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I actually deny that part, though.
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Sure, but it’s a reasonable suggestion. The two ideas are unlikely to be unrelated.
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Yeah, and that alone doesn't mean or imply anything, still.
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You brought it up as if it did mean or imply something, so don’t pin it on me that your point was irrelevant.
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Just when any of us said that, exactly?
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vlam: “keep in mind that more than half of French prisoners are muslims.” Brought up in context of a discussion about general European perceptions of Muslim demographics. What else was this meant to imply?
You: “How big does the prison population need to be to satisfy you? 70 thousand people are a reliable sample for statistics.” In reply to my comment that the French prison population only accounted for around 0.1% of the French population, and was likely to have skewed demographics. Exactly what were you trying to claim, if not that the Muslim demographics in French prisons could be used to infer something about the wider French population?
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Nobody said that. Neither about men, nor about Muslims.
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If that went over your head, let me clarify: I don’t legitimately think that about men in France
(sacré bleu!), and nor am I claiming anyone else in this thread does. What I
am doing is illustrating how the skewed demographics of French prisons cannot and should not be used to draw conclusions of the larger French population, and I’m tying it to the current subject of the thread: European perception of Muslims, how Europeans generally overestimate the current and projected Muslim population and the implications this might have on immigration and xenophobia. I am inferring that some people would hold the high Muslim prison population as reason to deport Muslims or prevent immigration of Muslims into Europe, and I am comparing that to another over-represented demographic in French prisons to show its absurdity.
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I'm concerned about your double standard when it comes to judging statistics.
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I’m concerned by yours: on the one hand you think that examining the relationship between public perception and hard statistics is worthless, and on the other that a heavily skewed sample of the French population is a useful statistic to judge Muslims with.
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That's pretty muh what "nearly" means. It means that it's not there, but a big majority is.
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7.5% is not close enough to 10% to be directly compared in that way – if you could round it up to the nearest decimal place, then I’d give it to you, but 2.5% is a significant enough margin to matter, especially when that’s 2.5% of a population of 66.03 million.
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You might stop and look at yourself before you tell people they're exaggerating, it seems like a good moment to do it.
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I’m certainly spending an exaggerated amount of time replying to this thread!
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The state is not responsible for their wellbeing, silly. They're reponsible to give them a fair opportunity to earn it. Muslims are not denied education or work, the teachers don't go all "hurr durr you're not allowed to go to this school because you're Muslim". If anything, they do their best to allow that.
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The state does have a responsibility for its citizens’ wellbeing: it has an obligation to provide protection, uphold human rights and justice, and in the process provide reasonable access to education, housing, healthcare etc. Of course this varies by government, and citizens do have the ability to remove themselves from those provisions, but the general principles remain the same.
You misrepresent me: I am not suggesting that France deliberately bars Muslims access to education or work, and you know that. I am stating that France has not done enough to tackle the socio-economic problems which makes access to good education, good living conditions, good job prospects more difficult for Muslims. These are conditions which can and must be solved by government intervention, for the Muslim community cannot solve them on their own.
