War is Religion

Ah yes, the ole Hitchens cop out. Its religion when I don't like it and not religion when I like it. To re-imagine an anti-theist dictatorship that viciously suppressed organized religion as a theocracy takes some serious mental gymnastics. At that point you're stretching the definition of theocracy to the point of absurdity. I guess Nazism and Revolutionary France were theocracies as well then? The British and Mongol Empires too?

Why would the Sultanate be such a bad idea? Look at the most successful countries in the region, they're mostly monarchies. Much better than having a dozen different republics that engage in military dick measuring contests. Heck even in Europe the nation state system lead to brutal wars.

I think @Yehudim's point is that having a decentralized monarchical system with regional//local autonomy would better accommodate the ethno-linguistic diversity of the region than a bunch of different nation states that try to homogenize and end up persecuting their own minorities and/or fighting each other.
It had all the hallmarks of religions as I described it so what's the problem? Just to soothe your troubled soul, I never read Hitchens. If it swims like a duck, quacks like a duck then it sucks just as bad as an authoritarian duck.
 
It had all the hallmarks of religions as I described it so what's the problem? Just to soothe your troubled soul, I never read Hitchens. If it swims like a duck, quacks like a duck then it sucks just as bad as an authoritarian duck.
If you want to call the USSR or Maoist China authoritarian then no qualms from me. But to twist the term theocracy so that it applies to communist dictatorships reeks of agenda driven polemics, facts be damned.
 
Why would the Sultanate be such a bad idea? Look at the most successful countries in the region, they're mostly monarchies. Much better than having a dozen different republics that engage in military dick measuring contests. Heck even in Europe the nation state system lead to brutal wars.

I think @Yehudim's point is that having a decentralized monarchical system with regional//local autonomy would better accommodate the ethno-linguistic diversity of the region than a bunch of different nation states that try to homogenize and end up persecuting their own minorities and/or fighting each other.

As long as there were checks and balances to the Sultan where each citizen including minorities had inalienable rights that matched the UDHR I would see no issue with it.
 
If you want to call the USSR or Maoist China authoritarian then no qualms from me. But to twist the term theocracy so that it applies to communist dictatorships reeks of agenda driven polemics, facts be damned.
If you don't like comparing ideas to ideas and in the way some operate in an identical manner then that's on you. Just because one has elements of mysticism it matters little to people not attached to any spiritual system.
 
As long as there were checks and balances to the Sultan where each citizen including minorities had inalienable rights that matched the UDHR I would see no issue with it.
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Most of the people in the region up until relatively recently, arguably even today really, didn't give a shit about liberal freedom, they just wanted autonomy for their in group and material prosperity. Even the international liberal order doesn't care about freedom in the liberal sense, hence why they're happy to do business with the most brutal autocrats so long as they liberalize in an economic sense. Having on unified mega state would mean that the Sultanate would be a mega market and could wield clout not unlike that of China instead of having a bunch of weaker states that have less leverage in the international system.
 
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Most of the people in the region up until relatively recently, arguably even today really, didn't give a shit about liberal freedom, they just wanted autonomy for their in group and material prosperity. Even the international liberal order doesn't care about freedom in the liberal sense, hence why they're happy to do business with the most brutal autocrats so long as they liberalize in an economic sense.

I guess most don't care, except for the ones being persecuted.
 
If you don't like comparing ideas to ideas and in the way some operate in an identical manner then that's on you. Just because one has elements of mysticism it matters little to people not attached to any spiritual system.
Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia? Virtually identical!
<Goldie11>
I guess most don't care, except for the ones being persecuted.
Even they don't care. You don't need Western liberal style freedom to avoid that persecution, just the regional/local autonomy that I was referring to. Often those groups don't frame their grievances in the sense of individual rights but rather group rights such as the right to teach and govern in their own language or observe certain traditions or practice their own unique religious rites and so on.
 
Even they don't care. You don't need Western liberal style freedom to avoid that persecution, just the regional/local autonomy that I was referring to. Often those groups don't frame their grievances in the sense of individual rights but rather group rights such as the right to teach and govern in their own language or observe certain traditions or practice their own unique religious rites and so on.

It's not just ethnic minorities, the rights of people to convert to another religion or leave a faith all together. the rights of homosexuals, womens rights etc.
 
Remember when we all laughed at Kushner's inexperience, and the staggering impossibility of the workload thrust upon him? I do. I was one of those pointing and laughing. Well...
Mideast experts aren’t laughing at Jared Kushner anymore

He already won over the UAE and Bahrain, and just in the past 24 hours, both Israel's government and aides within the White House have signaled that at least 2-- probably 3-- other Arab countries will sign peace treaties by next year:
Israel’s envoy to US: At least 2 more Arab states will normalize ties by January
Five Countries Are Weighing Normalized Ties to Israel, Trump Aide Says


You wanted peace in the Middle East? All you had to do was let an American Jew take point.

Badabang.
 
It's not just ethnic minorities, the rights of people to convert to another religion or leave a faith all together. the rights of homosexuals, womens rights etc.
Like I said, no one really cares about that shit if they can have in group autonomy and material prosperity. Certainly not in the generation when the Sultanate fell and even today in many parts of the region they probably still don't. Some urban young people sure but they're not representative of the region in the slightest.
 
Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia? Virtually identical!
<Goldie11>

Which authoritarian shit hole would you prefer to live in? What's the practical difference if you don't toe the party line / bow down to the religious rulers?

Does it matter if you're under the thumb of an economic system or a religious one if the methodology of repression and the consequences are virtually identical?

Control speech, make sure the plebs are reminded every day who their overlords are and install and encourage a method of civilian censorship and reporting any behavior outside of what is acceptable dogma.

Same shit, different pile.
 
Like I said, no one really cares about that shit if they can have in group autonomy and material prosperity. Certainly not in the generation when the Sultanate fell and even today in many parts of the region they probably still don't. Some urban young people sure but they're not representative of the region in the slightest.

Ya who cares about shit like human rights...lol. Why do you act like material prosperity and individual rights are mutually exclusive?
 
Which authoritarian shit hole would you prefer to live in? What's the practical difference if you don't toe the party line / bow down to the religious rulers?

Does it matter if you're under the thumb of an economic system or a religious one if the methodology of repression and the consequences are virtually identical?

Control speech, make sure the plebs are reminded every day who their overlords are and install and encourage a method of civilian censorship and reporting any behavior outside of what is acceptable dogma.

Same shit, different pile.
Right so under this logic every authoritarian government is a theocracy. The Mongol Empire, Chile under Pinochet, Revolutionary France, the Tokugawa Shogunate, and Gaddafi's Libya are all virtually identical theocracies!
<Goldie11>
Ya who cares about shit like human rights...lol. Why do you act like material prosperity and individual rights are mutually exclusive?
I never said that material prosperity and individual rights are mutually exclusive, you're putting words in my mouth. What I said is that people in the region care more about in group autonomy and material prosperity than they do individual rights. Which is true. The Kurds would take autonomy and an oil field over the freedom to be a homo any day of the week.
 
Seems like you're citing Chomsky as an anti thiest when he's far from it. He's particularly sympathetic to liberation theology in particular.
 
I never said that material prosperity and individual rights are mutually exclusive, you're putting words in my mouth. What I said is that people in the region care more about in group autonomy and material prosperity than they do individual rights. Which is true. The Kurds would take autonomy and an oil field over the freedom to be a homo any day of the week.

Human\Individual rights aren't there for the majority, they never were. Why can't you have autonomy for the Kurds and homo rights?
 
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Right so under this logic every authoritarian government is a theocracy. The Mongol Empire, Chile under Pinochet, Revolutionary France, the Tokugawa Shogunate, and Gaddafi's Libya are all virtually identical theocracies!
<Goldie11>

I never said that material prosperity and individual rights are mutually exclusive, you're putting words in my mouth. What I said is that people in the region care more about in group autonomy and material prosperity than they do individual rights. Which is true. The Kurds would take autonomy and an oil field over the freedom to be a homo any day of the week.
If the parallels are there then they will be noticed. You're either allowed to think for yourself and make your own choices or not. The reasons why mechanisms are in olace matter less than the fact that they're implemented.

The scientific method (reason free of dogma) was an affront to the church just a few centuries ago. Freedom of choice was anathema to Communist big wigs just decades ago. Freedom of/from religion is illegal in current day SA. If you don't see how they all used the same methods then you're being willfully ignorant.

Yeah, my use of theocracy obviously wasn't accurate, but it was made to illustrate a point that authoritarianism is authoritarianism regardless of the seed that spawned that that particular controlling tree.
 
He actually isnt anymore a top one. His main thesis was debunked and other claims he made are oudated now by what neuroscience shows on language learning. And he only really speaks English, his Hebrew is rusty and he doesnt speak it when he has chances to in interviews with Hebrew speakers that I have seen. Which is sad for a supposed top language expert and linguist. Now not all linguists are multilingual but with a lot of the top minds they are and its standard to be.

In a way its actually sad that his career was debunked. Not in vain but just wrong. He did a lot for linguistics in a time before hard science could show brain operations more. Debunking his universal grammar theory among many others he held are unfortunate in a way for him but such is science.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-chomsky-s-theory-of-language-learning/

https://aeon.co/amp/essays/why-language-is-not-everything-that-noam-chomsky-said-it-is
That’s what you call debunked? There has always been criticism of his work, but to pretend the scientific community has largely rejected his work is just not true.
 
That’s what you call debunked? There has always been criticism of his work, but to pretend the scientific community has largely rejected his work is just not true.

Yes. Its a subject I follow closely. To have your lifes work disproven? And with that said there is huge differences between the eastern world vs western world. Chomsky long held beliefs counter to Chinese, Russian, Israeli, Arab etc community on languages and the human brain and its abilities and between races and cultures. And now the western world has gone against much of what he promoted as absolute fact.

Id be sad if I was him and this isnt even mentioning losing his fluency in languages as a linguist. Nobody takes serious such linguists and regarding most programs in the US, fluency in another language is required and usually people take a 3rd. One needent be a polyglot which is actually rare for a lot of linguists, but monolingual as Chomsky is now more or less is sad.
 
Some American Christians basically want the apocalypse to happen....self fulfilling prophecy.....They are very dangerous, they wish a big war will happen in the ME to activate the apocalypse script, at least in their minds.



We need a classical Ottoman empire which was reasonably tolerant of minorities and which rendered all the land and ethnic disputes irrelevant since the entire empire was the Sultan’s personal property.

The Turks turned into dog shit when they tried to emulate the European model of a nation state.

If the Ottoman empire was so great everyone would have been wanting to join. They used minorities as cannon fodder. The jizya was humiliating. The freedom and sovereignty the founding fathers of America fought for is what we need.

It's a good thing the Ottomans didn't get involved with North and South America.

There's nothing bad about the nation state and it might not be a European model and not something that arises out of political ingenuity, or a political invention. It could be an inadvertent byproduct of 15th-century intellectual discoveries in political economy, capitalism, mercantilism, political geography, and geography combined together with cartography and advances in map-making technologies. It was with these intellectual discoveries and technological advances that the nation state arose.
 
As much as I dislike Islam and all of it's backwards stupidity, TS is right. It's only VERY RECENTLY, and I can't state it enough, RECENTLY that Christians stopped their extreme fanaticism that we criticize islam so much for. And I wonder if even that, because Christians still blindly go to wars thinking they are morally superior based off of being doused in dirty water and believing in a 2000 year old fairy tail book. THREE entire continents (N/S America & Australia) cultures, religions, and peoples were absolutely massacred, forced, & brain washed into giving up everything they knew and convert to christanity. Millions of Europeans got duped into believing a story from a bunch of nomadic sheep herders.

You think it was Christianity that made Europeans push aside primitive people with no technology practicing slavery and human sacrifice in a land full of resources?

We live in a world full of tyrants. Europeans are used to fighting it which is why they created nice countries with rights and freedom. The world's last bastions of freedom are now besieged by communist tyrants and their ANTIFABLM army.
 
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