unconsequential

I hear you. But, I would say not any more than wage gaps in the US are a Christian problem. Fire can be used to cook or used to burn down your house. It’s not fire that’s inherently good or bad. It’s whose hands it’s in and how they’re using it.

Reducing the argument to “if Islam/religion was gone everything would be fixed” is simply oversimplification of complex socio-cultural problems between the sexes that exist across the entire world, often where Abrahamic faiths don’t even exist traditionally. I mean places they’ve abolished religion should be women led utopias accepting of all genders and sexual expressions right? But we don’t see that. They just change tactics using biological sciences or dogmatic “hunter gatherer, this is how it’s always been” conservatism.

Also, faith and religion are not automatically synonymous. Religion implies societal hierarchy, whereas faith is personal. I stand by Islam in and of itself existing isn’t the primary problem here. She may be provoking power with antiquated laws surrounding it, triggering an unevenly applied ‘blasphemy’ law, but that’s not Islam, that is the patriarchal machine whirring to life to oppress a woman challenging their systemic and deep seated cultural bias.

See: Fatema Mernissi and Asma Lamrabet (they are Islamic feminists of Moroccan origin that can do a better job of explaining this than me.)

I’m struggling to understand your argument here because it appears you have none. Only a visceral hate for Islam. You’ve already determined your prejudice and are blinded by that. Completely missing the nuance of what I’m saying. You’d rather your black and white understanding of the world be true than address the larger picture. Or have I missed something?

There's something larger at work here than simply “Islam bad”. Islam is used by power structures as a tool. I’m not saying there aren’t followers who believe this. I personally find her shirt very offensive, Allah SWT has no gender, but that’s the entire point of the shirt. To upset, disrupt and challenge norms and powers that be. I respect her courage at challenging centuries old practices. But I’m also from the West and understand free speech and liberation comes at the cost of sometimes being offended. Just like people will wear slurs for certain lifestyles. I respect her right to wear something that I find offensive and more than anything what she’s attempting to do overall. (I could go into the various levels of what this shirt is saying but I think it’d be lost on you as you seem to be operating from a very limited space on Islamic scholarship.)

If you care to know there are many women, some of the most notable from her own home country, that are feminist scholars of Islam. They’re hard at work within their faith and society to advocate for systemic change. Feminism in Islam may not look like what you’re used to but that doesn’t make it any less important. Women should be able to advocate for their needs within their context- not just replicating Western values. Muslim women don’t need rescuing and one-size-fits-all top down ascription of values from outside. They got this.

See: Fatema Mernissi and Asma Lamrabet

I volunteer— not like you go through most dangerous sea passage in the world or anything…

Women are oppressed everywhere men are found. That oppression just manifests differently culture to culture. This is a governments law being enforced by a government. It may be based on perceived religious principles but it’s still man’s law, one that was heavily designed by medieval interpretations and applied unevenly by a patriarchal system (also, not unique to Islamic dominated countries).

Also, she is being jailed for blasphemy. She wanted to make a statement. She did and her government is throwing the book at her. She’s confronting her own country’s inequities just like suffragettes did in the West. Something that is not inherently without risk. She’s working towards reforms in her home country like many women globally do every day. (Which I might add many women are working within Islam for reform as well, just as they have within sects of Christianity in the West.)

This isn’t an Islam issue, or even a religion issue, it’s a systemic patriarchal issue that hides behind religion to dole out oppression. Using faith as a manipulation tactic to serve political agendas.

More like Toddler Tantrums. Someone’s due for a diaper change again.

This. The reporting around things like this are reckless. Half the time it sounds like they’re inadvertently giving a platform to the rhetoric to spread. To normalize something that people already fought down before. But unfortunately many people are ignorant to that fact because many were raised with a revisionist version of history. And most don’t talk to people. Seriously. They don’t listen to family stories of what actually went down in their communities. For better or for worse.

One child executed by the Israeli regime every hour as they continue their genocide.

Rule number one. Don’t fuck with Mexicans. Viva Mexico cabrones!!!

I could see him rambling on about this for a half hour. I just watched him ramble about grass in DC for idk how long. Grass. And people breaking curbs with hammers to throw at police? Like, grandpa needs a really long (grass) nap. They also prayed with him like he was God’s messiah sent to earth and it creeped me out, they’re all going to hell for that one.

I think this is where CRISPR and extremophiles are going to enter the human genetic scene. Prolonged space flight for unmodified humans is a no go. We can’t replicate earth’s environment to satisfactory levels to not end up all kinds of dead and mutated. We’ll be self-mutating generations for survival. Increased radiation resistance and rapid gene repair is probably going to come in handy on earth as well if things keep going the way they’re going. Question is are robotics or genetic manipulation going to win the race for humankind’s survival? Or will we be some sort of blend of biotech and gene manipulation? … all ethical considerations aside, of course.

That’s for after dinner

Where are you bringing this rose colored glasses history of the US from? I mean, that’s a wonderful ideal but ignores a lot of very bloody, violent and horrific suffering of native Americans and black Americans history. As well as the tremendous suffering of many earlier immigrant groups like German and Irish Catholics. Our kids literally died in factories and mines following fantasies like that.

When I hear this propoganda it always makes me think of the Don Bluth film American Tale. They flee the pogroms and sing on the boat over, “there are no Cats in America and the streets are paved with cheese!” Of course, there were cats in America and oppression and poverty and orphans on every corner. As soon as they ran out of one group to exploit they would ship in another and turn them on the new group.

One of my early grade school memories was standing on an island in the Wisconsin River with my classmates learning about how they mass murdered children like me. They were surrendering. They opened fire and killed hundreds of innocents. I don’t think their treatise were very inspiring while the river ran red with their children’s blood. Then we all moved in and built our barns on top of their burial mounds because it was the high ground on the property. Let our dairy cows shit on their ancestors for generations. Remember kids, always sign papers with the white man government.

It’s also absolutely not a mistake that Texas is as racist and horrific as it is and that you see many white Texans running to colonize Israel now. They were sent to Texas to mass murder the Mexican population and overtake the land from the people who lived there even before it was “won” in the “war”. A lot of Irish immigrants partook in it too because it was one of the only ways to raise their social class. Which you also see with the iconic Buffalo soldiers who were black men sent to genocide the Native American population after the civil war to raise their social status as freemen.

I’m primarily bohemian-Czech and German Catholic descent and many of the people from my demographic now live to step on the newest batch of immigrants. That’s the only tried and true American tradition. You even see it with the Cubans in Florida today. They saw themselves as different from other Latino groups because they were established. Germans once beat on the Irish because they were in competition and both beat on the blacks. Labor history is full of these stories. But you also saw them intermarry a lot because they were all on the bottom of someone else’s shoe.

The US was NEVER designed to be a melting pot. It was designed to be a land grab for resources and to exploit various groups of immigrants to make a profit. I mean look out West what they did to Chinese immigrants. They would hang them from cliffs to mine, if they fell asleep they cut their ropes letting them fall to their deaths. And the horrors of the railroads are too numerous to name here.

It’s always been a few rich white protestant families exploiting the newest off the boat group. I love the fantasy of the melting pot because that’s what it should be today. There are a lot of white Americans who are jumping on the bandwagon thinking they’re included in a group they aren’t because WWII Nazism raised their social status in the US. That’s why you see a lot of the poor white immigrants’ descendants clinging to it because it affords them a class they’re locked out of as Germans, Irish, Polacks, Norwegians, Italians or just poor southern European-mutt whites etc. The only prerequisite is that you’re white presenting, a vast “improvement” for those groups that were normally divided by religion, origin, etc. So maybe that’s your melting pot?

The entire US system is designed to exploit immigrants for profit. It was never to “build a great nation together and sing kumbaya my lord into the sunset” as some great bastion of diversity (over the mass graves of native, Mexican and blacks of course). This land is drenched in blood and pain. Don’t erase that or you’re not better than the “ban critical race theory” or the “I don’t see color” folks.

You can’t rewrite the future with lies. You need to hold space for the truth if you ever hope to deconstruct it and build something better. Let’s make that melting pot fantasy a reality but in order to do that you need to first look very seriously at the real current reality. You’re not going to strike down white Christian nationalists by regurgitating their own sanitized version of history. You need to understand where they were born from and what motivates them if you ever want to defeat them.