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I’ve been reading an old book “Doctor in Arabia,” given me my neighbor. She was put in charge of giving away the library of a surgeon at her church after he died, and she picked out seven books I might like, with a remarkably high batting average. This 1940 book by a Yankee surgeon, Paul W. Harrison, about his 30 years in Oman and the Persian Gulf (which was known back then as the Pirate Coast) as a Christian missionary surgeon, is full of interest.
Harrison, who graduated in the early 20th Century from Johns Hopkins medical school, the pioneer of scientific medicine, argues that the root of problems in the Arab Muslim world stems from the inequality of husband and wife, such as in polygamy but even more in the ease of men in divorcing their wives:
The destruction of the home is the gravest sociological blemish of practical Mohammedanism. … Such lessons in co-0peration as we have learned in the West, we learned in the home, and it is our capacity to co-operate instead of cutting each others’ throats competitively which is the measure of our possible future progress.
Harrison portrays the effect of the threat of easy divorce in Arabia as lessening the urge of family members to commit wholeheartedly to the long term benefit of all members of the family.
The Arabs are a great race of individualists, but as co-operators they are a total loss. Partnerships are almost unknown in the business world, and co-operative social enterprises impossible.
Oman shows the same exaggerated individualism as the rest of Arabia. … Oman’s entire history has been one long record of wars and raids and fights, a sort of opera-bouffe imitation of Balkan politics. …
Iraq is the supreme illustration of Mohammedanism’s destruction of all capacity to co-operate.
He asserts that archeologists have found that Mesopotamia’s ancient vast system of irrigation works began falling apart from lack of maintenance after the arrival of Islam in the seventh century and that the Mongol-inflicted intentional damage to the system in 1257 should not have been as long-lasting as it is often described as being:
An irrigation system cannot be carried away as loot, nor can it be burned down like a house. The real trouble was that the capacity for co-operation had been reduced to so low a level by six hundred years of Mohammedanism that, far from being able to develop such a system, they were not able to repair a comparatively trifling damage to it. From that day to this, Mesopotamia has been little more than an empty desert. Wherever the visitor goes, the remains of the old canals are seen. Desolate heaps of ruins stand as monuments to Arab individualism.
As a Christian missionary, Harrison’s reading of the archaeological record might have been a little motivated. I don’t know what the latest findings suggest. But it’s an interesting perspective.
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It seems a little harsh to ascribe the failure of Mesopotamian irrigation systems to the arrival of Islam. Rising levels of salt were probably the major factor. From the waterencyclopaedia.com on irrigation systems in antiquity:
“Even today, 4,000 to 5,000 years later, the embankments of the abandoned canals are still present. These canal systems, in fact, supported a denser population than lives there today. Over the centuries, the agriculture of Mesopotamia began to decay because of the salt in the alluvial soil. Then, in 1258, the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia and destroyed the irrigation systems.”
I seem to recall that the US writer James A Michener made similar observations about the decayed irrigation systems in Afghanistan and Iran in one of his books.
Not so much with irrigated land.
https://youtu.be/8TjGAWxL23c?t=86
American "rugged individualism" built the country and spread to the current scourge of consumerist individualism that has destroyed white American social networks and that has atomized American....and increasingly all white societies.
Arabs on the other hand are tribal to the core. And often like Mossad or ppl from the Balkans carry out blood feuds....Replies: @dr kill, @CAL2
The Tigris and Euphrates, apparently, tend by nature to be unstable. They move around, so the canal you built a century ago is not well connected to where the rivers are now.
Methinks I learned this from reading a Charles Issawi book, probably _Economic History of North Africa / Middle East_.
Egypt is just more "chill." You get predictable irrigation services from the Nile, it flushes out the salt (before they built the Aswan High Dam), the wind blows you up river if you put up a sail on a boat, and mostly you are isolated from major invasion routes. Various scholars have mentioned the benign features of the region. Maybe this is why the original religions of Egypt are more optimistic than those of Mesopotamia.
In Mesopotamia the rivers won't stay in one place, *and* you are on a major invasion / transit route between Persia and the Levant / Mediterranean. One could argue that it's a "bad neighborhood" for that reason.
In the papers that Patton was putting together for his memoirs, he mentions that Arab’s treatment of their women is the reason for their backwardness.
The book may be in the public domain by now. I would be interested in reading it. You may not have the means to scan and republish, even by PDF. I only have a home office scanner. But if you send it over I will give it a go.
Am I the only one who did a double-take trying to read this sentence? With the greatest affection for Steve, this doozy should get an award for most undecipherable, but still grammatically correct, English language sentence of 2017. Maybe even appear at the end of a SAT test.
And then they came for Tavis Smiley:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/13/media/tavis-smiley/index.html
Elmore Leonard has a sentence in one novel: "That redneck motherf*cker you lookin for's driving a [such and such a car, probably a beat up Montego piece of sh*t, if I recall the sentence]." Toward the end of _Unknown Man Number 89_.
Obviously "a surgeon at her church" must be the departed owner of the library, since Steve is talking about books.
Whose library? A surgeon-at-her-church's library. And Steve got seven books.
It's not the most foolproof sentence, but Steve writes a lot.Replies: @charles w abbott
Old books are great. I recently obtained a copy of an old book "Roots of America", by Charles Morrow Wilson. 1936. A first edition, not that that matters.
The following is from page 1:Strauss and Howe are probably dead right about everything.Replies: @Ian M., @Abe
Am I the only one who did a double-take trying to read this sentence?"
No. But I got the meaning on the second read through. I just reminded myself that Steve had written it and it instantly became clear to me. Not trying to be funny, that's what I did.
Se puso a cargo de repartir la biblioteca de un cirujano difunto de su iglesia.Replies: @Not Raul, @BB753
When dropping the "to" does one also drop the "by"?
Well, thanks to the 1960s New York-Jewish feminism of Friedan, Steinem, Firestone et. al., that ship has now sailed, and we now have the “War of the Sexes.”
What a pity that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld didn’t read that before invading Iraq and thinking they were going to turn it into a cooperative 21st century democracy, eh?
Well, I haven’t spent 30 years in the Middle East as a missionary, so perhaps I’m not qualified to make this analysis, but I’d wager that the main problem is not “Arab individualism” so much as Islamic despotism, under which whatever you might accomplish will go for naught if religious fanatics decide to put a sword to your throat. After a millenia-and-a-half of that, you’d probably see the evolution of a culture of supreme apathy.
Where there's a whip, there's a way...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoAfb3f04moReplies: @TTSSYF, @Hodag
When Israel pulled their settlements out of Gaza, they were originally going to dismantle the greenhouses they had built – Israel has a very lucrative business supplying cut flowers in winter to the European market. But some European charity paid for the Israelis to leave the greenhouses behind intact to benefit the good people of Gaza. Within hours of the Israeli pullout, hordes of locals descended on the greenhouses and everyone carried off whatever they could hold in their hands – 1 got a light fixture, 1 got a window pane, 1 got a door, etc. until everything was stripped to bare ground. What had been the basis for a very lucrative business when assembled together as a greenhouse probably generated 95% less value as bits and pieces in the hands of individuals, but everyone just cared about what they got.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/world/middleeast/israeli-settlers-demolish-greenhouses-and-gaza-jobs.htmlReplies: @Jack D
In Afghanistan when we turned over brand new Jeeps, SUV's, to the local police, they ended up on blocks with all their wheels and other gear taken off and sold.
The problem with Muslims is that they have a culture based on thievery, scams and avoidance of physical labor. You don't see Muslim men doing construction work, no they import blacks and SEAsians to do that. Even hands on technical work such as working in oil refineries is beneath the Muslim male. Most of their great works of art and architecture were done by slaves.
The Persians are probably the exception to this to some degree.Replies: @Escher, @Difference Maker, @Jim Don Bob
Sounds exactly like a certain American demographic.
Ouch, hasn’t that happened in the West in the last few decades?
I seem to remember an article at avoiceformen.com that had a perspective on divorce in the Islamic world that alleged a variety of cultural norms about dowry and/or bride price that made it clear that females had plenty of power that was not convenient for the feminist myths of powerlessness.
Trump wasn’t elected by republicans , he was elected by a nascent 3rd party . Between now and 2020 we need to find a viable candidate to unseat the clown and hold the Executive .
Who is more successful? Dudes who treat women as disposable or beta males
Mesopotamian desertification predates Islam by a long while. Deforestation by the old Mesopotamian empires, along with the later Persian, Greek, Roman and other empires contributed greatly to desertification. Also grazing by goats and other animals contributed significantly.
Beyond Mesopotamia, Roman North Africa and even Afghanistan still has semi-function remains of canals and cisterns from the time of Alexander's Empire and before.
In all cases the systems went into decline when Islam came on the scene. North Africa was the bread basket of Rome and Islam wrecked the well tuned irrigation system they put in place over the centuries. Arabs being primitive tribesman had no idea what constituted a irrigation system and replaced it with goat hearding.
In Afghanistan these canals worked quite well but also went into decline once Islam took over from the white Hunic empire that ruled the region in the 6th century AD. The final death knell come when the Mongols rolled in and wrecked the system. Even when the Mongols left, the Muslims never rebuilt the system.
Normally a people would rebuild such a system - it's not complicated, just takes hard work and co-operation. Something foreign to Muslims so it never happened.Replies: @Autochthon
That sounds like the asset stripping by Jewish American financiers like Milken and Icahn.
Similar to the views of Eric Hoffer:
“The sign of a good society and a good government is not in what it builds, but in what it maintains.” Hoffer went on to explain that good maintenance applies to big and small things alike, from securing the intent of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to assuring that our roads are smooth and that public bathrooms are clean.
I would think that chronic individualism is a characteristic of nomadic people segregated into clans. I don’t think Islam had an effect either way. Where it took root among nomadic tribesmen, it was adapted to their mean life ways. Elsewhere, it helped establish powerful and thriving dynasties. The Ottomans were hardly disorganized. So yes, there is more than a little evangelical bias in blaming the fecklessness of desert Arab societies on Islam.
One might also wonder, what actual advantages WASP gender equality has bestowed on America. In 1940, there were perhaps still a few things to say in its favor, though Prohibition was not one of them. Today. what does it engender? White-hating whites, mannish women, and invertebrate males, vide the Clintons.
Certainly the first time in history that sentence has been used.
And then they came for Tavis Smiley:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/13/media/tavis-smiley/index.html
I see the problem here:
On the other hand, Hussein(scum that he was) did provide water to his people, but then, US destroyed the waterworks and forced millions to live on sewer water, killing a lot of children and women.
And Syria was working too, sort of, before US and its allies decided to undermine its borders and push Diversity Terrorism into that country from all over the world.
Iraq population in 2015: 37 million.
Sweden population in 2001: 8.8 million
Sweden population in 2015: 9.2 million
Looks like drinking sewer water greatly improves human fertility.
The archeology backs up Harrison’s anthropological observations. It is all amply demonstrated in Emmet Scott’s Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (https://www.amazon.com/Mohammed-Charlemagne-Revisited-History-Controversy-ebook/dp/B006N0THLO). The catastrophic collapse of agriculture in the breadbasket of Roman antiquity – North Africa and the Levant – followed the same pattern. Greece and Iberia got hammered pretty hard by their centuries of Muslim rule, too. Aye, and Sicily, come to think of it.
This is why the Roman cities of North Africa are all ruins standing in desolate wastelands, while those of Christian Europe are still thriving cities in productive agricultural provinces, as they were 1,500 years ago.
Points to consider:
1. The insular, low trust nature in much of the Middle East makes it difficult to impossible for them to make any scientific advances or even produce much of a civic culture. Everything is based on kinship/marriage ties.
2. Islam really generates bad vibes in every society. Compare the crime rates of Thailand and Malaysia. The latter has higher rates of crime (except for the fun stuff-drugs and hookers), yet racially they are similar people. The most noticeable difference is religion.
3. I don’t care about Muslims. I just don’t want to share a society with them.
I think it was from the Alexander Jefferson Library. Strange things happen there.
The Arabs’ downfall is not individualism so much as fatalism. Arabs tend to believe that everything is in Allah’s hands, so there’s no point in planning or doing vital prep work. The Arab’s favorite catch phrase is “Inshallah,” meaning ” if God wills it. ”
When Arab armies fought Israel, their tanks and armored cars regularly broke down. Why? Because nobody bothered maintaining them. Everyone figured, “The tank will work if God wants it to- so changing the oil and replacing worn out parts is unnecessary.”
When the Arabs were nomadic shepherds, fatalism was a sensible approach to life. In the desert, you may wander long and far in search of water and grass. You may find them, you may not, but regardless, you have no control. You blithely accept that it’s in God’s hands, not yours. Worrying can’t help, so chill out and let God handle it.
So, if Arabs inherit canals, they don’t bother keeping them in working order as the Babylonians had. If Allah wants the water to flow, it will.
They came for Tavis Smiley
They don’t raffle off dead congregants at your church? How dull!
PS: The Christian West has easy divorce now, too. But, no problem, right? What could possibly go wrong?
Easy divorce is no way to run a society. Boy, did we find that out in the past half-century.
The statement Abe cited is decipherable but absurd.
In American society divorce is easy for the female, very costly for the male.
The difference is important in terms of long term family formation.
As long as the taxpayer can be substituted for the husband, easy female divorce and households without fathers will be the norm.
He’s wrong about Mesopotamia. Baghdad was founded by Muslims, and grew to over a million inhabitants before it was destroyed by Mongols.
A warning to America.
In the West, individualism was balanced by rule of law and morality.
But with high rates of divorce, loose sexual behavior, and lack of patriotism, things are falling apart in UK and US, especially in depressed white areas.
Primacy of the Pleasure of the Moment. Sacrifice everything for Pow Now and Wow Now.
But maybe the guy made a mistake. Maybe it wasn’t so much Islam as Arab culture. After all, Southern Italians and Greeks are Christians, but wow, what two-faced lying weasels.
Also, if Islam sucks so bad, how were so many Muslims able to organize and even take over parts of Europe in Spain, Southern Italy, and Balkans? There must have been some kind of teamwork. Indeed, it seems Ottoman worked better as a team than the Greek Byzantines who, though Christian, just got worse and worse.
Were Arabs any better organized prior to Islam? Maybe their bad habits carried over despite Islam’s disciplinary influences.
He asserts that archeologists have found that Mesopotamia’s ancient vast system of irrigation works began falling apart from lack of maintenance after the arrival of Islam in the seventh century
That may owe less to the problems of Islam than rise of tribalism despite Islam. To maintain massive waterworks, there has to imperial stability over vast areas. China had massive irrigation system because the central government was able to rule over vast areas. Same with Romans who built massive roads and waterworks. Without imperial domination, such projects will fall apart.
When Roman authority fell, so much of what the Romans had built fell into ruin. And Europe was very slow to recover. Also, it was impossible for a single power to maintain long-term domination over all of Europe since the fall of Roman. So, projects became local than imperial. And over time, local works connected with other local works.
Prior to the rise of Islam, the Near East was dominated by Byzantines and Persians, both of which were imperial powers that could exert force and stability over vast distances.
In contrast, Islam was not an empire but a mission of a belief system. It allowed tribes to maintain local authority as long as they heeded Allah. So, Islamic systems weren’t as imperial as the earlier systems because it was more about various tribes adhering to the Koran than serving a single temporal power, like in China.
PS. People of Oman seems to have considerable Negroid mixture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omanis
https://www.google.com/search?q=oman+people&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjPlerRwojYAhWB0YMKHXj-De4Q_AUICigB&biw=1680&bih=944
So regarding divorce we’re just doing the same as the Muslims but putting it in the woman’s hands.
That ought to work out great in the long run!
Doesn’t add up for me. I’ll bet that, even with their rather one-sided divorce laws, traditional Muslim countries have less divorce than we have in the good old US of A.
If the man can dismiss the woman for any reason, or no reason, and she has no recourse, that's a recipe for happy marriages, as both men and women prefer relationships where the man is firmly in charge (Whiskey crudely expresses this as "women hate hate hate beta males"). Sure, the muslim system risks creating hellish nightmares for some unlucky women. But again the USA system means hellish nightmares for huge numbers of men.
It's kind of like how high unemployment tilts the power balance strongly in favor of employers, which leads to high productivity, as workers feel they must go to increasing lengths to please their employer.Replies: @PV van der Byl
I was born towards the tail end of the 1960s, so I was but a sprout when the idea of no-fault divorce took hold, in California, and it spread, as so many California ideas have, across the fruited plain. I'm still not sure if I can really blame my parents' generation---divorce had been rare before, vanishingly rare, but it became a fad, like the pet rock, only vastly more destructive.
Of the people I knew in high school, I can think of only two families where the parents remained married. That's not just my friends, mind you, that's pretty much everyone I knew. Their parents divorced . . . and a flood of evils ensued.Replies: @Ivy, @Hare Krishna
In late night study sessions sometimes too much personal information gets shared. She opened up that she hated that her husband could declare a temporary divorce and basically sleep with whomever he wanted.
This was all within the bounds of Islam; you could tell she felt guilty even mentioning it.
Islam is so foreign to our western ways of thinking that I'm not sure we can trust any parallels made between middle east and west.Replies: @Jack D, @Big Bill
I don’t get it…
I’ve been reading an old book “Doctor in Arabia,” given me my neighbor. She was put in charge of giving away a surgeon at her church’s library after he died, and she picked out seven books I might like, with a remarkably high batting average.
If I was going to receive a dead surgeon, I would certainly expect more than a few books, even if they were good ones.
I also stumbled over that sentence, but just once.
Elmore Leonard has a sentence in one novel: “That redneck motherf*cker you lookin for’s driving a [such and such a car, probably a beat up Montego piece of sh*t, if I recall the sentence].” Toward the end of _Unknown Man Number 89_.
Obviously “a surgeon at her church” must be the departed owner of the library, since Steve is talking about books.
Whose library? A surgeon-at-her-church’s library. And Steve got seven books.
It’s not the most foolproof sentence, but Steve writes a lot.
Yeah, sure, should probably read “…giving away the library of a surgeon at her church” but I knew what he meant.
Old books are great. I recently obtained a copy of an old book “Roots of America”, by Charles Morrow Wilson. 1936. A first edition, not that that matters.
The following is from page 1:
Strauss and Howe are probably dead right about everything.
Well, with all the love in the world to our gentle host, that sentence was the literary equivalent.Replies: @Perplexed
I think what’s being described here is a lack of social trust, which is not really the same thing as “individualism” in the same sense we usually mean it. Arabs (traditionally) are tribalists, not individualists.
How long would you expect greenhouses to last in Gaza, considering how fond the Israelis are of using the place for target practice?
The Greenhouses
Israel responded to Hamas’ election victory by further restricting access in and out of Gaza. As it happens, these restrictions played a key role in explaining why Gaza’s greenhouses did not help it become Singapore. American Jewish leaders usually tell the story this way: When the settlers left, Israel handed over their greenhouses to the Palestinians, hoping they would use them to create jobs. Instead, Palestinians tore them down in an anti-Jewish rage.
But one person who does not endorse that narrative is the prime mover behind the greenhouse deal, Australian-Jewish businessman James Wolfensohn, who served as the Quartet’s Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement. In his memoir, Wolfensohn notes that “some damage was done to the greenhouses [as the result of post-disengagement looting] but they came through essentially intact” and were subsequently guarded by Palestinian Authority police. What really doomed the greenhouse initiative, Wolfensohn argues, were Israeli restrictions on Gazan exports. “In early December [2005], he writes, “the much-awaited first harvest of quality cash crops—strawberries, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers and flowers—began. These crops were intended for export via Israel for Europe. But their success relied upon the Karni crossing [between Gaza and Israel], which, beginning in mid-January 2006, was closed more than not. The Palestine Economic Development Corporation, which was managing the greenhouses taken over from the settlers, said that it was experiencing losses in excess of $120,000 per day…It was excruciating. This lost harvest was the most recognizable sign of Gaza’s declining fortunes and the biggest personal disappointment during my mandate.”
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.608008?v=9D3E8191C0D2AFBE8F367C467342F6EBReplies: @Jack D
You need to compare to divorce rates prior to 1940 when the doctor wrote the book. Possibly even earlier than that, depending on how long he served as a missionary, he might have been comparing to an even earlier era in the United States.
See also: a fantastic time-lapse scene in Lord of War (with Nic Cage) where a cargo plane stranded in West Africa is dismantled in the same manner.
Even with? You mean because of. We would expect one-sided divorce laws in favor of the male to lead to fewer divorces.
If the man can dismiss the woman for any reason, or no reason, and she has no recourse, that’s a recipe for happy marriages, as both men and women prefer relationships where the man is firmly in charge (Whiskey crudely expresses this as “women hate hate hate beta males”). Sure, the muslim system risks creating hellish nightmares for some unlucky women. But again the USA system means hellish nightmares for huge numbers of men.
It’s kind of like how high unemployment tilts the power balance strongly in favor of employers, which leads to high productivity, as workers feel they must go to increasing lengths to please their employer.
Today perhaps but not at the time the author was writing.
Aye, and it’s been no good for us either.
I was born towards the tail end of the 1960s, so I was but a sprout when the idea of no-fault divorce took hold, in California, and it spread, as so many California ideas have, across the fruited plain. I’m still not sure if I can really blame my parents’ generation—divorce had been rare before, vanishingly rare, but it became a fad, like the pet rock, only vastly more destructive.
Of the people I knew in high school, I can think of only two families where the parents remained married. That’s not just my friends, mind you, that’s pretty much everyone I knew. Their parents divorced . . . and a flood of evils ensued.
Both disruptive of traditional family patterns.
Yet no-fault divorce spread across the country with little controversy, and the states that resisted the most were not Bible Belt states (Mississippi and Alabama adapted no-fault divorce not long after California) but New York and New Jersey, which didn't adapt no-fault until the '90s.
Why didn't the South resist no-fault divorce?Replies: @The Man From K Street, @stillCARealist, @Neoconned1, @Charles Erwin Wilson
Libya had a pretty effective irrigation system until Hillary decided that Khadafi had to go. She gets an Honorary Mongol award.
I was born towards the tail end of the 1960s, so I was but a sprout when the idea of no-fault divorce took hold, in California, and it spread, as so many California ideas have, across the fruited plain. I'm still not sure if I can really blame my parents' generation---divorce had been rare before, vanishingly rare, but it became a fad, like the pet rock, only vastly more destructive.
Of the people I knew in high school, I can think of only two families where the parents remained married. That's not just my friends, mind you, that's pretty much everyone I knew. Their parents divorced . . . and a flood of evils ensued.Replies: @Ivy, @Hare Krishna
In the 1960s, divorce and second mortgages were looked down upon, or in recent Victorian commenting terms, just weren’t done. Now look at the world and see how well everyone has done.
I guess we’ll never know how target practice would have gone…..
That ought to work out great in the long run!Replies: @Ian M.
The great French reactionary Louis de Bonald wrote in 1801:
Insightful and prescient.
Except that they had to pay for the assets first and do so at a premium to the market.
I went to professional school with a Muslim Iranian girl whose husband was attending school in another state.
In late night study sessions sometimes too much personal information gets shared. She opened up that she hated that her husband could declare a temporary divorce and basically sleep with whomever he wanted.
This was all within the bounds of Islam; you could tell she felt guilty even mentioning it.
Islam is so foreign to our western ways of thinking that I’m not sure we can trust any parallels made between middle east and west.
However, most Iranians don't bother with this as just plain prostitution is (surprisingly) widespread (though illegal). The funny thing is that the streetwalkers wear chadors like all the other women.Replies: @nigel, @Eagle Eye, @Neoconned1
A Shiite Muslim man has four (4) slots for a wife. If he has at least one wife slot vacant, he can approach an unmarried woman and say, e.g., "Will you marry me for two hours for a hundred dollars?" If she says, "yes", then they are officially married in the eyes of Allah for the next couple hours. [He must pay her, of course.]
It is truly a brilliant and lawyerly way to immediately eliminate immorality, prostitution, faithlessness, and cheating. Give every man the right to conveniently, expeditiously, and temporarily marry another woman for as little as a few minutes and still be considered a moral, upright and godly person.
Don't laugh! A well-born Muslim woman living in England seriously suggested legalizing Muslim-style temporary marriage as a solution to England's pervasive, pandemic, drunken, sluttish rutting and bastardy.
Think I'm kidding? Iran's Holy City of Qom (aka "the Shiite Vatican") is stuffed with pimps (aka "marriage brokers") and whores (aka "temporary wives") who service the many horny and poverty-stricken imams. Google the Iranian documentary, "In the Bazaar of Sexes."
Imagine what a wonderful world it will be once we embrace and celebrate Muslim culture in the West. No more screaming fights over "cheating" on your wife. No more wife-initiated divorces for "infidelity". No more custody battles because you are sleeping around and bring your "girlfriends" home. Heck, they aren't "girlfriends", they are wives! ... for the weekend, anyway. Replies: @Thea, @GSR
Dr. Harrison offers a similar analysis in his 1924 book “The Arab At Home”
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015013707297;view=1up;seq=9
If the man can dismiss the woman for any reason, or no reason, and she has no recourse, that's a recipe for happy marriages, as both men and women prefer relationships where the man is firmly in charge (Whiskey crudely expresses this as "women hate hate hate beta males"). Sure, the muslim system risks creating hellish nightmares for some unlucky women. But again the USA system means hellish nightmares for huge numbers of men.
It's kind of like how high unemployment tilts the power balance strongly in favor of employers, which leads to high productivity, as workers feel they must go to increasing lengths to please their employer.Replies: @PV van der Byl
Basically, I agree. Durung the 19th century, it was common for divorced husbands, rather than divorced wives, to get custody of the children.
Old books are great. I recently obtained a copy of an old book "Roots of America", by Charles Morrow Wilson. 1936. A first edition, not that that matters.
The following is from page 1:Strauss and Howe are probably dead right about everything.Replies: @Ian M., @Abe
Agreed on old books. Here’s one of my favorite quotations from one of my favorite novels, Henry James’s The Bostonians, spoken by the protagonist Ransom, that I think is relevant to our present age (and prescient):
And, to make things a little more relevant to the current thread, here’s an exchange between Ransom and his love interest, Verena:
Old books are great. I recently obtained a copy of an old book "Roots of America", by Charles Morrow Wilson. 1936. A first edition, not that that matters.
The following is from page 1:Strauss and Howe are probably dead right about everything.Replies: @Ian M., @Abe
Have you ever eaten a steak that was not the highest quality beef, but for whatever reason (you were really hungry, the cook did an excellent job) you ravenously devoured it, not stopping at the gristle portions you might normally avoid, until you bit off a stringy, fatty, particularly knotty piece which you then even more foolishly decide to swallow rather than chew, and then- holy sh!t- it forms a perfect coil in the middle of your throat, and you cant’t cough it out- and oh my god if it slips any further down I’m 100%-not-going-to-be-able-to-breath-and-die-right-here-at-the-dinner-table!-until… ah!- it suddenly slides down your throat of its own volition, and then you go back to eating your steak, gristle and all?
Well, with all the love in the world to our gentle host, that sentence was the literary equivalent.
No, I've never done this. Have you?
One might also wonder, what actual advantages WASP gender equality has bestowed on America. In 1940, there were perhaps still a few things to say in its favor, though Prohibition was not one of them. Today. what does it engender? White-hating whites, mannish women, and invertebrate males, vide the Clintons.Replies: @Pseudonymic Handle
The ottomans were extremely disorganized by the eighteenth century. The quasi-independent mamluk beys in the arab parts of the empire and the Derebeys in Anatolia gained the ottomans the name of the Sick Man of Europe.
They paid for it with junk bonds that were paid back with asset stripping.
The percentage of companies that incompetently managed was actually rather small.
If a business is worth less than the sum of its assets, then it's not much of a business. It makes sense to sell the assets to businesses that know what to do with them.
This is the exact opposite of the scenario with the greenhouse: the assets individually are worth less than the business, but due to a civilizational failure the business is destroyed and the business owner gets nothing.
I’m reading the 6-volume New Cambridge History of Islam. In the middle of the 5th volume now. Yes, the medieval destruction of the Mesopotamian irrigation system is mentioned there. I think that was several centuries into the Islamic period though. The authors blame that on internal strife within the declining, fracturing khalifate. The early, unified khalifate maintained the irrigation network.
Baghdad was the intellectual capital of the-world-minus-China from the 8th century till sometime in the 11th. The thinkers who lived there went farther than the ancient Greeks in many fields, including some topics in mathematics and medicine. Some even ventured into atheism, agnosticism and materialism. All of that withered and died. The culture stultified, intellectual inquiry ceased soon after 1000 AD. The authors of the Cambridge History kind of, sort of imply that invasions of Central Asian nomads might have been to blame. Even before the Mongols Turkic-speaking East-Asian-looking tribes started to dominate the Muslim world’s politics. I think they were the main protagonists of the strife that destroyed Iraq’s irrigation. They sometimes served as mercenaries, sometimes took power for themselves. The Mongol invasion of the 13th century was an absolute catastrophe, but the decline started earlier.
The Mongol invasion of the 13th century devasted Russia, Poland and Hungary, but stopped after that. Right after Poland and Hungary there's Germany, which is in the Core. Untouched.
Again in the 16th century the Ottoman invasion was very famously stopped at Vienna. That's also the very edge of Core Europe.
Is that because Core Europeans were better at defending themselves than Peripheral Europeans like Spaniards, Balkan natives, etc.? Or is Core Europe simply too far from any traditionally nomadic areas? No nomads have ravaged it since the Huns, well and I guess the Magyars. None ever despoiled the British Isles. What if Core Europe is simply the area that hasn't been touched by nomads in a long time? What if that's the thing that gave it Core characteristics? This may or may not be a part of the grand storyline of civ., together with the eugenic effects of agriculture in the high latitudes.
The whole of the Middle East was continuosly harrassed by nomads until relatively recently. All of its settled areas are close to nomadic areas.Replies: @Anon, @YetAnotherAnon, @Lars Porsena, @Jim
Meet Jessica Bennett, the NY Times intersectional gender editor: “I want everything we do to be intersectional in its approach — and race, class and gender identity are an important part of that.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/reader-center/jessica-bennett-our-new-gender-editor-answers-your-questions.html?smid=tw-share
“Ms. Bennett has started a newsletter (The #MeToo Moment); contributed to The Times’s reporting on sexual misconduct; written about how the Weinstein scandal has unleashed a global movement; and hosted a series of live events about male abuse of power and the role of technology to upend it.”
I imagine that it would have gone like every other time.
I suspect that the good doctor sees Islamic despotism as the ultimate expression of Arab individualism; if men will not cooperate willingly, someone will emerge who will make them cooperate unwillingly.
Where there’s a whip, there’s a way…
How about this: the individualism and lack of cooperation among arabs is caused by too many goddamn alpha males; and that in turn is caused by (and the cause of) polygamy.
“Desolate heaps of ruins stand as monuments to Arab individualism.”
Individualism or clannishness? My sense is that Muslims probably have a lower divorce rate than non-Muslims. In fact I’d bet on it. It woukd be hard for Islam to surpass Western divorce rates. It may be easy to divorce in Islam but there may be fewer reasons to do so, especially when your wife is at your beck and call, and she feels it is her religious duty to answer to you. Remember that in the US the majority of divorces are initiated by women, not men.
At the very least give Islam credit for inspiring in its believers a willingness to defend to the death their cause, and to trust each other in that fight. Even if their cause is both stupid and evil (it is) those are not qualities that are lightly dismissed. The West is being overrun for the very reason that Westerners can’t trust each other to defend our heritage and, moreover, can be expected to be vilified by our own when we do.
Islam is successful in its spread for a reason. It’s practitioners live in backwardness for a reason. We can learn from Islam’s successes as well as its failures.
Palestinians are like blacks in America. They have no agency. If they do anything bad, it’s not their fault, it’s whitey’s somehow.
There are greenhouses in many Arab countries. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Algeria, Tunisia, etc.
Baghdad was the intellectual capital of the-world-minus-China from the 8th century till sometime in the 11th. The thinkers who lived there went farther than the ancient Greeks in many fields, including some topics in mathematics and medicine. Some even ventured into atheism, agnosticism and materialism. All of that withered and died. The culture stultified, intellectual inquiry ceased soon after 1000 AD. The authors of the Cambridge History kind of, sort of imply that invasions of Central Asian nomads might have been to blame. Even before the Mongols Turkic-speaking East-Asian-looking tribes started to dominate the Muslim world's politics. I think they were the main protagonists of the strife that destroyed Iraq's irrigation. They sometimes served as mercenaries, sometimes took power for themselves. The Mongol invasion of the 13th century was an absolute catastrophe, but the decline started earlier.Replies: @Glossy, @Anonymous
The initial Muslim invasion was very famously stopped in southern France, at the door of Core Europe. Iberia isn’t in the core, but France is.
The Mongol invasion of the 13th century devasted Russia, Poland and Hungary, but stopped after that. Right after Poland and Hungary there’s Germany, which is in the Core. Untouched.
Again in the 16th century the Ottoman invasion was very famously stopped at Vienna. That’s also the very edge of Core Europe.
Is that because Core Europeans were better at defending themselves than Peripheral Europeans like Spaniards, Balkan natives, etc.? Or is Core Europe simply too far from any traditionally nomadic areas? No nomads have ravaged it since the Huns, well and I guess the Magyars. None ever despoiled the British Isles. What if Core Europe is simply the area that hasn’t been touched by nomads in a long time? What if that’s the thing that gave it Core characteristics? This may or may not be a part of the grand storyline of civ., together with the eugenic effects of agriculture in the high latitudes.
The whole of the Middle East was continuosly harrassed by nomads until relatively recently. All of its settled areas are close to nomadic areas.
As for Europe, the Mongols pulled back because they were having an internal political crisis.Replies: @Difference maker
PS - there's not much left of Roman water systems in the West, either. It took 1500 years for them to be recreated by 19th century European engineers. The Quanats have done pretty well.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat
As I read it that is how the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth came into being. They were unconquered, and when the hordes were weakened and infighting a hundred years later the Poles and the Lithuanians rode in and drove them out retaking the lands, and all the Kievans and other Rus pledged allegiance to them as liberators and filled up their armies. That is how tiny itty bitty little Lithuania had an empire including most of core Russia west of Moscow, Belarus and Ukraine. Between the two of them Poland had many many more people than Lithuania but before the merger Lithuania had a great deal more land then Poland and not enough nobles to manage it, because they were the spearhead of a slavic snowball.
I think western Europe never really got hit that hard by Islam, except from the south by the Moors. For most of the middle ages Poland-Lithuania and Austro-Hungaria were the wall that kept the Turks and the hordes out of Europe.Replies: @Lars Porsena, @Glossy
In 1900 Egypt had a population of 10,000,000 and France had a population of 39,000,000. Today Egypt has a population of 92,000,000 and France has a population of 67,000,000. It is this shift in population sizes that makes the current situation so very different from the past history of the conflict between the West and Islam.
I don't understand why this massive shift in demographic balance is ignored by so many people in discussing the history of the West vs. Islam.
Core Europe as you call it was massively affected by the Viking onslaught although I wouldn't call the Vikings nomads. Scandanavians were farmers not nomads.
I do think that the fact that Western Europe was not directly affected by the Mongols is a very important fact of history.Replies: @Autochthon
It wasn’t a European charity. James Wolfensohn of the World Bank had the idea; he got most of the money to buy the greenhouses from Bill Gates, and got a smaller donation from Mort Zuckerman.
donut, it is so good of you to offer yourself as the next Executive. Taking one for the team, right?
Found Leon Uris’ historical fiction “The Haj” about a Palestinian warlord and his family at the time of the Zionist movement very helpful. Uris was an Israeli Jew, but he emigrated to the US, joined the Marine Corps after Pearl Harbor and served in combat in the Pacific Theater. Basic idea was even in a family of some very loving and decent Arabs, the Islamic dog eat dog culture sabotages them all. Also touches on the outcomes of inbreeding, failure to take the helping hands of the west and Jews when offered, the destructive nature of polygamy.
Department of “What, did you think that I wasn’t hot enough for Harvey Weinstein”:
Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too
By SALMA HAYEK
Obligatory Trump reference….
Harvey really seems to have a thing about having women watch him shower….
Just in case anyone’s forgotten, I had one hell of a body….
And sexy, too….
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contributors/salma-hayek-harvey-weinstein.html
I have often wondered to what extent these nude scenes get plotted into movies just to juice up ticket sales. Hayek with her shirt off is unquestionably TV worth watching.Replies: @Big Bill, @Charles Erwin Wilson
Agree.
In late night study sessions sometimes too much personal information gets shared. She opened up that she hated that her husband could declare a temporary divorce and basically sleep with whomever he wanted.
This was all within the bounds of Islam; you could tell she felt guilty even mentioning it.
Islam is so foreign to our western ways of thinking that I'm not sure we can trust any parallels made between middle east and west.Replies: @Jack D, @Big Bill
This got a little garbled in translation. Since Muslim men can have more than 1 wife, they have no need to temporarily divorce their existing wife to take another. However, Shia Islam has an institution of temporary or “pleasure marriage” where even a devout Muslim can legally contract to marry a woman for a period of fixed duration, as little as 3 days.
However, most Iranians don’t bother with this as just plain prostitution is (surprisingly) widespread (though illegal). The funny thing is that the streetwalkers wear chadors like all the other women.
Thanks. I'm sure you are right. It was probably a little garbled in translation and garbled by my lack of understanding the culture. It was a shocking revelation to my young rural American mind.
They also allow homosexuals to convert to trans.
Call it what you will, they're more progressive than many islamists...Replies: @dfordoom, @Difference maker
What could go wrong? Well, what has gone wrong is that the costs for the decisions of self-indulgent adults have been shifted to children. Which is a bedrock principle of the Left – shift the costs of adult decisions to children (schools, adoptions, family – or lack thereof) – and all you disgusting leftists should own up to your vicious political philosophy.
Eventually archaeologists will dig up pieces of 1950’s Detroit, and wonder, when they get to some of the finer cultural and civic and pleasure palace remains, who created this Art Deco-meets-Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Charlie-and-the-Chocolate Factory whimsical splendor? And how came it to be occupied by blacks during the (by then The Great Migration North and ‘Civil Rights’ will be conflated under the vague, catch-all term) ‘Blackervanderung’? And how came squat Mexicans and slovenly Arabs to then occupy them from the black occupiers, displace the original displacers?
And one particularly iconoclastic archaeologist may say-
Then how came the squat Mexicans and slovenly Arabs to displace these fierce blacks-in-packs he would be asked?
And what was that?
And then they would solemnly consider their iconoclastic colleague’s intriguing theory, but in the end discard it as too fantastic to believe.
Just when I thought no one could outdo Tiny Duck for vacuity, ignorance and malice, you one up the Duck – way to go!
Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too
By SALMA HAYEKObligatory Trump reference....Harvey really seems to have a thing about having women watch him shower....Just in case anyone's forgotten, I had one hell of a body....And sexy, too....
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contributors/salma-hayek-harvey-weinstein.htmlReplies: @Jack D, @Abe, @Lurker, @Neoconned1
Frida has a very hot (and somewhat extraneous to the plot) nude lesbian sex scene with Hayek. It’s steamy, vavavoom, not safe for work, etc. According to Hayek, Harvey forced her to do this scene against her will and she was physically sickened by having to do it. All I can say is that in that case she is a hell of an actress because she sure doesn’t look sick on screen. (Actually Hayek seems to take off her clothes quite a bit in Frida – she doesn’t blame Harvey for all of the other nude scenes).
I have often wondered to what extent these nude scenes get plotted into movies just to juice up ticket sales. Hayek with her shirt off is unquestionably TV worth watching.
There are rain-fed pastures in England that have been productive for 2,000 years.
Not so much with irrigated land.
Baghdad is the old Ctesiphon/Seleucia/Babylon
Babylon is more than 50 miles south of Baghdad. Ctesiphon and Seleucia are more than 20 miles away from Baghdad.Replies: @Difference maker
Greenhouses, Gaza, Palestinians, isn’t there some proverb about folks in glass houses not throwing stones?
In late night study sessions sometimes too much personal information gets shared. She opened up that she hated that her husband could declare a temporary divorce and basically sleep with whomever he wanted.
This was all within the bounds of Islam; you could tell she felt guilty even mentioning it.
Islam is so foreign to our western ways of thinking that I'm not sure we can trust any parallels made between middle east and west.Replies: @Jack D, @Big Bill
It’s not a “temporary divorce”. It’s a temporary marriage, or rather, a marriage for a predetermined period of time, called “mut’a”.
A Shiite Muslim man has four (4) slots for a wife. If he has at least one wife slot vacant, he can approach an unmarried woman and say, e.g., “Will you marry me for two hours for a hundred dollars?” If she says, “yes”, then they are officially married in the eyes of Allah for the next couple hours. [He must pay her, of course.]
It is truly a brilliant and lawyerly way to immediately eliminate immorality, prostitution, faithlessness, and cheating. Give every man the right to conveniently, expeditiously, and temporarily marry another woman for as little as a few minutes and still be considered a moral, upright and godly person.
Don’t laugh! A well-born Muslim woman living in England seriously suggested legalizing Muslim-style temporary marriage as a solution to England’s pervasive, pandemic, drunken, sluttish rutting and bastardy.
Think I’m kidding? Iran’s Holy City of Qom (aka “the Shiite Vatican”) is stuffed with pimps (aka “marriage brokers”) and whores (aka “temporary wives”) who service the many horny and poverty-stricken imams. Google the Iranian documentary, “In the Bazaar of Sexes.”
Imagine what a wonderful world it will be once we embrace and celebrate Muslim culture in the West. No more screaming fights over “cheating” on your wife. No more wife-initiated divorces for “infidelity”. No more custody battles because you are sleeping around and bring your “girlfriends” home. Heck, they aren’t “girlfriends”, they are wives! … for the weekend, anyway.
“Beta males.” It’s not even close.
I have often wondered to what extent these nude scenes get plotted into movies just to juice up ticket sales. Hayek with her shirt off is unquestionably TV worth watching.Replies: @Big Bill, @Charles Erwin Wilson
However, Salma sensitively pointed out that she really doesn’t have anything against filming steamy lesbian sex scenes as a general principle. It’s just that Harvey was so … so … icky about it.
Israeli Settlers Demolish Greenhouses and Gaza Jobs
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/world/middleeast/israeli-settlers-demolish-greenhouses-and-gaza-jobs.html
Nah, they do, he’s just baffled because, unlike Steve’s church, his doesn’t give away the dead congregants in the church’s library (they do it in the rectory, like any respectable church would!).
If you don’t respect women for their brains, it’s kind of hard to breed your people for higher intelligence. After all, who is left to breed the next generation with?
Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too
By SALMA HAYEKObligatory Trump reference....Harvey really seems to have a thing about having women watch him shower....Just in case anyone's forgotten, I had one hell of a body....And sexy, too....
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contributors/salma-hayek-harvey-weinstein.htmlReplies: @Jack D, @Abe, @Lurker, @Neoconned1
You know it’s weird- I’ve tried to read this NYT op-ed like 20 times, but for some reason I can never get past the first 15 minutes…
The Mongol invasion of the 13th century devasted Russia, Poland and Hungary, but stopped after that. Right after Poland and Hungary there's Germany, which is in the Core. Untouched.
Again in the 16th century the Ottoman invasion was very famously stopped at Vienna. That's also the very edge of Core Europe.
Is that because Core Europeans were better at defending themselves than Peripheral Europeans like Spaniards, Balkan natives, etc.? Or is Core Europe simply too far from any traditionally nomadic areas? No nomads have ravaged it since the Huns, well and I guess the Magyars. None ever despoiled the British Isles. What if Core Europe is simply the area that hasn't been touched by nomads in a long time? What if that's the thing that gave it Core characteristics? This may or may not be a part of the grand storyline of civ., together with the eugenic effects of agriculture in the high latitudes.
The whole of the Middle East was continuosly harrassed by nomads until relatively recently. All of its settled areas are close to nomadic areas.Replies: @Anon, @YetAnotherAnon, @Lars Porsena, @Jim
I’ve read that the deserts of the Middle East stopped the Mongols there because there wasn’t enough grass to support the massive herds of horses the Mongols needed to keep a large-scale cavalry invasion going. Each Mongol cavalryman had several mounts, and he traded off frequently so he always had a fresh horse.
As for Europe, the Mongols pulled back because they were having an internal political crisis.
until the collapse of the Seleucid state the Parthians consistently fall back from Seleucid infantry and melee cavalry. (No doubt the Seleucids here made use of Syrian archers as well)There just aren't that many places to go to, extract resources and maneuver, out there in the desert, outside the highway of the green belt
The whole idea of Frida is vastly amusing. Casting a hottie to play the part of such a spectacularly ugly woman.
Another two aspects of Islamic tradition critical to understanding the stunted economies in Muslim world are inheritance law and the prohibition on lending.
The sunnah requires splitting an inheritance into very specific tranches, dispersing it across the surviving family. This has the effect of dispersing wealth across generations, retarding the growth of estates and capital. Along with the absolute quranic prohibition on interest (usury) you end up with a culture inimical to capitalism. The core of ineritance and lending law is actually enumerated in the Quran, not merely the hadith or usul al-fiqh, which is a bit unusual in the shariah, and makes it more or less impossible to adapt or modify. No ijtihad allowed here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_inheritance_jurisprudence
Contrast this with the German tradition of primogeniture followed throughout the West. Primogeniture, while tough on younger sons and daughters, garanteed the integity of great estates and lead to the accumulation of massive capital. The utter lack of any other traditional restriction on wills and inheritance allows Westerners to do very creative things with their estates.
The Islamic doctrine of hard predestination also has economic effect, inculcating fatalism and discouraging planning. Muslims generally do not create insurance pools. Try getting insurance for a rental car in Egypt – when I last tried in 2005 it was simply not done. Little risk management, no pooling of risk. It’s all only mash’allah and insh’allah: God’s will is ineluctable.
Another major issue is corporate law. In the West this comes out of ecclesiastical legal traditions governing monastaries, universities, guilds and such. Monastaries and other such legal entities were endowed flexibly, and allowed to adapt and change according to circumstance. This gave rise to modern corporate governance.
In the Muslim world the functional equivalent to the monastary was the waqf – the “pious endowment” – which is wealth and property held in mortemain, assigned to service a particular institution like a school, mosque or hospital.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waqf
The problem is that the waqf was governed in perpetuity according to the terms of the original endowment. There was little to no felxibility, the waqf had little room to change or adapt to circumstances. Instead of the creative corporate legal culture that emerged in late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, you ended up with rigidity and stagnation.
Christianity and Western culture was in every one of the aspects more flexible and thus gave rise to superior economic results over time.
If all you do is to take the stuff of other people, and that is what everyone else does, no one is building. No one is creating. You can't build an economy with that. An aircraft carrier or nuclear weapon is a byproduct of a modern economy. Maybe you can buy some old tanks with oil money produced by expats but that is about it.Replies: @dr kill, @Anonym
I will admit to being almost illiterate when it comes to Islamic economic history. Is your background in finance or in insurance?
I will warn you of 1 thing.... insurance companies are not everything. They very often can stifle economic growth by limiting types of employment and commerce....
Where did you learn all this about Islamic law and economics? Are you a comparative economist or lawyer? Political scientist?
I was born towards the tail end of the 1960s, so I was but a sprout when the idea of no-fault divorce took hold, in California, and it spread, as so many California ideas have, across the fruited plain. I'm still not sure if I can really blame my parents' generation---divorce had been rare before, vanishingly rare, but it became a fad, like the pet rock, only vastly more destructive.
Of the people I knew in high school, I can think of only two families where the parents remained married. That's not just my friends, mind you, that's pretty much everyone I knew. Their parents divorced . . . and a flood of evils ensued.Replies: @Ivy, @Hare Krishna
Both no-fault divorce and abortion were first legalized in the US (in the case of abortion, relegalized) in California under Ronald Reagan’s governorship.
Both disruptive of traditional family patterns.
Yet no-fault divorce spread across the country with little controversy, and the states that resisted the most were not Bible Belt states (Mississippi and Alabama adapted no-fault divorce not long after California) but New York and New Jersey, which didn’t adapt no-fault until the ’90s.
Why didn’t the South resist no-fault divorce?
Now we all have all this wonderful freedom to do as we please and to take care of the regret and guilt we have lots of pills.Replies: @Hare Krishna
No-fault divorce has been a disaster. But take it from me, the charm of those Southern Belles can be entirely superficial, and matched with a selfish coldness that freezes your soul like a block of ice on a windswept lake on the coldest day of a North Dakota winter.
No-fault was a bad idea, but I can understand the motivation.
Leon Uris was an American Jew. Born and raised in Baltimore. His father immigrated from Poland. Battle Cry, his book about the USMC in WWII, is a terrific read & was a bestseller in the 50’s. Uris didn’t visit Israel until this time.
From 1500-1950, Beta Males, obviously.
I increasingly get the impression these days that Islam is not only worse than we imagine, it’s worse than we can imagine.
Agree – this isn’t nearly well enough known. I didn’t think about it until reading Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome, on an iSteve recommendation. The massive civilisational disaster that was the end of Classical Roman civilisation – agriculture, industry, culture – across the Mediterranean world, was due to the Islamic not Germanic invasions, and Islamic piracy following that.
BWP's book is nonetheless fascinating, and I'm glad SS recommended it.Replies: @Simon in London
This was also a period of global cooling...characterized by a mini ice age that arguably helped cause the dark agesReplies: @Simon in London
Islam initially spread by way of merchant and administrative classes through, what was at least in the early centuries, a diaspora network in the population-declined power vacuum of the Middle East.
It would make sense that traders, scribes…bureaucrats without the old imperial Roman or Sassanian power would take to, and shape, a religion which perpetuates weak immediate bonds but aspires to strong extended ones, privatized religious judgements, etc.
It only worked as long as Islam remained a religion of the ruling classes; once these lands became majority Muslim, who was left to run ancient arrangements?
Baghdad was the intellectual capital of the-world-minus-China from the 8th century till sometime in the 11th. The thinkers who lived there went farther than the ancient Greeks in many fields, including some topics in mathematics and medicine. Some even ventured into atheism, agnosticism and materialism. All of that withered and died. The culture stultified, intellectual inquiry ceased soon after 1000 AD. The authors of the Cambridge History kind of, sort of imply that invasions of Central Asian nomads might have been to blame. Even before the Mongols Turkic-speaking East-Asian-looking tribes started to dominate the Muslim world's politics. I think they were the main protagonists of the strife that destroyed Iraq's irrigation. They sometimes served as mercenaries, sometimes took power for themselves. The Mongol invasion of the 13th century was an absolute catastrophe, but the decline started earlier.Replies: @Glossy, @Anonymous
A lot of the thinkers and literati of those early Islamic centuries weren’t Muslims but Nestorian or other kind of non-Chalcedonian Christians, or converts. It was mainly they by whose labor Aristotle and other Ancient Greeks were translated into Arabic. A “New Cambridge” history of Islam is unlikely to stress such a point. Refer to more specialized scholarly works, such as https://www.amazon.com/Lost-History-Christianity-Thousand-Year-Asia/dp/0061472816
He was certainly vicious, but to call Saddam Hussein (I assume you mean him and not King Hussein of Jordan) “scum” in a country where a name like that of, say, Douglas Feith may be commonly uttered without a pro forma curse, seems extreme to me.
Saddam Hussein’s closest American analog was probably Brigham Young.
You’re confusing two different issues.
Beyond Mesopotamia, Roman North Africa and even Afghanistan still has semi-function remains of canals and cisterns from the time of Alexander’s Empire and before.
In all cases the systems went into decline when Islam came on the scene. North Africa was the bread basket of Rome and Islam wrecked the well tuned irrigation system they put in place over the centuries. Arabs being primitive tribesman had no idea what constituted a irrigation system and replaced it with goat hearding.
In Afghanistan these canals worked quite well but also went into decline once Islam took over from the white Hunic empire that ruled the region in the 6th century AD. The final death knell come when the Mongols rolled in and wrecked the system. Even when the Mongols left, the Muslims never rebuilt the system.
Normally a people would rebuild such a system – it’s not complicated, just takes hard work and co-operation. Something foreign to Muslims so it never happened.
It's not that any primitive people are especially defective so much as that Europeans and (to a lesser but nonetheless impressive degree) northeastern Orientals are spectacularly impressive.
Or were, before the autogenocide began....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhBIPZCVj84
On the other hand, Hussein(scum that he was) did provide water to his people, but then, US destroyed the waterworks and forced millions to live on sewer water, killing a lot of children and women.
And Syria was working too, sort of, before US and its allies decided to undermine its borders and push Diversity Terrorism into that country from all over the world.Replies: @Pericles, @bomag
Iraq population in 2001: 24 million.
Iraq population in 2015: 37 million.
Sweden population in 2001: 8.8 million
Sweden population in 2015: 9.2 million
Looks like drinking sewer water greatly improves human fertility.
The Iraqis pulled similar behavior when we turned over a large Army base to them in Northern Iraq. The local Iraqis swarmed in and stole everything. The base was eviscerated in a matter of hours. This was repeated across Iraq as we turned over functioning based to the scumbags. By the time the Iraqis were through with them, they didn’t even have running water.
In Afghanistan when we turned over brand new Jeeps, SUV’s, to the local police, they ended up on blocks with all their wheels and other gear taken off and sold.
The problem with Muslims is that they have a culture based on thievery, scams and avoidance of physical labor. You don’t see Muslim men doing construction work, no they import blacks and SEAsians to do that. Even hands on technical work such as working in oil refineries is beneath the Muslim male. Most of their great works of art and architecture were done by slaves.
The Persians are probably the exception to this to some degree.
Jack D is right. Our GoodWhites believe, not think - believe, that everyone in the world is just like them - capable of being a responsible citizen in a capitalist system, and that only Bad things like racism, poverty, etc. are holding them back.Replies: @stillCARealist
Afghanistan population in 2001: 21 million
Afghanistan population in 2015: 34 million
In the very outset, at the first meeting with them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in it limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a cord; for the unpledged allegiance of their minds made them obedient servants. They were incorrigibly children of the ideal, feckless and colour-blind, to whom body and spirit were for ever and inevitably opposed. Their mind was strange and dark, full of depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule, but with more of ardour and more fertile in belief than any other in the world. They were a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing.
Stop making excuses for Islam. There isn’t a single functioning Muslim society in the world. This isn’t an accident; Islam is a totalitarian satanic cult.
I lost a good deal of enthusiasm for the Daily Stormer crowd when they went all in on “White Sharia.” They also hate gays but I wonder if they’ve thought it through that if you reduce women to truly subhuman chattel status, homosexuality will inevitably bloom like it does in traditional muslim societies and did in ancient Greece. You can’t have a meaningful companionate relationship with someone who’s limited to being nothing but a baby making animal.
Another aspect that retards doctrinaire Muslims is that their religion places so much importance on war and warlike activity. It is a fairly juvenile mindset, typical of a teenage boy or younger.
If all you do is to take the stuff of other people, and that is what everyone else does, no one is building. No one is creating. You can’t build an economy with that. An aircraft carrier or nuclear weapon is a byproduct of a modern economy. Maybe you can buy some old tanks with oil money produced by expats but that is about it.
Arabs were stealing long before Muhammad showed up.Replies: @Steve Sailer
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/12/16/trump-to-throw-down-against-chinas-economic-aggression-in-national-security-strategy/
And I hope they take the intelligent, nuanced view. For military strength, you actually need to be able to build and engineer technical things. You also need to have GDP/capita. Raw human numbers alone is not going to do it, nor is it an intelligent use of the carrying capacity of your country.
The USA has the ability to not be overly concerned about defense and can focus on offense due to Admirals Atlantic and Pacific. However, it is still what it is in large part because of GDP/capita. Squander that with importing Mexicans on the low end and East Asians on the high end who are going to walk out with your technology on thumb drives... well, the logical outcome is not good.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Hell, that graph alone puts the lie to "diversity is strength". Instead, if you want strength, have a big country and stock it with Europeans (or maybe East Asians).
The Mongol invasion of the 13th century devasted Russia, Poland and Hungary, but stopped after that. Right after Poland and Hungary there's Germany, which is in the Core. Untouched.
Again in the 16th century the Ottoman invasion was very famously stopped at Vienna. That's also the very edge of Core Europe.
Is that because Core Europeans were better at defending themselves than Peripheral Europeans like Spaniards, Balkan natives, etc.? Or is Core Europe simply too far from any traditionally nomadic areas? No nomads have ravaged it since the Huns, well and I guess the Magyars. None ever despoiled the British Isles. What if Core Europe is simply the area that hasn't been touched by nomads in a long time? What if that's the thing that gave it Core characteristics? This may or may not be a part of the grand storyline of civ., together with the eugenic effects of agriculture in the high latitudes.
The whole of the Middle East was continuosly harrassed by nomads until relatively recently. All of its settled areas are close to nomadic areas.Replies: @Anon, @YetAnotherAnon, @Lars Porsena, @Jim
“The initial Muslim invasion was very famously stopped in southern France, at the door of Core Europe. Iberia isn’t in the core”
Tours, where they were stopped, is bang inside Core Europe, not that far from Paris. But ten years before Tours, in 722 AD, they were also stopped at Covadonga in Asturias, Northern Spain, by Pelagius/Pelayo.
Asturias and Basque Navarre were the start of resistance to Islam, 80 years later Charlemagne took Catalonia, and 1300 years later these regions are still the the most wealthy and industrialised parts of Spain (and inside the Hajnal Line).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Covadonga
PS – there’s not much left of Roman water systems in the West, either. It took 1500 years for them to be recreated by 19th century European engineers. The Quanats have done pretty well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat
In Afghanistan when we turned over brand new Jeeps, SUV's, to the local police, they ended up on blocks with all their wheels and other gear taken off and sold.
The problem with Muslims is that they have a culture based on thievery, scams and avoidance of physical labor. You don't see Muslim men doing construction work, no they import blacks and SEAsians to do that. Even hands on technical work such as working in oil refineries is beneath the Muslim male. Most of their great works of art and architecture were done by slaves.
The Persians are probably the exception to this to some degree.Replies: @Escher, @Difference Maker, @Jim Don Bob
It seems to be more Arab laziness. A lot of the imported labor is from the Indian subcontinent, with a high percentage of those being Muslims.
Haters gotta hate.
We ought to dig him up and burn him for this heresy.
I always felt the opposite.
American “rugged individualism” built the country and spread to the current scourge of consumerist individualism that has destroyed white American social networks and that has atomized American….and increasingly all white societies.
Arabs on the other hand are tribal to the core. And often like Mossad or ppl from the Balkans carry out blood feuds….
Muslims are tribal but even within the tribe there is vicious infighting for position.
As a side note, the Ottoman Empire for all of its organization and power had to rely on Christian children to create its shock troops.Replies: @Eagle Eye
Patton was a white knighting cuck who hid his beta worship of lying, cheating women behind his crazy cowboy persona when really all he did was bark shit and those below him did all the work.
In Afghanistan when we turned over brand new Jeeps, SUV's, to the local police, they ended up on blocks with all their wheels and other gear taken off and sold.
The problem with Muslims is that they have a culture based on thievery, scams and avoidance of physical labor. You don't see Muslim men doing construction work, no they import blacks and SEAsians to do that. Even hands on technical work such as working in oil refineries is beneath the Muslim male. Most of their great works of art and architecture were done by slaves.
The Persians are probably the exception to this to some degree.Replies: @Escher, @Difference Maker, @Jim Don Bob
On a YouTube video of a locksmith at work with a broken lock, one of the comments expressed amazement and said that, sadly, in the middle east such a door would simply be destroyed and replaced. And take a week
In the more vibrant areas of St. Louis, such a door would simply be destroyed. And take a week.
Aye, the nice, intellectual muslims are merely the conquered populations
I guess that’s why so many people in the USA and Israel get so worked up over Iran and its “nuclear threat?” And I suppose that a little reflection on how Libya went from the best performing African country in human development indices prior to recent “western intervention” to holding open-air slave markets today would have us conclude that it is down to its religion.
Three appropriately-placed hyphens would have helped. I read it twice also.
“She was put in charge of giving away a surgeon at her church’s library after he died, ..”
After I read this I thought: “Did anyone accept the corpse?”.
American "rugged individualism" built the country and spread to the current scourge of consumerist individualism that has destroyed white American social networks and that has atomized American....and increasingly all white societies.
Arabs on the other hand are tribal to the core. And often like Mossad or ppl from the Balkans carry out blood feuds....Replies: @dr kill, @CAL2
Please demonstrate how ‘rugged individuals’ destroyed White America. I completely disagree, but maybe I’m missing something. I observe that ‘pussy collectivists’ have converged white social networks to where real men walk out.
Anglo-Celt Americans wrote a frontier-capitalist Constitution, including a Second Amendment to try and keep things that way and protect your homestead from the Injuns. In late-stage America, this means any atomized schmuck (or Muslim jihadist) can project the force of an infantry fire team. Of course, they also wrote the Post Office into the Constitution so all those frontier-capitalists could stay in touch with each other. Now we have e-mail and FedEx and the USPS pays pensions to government employees distributing corporate marketing material below cost. The frontier closed in 1890 but a lot of the governing structures are still in place and not working so well any more. For that matter, individualistic Anglo-Celts aren't working so well any more.
Still and all, as an Anglo I'd rather grow up in a society that tilts more individualistic. Collectivist societies can be incredibly stultifying. There's a balance somewhere.Replies: @dr kill
Jack of all trade masochistic cucks who can work on cars and weld and drive trucks and tinker and fix any rutting piece of shit mechanical contraption you can think of.
But they'd rather take a minimum wage job and not unionize or rock the boat than force Mexicans out or force their employer to give them better wages....
But hey they got their shitty rifle collection....
If all you do is to take the stuff of other people, and that is what everyone else does, no one is building. No one is creating. You can't build an economy with that. An aircraft carrier or nuclear weapon is a byproduct of a modern economy. Maybe you can buy some old tanks with oil money produced by expats but that is about it.Replies: @dr kill, @Anonym
I don’t consider myself an expert on Arab behavior, but I did live in a Holiday Inn Express on Oleya Street for an entire winter. I feel the difference between White American and Arab culture can be easily explained by comparing folk tales. Consider Ali Baba and Paul Bunyan as demonstrating traits the two groups find admirable and emulative.
Arabs were stealing long before Muhammad showed up.
Arabs were stealing long before Muhammad showed up.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Dr. Harrison repeatedly mentions theft as being something that Arabs don’t see as wrong.
All of these and others are about the protection of personal ownership and the protection of personal property. Biblical regard for ownership is strong and it's violation is roundly condemned.
In the scholarly works on irrigation throughout the middle ages and early modern period the myth has long been one of a Islamic superiority in Spain followed by Christian neglect. This author, Jacob Tullberg, who seems very woke in a Sailerspheric sense doesn’t buy it. But nor does he argue that Islamic civilization somehow set Islamizied parts of the former Roman empire back compared to the Christianized parts.
It seems that the local factional/tribal socio-economic structure of the Islamic world was capable of matching its European Christian feudal counterpart in terms of economic production. Both sides inherited Roman irrigation and did fine with them. In other words they were comparable civilizations in economic output within malthusian age limits of the pre-industrial age. In that light the Westeuropean expansion from 11th-14th century was merely about catching up to the Islamic and Byzantine civilizations.
The big advantage for Western Europeans only came once you had to make the leap to transnational and industrial production. Then the particular social institutions and structures W.Europeans built came in handy.
If you want to understand the different heritages of Islamic and Western European civilizations then this dissertation is a great place to start. It is trying to make sense of Western Europe but uses the Islamic world as a counterpoint. It touches on the local level, regional and imperial level. He notes that that the idea of a weakened European tribalism is probably because there never was much of any tribalism except on the periphery(Celts for examples) to begin with. So European exceptionalism, on this issue might well stretch back further than the medieval period despite Hbd Chick’s good work.
Highly recommended
http://www.academia.edu/10835470/PhD_Dissertation
Where there's a whip, there's a way...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoAfb3f04moReplies: @TTSSYF, @Hodag
Far from seeing it as Arab individualism, I see it as group-think writ large, with Islam nothing more than an international men’s club.
However, most Iranians don't bother with this as just plain prostitution is (surprisingly) widespread (though illegal). The funny thing is that the streetwalkers wear chadors like all the other women.Replies: @nigel, @Eagle Eye, @Neoconned1
.
Thanks. I’m sure you are right. It was probably a little garbled in translation and garbled by my lack of understanding the culture. It was a shocking revelation to my young rural American mind.
” ‘She was put in charge of giving away a surgeon at her church’s library after he died’
Am I the only one who did a double-take trying to read this sentence?”
No. But I got the meaning on the second read through. I just reminded myself that Steve had written it and it instantly became clear to me. Not trying to be funny, that’s what I did.
“On a YouTube video of a locksmith at work with a broken lock, one of the comments expressed amazement and said that, sadly, in the middle east such a door would simply be destroyed and replaced. And take a week”
In the more vibrant areas of St. Louis, such a door would simply be destroyed. And take a week.
Where there's a whip, there's a way...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoAfb3f04moReplies: @TTSSYF, @Hodag
Didn’t Xenophon also had a wtf? moment when camped outside Ninevah? Huge ruins abandoned for lack of governmental power.
The statement Abe cited is decipherable but absurd.Replies: @CK
In arab /muslim societies divorce was easy for the male, costly for the female.
In American society divorce is easy for the female, very costly for the male.
The difference is important in terms of long term family formation.
As long as the taxpayer can be substituted for the husband, easy female divorce and households without fathers will be the norm.
No shareholder was obligated to take junk bonds and very few shareholders were even given the chance–they usually got cash, even if the acquirer raised the cash by selling junk bonds to institutional investors. That meant that the buyers of the junk had to be very confident that the assets of the acquired company were worth a lot more than what the company’s shares were trading for previously.
The percentage of companies that incompetently managed was actually rather small.
I’m surprised he noted that business partnerships were unheard of, because in Timur Kuran’s The Long Divergence he noted that partnerships (unlike corporations) were one of the few types of business organizations compatible with Islamic law. Unfortunately, inheritance law required that any such partnership be dissolved after the death of one of the partners.
The Middle Easterners I know seem mystified by complex Western corporate structures because anything that big back home is either owned outright by the government or on the side by well-connected bureaucrats. The manufacturing tends to be in unsophisticated factories where the owner frantically squirrels away his profits to prepare for the day that the Undersecretary of Something confiscates the place.
They tend to push their kids into the professions or, failing that, proprietorships.Replies: @Jack D, @Corvinus, @Corvinus
I think this can be demonstrated fairly easily. The “Little House” series includes the biography of a rugged individualist who dragged his family across the frontier, nearly killing them in the process. The hardy Ingalls’ line died out in two generations. Libertarian thinkers Lysander Spooner and Garet Garrett died childless. So did Ayn Rand. The future belongs to those who show up. Mormon-Hasidic-Amish and Muslim/r-selected America will be an interesting place.
Anglo-Celt Americans wrote a frontier-capitalist Constitution, including a Second Amendment to try and keep things that way and protect your homestead from the Injuns. In late-stage America, this means any atomized schmuck (or Muslim jihadist) can project the force of an infantry fire team. Of course, they also wrote the Post Office into the Constitution so all those frontier-capitalists could stay in touch with each other. Now we have e-mail and FedEx and the USPS pays pensions to government employees distributing corporate marketing material below cost. The frontier closed in 1890 but a lot of the governing structures are still in place and not working so well any more. For that matter, individualistic Anglo-Celts aren’t working so well any more.
Still and all, as an Anglo I’d rather grow up in a society that tilts more individualistic. Collectivist societies can be incredibly stultifying. There’s a balance somewhere.
I'm proposing another amendment to the Constitution, this one only states that there are no exceptions. It's the well-meaning, well-intentioned exceptions (for the children, the weak of mind or body, ) that are destroying the USA. A few exceptions and exemptions lead to established case-law and Proggy Attorneys and BOOM, there goes a perfectly good country.
I myself am in favor of a few exceptions, but I also admit this is a poor way to run a Republic. Let private charities or familial obligations provide.
One way or another, the USA will arrive back at the point of private charity.
American "rugged individualism" built the country and spread to the current scourge of consumerist individualism that has destroyed white American social networks and that has atomized American....and increasingly all white societies.
Arabs on the other hand are tribal to the core. And often like Mossad or ppl from the Balkans carry out blood feuds....Replies: @dr kill, @CAL2
Rugged individualism is that Old West myth about the country. It’s not really true. No one builds a civilization all by themselves nor does a group of individuals who can’t cooperate or trust each other. What the West was good at for a long time was balancing the individual and community. The individual should get to keep the fruits of his labor but that doesn’t mean he gets to act in ways that hurt the community.
Muslims are tribal but even within the tribe there is vicious infighting for position.
As a side note, the Ottoman Empire for all of its organization and power had to rely on Christian children to create its shock troops.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/world/middleeast/israeli-settlers-demolish-greenhouses-and-gaza-jobs.htmlReplies: @Jack D
The greenhouses were privately owned and their owners dismantled their property and took it back to Israel where I assume they were reassembled back into productive greenhouses. When this process was about halfway done, the World Bank put together the program to buy out the owners and leave the other half “to create jobs” for the Gazans. But the “Gaza Jobs” in the headline were a liberal fantasy. Not one job was created because the Gazans stole everything.
BTW, check out the number of “Syrian refugees” from last year who are actually working in Germany. Last time I checked, 99% of them were living on benefits. “Jobs” are not actually a priority for most Arabs. They would prefer NOT to work if they can figure some angle. Of course employers in the Arab world tend to treat their employees like slaves, so the desire not to be employed is somewhat understandable.
The classic liberal mistake is to assume that everyone is just like them. If they found themselves as refugees in another country or were gifted free greenhouses, THEY would want to do something productive (and they assume a rule of law framework that makes productivity possible) so therefore Arabs, who are just like us, will do exactly the same thing.
But it's a shame that she didn't put such marvelous baby feeders, much earlier and more often, to their God given use. She was exquisitely crafted by the deity for reproduction, yet eschewed that role for "career" for years and years and was fortunate to be able pop out one pup with the French guy at 40+. You see woman after woman who have something positive going on--smarts, looks, athleticism--who let that crowd out, crimp, diminish their performing the natural role they were made for--that passes on their talent--and would give most of them the deepest life happiness and satisfaction.
General Patton noted in his WW 2 diary that the problem with Arab societies was their subjugation of women and that they’d always be backward until they changed.
That makes sense in low-trust society.
The Middle Easterners I know seem mystified by complex Western corporate structures because anything that big back home is either owned outright by the government or on the side by well-connected bureaucrats. The manufacturing tends to be in unsophisticated factories where the owner frantically squirrels away his profits to prepare for the day that the Undersecretary of Something confiscates the place.
They tend to push their kids into the professions or, failing that, proprietorships.
Except Americans of Middle Eastern descent are other than mystified. Rather, they are neck deep in "western corporate structures".
https://arabamericandoc.com
And that future is Generation Z.
http://www.kenhughes.info/generation-z/
"Mormon-Hasidic-Amish and Muslim/r-selected America will be an interesting place."
Hate to break it to you, but K-R selection theory is pseudo-science.
"Anglo-Celt Americans wrote a frontier-capitalist Constitution..."
It's always amazing to me how you craft the narrative to benefit your "tribe". In reality, it was Englishmen who were influenced directly by Iroquois concepts of government and who incorporated Enlightenment theories, in part developed by the French, who were inspired by Greek and Roman models of government.
"Still and all, as an Anglo I’d rather grow up in a society that tilts more individualistic."
Just like Custer's last stand.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
Yet who is invading whom and who is strutting around as conqueror while making sex slaves of the loser?
Both disruptive of traditional family patterns.
Yet no-fault divorce spread across the country with little controversy, and the states that resisted the most were not Bible Belt states (Mississippi and Alabama adapted no-fault divorce not long after California) but New York and New Jersey, which didn't adapt no-fault until the '90s.
Why didn't the South resist no-fault divorce?Replies: @The Man From K Street, @stillCARealist, @Neoconned1, @Charles Erwin Wilson
Smallest proportion of Catholics of any US region’s population.
Do gay muslim/arab men marry women for cover and abuse the woman because they are can’t perform without a man and feel guilty for it? I always wonder about that. Then they are forced to stay with that woman and can’t go to the man they want to be with and she is forced to stay with him because he wrecked her life and family and has no where to turn and no available resources for women.
I’ve heard of that a lot in the US especially people of color. I wonder if they marry to whites.
“Meaningful companionate [intersex] relationships” are a Christian fantasy. The classical West didn’t believe in them.
The West started to become addicted to the "romantic love as the basis for marriage" myth during the High Middle Ages. It started to become really toxic once Hollywood got hold of it, back in the 20s.
Romantic love proved to be a useful weapon for undermining marriage and morality. It gave the green light to women to break up their marriages, for the sake of True Love.Replies: @Anon, @L Woods
Too bad about your failure though. I understand the motivation for your bitter post. You should forgive her, but you won't.
Your hatred will kill you.
The Middle Easterners I know seem mystified by complex Western corporate structures because anything that big back home is either owned outright by the government or on the side by well-connected bureaucrats. The manufacturing tends to be in unsophisticated factories where the owner frantically squirrels away his profits to prepare for the day that the Undersecretary of Something confiscates the place.
They tend to push their kids into the professions or, failing that, proprietorships.Replies: @Jack D, @Corvinus, @Corvinus
The essence of capitalism is CAPITAL. If you have to generate all the money you need to build a factory before you build the factory you’ll never have enough to build a nice factory – you’ll string together whatever you can scrape up with your own money. Arab countries did not develop banking because of Muslim law restrictions on interest, lack of rule of law, etc. So large scale businesses outside of government ownership were impossible. Anything large scale in the Arab world in modern times (railroads, canals, etc.) was built with European capital.
The Mongol invasion of the 13th century devasted Russia, Poland and Hungary, but stopped after that. Right after Poland and Hungary there's Germany, which is in the Core. Untouched.
Again in the 16th century the Ottoman invasion was very famously stopped at Vienna. That's also the very edge of Core Europe.
Is that because Core Europeans were better at defending themselves than Peripheral Europeans like Spaniards, Balkan natives, etc.? Or is Core Europe simply too far from any traditionally nomadic areas? No nomads have ravaged it since the Huns, well and I guess the Magyars. None ever despoiled the British Isles. What if Core Europe is simply the area that hasn't been touched by nomads in a long time? What if that's the thing that gave it Core characteristics? This may or may not be a part of the grand storyline of civ., together with the eugenic effects of agriculture in the high latitudes.
The whole of the Middle East was continuosly harrassed by nomads until relatively recently. All of its settled areas are close to nomadic areas.Replies: @Anon, @YetAnotherAnon, @Lars Porsena, @Jim
Only parts of Poland were conquered by the Mongols, they never made it through. Most of the “Poland” that was conquered was Ukraine. Back then, Poland would have been part of the Kievan Rus, which was destroyed, but while the core Rus states were conquered many of the periphery northern and western Rus states never fully were. I think part of it was geography, the Hordes were steppe armies on horses that roamed the plains and as you head further west or north from eastern Europe you leave the steppe and they would have gotten into thick forest and swamps. Germany in Roman times was swampy forest and up by the baltics you get into the boreal forest.
As I read it that is how the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth came into being. They were unconquered, and when the hordes were weakened and infighting a hundred years later the Poles and the Lithuanians rode in and drove them out retaking the lands, and all the Kievans and other Rus pledged allegiance to them as liberators and filled up their armies. That is how tiny itty bitty little Lithuania had an empire including most of core Russia west of Moscow, Belarus and Ukraine. Between the two of them Poland had many many more people than Lithuania but before the merger Lithuania had a great deal more land then Poland and not enough nobles to manage it, because they were the spearhead of a slavic snowball.
I think western Europe never really got hit that hard by Islam, except from the south by the Moors. For most of the middle ages Poland-Lithuania and Austro-Hungaria were the wall that kept the Turks and the hordes out of Europe.
Artillery created centralized states after 1500, but before that, in the Middle Ages, all states were weak and there was no organizational capacity to create large armies. So a small tightly-knit tribe could do great things.Replies: @Lars Porsena
As I read it that is how the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth came into being. They were unconquered, and when the hordes were weakened and infighting a hundred years later the Poles and the Lithuanians rode in and drove them out retaking the lands, and all the Kievans and other Rus pledged allegiance to them as liberators and filled up their armies. That is how tiny itty bitty little Lithuania had an empire including most of core Russia west of Moscow, Belarus and Ukraine. Between the two of them Poland had many many more people than Lithuania but before the merger Lithuania had a great deal more land then Poland and not enough nobles to manage it, because they were the spearhead of a slavic snowball.
I think western Europe never really got hit that hard by Islam, except from the south by the Moors. For most of the middle ages Poland-Lithuania and Austro-Hungaria were the wall that kept the Turks and the hordes out of Europe.Replies: @Lars Porsena, @Glossy
You mentioned that the Ottomans were stopped at Vienna but you didn’t mention that they were stopped because Jan Sobieski king of Poland-Lithuania broke the siege. They certainly never got anywhere near Britain because how would they have even got there, short of a Baltic naval fleet? They were horse archers not sailors. They never conquered any of the approaches to Britain they would have had to get through first.
hordes of locals descended on the greenhouses and everyone carried off whatever they could hold in their hands… everyone just cared about what they got.
Sounds exactly like a certain American demographic.
The biblical ten commandments are almost all about forbidding theft. Thou shalt not steal thy neighbors life. Thou shalt not steal thy neighbors belongings. Thou shalt not steal thy neighbors wife. Thou shalt not steal thy neighbors good name. The first four.
All of these and others are about the protection of personal ownership and the protection of personal property. Biblical regard for ownership is strong and it’s violation is roundly condemned.
Muslims need a strong leader to keep them in line, e.g. Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein.
Well, with all the love in the world to our gentle host, that sentence was the literary equivalent.Replies: @Perplexed
“Have you ever eaten a steak that was not the highest quality beef, but for whatever reason (you were really hungry, the cook did an excellent job) you ravenously devoured it, not stopping at the gristle portions you might normally avoid”
No, I’ve never done this. Have you?
Both disruptive of traditional family patterns.
Yet no-fault divorce spread across the country with little controversy, and the states that resisted the most were not Bible Belt states (Mississippi and Alabama adapted no-fault divorce not long after California) but New York and New Jersey, which didn't adapt no-fault until the '90s.
Why didn't the South resist no-fault divorce?Replies: @The Man From K Street, @stillCARealist, @Neoconned1, @Charles Erwin Wilson
They all felt the bend of the moral ark of the universe or something. Everyone wanted a divorce so why not just make it easier? And women were getting abortions illegally so make it legal and cleaner. Much the same with homosexuality. why confine it to cheap hotels and big covered-window vans? Just legalize it and let them have their fun in public and without shame.
Now we all have all this wonderful freedom to do as we please and to take care of the regret and guilt we have lots of pills.
Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too
By SALMA HAYEKObligatory Trump reference....Harvey really seems to have a thing about having women watch him shower....Just in case anyone's forgotten, I had one hell of a body....And sexy, too....
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contributors/salma-hayek-harvey-weinstein.htmlReplies: @Jack D, @Abe, @Lurker, @Neoconned1
Salma still has one hell of a body.
Afghanistan population in 2015: 34 millionReplies: @Lurker
Is some of that increase actually returning exiles from Iran and Pakistan?
I never said that they didn’t have agency.
There are greenhouses in many Arab countries. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Algeria, Tunisia, etc.
No, Baghdad was a new city.
Babylon is more than 50 miles south of Baghdad. Ctesiphon and Seleucia are more than 20 miles away from Baghdad.
Anglo-Celt Americans wrote a frontier-capitalist Constitution, including a Second Amendment to try and keep things that way and protect your homestead from the Injuns. In late-stage America, this means any atomized schmuck (or Muslim jihadist) can project the force of an infantry fire team. Of course, they also wrote the Post Office into the Constitution so all those frontier-capitalists could stay in touch with each other. Now we have e-mail and FedEx and the USPS pays pensions to government employees distributing corporate marketing material below cost. The frontier closed in 1890 but a lot of the governing structures are still in place and not working so well any more. For that matter, individualistic Anglo-Celts aren't working so well any more.
Still and all, as an Anglo I'd rather grow up in a society that tilts more individualistic. Collectivist societies can be incredibly stultifying. There's a balance somewhere.Replies: @dr kill
I smell you, A G, but I believe you are confusing the rule of law with administrative rule-makers clenching the bit between their teeth and running off. I have been pondering on this for a while now, and basically considering how a guy like Vox Day sounds so extreme compared to what you might consider a more conventional thinker.
I’m proposing another amendment to the Constitution, this one only states that there are no exceptions. It’s the well-meaning, well-intentioned exceptions (for the children, the weak of mind or body, ) that are destroying the USA. A few exceptions and exemptions lead to established case-law and Proggy Attorneys and BOOM, there goes a perfectly good country.
I myself am in favor of a few exceptions, but I also admit this is a poor way to run a Republic. Let private charities or familial obligations provide.
One way or another, the USA will arrive back at the point of private charity.
In Afghanistan when we turned over brand new Jeeps, SUV's, to the local police, they ended up on blocks with all their wheels and other gear taken off and sold.
The problem with Muslims is that they have a culture based on thievery, scams and avoidance of physical labor. You don't see Muslim men doing construction work, no they import blacks and SEAsians to do that. Even hands on technical work such as working in oil refineries is beneath the Muslim male. Most of their great works of art and architecture were done by slaves.
The Persians are probably the exception to this to some degree.Replies: @Escher, @Difference Maker, @Jim Don Bob
Same thing happened in the Philippines when we left the naval base at Subic Bay. They even stole the copper pipes in the plumbing.
Jack D is right. Our GoodWhites believe, not think – believe, that everyone in the world is just like them – capable of being a responsible citizen in a capitalist system, and that only Bad things like racism, poverty, etc. are holding them back.
A Shiite Muslim man has four (4) slots for a wife. If he has at least one wife slot vacant, he can approach an unmarried woman and say, e.g., "Will you marry me for two hours for a hundred dollars?" If she says, "yes", then they are officially married in the eyes of Allah for the next couple hours. [He must pay her, of course.]
It is truly a brilliant and lawyerly way to immediately eliminate immorality, prostitution, faithlessness, and cheating. Give every man the right to conveniently, expeditiously, and temporarily marry another woman for as little as a few minutes and still be considered a moral, upright and godly person.
Don't laugh! A well-born Muslim woman living in England seriously suggested legalizing Muslim-style temporary marriage as a solution to England's pervasive, pandemic, drunken, sluttish rutting and bastardy.
Think I'm kidding? Iran's Holy City of Qom (aka "the Shiite Vatican") is stuffed with pimps (aka "marriage brokers") and whores (aka "temporary wives") who service the many horny and poverty-stricken imams. Google the Iranian documentary, "In the Bazaar of Sexes."
Imagine what a wonderful world it will be once we embrace and celebrate Muslim culture in the West. No more screaming fights over "cheating" on your wife. No more wife-initiated divorces for "infidelity". No more custody battles because you are sleeping around and bring your "girlfriends" home. Heck, they aren't "girlfriends", they are wives! ... for the weekend, anyway. Replies: @Thea, @GSR
I’ve followed the writings of the ayatollah for years now(weird hobby) and he definitely does not consider temporary marriages to be Islamicly sanctioned. He also advocates against widespread divorce as do most Iranian judges. It is more difficult to dissolve a family in some ways.
Some of these customs being attributed to Islam were common in the Arabian peninsula before Islam and we’re just adopted as a result.
However, most Iranians don't bother with this as just plain prostitution is (surprisingly) widespread (though illegal). The funny thing is that the streetwalkers wear chadors like all the other women.Replies: @nigel, @Eagle Eye, @Neoconned1
In Biblical times, it appears that a chador was the uniform of prostitutes, presumably so that johns could consorted with them anonymously and without consequences. Check out the story of Tamar.
Beyond Mesopotamia, Roman North Africa and even Afghanistan still has semi-function remains of canals and cisterns from the time of Alexander's Empire and before.
In all cases the systems went into decline when Islam came on the scene. North Africa was the bread basket of Rome and Islam wrecked the well tuned irrigation system they put in place over the centuries. Arabs being primitive tribesman had no idea what constituted a irrigation system and replaced it with goat hearding.
In Afghanistan these canals worked quite well but also went into decline once Islam took over from the white Hunic empire that ruled the region in the 6th century AD. The final death knell come when the Mongols rolled in and wrecked the system. Even when the Mongols left, the Muslims never rebuilt the system.
Normally a people would rebuild such a system - it's not complicated, just takes hard work and co-operation. Something foreign to Muslims so it never happened.Replies: @Autochthon
Cf. the rails and rolling stock in even India (comparatively well run and with a relatively intelligent population!). It’s all all deteriorating from the time the British left. The Arabic version is just one flavour. Likewise Africa, Empire of Dust.
It’s not that any primitive people are especially defective so much as that Europeans and (to a lesser but nonetheless impressive degree) northeastern Orientals are spectacularly impressive.
Or were, before the autogenocide began….
As I read it that is how the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth came into being. They were unconquered, and when the hordes were weakened and infighting a hundred years later the Poles and the Lithuanians rode in and drove them out retaking the lands, and all the Kievans and other Rus pledged allegiance to them as liberators and filled up their armies. That is how tiny itty bitty little Lithuania had an empire including most of core Russia west of Moscow, Belarus and Ukraine. Between the two of them Poland had many many more people than Lithuania but before the merger Lithuania had a great deal more land then Poland and not enough nobles to manage it, because they were the spearhead of a slavic snowball.
I think western Europe never really got hit that hard by Islam, except from the south by the Moors. For most of the middle ages Poland-Lithuania and Austro-Hungaria were the wall that kept the Turks and the hordes out of Europe.Replies: @Lars Porsena, @Glossy
I think Lithuanians had outsize importance in the military sphere already before the Mongols. In the past it wasn’t unusual for a small people to conquer vast tracts of land. Romans, Alexander’s Greeks, Franks, Mongols all originated in small areas. Ancient and medieval armies tended to be small, thousands or tens of thousands of troops. One doesn’t necessarily need special explanations for the Lithuanian phenomenon.
Artillery created centralized states after 1500, but before that, in the Middle Ages, all states were weak and there was no organizational capacity to create large armies. So a small tightly-knit tribe could do great things.
It was a loose tribal federation sort of a thing. Same as with the native americans. The indians were all divided into small tribes too. But occasionally a great diplomatic leader would come along that could unite a huge number of tribes into an alliance to dominate all their rivals and rampage continents. The mongol armies themselves were like this, including Ghengis Khan's. The central asian hordes had massive numbers. It was not a centralized empire but a huge alliance of tribes. Sort of like people joke the HRE was neither holy, nor roman, nor an empire. More like a treaty organization or alliance structure. Certainly not an empire in the centralized Roman sense. The power of the hordes usually didn't last long beyond the lives of the people who created them because they would beak back up into tribal in-fighting once their leaders died.
The Romans themselves are another example. The Latin tribe itself may have been small to start with an capable of great things, but by later ages Latins wouldn't even fight except among themselves and they fielded huge armies of umpteen nations all over the continent-spanning empire. In 400AD Alaric led 20,000 visigoth mercenaries fighting for the Empire before he turned against it. And that was only visigoth mercenaries. And supposedly he lost 10,000 of them so the other side probably had some numbers too.
If you were in the HRE you would be a tribal clan fighting with your neighbors for control of some local hamlet. HRE member states were always at war with each other. But if some giant empire came to attack it from outside, they might potentially face the combined might of ALL the German states at the same time. At least they would, IF various members weren't scheming and collaborating with the outsiders to take out their local rivals, which is what usually happened.
It is a point of debate among historians, and there are some on both sides who do or don't believe the numbers, but there are plenty of ancient written histories that number some ancient armies in the hundreds of thousands. The norm for normative tribal raiding among local tribes would have been much smaller, with warrior bands in the hundreds or thousands typically feuding over rivers with their neighbors. But when giant alliances or massive empires like the Timurids would come along they could get much much larger. When the Timurids beat the Ottomans, sacked Ankara and captured the Sultan, Timur the Uzbek warlord was supposed to have 140,000 cavalry who could beat the crap out of anyone. But after Timur died, the whole thing collapsed in a few years.Replies: @Lars Porsena
Muslims are tribal but even within the tribe there is vicious infighting for position.
As a side note, the Ottoman Empire for all of its organization and power had to rely on Christian children to create its shock troops.Replies: @Eagle Eye
Indeed. In fact, Muslims were prohibited from becoming Janissaries, apparently out of fear that the Janissary corps’ loyalty to the sultan would be diluted if the corps became allied with specific Muslim clans.
The Middle Easterners I know seem mystified by complex Western corporate structures because anything that big back home is either owned outright by the government or on the side by well-connected bureaucrats. The manufacturing tends to be in unsophisticated factories where the owner frantically squirrels away his profits to prepare for the day that the Undersecretary of Something confiscates the place.
They tend to push their kids into the professions or, failing that, proprietorships.Replies: @Jack D, @Corvinus, @Corvinus
“The Middle Easterners I know seem mystified by complex Western corporate structures because anything that big back home is either owned outright by the government or on the side by well-connected bureaucrats.”
Except Americans of Middle Eastern descent are other than mystified. Rather, they are neck deep in “western corporate structures”.
https://arabamericandoc.com
A Shiite Muslim man has four (4) slots for a wife. If he has at least one wife slot vacant, he can approach an unmarried woman and say, e.g., "Will you marry me for two hours for a hundred dollars?" If she says, "yes", then they are officially married in the eyes of Allah for the next couple hours. [He must pay her, of course.]
It is truly a brilliant and lawyerly way to immediately eliminate immorality, prostitution, faithlessness, and cheating. Give every man the right to conveniently, expeditiously, and temporarily marry another woman for as little as a few minutes and still be considered a moral, upright and godly person.
Don't laugh! A well-born Muslim woman living in England seriously suggested legalizing Muslim-style temporary marriage as a solution to England's pervasive, pandemic, drunken, sluttish rutting and bastardy.
Think I'm kidding? Iran's Holy City of Qom (aka "the Shiite Vatican") is stuffed with pimps (aka "marriage brokers") and whores (aka "temporary wives") who service the many horny and poverty-stricken imams. Google the Iranian documentary, "In the Bazaar of Sexes."
Imagine what a wonderful world it will be once we embrace and celebrate Muslim culture in the West. No more screaming fights over "cheating" on your wife. No more wife-initiated divorces for "infidelity". No more custody battles because you are sleeping around and bring your "girlfriends" home. Heck, they aren't "girlfriends", they are wives! ... for the weekend, anyway. Replies: @Thea, @GSR
Exactly correct. I am a life long resit of Dearbornistan, Michigan. I know about Mohammedism.
The Middle Easterners I know seem mystified by complex Western corporate structures because anything that big back home is either owned outright by the government or on the side by well-connected bureaucrats. The manufacturing tends to be in unsophisticated factories where the owner frantically squirrels away his profits to prepare for the day that the Undersecretary of Something confiscates the place.
They tend to push their kids into the professions or, failing that, proprietorships.Replies: @Jack D, @Corvinus, @Corvinus
“The future belongs to those who show up.”
And that future is Generation Z.
http://www.kenhughes.info/generation-z/
“Mormon-Hasidic-Amish and Muslim/r-selected America will be an interesting place.”
Hate to break it to you, but K-R selection theory is pseudo-science.
“Anglo-Celt Americans wrote a frontier-capitalist Constitution…”
It’s always amazing to me how you craft the narrative to benefit your “tribe”. In reality, it was Englishmen who were influenced directly by Iroquois concepts of government and who incorporated Enlightenment theories, in part developed by the French, who were inspired by Greek and Roman models of government.
“Still and all, as an Anglo I’d rather grow up in a society that tilts more individualistic.”
Just like Custer’s last stand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhBIPZCVj84
On the other hand, Hussein(scum that he was) did provide water to his people, but then, US destroyed the waterworks and forced millions to live on sewer water, killing a lot of children and women.
And Syria was working too, sort of, before US and its allies decided to undermine its borders and push Diversity Terrorism into that country from all over the world.Replies: @Pericles, @bomag
For all the clumsiness, we did pump in a lot of money and pvc pipe. There should be more than one guy in the country who can organize an enterprise.
Jack D is right. Our GoodWhites believe, not think - believe, that everyone in the world is just like them - capable of being a responsible citizen in a capitalist system, and that only Bad things like racism, poverty, etc. are holding them back.Replies: @stillCARealist
Can you and Rod1963 provide any verification for what you said about thefts at subic bay or the ME? Interesting topic.
It was Clark Air Force Base, not Subic Bay.
It turns out that looters DIDN’T destroy the greenhouses. From Haaretz:
The Greenhouses
Israel responded to Hamas’ election victory by further restricting access in and out of Gaza. As it happens, these restrictions played a key role in explaining why Gaza’s greenhouses did not help it become Singapore. American Jewish leaders usually tell the story this way: When the settlers left, Israel handed over their greenhouses to the Palestinians, hoping they would use them to create jobs. Instead, Palestinians tore them down in an anti-Jewish rage.
But one person who does not endorse that narrative is the prime mover behind the greenhouse deal, Australian-Jewish businessman James Wolfensohn, who served as the Quartet’s Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement. In his memoir, Wolfensohn notes that “some damage was done to the greenhouses [as the result of post-disengagement looting] but they came through essentially intact” and were subsequently guarded by Palestinian Authority police. What really doomed the greenhouse initiative, Wolfensohn argues, were Israeli restrictions on Gazan exports. “In early December [2005], he writes, “the much-awaited first harvest of quality cash crops—strawberries, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers and flowers—began. These crops were intended for export via Israel for Europe. But their success relied upon the Karni crossing [between Gaza and Israel], which, beginning in mid-January 2006, was closed more than not. The Palestine Economic Development Corporation, which was managing the greenhouses taken over from the settlers, said that it was experiencing losses in excess of $120,000 per day…It was excruciating. This lost harvest was the most recognizable sign of Gaza’s declining fortunes and the biggest personal disappointment during my mandate.”
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.608008?v=9D3E8191C0D2AFBE8F367C467342F6EB
If your country has Tragic Dirt then something always goes wrong and it's usually caused by whitey. They have no problem smuggling in concrete to build invasion tunnels but they can't get the export crops out. Wolfensohn is a fool if he believes Palestinian "dog ate my homework" excuses.
Heinlein comes to mind:
Artillery created centralized states after 1500, but before that, in the Middle Ages, all states were weak and there was no organizational capacity to create large armies. So a small tightly-knit tribe could do great things.Replies: @Lars Porsena
But not too great of things. They were capable of forming alliances. You are right that society was organized among much smaller lines by and large, but the Kievan Rus, the commonwealth, the Ottomans, the hordes and the HRE are all examples that a great many tribes would ally together to create great giant blocks that when called upon COULD actually produce massive mammoth armies. At Vienna, Sobieski led 75,000 men to relieve the siege, in addition to however many the Austrians had in Vienna, and could summon from the other German states in the empire.
It was a loose tribal federation sort of a thing. Same as with the native americans. The indians were all divided into small tribes too. But occasionally a great diplomatic leader would come along that could unite a huge number of tribes into an alliance to dominate all their rivals and rampage continents. The mongol armies themselves were like this, including Ghengis Khan’s. The central asian hordes had massive numbers. It was not a centralized empire but a huge alliance of tribes. Sort of like people joke the HRE was neither holy, nor roman, nor an empire. More like a treaty organization or alliance structure. Certainly not an empire in the centralized Roman sense. The power of the hordes usually didn’t last long beyond the lives of the people who created them because they would beak back up into tribal in-fighting once their leaders died.
The Romans themselves are another example. The Latin tribe itself may have been small to start with an capable of great things, but by later ages Latins wouldn’t even fight except among themselves and they fielded huge armies of umpteen nations all over the continent-spanning empire. In 400AD Alaric led 20,000 visigoth mercenaries fighting for the Empire before he turned against it. And that was only visigoth mercenaries. And supposedly he lost 10,000 of them so the other side probably had some numbers too.
If you were in the HRE you would be a tribal clan fighting with your neighbors for control of some local hamlet. HRE member states were always at war with each other. But if some giant empire came to attack it from outside, they might potentially face the combined might of ALL the German states at the same time. At least they would, IF various members weren’t scheming and collaborating with the outsiders to take out their local rivals, which is what usually happened.
It is a point of debate among historians, and there are some on both sides who do or don’t believe the numbers, but there are plenty of ancient written histories that number some ancient armies in the hundreds of thousands. The norm for normative tribal raiding among local tribes would have been much smaller, with warrior bands in the hundreds or thousands typically feuding over rivers with their neighbors. But when giant alliances or massive empires like the Timurids would come along they could get much much larger. When the Timurids beat the Ottomans, sacked Ankara and captured the Sultan, Timur the Uzbek warlord was supposed to have 140,000 cavalry who could beat the crap out of anyone. But after Timur died, the whole thing collapsed in a few years.
Alexander is a good example too. He could conquer all the way to India because he wasn't just doing with Macedonians but with the soldiers of all the people he previously conquered too, all the Greeks and the Persians.
Phillip conquered the Greeks by force, but then Alexander was able to use all the Greeks in his army to conquer others the same way. That was I think an important point of Hellenism, Alexander and his family went to great lengths to try to develop a unified Greek identity that could merge them all into something bigger (and also include Alexander's family in it), so they would fight together instead of amongst each other. Before Phillip all the Greeks were divided into little tribal states that fought each other. Under Alexander they all fought together and conquered continents. Then after Alexander died, they all broke up into independent fiefdoms and when back to fighting each other.
It was a loose tribal federation sort of a thing. Same as with the native americans. The indians were all divided into small tribes too. But occasionally a great diplomatic leader would come along that could unite a huge number of tribes into an alliance to dominate all their rivals and rampage continents. The mongol armies themselves were like this, including Ghengis Khan's. The central asian hordes had massive numbers. It was not a centralized empire but a huge alliance of tribes. Sort of like people joke the HRE was neither holy, nor roman, nor an empire. More like a treaty organization or alliance structure. Certainly not an empire in the centralized Roman sense. The power of the hordes usually didn't last long beyond the lives of the people who created them because they would beak back up into tribal in-fighting once their leaders died.
The Romans themselves are another example. The Latin tribe itself may have been small to start with an capable of great things, but by later ages Latins wouldn't even fight except among themselves and they fielded huge armies of umpteen nations all over the continent-spanning empire. In 400AD Alaric led 20,000 visigoth mercenaries fighting for the Empire before he turned against it. And that was only visigoth mercenaries. And supposedly he lost 10,000 of them so the other side probably had some numbers too.
If you were in the HRE you would be a tribal clan fighting with your neighbors for control of some local hamlet. HRE member states were always at war with each other. But if some giant empire came to attack it from outside, they might potentially face the combined might of ALL the German states at the same time. At least they would, IF various members weren't scheming and collaborating with the outsiders to take out their local rivals, which is what usually happened.
It is a point of debate among historians, and there are some on both sides who do or don't believe the numbers, but there are plenty of ancient written histories that number some ancient armies in the hundreds of thousands. The norm for normative tribal raiding among local tribes would have been much smaller, with warrior bands in the hundreds or thousands typically feuding over rivers with their neighbors. But when giant alliances or massive empires like the Timurids would come along they could get much much larger. When the Timurids beat the Ottomans, sacked Ankara and captured the Sultan, Timur the Uzbek warlord was supposed to have 140,000 cavalry who could beat the crap out of anyone. But after Timur died, the whole thing collapsed in a few years.Replies: @Lars Porsena
Double comment day.
Alexander is a good example too. He could conquer all the way to India because he wasn’t just doing with Macedonians but with the soldiers of all the people he previously conquered too, all the Greeks and the Persians.
Phillip conquered the Greeks by force, but then Alexander was able to use all the Greeks in his army to conquer others the same way. That was I think an important point of Hellenism, Alexander and his family went to great lengths to try to develop a unified Greek identity that could merge them all into something bigger (and also include Alexander’s family in it), so they would fight together instead of amongst each other. Before Phillip all the Greeks were divided into little tribal states that fought each other. Under Alexander they all fought together and conquered continents. Then after Alexander died, they all broke up into independent fiefdoms and when back to fighting each other.
Abe, when my neighbor, a local attorney died, his wife let me pick any and all books I wanted from his extensive, personal library. A wonderful day indeed.
I took a class with Clinton Bailey, the expert on Bedouins, and he once told the class that Bedouins, the true desert Arabs, can always fool a lie detector because they see nothing wrong in what we consider to be lying. Whereas in the West, we judge a statement that asserts a fact as either “true” or “false”, they judge a statement as either “useful” or “not useful” and if a lie is “useful” then, to them, it is what we would call “true”.
Though I recall one guy did bare his teeth in a 'wolf grin' as we were quizzing him.
The Greenhouses
Israel responded to Hamas’ election victory by further restricting access in and out of Gaza. As it happens, these restrictions played a key role in explaining why Gaza’s greenhouses did not help it become Singapore. American Jewish leaders usually tell the story this way: When the settlers left, Israel handed over their greenhouses to the Palestinians, hoping they would use them to create jobs. Instead, Palestinians tore them down in an anti-Jewish rage.
But one person who does not endorse that narrative is the prime mover behind the greenhouse deal, Australian-Jewish businessman James Wolfensohn, who served as the Quartet’s Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement. In his memoir, Wolfensohn notes that “some damage was done to the greenhouses [as the result of post-disengagement looting] but they came through essentially intact” and were subsequently guarded by Palestinian Authority police. What really doomed the greenhouse initiative, Wolfensohn argues, were Israeli restrictions on Gazan exports. “In early December [2005], he writes, “the much-awaited first harvest of quality cash crops—strawberries, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers and flowers—began. These crops were intended for export via Israel for Europe. But their success relied upon the Karni crossing [between Gaza and Israel], which, beginning in mid-January 2006, was closed more than not. The Palestine Economic Development Corporation, which was managing the greenhouses taken over from the settlers, said that it was experiencing losses in excess of $120,000 per day…It was excruciating. This lost harvest was the most recognizable sign of Gaza’s declining fortunes and the biggest personal disappointment during my mandate.”
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.608008?v=9D3E8191C0D2AFBE8F367C467342F6EBReplies: @Jack D
How much of the funding for the Palestine Economic Development Corporation disappeared into Swiss bank accounts of the high officials? Why are greenhouses being run by a government agency instead of as private businesses?
If your country has Tragic Dirt then something always goes wrong and it’s usually caused by whitey. They have no problem smuggling in concrete to build invasion tunnels but they can’t get the export crops out. Wolfensohn is a fool if he believes Palestinian “dog ate my homework” excuses.
Heinlein comes to mind:
Bryan ward Perkins blames the Germans. Like Niall Ferguson, a Brit Chauvinist still pounding the propaganda drums against Germany. Better to read Frankopan, who is pretty even handed. Scott, mentioned above by Kristor, is fascinating, dropping the anti-German pose heroically started by Pirenne, who had lost a son to them in WW1 but still felt committed enough to historical truth to absolve them of blame for the Roman Collapse.
BWP’s book is nonetheless fascinating, and I’m glad SS recommended it.
The day that your neighbor died was a wonderful day? 🙁
BWP's book is nonetheless fascinating, and I'm glad SS recommended it.Replies: @Simon in London
Aside from Britain, he blames the Arabs a LOT more than the Germans AFAICR.
I’d suppose that the Israelis were happy to sell those greenhouses because they knew what would happen to them.
Unitarians do it in the library. You know those Unitarians and their books!
It’s Hell viva-ing Saudi postgrad students suspected of cheating (essay buying) – most of them are entirely without a guilt reflex and can tell bare faced, incredible lies with an entirely straight face.
Though I recall one guy did bare his teeth in a ‘wolf grin’ as we were quizzing him.
This never would have been a problem in a non-positional language like Spanish.
Se puso a cargo de repartir la biblioteca de un cirujano difunto de su iglesia.
This syntax also works in English:
She was put in charge of giving away the library of a deceased surgeon from her church.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Air_Base
It was Clark Air Force Base, not Subic Bay.
Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too
By SALMA HAYEKObligatory Trump reference....Harvey really seems to have a thing about having women watch him shower....Just in case anyone's forgotten, I had one hell of a body....And sexy, too....
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contributors/salma-hayek-harvey-weinstein.htmlReplies: @Jack D, @Abe, @Lurker, @Neoconned1
Dammit syonredux, best me to the link. I added a lurid chesty pic of the author though in my post.
However, most Iranians don't bother with this as just plain prostitution is (surprisingly) widespread (though illegal). The funny thing is that the streetwalkers wear chadors like all the other women.Replies: @nigel, @Eagle Eye, @Neoconned1
Iran has a needle exchange for heroin addicts. They also until recently had a general subsidy that kept food, gas, oil etc prices low, Soviet style.
They also allow homosexuals to convert to trans.
Call it what you will, they’re more progressive than many islamists…
Of course in the West we consider anything that tends to lead to civilisational collapse as progressive.
The Mongol invasion of the 13th century devasted Russia, Poland and Hungary, but stopped after that. Right after Poland and Hungary there's Germany, which is in the Core. Untouched.
Again in the 16th century the Ottoman invasion was very famously stopped at Vienna. That's also the very edge of Core Europe.
Is that because Core Europeans were better at defending themselves than Peripheral Europeans like Spaniards, Balkan natives, etc.? Or is Core Europe simply too far from any traditionally nomadic areas? No nomads have ravaged it since the Huns, well and I guess the Magyars. None ever despoiled the British Isles. What if Core Europe is simply the area that hasn't been touched by nomads in a long time? What if that's the thing that gave it Core characteristics? This may or may not be a part of the grand storyline of civ., together with the eugenic effects of agriculture in the high latitudes.
The whole of the Middle East was continuosly harrassed by nomads until relatively recently. All of its settled areas are close to nomadic areas.Replies: @Anon, @YetAnotherAnon, @Lars Porsena, @Jim
Regarding the stopping of the Arab advance at Tours it should be noted that Europe had a very large population advantage over the Arabs. In fact throughout the long conflict between Europe and Islam the West had a substantially larger population. But today that has changed. The Islamic Middle East now has a population about as big as Europe’s. That is the big difference between the current situation and past history.
In 1900 Egypt had a population of 10,000,000 and France had a population of 39,000,000. Today Egypt has a population of 92,000,000 and France has a population of 67,000,000. It is this shift in population sizes that makes the current situation so very different from the past history of the conflict between the West and Islam.
I don’t understand why this massive shift in demographic balance is ignored by so many people in discussing the history of the West vs. Islam.
Core Europe as you call it was massively affected by the Viking onslaught although I wouldn’t call the Vikings nomads. Scandanavians were farmers not nomads.
I do think that the fact that Western Europe was not directly affected by the Mongols is a very important fact of history.
This is really fascinating. Are you friends w Pittsburgh Thatcherite?
I will admit to being almost illiterate when it comes to Islamic economic history. Is your background in finance or in insurance?
I will warn you of 1 thing…. insurance companies are not everything. They very often can stifle economic growth by limiting types of employment and commerce….
Where did you learn all this about Islamic law and economics? Are you a comparative economist or lawyer? Political scientist?
I didn’t even notice, because I was still shaking my head at the previous string of words, “I’ve been reading an old book “Doctor in Arabia,” given me my neighbor.”
When dropping the “to” does one also drop the “by”?
Both disruptive of traditional family patterns.
Yet no-fault divorce spread across the country with little controversy, and the states that resisted the most were not Bible Belt states (Mississippi and Alabama adapted no-fault divorce not long after California) but New York and New Jersey, which didn't adapt no-fault until the '90s.
Why didn't the South resist no-fault divorce?Replies: @The Man From K Street, @stillCARealist, @Neoconned1, @Charles Erwin Wilson
Because most of these aww shucks Hicks down here are lying, thieving selfish hypocrites??
I recall reading when Rome fell apart in Europe that European men shrunk by several inches….and Europeans didn’t regain their nutritional based Roman era heights til the 1800s….
This was also a period of global cooling…characterized by a mini ice age that arguably helped cause the dark ages
Interviewer: What is the secret to winning wars?
Gen Moshe Dayan: Fight Arabs.
They’re not actually that rugged, just the first generation was a group of petty robbers & rapists while the 2nd generation and on were the masochist idiots you find in places like Mississippi and Louisiana today.
Jack of all trade masochistic cucks who can work on cars and weld and drive trucks and tinker and fix any rutting piece of shit mechanical contraption you can think of.
But they’d rather take a minimum wage job and not unionize or rock the boat than force Mexicans out or force their employer to give them better wages….
But hey they got their shitty rifle collection….
“The real trouble was that the capacity for co-operation had been reduced to so low a level by six hundred years of Mohammedanism that, far from being able to develop such a system, they were not able to repair a comparatively trifling damage to it.”
Islam was probably at fault but for a different reason. Importing African slaves, some of whom bore children to the Iraqi men, which bred into the local population, couldn’t have been good for the gene pool.
The owners of the asset (i.e. the stockholders) still receive a premium for the business, whether it’s Milken, his clients, or the bondholders that are paying for it.
If a business is worth less than the sum of its assets, then it’s not much of a business. It makes sense to sell the assets to businesses that know what to do with them.
This is the exact opposite of the scenario with the greenhouse: the assets individually are worth less than the business, but due to a civilizational failure the business is destroyed and the business owner gets nothing.
You may well be right.
The West started to become addicted to the “romantic love as the basis for marriage” myth during the High Middle Ages. It started to become really toxic once Hollywood got hold of it, back in the 20s.
Romantic love proved to be a useful weapon for undermining marriage and morality. It gave the green light to women to break up their marriages, for the sake of True Love.
They also allow homosexuals to convert to trans.
Call it what you will, they're more progressive than many islamists...Replies: @dfordoom, @Difference maker
And in the long term less likely to survive. If you compromise with liberalism you die. There’s no such thing as moderate liberalism. They’re being very very foolish.
Of course in the West we consider anything that tends to lead to civilisational collapse as progressive.
The West started to become addicted to the "romantic love as the basis for marriage" myth during the High Middle Ages. It started to become really toxic once Hollywood got hold of it, back in the 20s.
Romantic love proved to be a useful weapon for undermining marriage and morality. It gave the green light to women to break up their marriages, for the sake of True Love.Replies: @Anon, @L Woods
I tend to be skeptical of claims that something will destroy society if it has 2000 years to do it and kicks in c. 1950.
(edit: Not that I’m saying you’re making them)
Amen to that….
Jack, sigh, ” Some time after my neighbor died…..” Better?
This reminds me of how now the Saudi royalty have Pakistani commandos as their own guards rather than their own fellow tribalists…
Are Commandmants now suggestions?
Paging Talha for edification.
I have often wondered to what extent these nude scenes get plotted into movies just to juice up ticket sales. Hayek with her shirt off is unquestionably TV worth watching.Replies: @Big Bill, @Charles Erwin Wilson
Maybe, or maybe it was just more self-gratification material for Harvey.
Both disruptive of traditional family patterns.
Yet no-fault divorce spread across the country with little controversy, and the states that resisted the most were not Bible Belt states (Mississippi and Alabama adapted no-fault divorce not long after California) but New York and New Jersey, which didn't adapt no-fault until the '90s.
Why didn't the South resist no-fault divorce?Replies: @The Man From K Street, @stillCARealist, @Neoconned1, @Charles Erwin Wilson
When it is 98 degrees outside, and 98% humidity, and you cannot go outside to escape the harridan you married, you think no-fault divorce looks a lot better than murdering the woman you once loved, or shooting yourself or both.
No-fault divorce has been a disaster. But take it from me, the charm of those Southern Belles can be entirely superficial, and matched with a selfish coldness that freezes your soul like a block of ice on a windswept lake on the coldest day of a North Dakota winter.
No-fault was a bad idea, but I can understand the motivation.
Wrong. I have one. I know quite a few other that have one too. And, as Kant pointed out, the actual proves the possible.
Too bad about your failure though. I understand the motivation for your bitter post. You should forgive her, but you won’t.
Your hatred will kill you.
Couldn’t help yourself, eh Jack? Shame on you.
It was progressivism that I was referring to as the civilisation-destroying force. It’s only had maybe a century and a half so far. And the damage was starting to become visible by the 1920s.
The West started to become addicted to the "romantic love as the basis for marriage" myth during the High Middle Ages. It started to become really toxic once Hollywood got hold of it, back in the 20s.
Romantic love proved to be a useful weapon for undermining marriage and morality. It gave the green light to women to break up their marriages, for the sake of True Love.Replies: @Anon, @L Woods
I’d also say that it’s one of the last facsimiles of “meaning” and hope one is permitted in post-religious, post-nationalist consumer society. Sure, you’re just an cog grinding away so you can afford another stupid trinket while the oligarchy hollows out your patrimony like termites. But worry not — one day you’ll find “true love.” You’ll be “complete.” It’d be funny if it weren’t so depressing.
Whiskey, we are all disposable in the current year.
It’s easy to strut when white guys with guns got your back. Stupid, too.
Africa. Not a winning continent.
Europe, USA, Australia, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, etc.
As I’ve told your chowder head a zillion times, Japan, Tawain, Korea, etc; full of guys way more “beta” than White men. Yet, no strutting enslaving hordes. Your theory is stupid.
He didn’t say it happened the day he died.
Se puso a cargo de repartir la biblioteca de un cirujano difunto de su iglesia.Replies: @Not Raul, @BB753
Se puso a cargo de repartir la biblioteca de un cirujano difunto de su iglesia.
This syntax also works in English:
She was put in charge of giving away the library of a deceased surgeon from her church.
Yes, very true.
In 1900 Egypt had a population of 10,000,000 and France had a population of 39,000,000. Today Egypt has a population of 92,000,000 and France has a population of 67,000,000. It is this shift in population sizes that makes the current situation so very different from the past history of the conflict between the West and Islam.
I don't understand why this massive shift in demographic balance is ignored by so many people in discussing the history of the West vs. Islam.
Core Europe as you call it was massively affected by the Viking onslaught although I wouldn't call the Vikings nomads. Scandanavians were farmers not nomads.
I do think that the fact that Western Europe was not directly affected by the Mongols is a very important fact of history.Replies: @Autochthon
Even before the Viking incursions, Britain was despoiled by marauders inasmuch as it’s inhabitants to this day are their descendants. The Celts displaced the Picts, and were in turn displaced by Angles, Danes, Normans….
But maybe the Volkerwandering and related events are being excluded from the theory because they reshuffled the European deck rather than introducing wholly alien wildcards….
This was also a period of global cooling...characterized by a mini ice age that arguably helped cause the dark agesReplies: @Simon in London
People weren’t too short around AD 1000. There was a cool period ca 500-900 AD yes, contemporary with the Dark Ages, then the early medieval warm period with increased heights, then shrinking height to a lowest point in Britain around 1800. Probably both due to the Little Ice Age and increased population = increased poverty. Heights in Britain started increasing rapidly in the 1800s with better nutrition and public health, and I think are still doing so – increase in US has stopped (and reversed due to Latino immigration).
Agreed!
But it’s a shame that she didn’t put such marvelous baby feeders, much earlier and more often, to their God given use. She was exquisitely crafted by the deity for reproduction, yet eschewed that role for “career” for years and years and was fortunate to be able pop out one pup with the French guy at 40+. You see woman after woman who have something positive going on–smarts, looks, athleticism–who let that crowd out, crimp, diminish their performing the natural role they were made for–that passes on their talent–and would give most of them the deepest life happiness and satisfaction.
It’s obvious that “beta males” produce better societies. But do they fare better as individuals in the present context? Not so much.
Se puso a cargo de repartir la biblioteca de un cirujano difunto de su iglesia.Replies: @Not Raul, @BB753
More like: “La pusieron a cargo..”
And that future is Generation Z.
http://www.kenhughes.info/generation-z/
"Mormon-Hasidic-Amish and Muslim/r-selected America will be an interesting place."
Hate to break it to you, but K-R selection theory is pseudo-science.
"Anglo-Celt Americans wrote a frontier-capitalist Constitution..."
It's always amazing to me how you craft the narrative to benefit your "tribe". In reality, it was Englishmen who were influenced directly by Iroquois concepts of government and who incorporated Enlightenment theories, in part developed by the French, who were inspired by Greek and Roman models of government.
"Still and all, as an Anglo I’d rather grow up in a society that tilts more individualistic."
Just like Custer's last stand.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
Gosh, I thought I’d just shut up but then I clicked your link. None of the individuals mentioned have management positions in large-scale private organizations. General Abizaid belongs to a large public organization, the US military as he probably would back home as well, where “large-scale” usually means the government and the “Ministry of the Interior” doesn’t run the parks. Doubtless there are outliers to the general tendency.
Thanks for the red herring. It, however, needs some mustard sauce.Replies: @Anon
Not to diaspora Jews. Strangely, the usual “side with the non-white, the victim, the alien” (Blacks, Amerinds, criminal aliens) Jewish behavior is reversed, and Jews talk about Palestinians as if they were 1930s Germans.
Funny how that works. Almost as if Jewish morality is a veneer for Jewish interests.
In Hungary’s case, the Mongols were stopped at the border of “core” Europe, as it were. IIRC, at the Danube, where the dense web of stone fortifications of urbanized central and western Europe gave way to the wooden fortifications of rural eastern Europe. (I seem to recall the Hungarian regime immediately embarking on a castle-building project in the wake of the 1st Mongol invasion)
Obviously, the further west a country was, the better defended it was from eastern hordes. But it’s a good guess that “core” Europe looked too well-fortified for the Mongols’ taste. There really is no equivalent to how heavily medieval Europe was fortified. No other place comes close to the number, density, and strength of pre-modern fortifications that are found in “core” Europe. There are tens of thousands of castles in core Europe, and not very many outside it. The Mongols didn’t like siege warfare nearly as much as fighting on open ground, where they were history’s undisputed masters (though I would speculate that the Romans would have given the Mongols a very hard go of it; the Mongols never got anywhere near Constantinople, so we’ll never know). In siege warfare, the Mongols were dragged down to everyone else’s level. It is in siege warfare against non-Mongols, not open steppe warfare, where the record show Mongol Prince start dying (the Mongols REALLY didn’t like losing members of the royal family in combat with non-Mongols).
Try a Web search for castles in China. There are precious few structures that qualify, AFAICT. Japan has few. India has some. Europeans built some very nice ones in the Levant. But no place gets anywhere near the complexity, density, and quality of European fortifications.
Interestingly, again IIRC, the Mongols were repulsed at the Levant, where the Crusaders built their castles.
Babylon is more than 50 miles south of Baghdad. Ctesiphon and Seleucia are more than 20 miles away from Baghdad.Replies: @Difference maker
No, Baghdad is the same culture, place, civilization, in situ, as Ctesiphon/Seleucia/Babylon, which themselves had to be progressively moved. Ctesiphon and Seleucia were themselves once new cities which replaced the older.
River course changes merely made the resettlement expedient, and vanity, convenient
There aren’t that many places to live out there in the middle east; as we see in this thread it was a big desert. And indeed, the geography resembles a highway of green belts
Losing twice in Poland and Hungary probably had more to do with it. “Political crisis” makes for a convenient excuse, but why didn’t the Mongols go back and crush the impudent Europeans after resolving their crisis of succession? They certainly had centuries of military dominance to attempt their revenge. Mongols, like most bandits, were pretty good at risk-reward analysis. South and Southwest Asia and China were more adjacent to their native steppe and far less fortified, making for easier pickings.
True, but the Ottoman fleet was formidable with its use of archers
As for Europe, the Mongols pulled back because they were having an internal political crisis.Replies: @Difference maker
The Parthians suffered from this as well, while being relatively desultory with their conquests to begin with, and philhellenic
Even though we think of Mesopotamia as a big plain,
until the collapse of the Seleucid state the Parthians consistently fall back from Seleucid infantry and melee cavalry. (No doubt the Seleucids here made use of Syrian archers as well)
There just aren’t that many places to go to, extract resources and maneuver, out there in the desert, outside the highway of the green belt
They also allow homosexuals to convert to trans.
Call it what you will, they're more progressive than many islamists...Replies: @dfordoom, @Difference maker
Perhaps a strain of warm-heartedness that also expresses itself in the Parsees, and the old sassanid and post sassanid revolutionaries
De acuerdo.
Apparently irrigation in Egypt is easier than in Mesopotamia.
The Tigris and Euphrates, apparently, tend by nature to be unstable. They move around, so the canal you built a century ago is not well connected to where the rivers are now.
Methinks I learned this from reading a Charles Issawi book, probably _Economic History of North Africa / Middle East_.
Egypt is just more “chill.” You get predictable irrigation services from the Nile, it flushes out the salt (before they built the Aswan High Dam), the wind blows you up river if you put up a sail on a boat, and mostly you are isolated from major invasion routes. Various scholars have mentioned the benign features of the region. Maybe this is why the original religions of Egypt are more optimistic than those of Mesopotamia.
In Mesopotamia the rivers won’t stay in one place, *and* you are on a major invasion / transit route between Persia and the Levant / Mediterranean. One could argue that it’s a “bad neighborhood” for that reason.
Elmore Leonard has a sentence in one novel: "That redneck motherf*cker you lookin for's driving a [such and such a car, probably a beat up Montego piece of sh*t, if I recall the sentence]." Toward the end of _Unknown Man Number 89_.
Obviously "a surgeon at her church" must be the departed owner of the library, since Steve is talking about books.
Whose library? A surgeon-at-her-church's library. And Steve got seven books.
It's not the most foolproof sentence, but Steve writes a lot.Replies: @charles w abbott
My bad–the sentence “That redneck motherf*cker you lookin for’s driving a ’76 Mercury Monteg0…” is in Elmore Leonard’s _City Primeval_.
“None of the individuals mentioned have management positions in large-scale private organizations.”
Thanks for the red herring. It, however, needs some mustard sauce.
Thanks for the red herring. It, however, needs some mustard sauce.Replies: @Anon
You have no idea how to cook fish.
Because they could pump money out of the ground. The parent post suggested:
The possible exceptions are those with high oil production per capita: the oil revenue allows the society to function.
If all you do is to take the stuff of other people, and that is what everyone else does, no one is building. No one is creating. You can't build an economy with that. An aircraft carrier or nuclear weapon is a byproduct of a modern economy. Maybe you can buy some old tanks with oil money produced by expats but that is about it.Replies: @dr kill, @Anonym
Further to that point, the Trump administration has singled out maximizing GDP as a way of maintaining global military leadership. It makes sense, as economy provides for a military.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/12/16/trump-to-throw-down-against-chinas-economic-aggression-in-national-security-strategy/
And I hope they take the intelligent, nuanced view. For military strength, you actually need to be able to build and engineer technical things. You also need to have GDP/capita. Raw human numbers alone is not going to do it, nor is it an intelligent use of the carrying capacity of your country.
The USA has the ability to not be overly concerned about defense and can focus on offense due to Admirals Atlantic and Pacific. However, it is still what it is in large part because of GDP/capita. Squander that with importing Mexicans on the low end and East Asians on the high end who are going to walk out with your technology on thumb drives… well, the logical outcome is not good.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Hell, that graph alone puts the lie to “diversity is strength”. Instead, if you want strength, have a big country and stock it with Europeans (or maybe East Asians).
There are precedents for a nascent 3rd party. French President Macron pulled this trick when the two main parties in France were both discredited. Of course, his goal was to stop Marine Le Pen, and he had the backing of the French Establishment.
To pull the same trick, it would be necessary to have at least covert support from wealthy donors, business, and the media. Sadly, this support is more likely to be directed towards a 3rd party that will do “business as usual” – like Macron himself, who is following the same path as his discredited predecessors.
Polygamy is part of this blemish. If one man has four wives, then three men have no wife at all. Because Muslim families guard the chastity of their unmarried girls, the sexual prospects of large numbers of men are bleak. The remedy available to them is warfare, which allows them to take the enemy’s women as the spoils of war. This is one reason why the Muslim world is constantly at war with itself and with its neighbors.
Even today, involuntary celibacy is one of the factors that drives migration from Muslim countries to Europe. It is why the new colonists are mostly young men. In contrast, news photographs show that real refugees – for example the Rohingya fleeing persecution in Thailand – consist of entire families.
Now we all have all this wonderful freedom to do as we please and to take care of the regret and guilt we have lots of pills.Replies: @Hare Krishna
Yet they greatly resisted abortion and homosexuality.