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How the Arab World Came Apart

nytimes.com

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Re: How the Arab World Came Apart

#81

Post by douche »

nailer wrote: post #21
not_a_terrorist wrote: post #7

tl: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)

Do you think Saudi will fall apart?

Of course it will. Someday, there won't be enough bread and circuses and sinecures for all of the extended offshoots of the House of Saud, and somebody will stir up popular, probably religious, discontent, or else a disaffected faction of the government/royalty will stage a coup.

Besides that, it is a regime, and really, a nation, that is entirely predicated on petro-dollars. They have been fighting a price war against US/Canadian oil production, burning foreign currency reserves, in the hopes of setting back the clock. Unfortunately, the break-even point in the North Dakota and shale oil fields keeps going down[1].

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2016/02/29/the-break-eve...

Re: How the Arab World Came Apart

#82

Post by hacker42 »

ihsw wrote: post #56
hacker42 wrote: post #44

Earlier 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…

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…

I think addressing cultural flaws more directly could make such social programs more effective.

Re: How the Arab World Came Apart

#83

Post by tdkl »

douche wrote: post #61
tdkl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're just naive in that a community ruled by religious narratives will suddenly jump to democracy. Look at age of enlightenment. They never had one.

The age of enlightenment only came after a series of religious/civil wars that wracked Europe for hundreds of years, set brother against brother, depopulated and ravaged huge swatches of Germany, central Europe and France, and essentially broke the temporal power of the churches and the papacy. That's not the most pleasant blueprint to follow...

And yet that was the result. The price paid for it was enormous and it took time. The question is only if we're willing to repeat this in Europe again.

Re: How the Arab World Came Apart

#84

Post by tim333 »

reitoei wrote: post #39
jomamaxx wrote: post #28

Ha ha ha ... ha ... The 'Arab World' was never together. Ever. All of the 'Anti-American Imperialism' kids here should remember that the bulk of the 'Arab World' is 'Arab By The Sword'. Arabic is spoken across North Africa, in particular because of Arab Colonialism of the 9th-12th centuries. Not since then has the 'Arab World' been anything resembling 'together'. The Turks kept them (and there was not much of them) u…

> Once things stabilize in Syria, maybe things can start to settle down. OT, but do you see this happening soon? The only way it seems that Syria can stabilize is for the regime to retake control. That's beginning to look like the most likely outcome. Could there ever be a path back to pre-Spring peace? Anything is better than what they have now :(

I'm guessing that now Erdogan and Putin are friendly again things could stabilize quite quickly probably with the old regime still in charge.

Re: How the Arab World Came Apart

#85

Post by jmus »

bitchypat wrote: post #41
mms1973 wrote: post #12

I recommend to read Raphael Patai's classic "The Arab mind" to try to understand. Don't drink the NYT koolaid.

Adam Curtis's Bitter Lake has some good stuff too. https://thoughtmaybe.com/bitter-lake/

I watched this a while back on the BBC and remember it being pretty interesting. It examines the relationships of the US, UK and Russia with the middle east through the lens of their respective involvements in Afghanistan.

Re: How the Arab World Came Apart

#86

Post by ihsw »

jomamaxx wrote: post #33
ihsw wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

You are confusing Islam with the cultures of the Arabian Peninsula -- it may be the birthplace of Islam but Muslims have done much more than eek out a meager existence among sand dunes.

Education curriculum, fairness, equality, social justice, civic duty, personal accountability -- all of these things are similarly as present in Islam as they are anywhere else.

Also, governance by royal decree is one of the most un-Islamic things possible. This is not lost on the Gulf monarchies so they are forced into a submissive position when confronted by the relevant Sunni Islamic authority.

Re: How the Arab World Came Apart

#87

Post by tdkl »

jcbeard wrote: post #76
sevenless wrote: post #13

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…

> (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.

Re: How the Arab World Came Apart

#88

Post by maze-le »

Retric wrote: post #57
_delirium wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there much evidence for the specific choice of religion as a casual factor? Methods of blending a traditionalist religion with modern life seem much more important than which religion you start with. For example, Judaism imposes an extremely strict set of rules that govern almost every conceivable aspect of daily life. And indeed you find that strictly observant Orthodox Jews are mostly unable to function in a mod…

There is clear evidence that Catholic areas have lower levels of economic growth than Prodestent areas even within same country. So, religion really does impact economic growth. But, I don't think there is hard evidence to brake it down to specific causes within each religious group. PS: While you may disagree with this, there is a lot of research into this topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=religion+economi…

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 important industrialized) wallonia was very prosperous during the 19th century, in opposition to the more agrarian flanders. Nowdays its flanders that is more prosperous, and the old industrial regions in the south suffer from the effects of deindustrialisation.

Re: How the Arab World Came Apart

#89

Post by nickik »

return0 wrote: post #48
reitoei wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once things stabilize in Syria, maybe things can start to settle down. OT, but do you see this happening soon? The only way it seems that Syria can stabilize is for the regime to retake control. That's beginning to look like the most likely outcome. Could there ever be a path back to pre-Spring peace? Anything is better than what they have now :(

290.000 deaths later and 1/3 of the population fleeing the country. Even if the US knows that the return of Assad's tyranny is the only quick path to peace, they (US) will not be willing to bear the blame of the damage created.

US is not really to blame directly in this case. The US by now is willing to accept Assad for a limited time. Russia has also shifted and might accept that Assad has to go in the middle to long term. Their is a chance that they could agree.

However local powers, Turks, Saudis, Iranians are not that flexible. Iran really needs Assad in power, they really want to crush ISIS. The Turks don't want the Kurds to form their own country. The Saudis want Assad gone and don't want ISIS completely destroyed.

Re: How the Arab World Came Apart

#90

Post by mustaflex »

mms1973 wrote: post #18
awesomerobot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like most of modern history: America's fault most recently, but Europe's fault originally.

When Europe dominated the Middle East (and Africa), it was a pretty safe place. Certainly there was hope. Now the entire region is going down the sink. Maybe the problem instead is that Europe _LEFT_ ?

the White man's burden syndrom? France was the colonial power in control over there, they used basic divide and conquer tactics. While the sunnis arabs are in majority in Syria they took another minority faction, the nusayriis, and trained them in military schools, etc... to put them in power. It's like having a protestant pope in Vatican.

Contrary to Europe where different ethnic groups are well separated in different countries, in the middle-east, like in Irak, you can find arabs, kurds, turks living in the same villages, cities that makes a clean separation almost impossible. They lost the skill to live together in peace, my opinion is that it won't be resolved before civil wars and huge population displacements and even greater hatred between those ethnic groups.

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