Reminds me of back when Al “media whore” Gore was running for POTUS and many said they’d expatriate if he lost. Of course that was all hot air. Same now I guess.
Jumping from Sykes-Pikot to the Suez Crisis to this doesn’t seem reasonable considering that the region in question did not enjoy any particular “freedoms” during this particular timeline.
Not to justify this as reasoning for invasion, however there is an accurate link between “not ready for democracy, because … wrong religion” in the case of Salafi/Wahabi/similar spectrum of Islam. Sharia has only one legitimate form for government and that is a king/caliph who acts as a guardian of Sharia. Secondly the aspects of Sharia which cover living in countries which do not meet this criteria do not actually legitimize them. See here and then consult with a Sharia expert on the terms.
If one thinks that religion is always separate from the affairs of state of a people, it is a grave error. Unfortunately too many Americans across the political spectrum make this mistake and assume that Western principles of universality is what all other cultures want/need.
Daesh is just Arabic for what we shorten as ISIL: Dawlat al-Islamiyah f’al-Iraq wa al-Sham. Westerners who like to use Daesh instead of IS or ISIL are trying not to acknowledge either the Islamic aspect, the State aspect and the size of the territory conquered, but in fact they are in error both linguistically and factually.
So if we count the out-and-out killing of First Nations people in North America prior to 1776, as well as the biological warfare likewise conducted against same via smallpox-infected blankets, and the cultural genocide of same (ongoing), can it be reasonably argued that the start date could be 1607 or perhaps, if one looks at Spanish involvement perhaps the start date should read 1565 or (re the French) 1699.
I’m sure you’re right about that, but that doesn’t change my point. My assumption is that the DNC’s preferred outcomes were as follows, in descending order:
Don’t run.
Run as a Democrat so as not to risk siphoning votes in the general, and lose the nomination badly so that we can ignore you.
Run as a Democrat. but get enough votes that we’re forced to incorporate some of your agenda into our platform to gain your followers.
Win the nomination, then beat the Republican opponent with our help.
That’s not really relevant in the context of foreign intervention though. Mucking with somebody else’s business as strangers is risky and the fact that they ‘weren’t happy’ according to some does NOT excuse our actions in the least or make it okay.
Now, if we’d just invited anybody who wanted a different life over here and provided them the same dignity we say we give to our own people then that’d be a different matter. But let’s not pretend that because some people aren’t happy that anything we do is fully justified.
That is quite literally how we got in this mess.
It is an even more grave an error to assume that others are unable to ‘handle’ democracy (not that we’re doing great with it) or to paint an entire culture with a broad brush like that.
Yes, Christianity has FAR too strong a hold on us here in the U.S. and it’s definitely damaging in a number of ways, and has been abused frequently. But we agnostics are still fully capable of behaving like civilized adults and I know plenty of Christians who are really cool people!
Several residents in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city which fell to the extremist group in June, told The Associated Press that the militants threatened to cut the tongue of anyone who publicly used the acronym Daesh, instead of referring to the group by its full name, saying it shows defiance and disrespect. The residents spoke anonymously out of fear for their safety.
I’ve actually been contemplating referring to the Loud Christians (you know the type, the ones that loudly declare how Christian they are without actually following any of moral codes or moral imperatives) as either Fallen Christians or Mammonians.
I also feel SUPER bad for all the good ones because the bad ones are so loud and seem to be kind of politically dominant. Obviously faith doesn’t corrupt everyone (and honestly I think it’s used as an excuse by some to dehumanize others…here and abroad) and it can be used for good, and it’d be hard to be an American without running into some really nifty Christians (and Jews, and Muslims, and Atheists, and Agnostics, and so on…).
It’s kind of sad that the angry crowd gives the nifty one such a bad name.
As someone myself whose group identity is primarily religious and holds US citizenship, I do get what you are saying. Nonetheless, the whole separation of powers thing does remain a Western concept so my overall point stands.
Not clear if the disrespect there is using an acronym rather than saying the full name or if the problem is the acronym itself.
As you well know, humans are flawed. And if there are any humans on the face of this planet that you would expect to put a high priority on party loyalty, possibly even to the detriment of the country or world, it would be members of a party’s central committee. Sure, you can be critical of that fact, and call people out for it, try to replace party leadership, whatever. But it’s hard to get around the fact ANYONE who dedicates their career to explicitly supporting a party (as opposed to, say, a specific policy agenda) is pretty much by definition going to place a higher priority on party loyalty than the average Joe.
It is, but we don’t own it. It is very reasonable arguable that the bulk of the issues individuals in the Middle East are suffering are far more closely related to inequality, dehumanization, politics, and the love of money. These are known, traceable causes and we’ve had plenty of stretches in the West where we were no better off than the Middle East is now. We have examples here in America (the robber baron era, our treatment of natives, minorities, and others), and plenty more in Europe and elsewhere. We’re NOT magically enlightened.
Meanwhile, the fact that the ‘difficulties’ that people speak of in the Middle East are geographic and NOT specific to any particular religion (unless we pretend Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, the one with no oil and the one that we rarely interfere with, does not exist) means that, per Occam’s Razor, acknowledgement of one Judeo-Christian religion over another cannot be treated as a primary factor.
Can we at least acknowledge that other known causes …again, inequality, politics, commerce, power, wealth, and foreign intervention are key factors here and the part of the world that once gave us much of our civilization is no more trapped than we were during any number of our darkest times?
It hasn’t all been hugs and puppies for us, either. We’re just at a specific point in our timeline where we can hold our heads a bit higher, and that’s really not something that makes us ‘better’…just lucky to have been born now instead of then and here instead of there.
This isn’t my claim or my point. Its not a matter of which religion is “better” at all. Also FWIW as a Jew the idea of “Judeo-Christian” is nonsensical, its yet another Christian retcon. My point is that many in the West refuse to recognise that Islam, as it functions in a near total majority environment is not “just religion” but a full blown culture that operates under its own system which is in fact different.
To put it another way, the West makes pretty much the same mistakes when dealing with East Asian countries. A notable exception was how Gen. Douglas Macarthur lead the Allies in the Pacific War and directed the Occupation of Japan. Macarthur was successful because he understood and respected that he was dealing with people who operated under a different system of both war and peace. Its a shame that I can’t see any evidence of the same wisdom in current Western civilian leaders.
And my point is that, from the perspective of an Agnostic…the same is true of Judaism or Christianity.
Yet that’s not REALLY true. It’s just that religion gets overly intertwined with government. And when things get chaotic, that intertwining tends to get more dramatic because people get frightened (hence the shift in the Republican party). Then of course there’s the shift towards xenophobia and scapegoating of minority groups (which may or may not be religious…it honestly is more about the best targets)
As for how our government deals with other governments. Let’s be honest here, it’s about commerce and political power. They don’t CARE and never did. If we really cared about the people in the Middle East we’d either leave them alone or invite those who want to to join us.
Anything else is just interventionalism and we are 100% unqualified to ‘save’ anybody by stomping on their homeland or sending them boxes of explosions as gift. Our success rate is abysmal and we have no business even trying. Ever.
Just a side point I’d like you to appreciate, but as somebody who doesn’t have any skin in the game, all of the Abrahamic religions (or whatever you want to call them) look very similar when compared to the other world religions (old and new). They appear to have similar weird sexual obsessions, a similar patriarchal structure, an oddly coincidental recent burst of declarations of inerrancy, and shared origins.
It’s like watching siblings fight to many of us. (This conversation comes up a lot among the more Unitarian, Agnostic, Athiest, and just plain ‘we don’t care’ folks that I frequently interact with.)
From a distant view they don’t even look as different as Buddhism and Daoism are, and Buddhism wouldn’t be recognizable as what it is today without the Daoist influence.
I know you guys all feel like you’re right and the other guys are wrong and you’re sane and the other guys are crazy, but I just see human beings who tend to go rationalize going crazy in very similar ways.
I’m not saying this to be disrespectful, but rather to point out that it seems like the ones who are obsessing over the religion of X, are the ones who have religion Y. It’s like Romeo and Juliet, but with three families at war instead of two…and once certain subsets of your faiths start talking about other subsets of your faiths, it’s like the fact that people can care about anything else as their identity seems to go out the window.
I don’t think all your babies are actually trapped that way, nor are most of the humans who are of one or the other. It’s just that the tiny subset that ends up in power (any sort of leader with power, really) seems to more likely to be of a psychological profile that’s on the extreme end of the spectrum, and that’s the group from the ‘other side’ that makes the most noise, and therefore is most of what many seem to hear.
It’s kind of like how the news gives us bite sized bits of horror from seven billion people…it’s completely out of context with reality.
