Moderate Muslims, everybody.

But knowing that more than one out of four British Muslims have sympathy for the reasons for the Charlie Hebdo attacks is one thing, but it's another thing to realize that your not talking about something like 75 British Muslims who feels this way, or 750, but 750 thousand, and that about 300,000 sympathize with the jihadists. There's no way to keep an eye on that many people.

True, successfully securing a random sample of that size is highly unlikely, primarily because -- especially if your suspicions are correct -- you'll get a huge percentage of just plain non-respondents.

But what that means fairly -- scientifically -- is that you have a huge "dead zone" of non-respondents. That's all it means, statistically. You can't just make anything of it that you want to.

Of course, the government of the U.K. (and, increasingly, the government of the U.S.) fail to get one thing straight:

You owe your allegiance to the people who fucking pay you. That is the British, and for the latter, the American, citizenry. Not to the raghead fucks who are actively conspiring to destroy you. You don't owe those cocksuckers a fucking thing.

But they're fucking stupid, so they deserve to collapse and get the fuck out of the way of we, the people. We'll scour the Muslim scourge, and the left won't like it, but fuck 'em -- their policies will have robbed them of their strong-arm man, Government, by that point.

That's why no leftist ideology has ever secured its grander aims -- because one of its formative goals results in it destroying itself.

Way to read, idiot.

"Terrorist imam makes up excuse for terrorist supporters. News at 11:00."

I'm sure you have proof this imam is a terrorist?

If that's the same mosque where the son attended, which seems likely, then it's also the mosque that's sent a lot of fighters to ISIS.

See, here's your perfect extrapolation condition: the congregation of any given specific mosque is an extremely small and homogenous random sample.

Um, no. It's anything but random.

Within the sampling frame of "mosque attendees", it's random. Within that single independent variable, it remains completely probabilistic.

The fact is that no sample is absolutely probabilistic with respect to geographical specificity except a 100% human population global sample, which is unfeasible.

Well, no. People choose their mosque according to their beliefs. If you're going to sample beliefs, taking them all from one mosque is the definition of a biased sample. It would be like polling the local Republican caucus and asking them about their opinion on Obamacare.

That's why you poll more than one. And don't forget that you're getting a non-probabilistic sample by polling them to begin with, soliciting voluntary cooperation, making it a voluntary sample.

Granted, you can't really get an involuntary sample without violating guarantees of due process, but that's a whole 'nother question.

Still, you broaden the responses beyond just the one mosque to every mosque within a given geographical area; for example, the entire Phoenix Metro area, or the DFW area, or the L.A. area.

But I know what you fear. I can feel it radiating off you. You fear that you'd get the kind of response off Mosque-going Muslims that "Islamophobes" tell you you'd get off them. Anti-democracy, anti-freedom, anti-American responses.

Are you so afraid of validating the ideological opposition as that? What if the ideological opposition turns out to be correct? Have you the intellectual and scientific honesty and integrity to acknowledge it if that turns out to be the case?

Oh, sure, that's fine. It seemed to me you were saying the very opposite, assuming that one mosque gives you an unbiased sample for Muslims in general.

(In Germany, even going to several mosques would still be strongly biased, as there's a huge amount of Muslims that are so irreligious they hardly ever go to mosque, much like the vast majority of Christians here hardly ever go to church. That's an issue not of biased samples, but of biased questioning: When you ask a basically but not explicitly secular society about their religion, you generate false answers.)

From the mosque whose Imam has just said that the murderer is a criminal for whose crime God must be asked for forgiveness? Hardly. I would, however, fully expect the other crowd to claim he is lying when he says that Muslims go to mosque to pray on Fridays, because they think it's much more likely that they only do so in support of a religiously fanatic murderer.

Well, and that's a perfect illustration of the point that you simply cannot extrapolate a larger sample from a smaller one just in the abstract. Because for that one Imam who is moderate, I'm sure we could find a dozen who are hardline anti-Democracy zealots. Nothing can be extrapolated from the one Imam Polling the congregations of a dozen, however, would be far more illustrative, not to mention statistically significant.

True. But it's also true that the people frequenting that one mosque probably tend to agree with that Imam speaking for them, because if they didn't, they wouldn't be frequenting that mosque.

This is another case of potentially misleading questions. Religions often aren't democratic. If you poll a bunch of Catholics and ask them what they think about, say, gay marriage, and then poll them again after the Pope has said something unexpected about gay marriage ex cathedra, many of their opinions will have changed. You should have asked them which opinions they would be prepared to adopt if their pontifex proclaimed them, otherwise you won't have any prognostic value for their actual behaviour once he does.

Spoiler for size. It's worth it.

But that really points at the heart of the problem: We shouldn't be using statistics to create better stereotypes and then assume they won't fail like all stereotypes do. That fallacy starts by assuming there must be a good answer to questions like, "What do Muslims, in general, believe/do/desire about...?" In many cases, that information might just not be available, or might not even exist.

Which, while you're exactly right, speaks to 2 points, not just one:

First, these Abrahamic religions are cults. It's how they're designed, it's why the little fringe groups that even you recognize as cults splinter off from them so easily.

The Branch Davidians had an unconventional interpretation of this idiotic shit, but it was an interpretation of this idiotic shit.

ISIS has an unusually fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, but it is an interpretation of Islam. Nothing else. ISIS are Muslim. Obama denies that and every time he denies it, he takes a pound of flesh out of the lready crippled and rotting corpse of his public legitimacy. ISIS is Muslim, if simply by virtue of the fact that it's nothing else.

And then there are organizations that make a certain set of beliefs their prerequisites.

Look at the requirements for who who could join the Nazi party.

And no, this post isn't subject to Godwin's Law. No post critical of Muslims is, because like the Nazis, Muslims are fascists who have appropriated religious symbology in order to advance a fascist cause. Like the Nazis, Muslims want to wipe out the Jews, conquer the West, and silence free speech. Also like the Nazis, they aren't above acts of terrorism to silence resistance to their advance in not-yet-conquered territory.

We shouldn't accept the lie, first of all, that any stereotype has ever failed.

None ever has.

Stereotypes become stereotypes because they are observed, so often, so widely, and so consistently in the real world that they take root in association with a subculture.

Stereotypes do not, and can not, even become stereotypes without being true, for a long time.

If you really, genuinely, have a problem with a stereotype, it's on you to do one of two things:

1. Mentor the subject to rise above the stereotype;,

Or...

Accept the validity of the stereotype.

There's no secret cabal of white men getting together and just inventing the fucking things, you know.

No. It's like they say about alternative medicine: Alternative medicine that has been proven to work is called medicine. Stereotypes that are true for any measure of time aren't stereotypes, but types (or classes, or ideas, or phylae, depending on your discipline).

Stereo-, via the French version meaning imprinting the type unto the object, means just that: Something that is firm only because it is deprived of something, namely flexibility.

And if you could have stopped there, we could for once have agreed.

But you had to go on to say that Obama denies that ISIS are Muslim, when in fact he denies that Muslims are ISIS; you claim that ISIS is only defined by Islam, which isn't true -- it adds a whole bunch of ideas from European and colonial nationalism, and not least Nazi ideology. You then actually bring up the Nazis, but with a historically false claim about prerequisites for joining their party; and frankly, it is quite an achievement to find, when speaking about Nazi racism and fascism, one instance in which it technically wasn't expressed. And then you go on describing all Muslims by the values of those few who, while interpreters of Islam, have the qualities you describe because they also use other sources, among them -- Nazism!

You were doing so well, I could even look past some of the stupid that had begun to creep in to your last few posts. But this is just complete backsliding to your usual mode of deceitful hyperbole. Go ahead, talk about the truth behind some of these stereotypes:

• blacks are lazy
• atheists are evil
• Democrats are smarter than Republicans

To be consistent, you must defend these. But you're a lying, deceitful piece of shit, so you won't. Instead, you'll try to claim that they aren't stereotypes. But that's a trap, too, if you go down that path, so have at it.

Really? Then elucidate, for us, your idea of how stereotypes are formed in the first place. What is the origin of any stereotype?

I don't think you'll even try to answer this question. You won't dare touch it, because you know as well as I do that stereotypes aren't the result of invention, but rather of observation. Stereotypes achieve the status of stereotype by being true.

Bias against difference.

Here's another one for you to defend: all writers are alcoholics.

A difference that's invented ex nihilo, or a difference that's an observable fact?

So for example, did "gangsta rap" become stereotyped for praising violence and misogyny because white people just got bored and one day all got together in a big seekrit meeting to invent those characteristics of it? Or did it gain that stereotype because people noticed those characteristics in it that were already there?

Invented, poorly observed, or misunderstood. Either way, the resulting conclusion (ie the stereotype) is a reflection of bias, not objectivity. If you disagree, then you agree that blacks are lazy, Democrats are smarter, writers are alcoholics, and atheists are evil. I'd add Europeans are commies, but that one might be true.

That's not a stereotype but, rather, a generalization based on the stereotype established by Hemingway and others. But it was Hemingway and others who established the image that became the stereotype. No third party just invented it as a whole cloth fabrication. Stereotypes only become stereotypes by being true enough of the time and across a wide enough sample of the stereotyped population.

Ah, A for effort! Was their something known as gangster rap before people noticed that it praised violence and misogyny? If somebody said that was true for all rap, because they had heard some that did so, that would be stereotyping, and an incorrect conclusion. if they instead observed that there was a sub-genre of rap that focused on those topics, their position would be unassailable. They could go further, and study the sources that informed the artists' lyrics, determining that it was an outgrowth of gang culture. They might label the sub-genre gangster rap, and that would not be a stereotype. There is nothing wrong with labels and descriptions, so long as they are accurate and precise. Stereotypes are neither.

None of the above. Stereotypes are the intuitive, uneducated man's statistical medians. And they only get that way by being predominantly true. Another stereotype: People hawking products in late night infomercials are selling junk. The person who objects to stereotypes will yell, "Not ALLLLLWAAAAAYYYYZ!" Well, technically true. Not always. But enough of the time that they're known for it.

And that's their own fault. It was their own past behavior that established the stereotype in the first place.

If blacks want to blame anybody for the stereotype that blacks are lazy, they should blame their parents, grandparents, et cetera, for being the lazy blacks who established the stereotype. And Democrats never have been stereotyped as being smarter; the stereotype associated with Democrats is that of being arrogant and pretentious. The stereotype about writers was established by writers who were, in fact, addicts. To alcohol, to cigarettes, to any number of recreational substances.

And no stereotype applies automatically to every member of a stereotyped group. But it remains a fact that a whole shitload of somebody's within each of those groups established those stereotypes. There's no secret cabal out there just inventing the damn things and then assigning them.

Again, stereotypes only become stereotypes by being true.