Slightly off topic:
Clicking "Simplify Page" on the google chrome printing dialog makes this a fantastic formatted PDF. I'm impressed (be it Chrome's doing or NYT's).
How the Arab World Came Apart
111–120 of 341 posts
Re: How the Arab World Came Apart
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once the oil stops being important (Just Another Commodity like, e.g. iron ore), life will probably improve for citizens of the middle east: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse We'll stop meddling and making things worse. The leaders of those countries won't be able to substitute oil wealth for popular support or funnel money into pushing Wahhabism. It's the best thing that could happen to them.
It's the best thing that could happen to them. ... In the long term. In the short term, it's going to be very, very bad for them indeed, as the sole source of foreign exchange goes away and the ordinary folks find themselves abandoned in a climate-change-drought-crippled land that has become populated well above its agricultural carrying capacity, and the elite jets off to enjoy their stolen wealth in Switzerland.
I can see that happening to Saudi Arabia but not the middle east as a whole. A lot of them don't really see the benefit of the oil wealth (especially in surrounding 'pipeline' countries that don't have oil), they only get to deal with the fallout.
Re: How the Arab World Came Apart
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, the praying alone would not create a huge amount of cognitive load, but it is just symptomatic of an overly binding religion. It must be terribly confusing as a Muslim to see other cultures vastly outperforming them even though these cultures don't follow the word of Allah, e.g. by not throwing people off of cliffs for having wild gay sex and not stoning women for adultery. These are literally the kinds of rule…
Similar punishments are prescribed by the Old Testament, so not specific to Islam. Luckily religion was replaced as a moral and especially legal guideline in "the West" thanks to the Enlightenment and the French revolution.
> Similar punishments are prescribed by the Old Testament, so not specific to Islam.
Saying that is ignoring the hadiths and the sharia which describe in great details all the aspects of the life of a Muslim. There is no such thing with Christianity. There are no "christian tribunals" describe by the bible. Islam is closer to Judaism in that aspect. The bible doesn't cover in great details all the aspects of life of a christian. Furthermore the new testament is clearly a new covenant incompatible in many aspects with the first one.
Re: How the Arab World Came Apart
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Islam is unrelated to the emotional and intellectual deficits imposed upon victims of poverty and disenfranchisement -- not only that but I think there's a strong argument in that a task performed five times daily repeated ad infinitum doesn't cause cultural impairment, nor does the age of a given mandate. Furthermore, I think maximizing for "human potential" is a red herring -- the inevitable end-result is exercisin…
Preventing women from driving, from being in public without family members, from touching others, from having other see their face etc. etc. is 100% part of the 'intellectual deficit' imposed by Arabic flavours of Islam. Islam is a religion, an ideology and a culture all blended into one. Parts of it are bad. But I don't think it's any of that. I think it's something simpler: there is nothing in the desert. It's real…
> I think that were the Arab world to be green and lush, it would be a better place, because civilization and power would have developed from an agrarian base ... which is more distributed,
We are going to enter a similar situation in the developed countries as the workforce will be replaced by automation. Work has been a great "distributor" of wealth, each person being in charge of his own work potential. But after automation, people will have nothing to trade for. Regular people will become like "muslims in barren countries", dependants upon the state and wealthy. And the riches will collect in the hands of big corporations who operate the robotic fleets.
The only solution I see is to open source and democratize AI and robotics so it doesn't concentrate wealth like it happened with operating systems (Microsoft), search (Google), social networks (FB) and oil (arab countries). People need to be independent from now on. If corporations are to function without hiring people, then people need to function without needing said corporations. We need to focus on agriculture, 3D printing, solar and open source AI. We need to be self sufficient.
Re: How the Arab World Came Apart
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
The invasion of Iraq was stupid. It was likely illegal, based on false pretenses, and well....shouldn't have happened. The invasions initial execution was beautiful (first few days). The US Military performed splendidly. The follow through (driven by political leaders) was idiotic. Stupid decisions like not listening to his generals (Bush), disbanding the Iraqi security forces (Paul Bremer), and the odd focus on turn…
> (sounds like somebody that's running for president this year) Someone else running for president this year has pledged that the first act of her address would be removing Assad. Which brings us back at the beginning of stupid actions.
Well, unlike Iraq in 2003, there will be a war in Syria 12 months from now whether Hillary tries to remove Assad or not. The question is whether we continue to try to shape the outcome.
In the meantime, we have this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/02/toxic-gas-in-the-...
Re: How the Arab World Came Apart
#116Long piece , but it fails in that it does not give a coherent message. Pieces of stories here and there are not history. First of all , lets stop calling it Arab Spring. If anything it's the arab Autumn of civil wars, where all arabs are united only in their resentment of the west. Secondly, let's talk about people, their souls, aspirations, and culture instead of political history. Given that these states were built…
>Long piece, [...] This piece may be fun to get through your flight, Yes, it's ~43000 words and at 250wpm, it would be a 3 hour read! I think I'll wait to collect some more opinions/tldrs like yours before reading it myself. Three hours would be a terrible waste of time on a substandard article. Open question: Are there better articles on the topic that use that would use that finite reading time better?
Is there a decent way to save the article as a PDF to read later, say on an ipad?
I tried Safari's 'Export as PDF' but the formatting is too mangled. Safari can also save as a single 'web archive' file but I can't get that file to open on my ipad.
Firefox has a save option of 'Web page, complete', but you end up with lots of files, impractical to move around to other devices. Printing as a PDF also mangles the format.
Re: How the Arab World Came Apart
#117tl:dr 100 pages: 1) People are fucking poor and hungry (extreme wealth inequalities) 2) Salafi/Wahhabi (Saudi) funding of islamism 3) Antediluvian hatred between people (it goes, way, way, way farther back than Sykes-Picot)
It seems they are missing an important factor, namely 4) the personal, cultural and economical impairment due to the religion of Islam. Nobody has time to thrive when they have to pray five times a day, when almost every thought and action is dictated by an old book and when half of their human potential is hidden in cloth bags.
That's absurd. Everything we do in the modern world stands upon technological, mathematical and scientific success brought to us by the middle east. Don't let you (imo apparently biased) thoughts about islam distort history
Re: How the Arab World Came Apart
#118The NYTimes itself is also a considerable part of the reason, considering Judith Miller, Friedman, Krauthammer and many others propagandized hard for invading Iraq.
The invasion of Iraq was stupid. It was likely illegal, based on false pretenses, and well....shouldn't have happened. The invasions initial execution was beautiful (first few days). The US Military performed splendidly. The follow through (driven by political leaders) was idiotic. Stupid decisions like not listening to his generals (Bush), disbanding the Iraqi security forces (Paul Bremer), and the odd focus on turn…
> The invasions initial execution was beautiful (first few days)
War is not beautiful. The invasion was a revolting, unnecessary horror from conception to now, where it still has not ended and shows no sign of an end.
As far as Bush not listening to generals, etc. I don't believe Bush was anything more than a figurehead. Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. were the decision makers. They knew what they were doing, and they didn't have an exit strategy because exiting was never their goal.
Re: How the Arab World Came Apart
#119I recommend to read Raphael Patai's classic "The Arab mind" to try to understand. Don't drink the NYT koolaid.
Some sources claim the book is racist and not backed by solid research. Any opinions on this? (looking for a good book on the topic).
On what topic? The middle-east? If so, probably you want to read "The Modern Middle East: A History".
See: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/middleeast...
For some more resources
Re: How the Arab World Came Apart
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Arab world is literally where civilization--the first development of agriculture, of urban settlements, of writing, coherent state polities, etc.--was first invented in history (note that most of these developments happened independently in a few places). They've had those things for at least 1000 years before anything in Europe showed any signs of comparable developments.
Your comment makes no sense. So Hammurabi was "Arab"? That's extremely anachronistic. Prior to then advent of Islam the Christian Roman Empire was much, much more wealthy advanced and sophisticated than the Arabian desert.
If you're criticizing a region for its geographic resources or lack thereof, it makes sense to discuss its history in terms of that geographic region as opposed to using cultural or ethnolinguistic definitions.
I'll also point out that Hammurabi was likely speaking an Afro-Asiatic language (of which Arabic is the most widely-spoken in modern times), so ancient Mesopotamia is as close to the modern Iraq ethnolinguistically as ancient Greece is to modern Western Europe.