131–140 of 183 posts
And all those spanky new Toyota pick-ups. Uh huh.
Can you expand on this a little bit? What exactly are you trying to say?
Then what is behind the rise of the Islamic State's recruiting, whose targets aren't suffering any obvious economic strife? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/world/middleeast/from-minn... Modern liberalism offers no solution to the problem of evil. It assumes that as long as your basic needs are met, and you're mentally sane, that you will behave as a rational, non-violent person. It sees humans as essentially materi…
You statement assumes that everyone who joins/supports ISIS is evil or brainwashed like the people in that article. Imagine you are a resident of a town just captured by ISIS in Syria. Assuming that they don't kill you immediately for being a Shia, Kurd, Christian or Yazidi, how hard would it be for you to say no to supporting them, when the alternative is death, or to flee to another place only to be forced into des…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm starting to suspect that as any thread on Hacker News involving the Middle East, Islam or Islamic terrorism grows longer, the probability of someone calling Mohammed a pedophile approaches 1.
Calling? It's a pretty well established 'fact' covered by Islamic sacred text, Its an assertion held by 1.8 billion Muslims. The books could well be works of fiction, the vast majority of people who assert the truth of the books are Muslim. I'm perfectly willing to accept that Mohammed was neither a prophet, nor a child rapist, but Muslims believe these things bring glory to him. However, to be respectful of their fa…
Even in our own culture it was once the norm to betroth daughters to suitors while they were pre-pubescent, and to marry them as soon as they reached puberty... Polygamy is also a result of a violent era in which there were more unattached women than men - and in which having a husband was the only social security net.
The problem is the literal interpretation of a 1300 year-old book in today's society (which is pretty much the whole philosophy behind Salafism/Wahhabism, that ever so destructive ideology propagated by our friends the Saudis). There's still Christians today that think it's OK to burn witches at the stake, and do...
Edit - I love the downvotes for stating that mideivel attitudes are due to circumstances that arose during the middle ages (actually, a little bit earlier).
I don't understand why we shouldn't believe what's coming straight out of ISIS' mouth. ISIS has said they're killing us because of their interpretation of a book written in the first millennia. They say this every time they attack us. Yet (mostly on the left) we keep coming up with reasons why this isn't the case. "No, actually, you're not attacking us for that reason, really it's our fault because we gave the oil to…
There's a difference between the stated motive of ISIS and what enables them to exist and grow. I have a hard time believing that they can be so effective in their recruitment efforts with a message based entirely on an interpretation of an old book. It is more plausible to me that they prey on desperate, mentally unwell, and disaffected people to join their cause.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is not positing a general theory of income inequality and extremism merely offering a hypothesis for recent extremism in the middle east. Saying "I think X is the cause of Y in country Z" is not the same thing as saying X is always the cause of Y in all countries all the time.
If you can make causes conditional to one particular location, how is that a good explanation? Are extremists more likely to be the poorest of society? From what I read, this is not the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you expand on this a little bit? What exactly are you trying to say?
Oct 6, 2015 - US Officials Ask How ISIS Got So Many Toyota Trucks http://abcnews.go.com/International/us-officials-isis-toyota...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll agree with you there. Among impoverished and religious, they're still a tiny percentage. It's definitely complex what causes the individuals to convert. However, the factors that promote it seem pretty consistent. ;)
I'd say that the factors are anything but consistent. The closest thing to consistency is the personal desire for an all-encompassing identity, being a part of something bigger than one's self, and being raised in a society or culture that reveres illiberalism and the combination of religion and state.
I don't understand why we shouldn't believe what's coming straight out of ISIS' mouth. ISIS has said they're killing us because of their interpretation of a book written in the first millennia. They say this every time they attack us. Yet (mostly on the left) we keep coming up with reasons why this isn't the case. "No, actually, you're not attacking us for that reason, really it's our fault because we gave the oil to…
Pretty much everything Piketty writes, is originally written in French. He's French, after all...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calling? It's a pretty well established 'fact' covered by Islamic sacred text, Its an assertion held by 1.8 billion Muslims. The books could well be works of fiction, the vast majority of people who assert the truth of the books are Muslim. I'm perfectly willing to accept that Mohammed was neither a prophet, nor a child rapist, but Muslims believe these things bring glory to him. However, to be respectful of their fa…
Keep in mind it's not so much that Mohamed was a 'paedophile' by our modern definition, rather that the definition has changed over time. Even in our own culture it was once the norm to betroth daughters to suitors while they were pre-pubescent, and to marry them as soon as they reached puberty... Polygamy is also a result of a violent era in which there were more unattached women than men - and in which having a hus…
Irrational people believe that whatever we were doing 1300 years ago is what we should be doing today because... God said so.