I admit I found this--the casualness of it, and the acceptability--upsetting.
This was a pretty good post for that odd repeat-of-last-video glitch to show up in. It took me a second to remember that that happens sometimes, and I had a moment of confusion about why the casual French Cooking in 10 Minutes would be that upsetting. It is a very casual approach to French cooking, though.
I'm on record as a Pomiane fan! Also Boulestin. Their books nestle beside each other chez boys, although I have no idea if they got along in tea life.
I'm sorry, ogged-joon. It must feel awful.
Wow chez nous although chez boys sounds like fun and hmmmm describes our house pretty well. Sorry for the frivolity, can't bring myself to watch the video. Too horrifying.
1: I would think "Cockroaches" juxtaposed with "French Cooking in 10 Minutes" would be upsetting enough.
It doesn't seem like there's a "culturally Muslim" category to which a non-believer like me might belong
Really? That seems weird. Why would Muslims not have that category, as there are surely tens of millions of people either raised Muslim who've stopped believing (without renouncing anything) or else raised by whatever the Islamic equivalent is of Christmas-and-Easter Christians, such that they know the forms of the religion but don't pray 7x a day or what have you.
What I mean is, someone can say they're Jewish and it doesn't imply much at all about their religious beliefs, and while I'm sure there are non-believers who grew up in Muslim households and know the rituals, I don't think you can say "I'm a Muslim" and have that not communicate some measure of religious belief. Maybe I'm wrong; I don't hang out with enough Muslims to know.
Jewishness is sui generis; it can mean something cultural or religious or both (or more complex permutations that an outsider like myself can't really fathom). "Culturally Muslim" sounds to me more like "culturally Catholic", which I reluctantly identify with. I think that can be a meaningful category even if it isn't really apparent in the US right now.
Isn't a big difference that all it takes to become a Muslim is a profession of faith whereas to become Jewish is all complicated, and probably just not possible by some lights.
That's usually what people are going for with the term 'lapsed catholic', right?
I think it's pretty clear though that what they're thinking has little to nothing to do with culture and that the fumbling about whenever someone asks "but how would you know?" is because they think that, you know, everyone knows what they look like* and so on.
*They look Sikh.
Sort of apropos of 1 and 2: A friend of my father's once very unwisely bought his French wife a copy of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" for Christmas.
8: really? A good friend who is Muslim is Muslim in exactly this cultural sense. She says she's Muslim, but religiously she is an atheist.
That video is very depressing. I wonder when people will stop subscribing to the belief that agreeing with rich and famous people will make them rich and/or famous.
Huh. Interesting. In the literature I've read there's a problem of people in "The West" assuming that Arab = Muslim,* which can get really annoying if you're a non-Arab Muslim or an Arab non-Muslim.
I identify as a cultural Lutheran, which is confusing to Americans outside the northern midwest, and also to Europeans because the trappings of religious heritage have so permeated secular culture that people don't even really notice that what they do is religious.**
*Most Americans know Iranians are Muslims, but IME that's because they assume Iranians are Arabs. There's also a conflation of Mideast with Arab as well.
**"I'm totally an atheist, but of course I've been baptized and confirmed, and why yes, I do celebrate Christmas and Easter and I'll be buried with a church ceremony, and no Ascension and Good Friday aren't really religious holidays, we just get them off because."
According to Black Metal, your kind of thinking is why Norway sucks.
I don't think you can say "I'm a Muslim" and have that not communicate some measure of religious belief.
Do you mean not communicate some measure of religious belief to Joe Average American, or to religious Muslim Americans, or perhaps to both?
Anyway, Trump and his supporters increasingly sound like characters taken from the pages of Roth's The Plot Against America. Unsettling, at the very least, and maybe even kind of massively scary.
Gah! I just read on a relative's FB a defense of Trump. Basically it is that Trump's quotes are being taken out of context and that longer quotes show him to be quite moderate and in the mainstream. Others have engaged but the arguing is going nowhere (as expected). Now it has turned to an attack on Obama for denigrating Trump. I do think it is important for Trumpers to hear that other people think these positions are horrible. But arguing with them, nah.
They changed rationalizations. That's got to mean something, right?
They often just keep moving the topic and never really defending it. Or, saying that the position of excluding a HUGE class of people is simply common sense and anyway it is temporary and not aimed at American Muslims (supposedly per recent clarifications from Trump). They won't admit that the premises are wrong, so the discussion goes nowhere fast.
It is upsetting; I can only imagine how that feels. I'm so sorry, Ogged.
I only know one person who seems to possibly not be joking in his support of Trump, and he's a flamboyantly gay Vietnamese immigrant in his late 20s. He was insistent he wasn't trolling everyone, but his affect is such that it's hard to tell, and I still can't wrap my mind around the idea that someone like him would be a Trump supporter.
I dunno, he does seem pretty moderate.
I use "culturally Christian" for myself. As came up the other day, I was raised Catholic, but in a weirdly bloodless way. I know the liturgy and (by layman's standards) theology well, but basically none of the supposed Catholic touchstones resonate with me. But there's no denying that I feel comfortable with Christian cultural hegemony even though I'm more anti-religious than my utterly areligious wife.
Culturally Muslim is definitely a thing - there was a piece in the Guardian the other day by a woman who describes herself as 'secular' but also as a Shia, and who wore the full veil. The hijab is as much about tribal identification as anything else much of the time - just like being a Prod or a Taig in Norn Iron wasn't about deeply felt disagreements on transubstantiation or the Petrine succession, but about which gang you were in.
I was wondering how the British contingent would react to this post. I get the definite impression that a lot of the crazier aspects of the American right's attitude toward Islam stem from the fact that there really just aren't that many Muslims in the US, at least as a percentage of the overall population, so there's a huge number of Americans that have literally never met a Muslim personally and are therefore open to a lot of crazy ideas spouted by the professional Islamophobes and their fellow travelers like Trump.
OT: This article about the lack of African-American detective novels and detective characters is kind of interesting.
This article, about how Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe were both based on a real-life black detective in LA, was pretty good.
http://graphics.latimes.com/finding-marlowe/
30: well, there's a campaign going over here to ban Trump from entering the UK and widespread condemnation from pretty much all media outlets, politicians and the Met police. Not to say we don't have our own crazy racists and islamaphobes, but when even Nigel Farage thinks you've gone too far...
25: See also>
From May of this year: "he U.S. has enough problems without publicity seekers going out and openly mocking religion in order to provoke attacks and death. BE SMART"
I'm trying to think of what might have prompted that --ah, looks like a response to the Garland shooting.
Flip, that link doesn't go to an article about the lack of African-American detective novels, it goes to one about the Supreme Court and affirmative action...
there are surely tens of millions of people either raised Muslim who've stopped believing
Announcing to your parents that you've stopped believing in the faith in which they raised you is not quite as easy when you're a Muslim. Being an ex-Muslim, a lot of Muslims seem to think, should only be permitted in a Monty Python "ex-parrot" sort of way. There's an NGO in Britain, CEMB, that exists to support ex-Muslims who've been ostracised, disowned by their families, threatened with murder etc.
I do think there's a definite "cultural Muslim" category in the UK, particularly among South Asians. For instance, the ethnically Bengali guy whose very ham and alcohol infused stag do I went on recently, but who will be having a dry wedding out of deference to his side of the family. He's not remotely religious, obviously, but identifies as Muslim. It's pretty common among British Punjabis too, in my experience.
Because it's not really a proper stag do unless there's LOTS OF HAM. That's just how it's done. You get a bunch of your mates together, go up the town and get the ham in.
Well it was in Spain. Can't go to Spain and not have lots of ham.
I was wondering how the British contingent would react to this post.
Probably much as the American contingent would. We don't hold the moral high ground. It's incredibly depressing and frightening.
On the one hand, the great majority of British Muslims are of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage and if they speak any Arabic at all it's because they've memorised passages of the Quran; on the other hand this doesn't seem to make them any less vulnerable to ignorant Islamophobia.
So the Independent didn't bother to cover the festival itself, but thought it was newsworthy that the organisers were complaining about the media not covering the festival...
I've heard the British press can be very ironic.
"We had signs criticising ISIS!"
Good for you! Have a cookie. What will be your next courageous stand? Signs expressing full-blooded support of puppies and kittens? Perhaps a letter-writing campaign calling for less cancer and more chocolate biscuit? Expressing verbal opposition to a bunch of lunatic head-chopping totalitarian theocratic headbangers is pretty much the minimum requirement of being a civilised human being. What's really depressing is not that you think you deserve praise for doing it, but that you think it's unexpected enough that it ought to be newsworthy.
People I've known mostly use variations on "my parents are Muslim" or "I was raised Muslim."
They're not expecting medals. They just don't want to be abused and assaulted by ignorant bigots for existing while being Muslim .
44: How about "Latter Day Saints, but not quite so latter day as some people." LDSBNQSLDASP for short.
And the publicity would help with that aim.
Speaking of aim, why is that man killing a rug?
all it takes to become a Muslim is a profession of faith
Same with Unitarianism if you replace "faith" with "whatever."
48: fantastic picture.
At a guess, he's a practitioner of yowla, the ancient Hadramauti art of spinning around with a rifle. I think it came up in TFA.
But that's probably a real carpet. Some kids in Pakistan probably knotted it instead of learning to read and then he hauled out a very unique gun and shot it.
43: I don't understand this reaction. Maybe it's different in the UK, but a significant fraction of the US sincerely believes that all Muslims are either terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, and airwaves are full of people saying things like "Why don't Muslims condemn these attacks? I'm not accusing them of anything. I'm just asking questions." That makes Muslims criticizing the attacks newsworthy.
I once shot an abandoned refrigerator. Another time, a dumped car. The sound of shotgun pellets on metal is probably more interesting than you get shoot a musket ball into dirt and carpet.
43 is pretty stupid. A bunch of people took an ordinarily non-politicized event and decided to (unusually) politicize it to use it as an opportunity to combat bigoted idiots who lump all muslims together. What the fuck is so hard to understand about that?
I wonder if I could identify as "culturally atheist."
You can, but I think it involves contributing to NPR pledge drives.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that I couldn't, but someone should. "I was raised no going to church, and I still don't go to church, but really I've stopped not believing."
The sound of shotgun pellets on metal is probably more interesting than you get shoot a musket ball into dirt and carpet.
Cultural imperialist.
Meanwhile, in one of those delightful ironies that the looniest members of the GOP seem to revel in producing, Steve King has created a religious test for public office by demanding that Keith Ellison affirm the constitution as superior to sharia.
As per @#36 -- of course there's such a thing as cultural muslim. Potentially reduced at this instant in time, because, if you're only "culturally" muslim, why would you take the burden of self identification, when the world is so much against you? And, though there might be some who are actively identifying others as muslim, it's not as bad as it was for the jews who couldn't avoid the fate by choosing not to identify. If you wear the headscarf merely because your mother did, and not because you feel that it's a religious injunction, or you feel naked without it, it's not too hard to take it off.
@#36 cites South Asians and Punjabis, but there are also Egyptians and Iranians in my world who are "cultural" muslims in the same way that I know cultural Catholics and Jews.
Am I a bad person for reading laughing at this article that juxtaposes Mark Zuckerberg telling Muslims that they're welcome on Facebook with a picture of him hugging Narendra Modi ("a Hindu")?
Mind your P's and Q's, people. This thread has now been linked by BdL.
Especially since Modi is not, himself, terribly welcoming to Muslims in India. He's more massacre-y.
Potentially reduced at this instant in time, because, if you're only "culturally" muslim, why would you take the burden of self identification, when the world is so much against you?
Tribal identification, as I say. Why did non-religious Catholics still identify as such in Northern Ireland?
Some people chose to say they were Jewish under harsher circumstances
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Israel-honors-late-World-War-II-U-S-soldier-for-6670950.php
62: This thread has now been linked by BdL.
BdL? I'm at a loss.
The Banque du Liban. The Lebanese central bank. It must be a hell of a job, I'm not going to begrudge them a cock joke or two.
Thanks. But yes! Light dawned a few minutes ago, as I puttered around in the kitchen going "BdL, BdL, I surely know this ... Hedgehog?" Honestly, with the caution to mind one's P's and Q's -- a thing my mom used to say -- I could only think that we'd been linked by some horrid and frightening right-wing outfit, so I was thinking, Is it Vox Day [what's his deal?], is it some libertarian thing, is it Soopermexican or whatever the names of the other screamingly right wing bloggers are?
Anyway.
The Banque du Liban is where former commenters go when they disappear. James B Shearer and Cerebocrat are there now, and we can all go there if we're good.
72 I wouldn't want to go anywhere She/arer is at. I lurked for years but wouldn't comment while he was active here. Ugh.
Really? Surely you've been around since before he stopped commenting.
Yeah probably so, but I think I studiously ignored his foetid presence.
Yeah probably so, but I think I studiously ignored his foetid presence.
Sorry for the DP.
Just finished seeing the 1st part of a three part 6.5 hour film at the festival here, Miguel Gomes' "Arabian Nights". So far so great.