[fluoridation]

>So yes, the US military was literally created to fight the Islamic terrorism of its day. That is not propaganda, that is historical fact.

I mean, you're bending the truth a little. The US Navy was created to fight thieves and murderers on ships, who happened to be Muslim. There was no ideological component to the conflict. That someone can cite a passage from a book to justify robbing you doesn't mean that his robbing you is inspired by the book.

>funny story I read about this lately related to that is that the lead designer of the Call of Duty games is having trouble traveling overseas without a security attache because of the enemies he picked in his past games, lol.

Sounds extremely dubious. For one, there's not a designer. It's always been at least two different companies working on alternating titles; right now it's three or four. Second, who would even recognize him, by either face or name?

>B) If the movie depicts the US as flawed, you... Also see it as propaganda? See the problem yet? If there are no conditions under which a Marvel movie is not "United States propaganda" to you, then it is not falsifiable, end of story.

For example, if the US government wasn't a player at all (it's not aware of the conflict, it's totally powerless to do anything about it [for or against], etc.), it would not be propaganda. Or it could depict a realistic US government, as not a monolithic entity, but a massive swath of people with different motivations, principles, and knowledge. Hell, imagine this: two different branches of the government want to help with the problem but they refuse to cooperate out of mistrust and their solutions work against each other, cancelling each other out, and a third, smaller branch makes a small but key contribution to the heroes' effort.

[pmarreck]

> That someone can cite a passage from a book to justify robbing you doesn't mean that his robbing you is inspired by the book.

I'm sorry, what? I literally don't follow. If someone robs my home because of what it says to do in an unquestionable book that they've been raised on, how is that not literally inspired by the book? This is nonsense. People do things all the time (good and bad) because of what they believe is true in books. Would you not fault those books if they state something wrong that causes people to commit harm? I mean... Trepanation? Bloodletting? Countless other things that were believed to be true, were acted on because of that, but were actually wrong?

Have you actually read the relevant passages?

(I more or less agree with your other statements.)

[fluoridation]

>If someone robs my home because of what it says to do in an unquestionable book that they've been raised on, how is that not literally inspired by the book?

Yes, if I beg the question, I also can reach any conclusion I like. But someone doesn't rob because of what any book says. They rob you because they want what you have and they think they can get away with it. I assure you, if you put a sign on the front of the house saying "beware of the leopard" and the robber hears growling noises coming from inside, he will not rob you, no matter how righteous his unquestionable book says robbing you is.

(If he does, then I'll grant you in such a case there's an ideological component to it.)

>People do things all the time (good and bad) because of what they believe is true in books.

That's not how human nature works. It's not like before Muhammad came around pillaging didn't exist. What do you think vikings were, or the sea peoples? I haven't read the passage, and I don't need to. It doesn't matter what it says. The Old Testament says that Hebrews could take slaves from their neighboring nations. Leviticus didn't invent slavery. All the book did was condone a practice that already existed. At the most what the passage did was let people feel better about what they were doing (and we know they knew slavery was awful, because they had different practices for the in-group than for the out-group), if nothing else because their own countrymen would not punish them for it.

Take everything I said about the Hebrews and apply it to the Muslim pirates.

>I mean... Trepanation? Bloodletting? Countless other things that were believed to be true, were acted on because of that, but were actually wrong?

Now you're just conflating things. Trepanation and bloodletting were performed because it was mistakenly believed they would help the patient. Someone who enslaves you, robs you, or murders you because his holy book tells him is the righteous thing to do is under no mistaken impression that he's doing you a favor.