131–140 of 341 posts
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>Nobody has time to thrive when they have to prey five times a day Ah huh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
The classic "Golden age" deception. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Qpy0mXg8Y
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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).
> Some sources claim the book is racist Funny thing - given how easy it is to get an "racist" label these days, I'd treat this as a signal that the book may be touching on some controversial topics or reaching unpopular conclusions.
"Race" does not explain anything - although, many people would love it to because that would make it easier to comprehend the world. There is very dark history of this in european pseudoscience. There is far more genetic variation in average within population groups of same 'race' as there are between 'races'.
There are cultures with obviously harmful practices - take female circumsision for example - but to the way to respond to those is to make it clear it is not acceptable, and not to use it as an example of the barbarism of individuals belonging to the culture in question.
There are wide variations in cultural sensibilities, and actual painpoints between interactions of populations. There are well known, and actually difficult problems to solve. Adding crackpot theories to the mix based on opinion and imagination does not really help the world to evolve.
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Do you have any sources for that claim? I would be genuineley interested in the methodology of this research. Its just anecdotal, but here in Germany it is the other way around. The Catholic south is prosperous, whereas the protestant north (east) is poor. I can think of examples where the opposite is true (Belgium) but I highly doubt that there is a casual connection. In Belgium for example the catholic (and more im…
The Protestant northeast suffered from being part of East Germany. A hundred years ago Prussia was much more powerful than Bavaria.
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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
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> (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.
She has to pay for the campaign/Clinton foundation donations somehow. Mark my words a vote for Hillary is a vote for war.[0] [0] https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/04/01/19496/defense-con...
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I wonder how much use there is in putting a lot more effort into any of those countries. My angle is climate change. There is a record-breaking heat wave going on there right now, with temperatures close to making human life impossible. Outlook: Getting a lot worse. They already have water shortages. The population still is growing. The trouble in Syria is said to have been caused with a mismanaged big drought as a m…
> infrastructure for AC-based indoor living in the entire region and beyond Thats a huge amount of constant power and infrastructure, which is just not going to be built. Easier to build an underground city with high ceilings and taking advantage of physics than managing to give AC to everyone in the region, which is to say both options are extremely difficult and require pre-existing infrastructure. And this still d…
Ancient Iranian architecture was quite close to that, which you may be alluding to: http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Architecture/wind.htm
What people will do? Well, same as everywhere else, everything from agriculture to software. It's more a question of how many of them the local agriculture can support. The number of people who've fled Syria is more than its entire population was in 1950. Similar applies to places like Yemen. Malthusianism may not apply globally, but it can certainly bite locally.
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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…
Overly binding is subjective and many benefit from the strong social support provided by Islamic communities, and furthermore to feel jealousy towards other cultures is very un-Islamic. That said, I continue to assert that your arguments are red herrings -- attempts to indirectly answer one question with another's answer. Fixing the issues you brought up are unrelated to removing Islam's influence on the people of th…
The fact that when given a chance to re-envision their society and culture, revolutionaries in these countries such as the Muslim Brotherhood keep choosing Sharia and other forms of theocracy means I think they will remain in a society strangled by the yoke of fundamentalist religion for the foreseeable future.
People in the Arab world aren't patients - they are agents, and have the power to change their circumstances.
The 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…
I think we're still doing reasonably OK in Canada... :->
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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.
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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…
We also used to say statistics is what people should study (in the early 1970s? iirc). Not everyone has the inclination or bandwidth.
This is a problem that will only be solved by figuring out tools to help the human component.
And Unfortunately any tool created has immense scope of being misused. The power no man should have.
For example, a tool which can identify the intent of a speaker online by studying the sum total of all conversations they have ever had, would be vastly useful in in helping people build bridges with each other. IT would solve immense problems with law keeping, justice, and even mundane things like moderation on a forum.
At the same time knowing intent would be the scariest thing to see abused by an unscrupulous third party.