The problem lies within the idea of basing what you know about an individual on statistics. That is the logical fallacy I was talking about. It's like saying I would know Spanish because I am of Hispanic descent. Or that a young black voter in the US is a Democrat. It is statistically usual, but not necessarily the case.

I was saying it with context, TrPrado. He was messaging about Allah on social media. So that's like saying a second generation Hispanic whose parents only speak Spanish probably knows Spanish. Or a young black voter who supports Clinton's election campaign is probably a Democrat

Lol no one said this reflects at all on the Muslims who aren't terrorists. Making us repeatedly clarify this and jump through these purity hurdles is a transparent attempt to distract from any discussion of the motive for the killing. It is subtracting information from the discussion and should be reviled in any decent intellectual company.

Gold, of course there are illegal ways to get a weapon, but that is another conversation. Getting something illegally in order to do something illegally is tough to filter out, but what we have in almost all of our recent domestic terrorists are people getting guns - legally - and using them on people. Simple as that. Ted Kasczienski is not the common kind of domestic terrorist by any means, and if we cut down those who are mentally unstable enough to commit terrorism from buying weapons, we cut down on domestic terrorism, which also seems far more prevalent than non-domestic terrorism, and I doubt that is only because of the CIA, NSA, FBI and whoever else plays a part in prevention.

First of all, almost a third of your list aren't even "Arabic" countries.

Second, missing from your list is Lebanon (only 60% Muslim, even per your link).

Third, Egypt - far and away the most populous Arab country - is 10% Christian per the US Department of State (http://www.state.gov/outofdate/bgn/egypt/180843.htm), not 5%. I'm not in the mood for this right now, but I'd be willing to bet my last year's AGI that the State numbers (and numbers from plenty of other sources) will differ from your Pew numbers by similarly wide margins for a number of Arab countries.

gold: Even then those contexts aren't necessarily true. Christian Arabs also call God Allah. My grandfather is a second generation Hispanic, whose parents knew little to no English, knows extremely minimal amounts of Spanish. His parents refused to teach him. And that voter could easily be an independent or registered as some third party. Statistics aren't everything.

JECE - I was careful in wording my responses because I feared someone like you would draw that conclusion. I said terrorist acts, not crimes/murders. Everyone of every religion is an equal opportunity criminal. I also said in the West, to avoid your comparisons to Ghaddafi, et al.

I'll concede to you on the homegrown terrorism bit. Poor wording by me. I meant to highlight the fundamental differences between Islamic terrorism and lone wolf acts like the Charleston shooter, Sandy Hook, James Holmes, etc.

About the other points, I believe my response to TrPrado covers them. I'm a stats driven person. If the statistics for something are >95%, then for all intensive purposes it covers the whole population in my book. I'm aware I could be wrong, but making blanket statements doesn't bother me at that level. And as I said, I thought that held for Kuwait, but it turns out it doesn't.

As for the religion bit, its not an apt comparison. Tons of people I know are Christian. The ones that post about God and being Christian on Facebook are the ones who take religion seriously. I assume the same holds for Islam and all other religions.

You make a good point about the scrutiny and troubles that Muslims have undergone with America recently. But his father is much much older, and from Palestine. Its a hunch, but I would imagine his investigation was pre-9/11 and was with regard to connections to the PLO. But this is speculation, not fact.

bo - again, I agree with you. I really don't know what more you're looking for from me, unless you think that our statements conflict and that better screening at purchase will solve all problems? Because its possible for someone to develop mental problems after their purchase of a gun.

Bit let a white cop kill a black person and we INSTANTLY know the motivation.

All you fucking hypocrites that pretend you don't understand the motivation of this latest TERRORIST attack.... Let me wish ill upon you so that you can instantly grasp the tragedy that too many Americans... Of ALL races and creed... Suffer at the hands of Islamic terrorism.

You smug assholes that dismiss the obvious of one tragedy, while casting instant Blame for any cop shooting (most of which turn out to be justified...)... You are part of the problem.

"My name causes national security alerts. What does yours do?" This is the lamest yearbook quote ever, but it says a lot about his mindset.

Tolstoy - I just figured a wider net was better to prove the point. And cheers, I knew I was forgetting a country. I was confused on the Egypt number, because I thought I heard 10% were Christians. So thank you for making me fact check. Here's from the CIA world factbook. Forgive me for not formatting it nicely.

Afghanistan - 99%; Djibouti - 94%; Egypt - 90%; Iran - 99.4%; Iraq - 99%; Jordan - 97.2%; Kuwait - 76.7% (69% of pop is immigrants); Lebanon - 54% (6% Druze counted separately); Libya - 96.6%; Oman - 85.9% Muslim; Pakistan - 96.4% Muslim; Qatar - 77.5% Muslim (40% Arab population); Saudi Arabia - 100% (non-Muslims not allowed citizenship); Syria, 87% (3% Druze); Turkey 99.8%; Tunisia 99.1%, UAE 76% (consists of population. 85% of population is non-citizen), Yemen 99.1%.

So, the numbers are all slightly different, but the story hasn't changed. In fact, I think my case strengthened because the CIA Factbook shows how many in the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar are immigrants from (mostly) South Asia.

jmspool

"Being born into a Muslim family doesn't make him Muslim."
Oh come on. Really? That's getting real nit-picky there.

"Being Muslim by birth doesn't make him religious."
I never said that. I said based on his social media he probably was.

Being religious doesn't make him a terrorist.
Give me one other reason this man had to target US military recruiting centers.

"Being a terrorist doesn't mean he was a terrorist because he was a religious Muslim."
Again, I'm talking about averages. More often than not are religious Muslim terrorists in the West are who they are because of religion? Yes.

"Asserting because he did a terrorist act AND was born in a country that was 86.4% Muslim by population with a name often used by Muslims does seem to make you a racist. But I'm not going to assume you are, even though the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of that."

In what world is that racist. Using information to make an educated guess is not racist. Saying all Muslims are terrorists is racist. Saying that a guy with a Muslim name from a Muslim country who committed a terrorist act is probably a religious Muslim terrorist is not racist.

Racism, may I remind you, is believing that blacks and whites are fundamentally not equal to each other. It's believing that [insert race here] is fundamentally less intelligent than [insert race here] or that they are unequal in some way. It's that I'm going to charge X race a different price than Y race for this house because I don't want X race in my neighborhood. And I'm aware that this view of racism is narrow. I just don't want to go off on more examples. But your definition of racism is so damn wide, that anyone who uses any demographic information to make any claim is in danger of being called a racist/sexist/whatever by you.

"Give me one other reason this man had to target US military recruiting centers."

These are 100% speculation and have literally no basis in any fact as far as I know, but here are some possible motivators that we may not know about besides religion:

• Politically speaking, he may hate the US. He may hate the actions that the military has taken against a place he considers home. Maybe our military is responsible for the death of someone he loved.
• He may have been driven to come to America to avoid the military. Maybe he was afraid of us, and maybe (clearly), it wasn't working out for him here. Maybe he was upset at that and blamed the military for forcing him out.
• Maybe he was driven mad by some perception that the military was after him. I imagine his father and his political views would have fueled this. He surely would have hated them if he thought they were conspiring against him. This would suggest he was mentally unstable, but obviously, he was - anyone that kills under any circumstance but self defense is at least somewhat mentally unstable in my mind.

There's three perfectly possible motives based on facts that haven't surfaced yet that have nothing to do with religion.

Decent theories. Unfortunately the "Arabs hate America" one is probably the most plausible if it isn't religion lol

Are we really arguin whether Muhammed youssef abdulazeez is Muslim? You all are precious.

Hi my name is Moishe Avraham Weinberg and I'm a life long Sikh

"Being Muslim by birth doesn't make him religious."
Islam is not religion, it is a way of life.

goldfinger0303: Don't kid yourself; you're not using statistics. Even if you were using statistics, your work would not apply to an individual case, rather only to a proportions within a large group. And even if you were working with a large group, you would still get it wrong since you have no clue why Kuwait has a lower Muslim population than several others. The number of Kuwaiti citizens resident in Kuwait who aren't Muslim is in fact miniscule. There is a large expatriate communtiy in Kuwait as well as a foreign military presence, but most importantly there is a sizeable number of workers from the Indian subcontinent which provide cheap labor similar to the situation found in other Gulf states. If this man has little connection to Kuwait beyond his place of birth and his father is really Palestinian, for instance, then there is a much higher chance that he is actually Christian. Moreover, despite how you are trying to spin your words now for jmspool, you did not in fact qualify "he is a Muslim."

If his father really was investigated so long ago, it is much less likely that it was for connections to Islamic extremism. Certainly sympathies for the PLO are an indication of leftist ideology, not Muslim ideology. Islamic extremism has spread like wildfire in the last two decades.

"Islam is not religion, it is a way of life."

That is as ridiculous as me saying JamesYanik is not a username, it's a douchebag.

@TrPrado,

"The problem lies within the idea of basing what you know about an individual on statistics."

Actually, you can do that, so long as you realize that you get only probable knowledge. Let's say, for example, that I know that 90% of the people born and raised in Swordfishville are thieves. Let's say I know you were born and raised in Swordfishville, and I know nothing else about you. Then I can conclude that there is a 90% chance that you are a thief. That is not a fallacy; it's just statistics.

Nope. Found it. It's definitively a logical fallacy. Specifically, this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy#Mean_and_median

Yeah, but you see, this is just you showing that you haven't understood the explanation in your link. It says,


"Similarly, if a particular group of people is measured to have a lower average IQ than the general population, it is an error to conclude that a randomly selected member of the group is more likely to have a lower IQ than the average general population. Mathematically, this comes from the fact that a distribution can have a positive mean but a negative median. This property is linked to the skewness of the distribution."

A property with a numeric scale, like a distribution, can have skewness; a binary (yes/no) distribution cannot. Skewness occurs when a few people have very extreme values of the variable, throwing the median off from the mean. This can't happen when the only possible values are 0 and 1. The average value of the variable must in fact be the probability that any actual member has a 1 as the value.

Incidentally, this is a classic illustration of why, in my opinion, it is dangerous and typically futile to memorize lists of fallacies. More likely than not, you'll pull one out inappropriately because you never understood why it was a fallacy to begin with. Learn to reason *correctly,* not incorrectly, and then you'll detect the fallacies for yourself, because they won't be good reasoning.

http://newenglishreview.org/Rebecca_Bynum/Why_Islam_is_Not_a_Religion/

@bosox
you really should learn about Islam. Islam is Submission. Islam is everything.

Christians don't nearly compare in full truth, it is neither political nor cultural by nature, but Islam is. Islam is everything

It's submission to what, James?

Uhh, TrPrado that fallacy, while true, doesn't apply in this situation. It applies for things on a scale, such as a number line. This is a yes/no question. There are only two possible answers to "Is x person a Muslim". If 86% answer yes, then the average person will indeed be a Muslim. There's no difference in the mean and median.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy
Or this one.

*sigh* We're not going to get anything out of you other than links to articles that you don't understand, are we TrPrado?

This article is pointing out that it's wrong to assume, when dealing with conditional probabilities, that P(E|I) = P(I|E).

That's not what anybody here is doing, though. We're just calculating a conditional probability directly using the definition.

*sigh* I'm not going to get anything out of you other than misunderstanding of what goldie said and why it is a logical fallacy, am I, semck?

JECE - I actually do have a clue as to why its lower. I just didn't think that they would include the migrant population in statistics on citizens of Kuwait. Many Gulf nations have very strict citizenship laws that basically only apply to Muslims who were born there. I had assumed Kuwait was the same, and thus they weren't included. And the Pew pole said the Palestinian territories were 97% Muslim. So I don't think there's much a difference between there and the Gulf states.

But to be clear then - are you agreeing with my original statement? That since he's from Kuwait, it's safe to assume he's Muslim? And you could be right on the PLO bit, but that was just 100% speculation on my part and neednt be elaborated further.