The premise of the essay is not flawed. In fact, your criticism could be completely addressed by appending “some” in front of every instance of “Muslim” in the essay. You should get into the habit of always appending “some” in front of every generalisation anyone ever makes.
While a generalisation is technically for all x, x has property y and can be falsified with a single example this x has property z which is opposite of y, our best model of how generalisations work in the human brain is something more along the lines of for enough x that it matters, x has property y. Also, a narrowing of x to only those x that have property y.
So to actually address the premise of Yvain’s post, you’d want something more like “This characterisation isn’t even close to what most Muslims are like. This behaviour is exhibited by fundamentalists, who in most cases are disowned by Muslim communities in the same way that most Baptists would disown Jerry Falwell. Because the people you are dealing with are fundamentalists, several of the assumptions made in the post fall down: this, this, and this.” And so on.
The premise of the essay is not flawed. In fact, your criticism could be completely addressed by appending “some” in front of every instance of “Muslim” in the essay. You should get into the habit of always appending “some” in front of every generalisation anyone ever makes.
While a generalisation is technically for all x, x has property y and can be falsified with a single example this x has property z which is opposite of y, our best model of how generalisations work in the human brain is something more along the lines of for enough x that it matters, x has property y. Also, a narrowing of x to only those x that have property y.
So to actually address the premise of Yvain’s post, you’d want something more like “This characterisation isn’t even close to what most Muslims are like. This behaviour is exhibited by fundamentalists, who in most cases are disowned by Muslim communities in the same way that most Baptists would disown Jerry Falwell. Because the people you are dealing with are fundamentalists, several of the assumptions made in the post fall down: this, this, and this.” And so on.