Yeah, what about Burma? You sound quite well-informed, so could you explain a bit about that history, and how it relates to the centuries of persecution of Muslims over there?
No, I absolutely do not. What you are ignoring is that the canonical text of these religions are not equal. Where are the Tibetan suicide bombers?
Ignoring the religious and theological basis for this violence is part of the reason we've been so ineffective in fighting it. Clearly social tensions are part of the problem, but so is the religion itself.
Aum Shinryko drew upon Tibettan buddhist teachings.
There are plenty of buddhist terrorist attacks, and these can be found with simple web searches.
Tibetan armed struggle also happens, but because it's in China i) Chinese authority hides it ii) Chinese authority uses a too broad definition of terrorism. But there was armed resistance in 2008 in Lhassa.
Christianity was muzzled during the Enlightenment. While the religious right has been getting worse in recent decades (and this poses a long-term threat to freedom), Christianity is not practiced seriously and purely on a massive scale as it was during the Dark Ages.
Agreed. And some fringes are orders of magnitude larger than others.
Moreover:
- Most Germans were non-violent people in 1944, but we can still talk about cultural elements that enabled Nazism
- Most Russians were non-violent in the 60's, but we can still talk about cultural elements that enabled Stalinism
- Most Chinese were non-violent during the Maoist dictatorship, but we can still talk about culutral elements that enabled Maoism
I could go on, but you get the point. Just because most Muslims are nice people doesn't mean that Islamic canon doesn't play a role in terrorism. No politically-correct nitpicking can change that.
You still ignore that Christian fundamentalists who perpetuate violence? Or that right wing extremism is a greater threat to Americans that Islamic fundamentalism?
We can talk about them too! I hate them just as much, but but understand that you're no longer addressing the original point.
The original point is that Christian terrorism is objectively rarer (though by no means rare). I argue that this discrepancy is mostly accounted for by a difference in canonical content of the religion, rather than in a meaningful difference in wealth or suffering.
1. Islam has jurisprudential elements that are not present in Christianity
2. Islam sets a precedent for a militarized, theocratic state with ambitions of (a minima) regional dominance, which is present in no other Abrahamic religion
3. The very prophet of Islam perpetrated unspeakable atrocities, contrary to every other Abrahamic religion.
Again: you must acknowledge these points, else you're betraying ignorance at best, and bad faith at worse.
> The original point is that Christian terrorism is objectively rarer
In the present.
> Again: you must acknowledge these points, else you're betraying ignorance at best, and bad faith at worse.
He doesn't have to do anything.
As for the subject itself, Islam has yet to go through 'enlightenment' (assuming that will happen some day) and before Christianity did it was one of the more brutal religions on the planet. 5 centuries of progress can't be suddenly synchronized across the planet.
Precisely my point. My whole argument is that Islamic canon is partly responsible for the discrepancy, and that ignoring this fact accounts for our ineffectiveness in fighting radical Islam.
It indeed used to be the other way around. There is unique good to the Islamic cannon too.
The Filipino-Moro conflict has a centuries long history that predates the modern jihadist movement, it's not a "past 20-30 years" thing. It's also hardly as one-sided as you're presenting it. The Spanish-American War was a significant externality in its escalation, go figure.
True, Western foreign policy is not solely to blame. But it has definitely shown itself to have cumulative negative effects.
And have you researched its origins? Have you looked into how it's funded, how it was funded, which countries support it now, and which countries supported it in the past?
Perhaps the media equivalent of "Four legs good, two legs bad" is not a very insightful way to understand geopolitics and post-war history.
In a way you're right, you've just got the agressor wrong. In fact the crusades were started because of muslim agression. Because, and I'm quoting muslim historical sources here "the blood of Christians was standing above our knees in Jerusalem".
Apparently the Muslims did a big land grab about 1500 years ago or so (just like the Romans did before them) and that's, apparently, where it all started.
Turns out it has nothing to do with the US foreign policy of the past 60 or so years, the creation of the state of Israel (and the Israelis being a bunch of dicks about it, and for the record, I'm most certainly NOT an anti Semite, though I'm allergic to assholes) and the British hopelessly trying to colonize Afghanistan throughout 1800's and a whole bunch of other dickhead moves by the west and their buddies.
Apologies. I'm not trying to insult your (or anyone's) intelligence. I just couldn't resist...
/sarcasm
PS: I'm very much a westerner, white male, atheist, born and raised in the Netherlands and currently living in Australia, for what ever it's worth.
Calm happy people usually don't adopt violent ideologies. We pretty much caused a whole region to become very much not calm happy people. If we hadn't, chances are far fewer people would have supported these ideologies.
Examples? Typically it only happens if some strong leader portrays another group as the enemy and manages to build up wide support. Manufacturing fear.
How about we take as a first one: do you seriously think WWII happened because Hitler portrayed the Jews as the enemy ? Do you think Iraq happened (first time OR second time) because Bush (first one, then the other) portrayed Iraqi's as terrorists ?Or let's take non-western conflicts. Say, Iran-Iraq war. Who demonized who exactly (as a cause of war) ? Do you think the Falklands war was about demonized Argentinians ?
I'm not trying to belittle or avoid the fact that people were demonized during these conflicts, in some cases with very unpleasant consequences. However, that had little to do with the conflicts themselves.
You think the people didn't feel the need for a strong leader because of a threat? Their economy was crap, and Hitler have them a scapegoat and scared them by talking about how dangerous they were and the need to become pure, etc...
Iraq for invaded because oil most certainly, using the fear of WMDs as the excuse.
You're also conflating the original source of each conflict with the reason for WHY the large masses joined in and took sides, the reason for why the conflicts COULD become large and dangerous.
Not every poor country has gone to war. Propaganda is typically what makes people do so by amplifying fear and doubt and giving them The One Solution™.
> educated students, doctors and engineers are joining IS
How many are? Do we have any good information on this? I doubt IS releases the professinal and educational backgrounds of its hires!
Generally, my impression is that historiclly the middle class has provided the idealogues; the theory is thhat if you're living hand-to-mouth you have more immediate worries and less time to study such things, and if you are illiterate you have other obstacles. That's just one possible but commonly repeated hypothosis: I don't know what basis there is for it.
I can't remember where I read it, but I saw a comment that said Samsung is leading the way with its "3D NAND" technology and they are pushing a lot of consumer products into the pipeline, which is why there has been a recent fall in 1TB SSD prices.
Makes you wonder if online cloud backup services are going to have a tough time in the future...
I interviewed at Google. Didn't get the gig, but while I was in the office, it did seem like their engineers were mostly 30+ somethings. I didn't see a lot engineers there that looked like fresh grads. I know more than half the engineers working there interview two or more times before getting an offer.
Google, and most larger tech companies, optimize their hiring process to aggressively deny candidates if they aren't a slam dunk. The negatives that come from hiring a bad engineer far outweigh the positives that come from hiring a good engineer.
Not saying there isn't an age bias, just not an obvious one I noticed.
No statistics per say. Programmers are a different animal that say a job like tech support or customer service. Stuff they do, code they write, will stick around in your system for a while, and is non-trivial to remove or fix. If a customer service rep does a bad job you can fire them and going forward is a clean slate. But high turn over for software engineers leads to more technical debt. Lower quality programmers lead to exponentially greater technical debt. Also the cost of hiring someone in terms of dollars is not small.
So think about it from Google's point of view. You take a risk, hire a programmer that doesn't pan out. You fire him after 6 months. That's 6 months of salary and benefits. 6 months of bad code sitting in your code base. 6 months of lower productivity for whoever was on that person's team. And probably another 6 months after that of clean up either ripping out bad code, or worse, leaving passable code that turns bad at a later date causing even more work.
It is better to just take no action on a potentially good candidate and let them try again in a year than it is to take even a small risk on someone who might cause things to snowball.
What in America sorry I am ROTFL here! didn't seem to stop jack Dorsey making a lot of people redundant or MS using stack ranking to fire the lowest 10%
There are just a lot more young people studying Computer Science now as opposed to the 1970s since computers are ubiquitous now. So of course that era is underrepresented.
