build that mosque near ground zero in the first place. It doesn't bother me, but there are a heck of a lot of people who it does bother, and ignoring their feelings is jackass behavior too in my mind.

Now, do the Muslims have the right to build mosques where they want? Yes. Do conservatives have the right to bitch about it? Yes. They're both expressing their first-amendment rights to be jackasses. That's the point of rights. If they protected popular behavior, there would be no need to codify them as rights in the first place.

There are people pissed about mosques being built anywhere in the country.  Should we ask Muslims to be sensitive to that as well?  What about being sensitive to the families of muslims who died on 9/11 by not staging this as being a religious battle.  It's not insensitive to call it out as prejudice and encourage them to build a place of worship as long as it's peaceful.  The real question is whether the victims who are angry about it have a reasonable right to be.  I certainly understand their anger from a human nature standpoint, but that doesn't mean I think we should reinforce it... because it's based in prejudice.  I think they're being rude and irrational unnecessarily, and while we should understand and be polite about it, backing their position and calling it "insensitive" of Muslims to want to open a Muslim community center near ground zero is far, far more rude IMO.

I guess this is really subjective stuff, but in the end we can't be overly sensitive to everyone who's been a victim of something to the point that we're engaging in grossly insulting behavior towards an undeserving group.  We are being far more rude by taking the side of some (I'm willing to bet not all agree on this... and that some are actually offended by the other families) 9/11 families than by understanding their position and politely telling them that their reaction is sending a really hateful message.  I think it's a really bad idea to actively try to get Muslims to think of things in a way that stage this as a battle of religions.  If we're asking them to be sensitive at every turn to the fact that Americans see mainstream Muslims as contributors to 9/11, we're doing just that.  We might as well just tell them we'd rather they just be deported at that point.  Some may feel this way, but it won't result in deportation... just more resentment and less assimilation.

moda,
I guess my answer is a resounding, "who cares?" This seems like a remarkably content-less discussion, to be honest. Everybody is always offending everyone… everyone is always being offended… that's just the way things are.

I don't give two craps about who feels bad about what as long as the government butts out of it and doesn't actually stop them from building their mosque/community center/interfaith spiritual healing institute/whatever--and indeed, it got built, is now open to the public, and has been incident-free. Don't we all have better things to do with our lives than be outraged by the behavior of strangers that doesn't even affect us personally?

Whether it's being mad at Muslims for wanting to build a building near ground zero or being mad at conservatives for being mad at Muslims… who cares!?! If it doesn't affect you on a level other than the immature emotional part of your brain that says, "I don't want to live in a society where X people can do Y harmless but offensive thing without being punished!", what's the big deal? Let's all just learn to get along.

TL;DR version: If someone hurts your body, defend yourself accordingly. If someone hurts your feelings, grow up.

As a wise man once said:

"The price of freedom is tolerance."

Muslims are just the new Communists (or Blacks, or WOPs, etc.).  Same shit, different decade.