> I don't think we should "lowest common denominator" to oppressive regimes.
Chinese approval of their government is much higher than most Western regimes including the US. I think you are right about how we ought to apply the 1st amendment here, but I don't find that Chinese propaganda is any more insidious or pervasive than American. We just manage it differently: in China the state directly controls the media, while in the US business interests directly control the state and the media.
> If we ever desire to see real usages of the Internet(that is more than just information exchange medium)
We don't, or rather we see any and all "real usages" of the Internet to be that of (agnostic) information exchange, at their core.
> which requires real time data transfer (for instance remote surgeries, remote operation of machines by a human operator, etc etc), then that would require to get rid of net neutrality.
If you need truly real time behavior like this, then the Internet is not suited for your purposes, Net Neutrality or not.
That's a pretty ridiculous opinion to have considering the voting in this thread. Even if you're right, I'm clearly far from alone in thinking that what you've done here is wrong. So, in fact, there is an argument to be had here, and trying to preempt discussion like that just shows a false and unjustified confidence in your assertion. A little humility goes a long way, you know?
You keep saying it's a slur. Since we obviously have some kind of basic disagreement on what this word even means, I'll just elaborate why I think it was appropriate speech:
I think you'll agree that giving a charitable reading to what a person says is the best way to have a clear discussion. While that first sentence, taken by itself and without context, could possibly be interpreted as a bigoted or racist statement, in the context of the whole post I took it to mean "Islam has a reputation for violence, but this reputation exists in part because adherents of Islam in the West support violence more than the rest of the population". I don't think I am going particularly out of my way or being overly charitable in reading it this way. Moreover the grammar "X spoils the reputation of X" is not harsh language, nor is it a tautology - it can be proven wrong. Therefore, I don't think this was an inappropriate comment. How am I wrong? If you bother to answer, please be specific.
That said, I don't fully agree with the statement, actually, as I already mentioned. If you look at support for violence and religious law, etc., in places like the US and Germany, it looks like Muslims do not support that stuff any more than the general population, or they support it less. But looking at the data for France OP might have a point. But, I don't know if he meant only France, or Islam in general, or what, because he never clarified. Maybe he didn't clarify because he stopped reading, or because he doesn't care, or because he realizes he's wrong. Maybe after elaboration he would have outed himself as being a simple Islamaphobe who cherry-picks facts to justify his bigotry. We'll never know that now. But, he also may have stopped posting because you inappropriately called him out in this thread before giving what he said due consideration.
Emotions were probably running high at the time as it was shortly after the attacks and so what you did, in that case, is actually quite understandable. Even if I think you were wrong here, I don't hold this one against you at all. But as the moderator of HN I have seen you time and again shutting down discussion because you perceived something that wasn't there. You are making HN into more of a boring echo chamber and that's sad.
Have you noticed that Muslims in e.g. the US and Germany are by and large less radical than the broader population there? Islam doesn't seem to be particularly incompatible with Western culture, rather it seems to be incompatible with France. And I doubt it's something about French culture in particular either - if I was looking for what the difference is the first thing I'd do is look at French domestic policy and whether any of that stuff disproportionately affects immigrants or Muslims.
I'd be in agreement with you if the OP started and stopped with that first sentence, but he didn't. And OP is not claiming that all Muslims are violent or making a generalization like that - he very specifically referred to reputation for same and cited a document showing a significant minority of Muslims who support or tolerate violence, especially in France.
I also agree that he would have been better served to clarify in his post that the problem is particularly acute in France rather than in general, but even a cursory glance at the document he provided will bear that out. However that is something to bring up in further discussion (as I have actually done in a sibling comment). Then you can have a conversation about what France is doing differently from other countries that are having relative success, even to the point of e.g. the US where Muslims tend to be more peaceful than the wider population.
But when you just shut down the discussion as was done here, none of that can happen. That's why, as I say, if your goal is to integrate Muslims living in the West into Western society (and French Muslims into French society), then what happened here is counterproductive.
This wasn't a mere insinuation, this was a claim made along with some study linked in support of the claim. And since the topic at hand is precisely Islam's reputation in the first place, it seems we can't have any conversation about Islam's reputation for violence (deserved or not), and what to do about it, at all.
If your goal is to integrate Muslims living in Western nations into Western society, what is going on here is not helping to achieve it.
It's not a slur against Islam in the slightest, it's a supposition, with a link in support of it. If one-third of a population supports or tolerates a heinous thing, then it is not unreasonable to claim that the reason the population has a reputation for supporting or tolerating the heinous thing, is that one-third of them actually do support or tolerate it. I don't think it would be particularly controversial to say "American whites in the 50s had a reputation for racism" due to widespread support of Jim Crow and segregation, even if those things were not actually supported by the majority, but only a significant minority. So it goes here.
My takeaway from it would be "why does one-third of this population support this heinous thing?" but it's impossible to have that conversation with people like you piping in and asserting that any interpretation of data that could offend anyone's sensibilities, is off limits.
Indeed. The moderation in this thread has been supremely disappointing. Your post contained no slurs, only an interpretation of data along with a link.