Gandalf objected to me starting a new thread on this on the Islam board, but I think his curious take on how democracy works is worth it's own thread:
61% of Malaysians are Muslims. Of these, 86% favour Sharia law being the law of the land. Of these, 60% support stoning adulterers to death and 62% support the death penalty for apostasy. That makes roughly 31% and 33% of the total population.
When Gandalf and Ian demanded I explain why these laws have not come to pass in Malaysia, I suggested democracy might have something to do with it, as roughly two thirds of the population oppose these laws. It would be reasonable to presume they oppose them strongly enough to vote against any party that supports them. Apparently this explanation is not good enough.
This does not mean of course that they do not have similar laws. For example, Malaysia has "rehabilitation" camps for Muslim apostates and blasphemy is illegal. The government refuses to officially acknowledge Muslims who reject Islam and still classifies them as Muslims.
Gandalf has taken the extraordinary position that the reason they do not have these laws is because the 1/3 of the population that supports them don't really care enough to get them, rather than because 2/3 of the population oppose them - as "passionately" as you would expect people to oppose letting Muslims start killing people in the name of Islam. Despite having significant minor parties that push the issue, and Anwar Ibrahim needing to clarify prior to the last election that his coalition opposes the laws, Gandalf even tried to argue that there is not even any serious debate on the issue.
Gandalf, the reason I felt the need to start a new thread is because that seems to have far more success in getting you to see common sense. It worked very well with the rape conviction rate debate and I anticipate you suddenly seeing common sense on this issue also.
[mod edit: thread has been merged with existing discussion - new thread is completely unnecessary]
Gandalf's latest efforts to push this nonsense - by way of clarification, Gandalf insists on using the Malaysian government's official racial classification scheme. That is "Malay" actually means Malaysian Muslim. Gandalf uses this term so he can talk about the "majority of Malays" as if democratic principles support his argument that the only reason 1/3 of the population don't get their way over everyone else is because they don't really want what they say they want.
polite_gandalf wrote on Jan 1
st, 2014 at 11:35am:
[quote author=freediver link=1379233325/654#654 date=1388528084]Quote:
and gagging the fringe islamist party from talking about it
How so?
By declaring, on behalf of all PR parties including PAS, that hudud would never be implemented - even though PAS obviously would disagree with this stance.
freediver wrote on Jan 1
st, 2014 at 8:14am:
You don't become the ruling party in a democracy by adopting a policy that the majority strongly oppose.
ummm... thats the point FD. According to you thats exactly what the BN did - adopt a policy that the majority (of Malays) oppose - and yet their voter base is Malays. Especially now after a "chinese tsunami" abandoned BN in droves during last eleciton.
freediver wrote on Jan 1
st, 2014 at 8:14am:
We also have lots of fringe parties, yet it is still the two main parties that decide what an election is going to be fought over. If both labor and Liberal decide they support the Iraq war, then support for the war is not going to be a big election issue, even if many in the community feel strongly about it.
What you continue to fail to appreciate is that such a scenario suggests that by
allowing the major parties to de-emphasise issues like Iraq, the public is not all that serious about those issues after all. Even if we see record breaking protests in the streets on the issue. And by the way, the iraq example is a bad one to use - since at the time of the election the invasion was already over. The public was vehemently opposed to the invasion, but once we were there, we were actually supportive of staying there to "finish the job". Thus both labor and liberal adopted policies on Iraq that were consistent with public opinion.
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