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"Hooray, 3% of Muslims support us at least lukewarmly, truly we will drive out the unbelievers and the Shia and those who open the wrong end of a banana  "
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Jul 5, 2015 06:02
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Liberal_L33t posted:Considering it's the equivalent of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army polling at 3% of support among the global christian population, it is quite impressive ISIS has managed to garner so much favorability despite being adherents of the Pol Pot school of human rights. Jokes aside, one of their big selling points is that they bill themselves as the only current credible resistance against A) the Iraqi government's Shia death squads, B) Assad, and C) assorted Middle Eastern corrupt despots in general and the Saudis sort-of in particular. Oh, and Western Neocolonialism etc. It's definitely a pretty neat trick for an organization that was largely established by former Baathist bureaucrats. Not like there're any other solid anti-despot movements to rally around at the moment, though - the Muslim Brotherhood (itself a really neat, decidedly non-monolithic topic) is in the process of having its most successful franchise in decades burned to the ground and the ashes salted, and a big issue with Islamism <-> Middle Eastern politics is that a lot of the secular elites tend to be pretty willing to play nice with the despots (and the West  ).
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Jul 5, 2015 06:37
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Absurd Alhazred posted:You really can't think of a reason that the US is supporting KSA other than it playing nice with Israel? I can personally think of at least two things: one is a black liquid that runs your car, the other is a place where literally every Muslim is expected to visit at least once in their lives. I'm not exactly sold on the second one being a substantial reason - the main geopolitical importance of Saudi control of Mecca (and Medina) is that they get first dibs on Sunni theological evolution, and setting aside for a moment that whole "coopted scholars have no credibility" thing, ibn Saud's choices of favorite seminarians leave something to be desired from a US strategic perspective. I'd argue that it's considerably more important that we see some benefit from quashing pan-Arab inclinations, and propping up the Saudis happens to do that quite nicely (and provide a counterbalance to Iran, although the main reason we're opposed to Iran is that the Saudis hate them, sooooo). It's mostly the oil thing.
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Jul 7, 2015 18:10
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Liberal_L33t posted:It was spread through a mix of military conquest and economic pressure, always very coercively, in sharp contrast to the organic growth of... Hinduism  I, uh, respectfully submit that you have a pretty optimistic view of early Vedic syncretism, never mind the Maurya and Gupta empires and the entire history of India in general. Hinduism as a structural entity was very much about swallowing up local religions and smashing their square pegs into the round hole of a nice established priesthood in ways that aren't so unpalatable to the peasants that they freak the gently caress out. It's actually a lot like the Romans or, well, Christian absorption of pagan traditions. Edit: Effectronica, Hindus totally work from a single religious text, or at least a collection thereof. Mughal scholars said so, when asked to come up with an excuse for the Emperor to declare Hindus People of the Book. Would they lie?  Double edit: The mainstreamest Hindu texts are a little short on prescriptivism, but man do they have a lot of killin'. The Mahabharata is about a catastrophic dumb dynastic slapfight (and, incidentally, exhorts Arjuna to stop being a wussy little girl and go fulfill his duty and shoot his family members on the other side of the battle), the Ramayana is about Hindu Jesus invading Sri Lanka and mowing down its inhabitants and king (but they're not human, so that's okay), and if we want to stretch the definition of mainstream a bit, the Devi Mahatmyam largely involves the All-Goddess systematically demonstrating why she is not to be hosed with one demon at a time. Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Jul 10, 2015 |
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Jul 10, 2015 05:31
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rudatron posted:Can human rights be created in a country without some previous violent reform process? The answer is no. Politics is violence, the abolition of an old order will not happen without coercion. If you think the 'whole approach is fundamentally flawed', then you are in effect condemning the world to forever be shaped/burdened by the power structures that exist right now. Consent of the governed can only happen after those structures are removed, and only in those areas where they are removed by force. Had all progressives had your hand-wringing attitude throughout history, there wouldn't be a single democratic country in the world right now. Iceland?
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Jul 10, 2015 05:56
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ToxicAcne posted:I guess Sicily too. It scared the poo poo out of the pope at the time. Also Russia was occupied by the Golden Horde. The steppe tribes also clobbered some Genoese colonizers and dicked around on the Lithuanian frontier, but in fairness, it's not like Ukrainian peasants are real Christians, or for that matter human beings.
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Jul 14, 2015 09:38
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V. Illych L. posted:
Hello sir or madam to you too.
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Jul 30, 2015 03:18
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Mormon Star Wars posted:I mean, even if you are talking about Shia twelver Muslims, it's not like there is only one Marja, there are a bunch. I have some friends that used to be super active in Shia communities online, and there used to be some really hilarious profane (cussin') arguments whenever Fadlallah came up because he was considered a valid Marja to follow but his rulings were frequently more liberal than what Iranian Marja's tended to rule. It got to the point where, when Fadlallah died, his office refused to switch to a different living Marja and kept giving rulings in Fadlallah's style, it's kind of ghoulish and hilarious. That is in general an awesome thing about Muslim theology professional dorks. 
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Jul 30, 2015 23:33
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SedanChair posted:Other way around at least in some cases: I am okay with women bludgeoning their accusers and/or accusees to death in trial by combat. This is clearly the enlightened way to settle disputes.
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Sep 12, 2015 09:09
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Sethex posted:Do you mean little people in this thread? Or in the west? It also sucks to be a worker in arbitration against your current or former employer, should that be illegal in the US? ...Well, okay, yeah, maybe it should. But we have employer-  ) tend to be pretty willing to uphold arbitration results including monetary awards.Here's an overview article of sharia arbitration in the US from Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/jotl/manage/wp-content/uploads/Sisson_Future_of_Sharia_Law_in_American_Arbitration.pdf An interesting side part of the article of which I was not previously aware is that a really big practical incentive for wives to assent to handling divorce settlements in sharia courts is that US courts do not have a particularly great track record at handling
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Sep 14, 2015 21:19
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Volkerball posted:what's funny is over generations, muslim immigrants to the west tend to become more relaxed about that kind of thing without any intervention required. yet here we are talking about it. This is a very big part of why I am Not A Fan of banning face coverings. I'm unconvinced that a ban would accelerate the natural erosion of the more stringent modesty requirements. In point of fact, it might result in a deceleration, and is not even remotely a vital enough issue to justify that, never mind the discomfort of the women who are (for various reasons, some of them not great) used to wearing face coverings in public.
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Sep 15, 2015 03:11
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rudatron posted:Going through some sharia-marriage caes in the US, the biggest issues brought forward seems to be the dowry and arguments over that (big loving surprise). The biggest issue from a western perspective to all of them is the lack of no-fault divorce for women which, while not enforceable, when you bring in the dowry contracts or some kind of fee structure, is a massive problem. While this strikes me as a pretty good specific solution, maybe barring some quibbles about exactly how to structure the dowry in a fashion that makes Muslim couples comfortable, even just cutting out all marriage cases from arbitration (admittedly mostly targeted at Muslim arbitration, because nobody these days raises much fuss about Orthodox Jews or weird Christian denominations using it) is probably a pretty tricky subject to broach in the US, legislatively speaking. Abolishing arbitration as a parallel legal mechanism altogether is simply not going to happen.
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Sep 15, 2015 03:54
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Smudgie Buggler posted:
I mean, we could establish some other universal form of positive identification. DNA databases sound nice. Maybe dental record databases? It's pretty feasible to eat / chomp on a piece of putty while veiled, I'm told. Ooh, or retinal databases, although that only really helps niqab-wearers. This one might actually be not completely stupid, insofar as it might be possible to put the data part on portable personal IDs, but I don't particularly see (  ) a disabled-access-like push to overhaul identification standards for the sake of this particular minority.
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Sep 16, 2015 18:38
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I would just like to say, I would totally love to continue reading an Ask Me Why The Khan Translation Sucks / Let's Read The Koran whether it is in this thread or not. I hope we didn't scare the gentleman off.
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Sep 16, 2015 23:11
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