A neo-Nazi gang member went on trial for murder Monday with his swastika and other tattoos covered by makeup on the order of a Florida judge who thought they could prejudice jurors.If I were on a jury and the defendant had visible Nazi tattoos, I'd want to vote the death penalty, even if he was only charged with driving on a suspended license. But I'm funny that way.
There is another point to be made, however, and it speaks right to the Wingnuts' idea that those who are followers of the Prophet Muhammed can be crushed by military force alone: We crushed Nazi Germany. The leaders of the Nazi Party were, for the most part, all killed, whether before the war (the Night of the Long Knives), during the war or afterwards. Many killed themselves, others died in revenge killings or by hanging. The Nazi ideology was thoroughly discredited.
Yet the Nazi ideology, Nazi hate, survived. There are neo-Nazis in most every nation where Caucasians live. There are Nazis in Russia and even in Israel. The combined might of the Allies, tens of millions of soldiers, were not able to stamp out the Nazi ideology.
What makes the Wingnuts think they can stamp out a religion?
(H/T)
2 comments:
What makes the Wingnuts think they can stamp out a religion?
The same thing that makes militant atheists think they can stamp out religion -- wishful thinking bordering on delusion.
Human beings are in no way rational. Some are more rational than others, but on the whole, you will never completely purge a person of all shreds of irrationality.
Hmm, there's about a billion Muslims, and there was about 120 million Germans before we killed 30 million or so of them to cure them of being Nazis. So that means we need to kill about 350 million Muslims to convince them to give up being Muslims. Right now, it is estimated that our soldiers expend around 250,000 bullets for each kill. A M-4 has a duty cycle of around 700 bullets per minute. We have approximately 40,000 rifle-toters in the U.S. Army and Marines right now (the rest are support troops, drivers, loaders, etc.). So if every single one of them works 16 hours per day, firing 700 rounds per minute, it will take only, uhm.... 3125000 minutes, or 52083 hours, or 3255 days, or 8.9 years to kill sufficient Muslims to convert the rest to Christianity.
But of course that's poppycock because M4's won't fire 16 hours a day, soldiers can't do 16 hour days for 9 years straight, and we can't manufacture 87500000000000 bullets in any reasonable period of time, and the world certainly would not sit around watching us kill 350 million Muslims, they're getting a bit itchy just watching us kill the 1.5 million or so Afghans and Iraqis that we've managed to kill thus far either directly or indirectly (via disruption of basic necessities for survival, the collapse of security, etc.). My point was more around the sheer *magnitude* of the task that the wingnuts are proposing, putting numbers to what you already said. And as you pointed out with Naziiism, 350 million would be just the start....
- Badtux the Numbers Penguin
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