True enough, but the horrific intra-Christian bloodletting of the Thirty Years' War was 400 years ago.

[1.] That war was just one of the incalculable number of humiliations and humblings brought to Christianity across several centuries. These bitchslaps came in almost every realm of human experience: Politics, finance, law, sexuality, diet, literacy, family, through the Enlightenment and on and on.... They continue in yoeople dur neighborhood to this very day.

Furthermore, the Thirty Years War typified precisely the kind of complex international engagement and interplay, by potent & developed nations, forming the context of the Reformation.

[2.] The fact that this engagement happened (or at least started) a long time ago —which is something you apparently regard as really fabulous about it— in no way diminishes the fact that it happened, and that it had to happen for the power of the churches to be diminished.

Well, so, here's the thing. To say 'Islam needs a Reformation, man!' means nothing. When these cultures remain geographically, politically, and economically isolated and undisturbed, why would it happen?

Why would you expect change? Because you scold them for immaturity, as a seventh-grader in a training bra might challenge a suddenly-more-vulgar boy in her science class?

'Why can't they just be nicer?'

Well, why would they?

Sorry, that was supposed to say —

They continue in your neighborhood to this very day.

Also, because I'm watching the Malaysian Grand Prix at one in the morning with one eye, and I only have the two of them.

A shame, right? It was going to be one of the great blog comments.

But you, and I, have been cheated.

this article would make more sense if you cited examples of feminists dissing her

Also, saying 'Time for a Reformation!' neither predicts nor instructs.

"Also, saying 'Time for a Reformation!' neither predicts nor instructs."

Well it's more constructive than saying "Youse guys suck!"

Speaking of "time"

https://www.facebook.com/politichicks/photos/a.190664381023308.45021.174133289343084/834166400006433/?type=1&theater

Not too long ago, Brandeis offered her an honorary degree but had to back down because of liberals protesting her being associated with their school.

It wasn't exactly the feminists who protested her - it was her "Islam is violence" attitude that set the liberals off.

Or, perhaps, it was because she so often dismisses the American/Western feminist's "first world problems" by not immediately jumping to agree with them.

American feminists complain about such trivial stuff (look, he called me "honey," or women only make 87 cents to a dollar that men make - that's so unfair! boo-hoo) while Ayaan Hirsi Ali will counter by saying things like - well, having your genitals mutilated, being married off at a young age, being forced to cover yourself from head to toe, being raped and then forced to marry you rapist or be stoned to death is what feminists should really be caring about - and then they all go off on her because she does not care about THEIR first-world problems.

I cannot remember who; but, it was a university professor who got into trouble for saying that American feminism wasn't about equality for women, rather it was about upper-class women getting the cushy non-profit organization's President or other dreamy-office jobs. He wasn't fired for saying that (he had tenure, if I recall correctly); but, the howls from the feminists were quite shrill (yea, I know, how misogynistic of me to phrase it that way).

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is sort of saying the same thing; but, her focus is on trying to truly help the "forgotten" women in the Middle-East. And, for that, instead of focusing on THEIR problems, the feminists DO dismiss her.

More:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ayaan-hirsi-ali-fights-radical-islams-real-war-on-women/article/2556984

> Well it's more constructive than
> saying "Youse guys suck!"

Do you seriously think so?

Because I think it's exactly the same thing... It has exactly that same kind of thoughtless illiteracy to it... Short, inarticulate words, spoken from a place of distant isolation from the cares of their target:

'I don't care what your life is like, what you know of the world, or even how word of my demands might possibly reach your ears... I'm just a fat white person on the comfy side of suburban history, and I demand that you instantly CHANGE YOUR CAPACITY FOR understanding right this very minute! It's time for the primitive people of the world to just *know* stuff! By magic!'

'…On the basis of BECAUSE I SAID SO, Bub…'

Also, this is a fuckin' great tune.

Christianity was reformed because the culture, and the cultural values changed.

Change the culture in North Africa, and the Middle East, and Islam will follow.

However, it isn't easy, and I can't think of a single instance where it wasn't done at gun point.

You have to kill enough of the adult males, and those in power, in order to wipe out the old guard, and impose change on the rest.

Do that, and Islam will *reform*.

She's a critic of religion -- just the wrong one for feminists to get on board with her, as she criticizes Islam and calls for its reformation. Eek! So un-PC!

So much of Western liberalism's criticism of religion seems to be anti-Christianity rather than advocacy of secularism; as if they're spoiled children rebelling against anything and everything Mommy and Daddy chose. Since Mommy and Daddy weren't Muslim or said bad things about Islam, it's okay and can't be criticized.

Well, keeping powder dry will be very useful here, but modernity will do most of the heavy lifting bloodlessly.

Women everywhere, even those illiterates oppressed into gruesome submission in the remotest desserts and valleys, want their children to survive and have things they don't have. They want nutrition and water and medicine and stuff.

That last one is very important.

Frank Zappa:

The second word a child learns is 'Mine!' People want to own stuff.

And then there is the Tenth Commandment. 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's.' The Ten Commandments are God's basic rules about how we should live — a brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts.

The first nine Commandments concern theological principles and social law. But then, right at the end, is 'Don't envy your buddy's cow.' How did that make the top ten? What's it doing there? Why would God, with just ten things to tell Moses, choose as one of those things jealousy about the starter mansion with in-ground pool next door?

Yet think how important the Tenth Commandment is to a community, to a nation, indeed to a presidential election. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don't be a jerk and whine about what the people across the street have — go get your own.

The Tenth Commandment sends a message to all the jerks who want redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, more government programs, more government regulation, more government, less free enterprise, and less freedom. And the message is clear and concise: Go to hell.

The attractions of modernity rust the Muslim soul like saltwater on iron.

Wife and ass are separate in the Catholic commandments. That might explain a few things.

http://atheism.about.com/od/tencommandments/a/prot_cath_3.htm

"Well, keeping powder dry will be very useful here, but modernity will do most of the heavy lifting bloodlessly."

This is the point where we disagree. Modernity was making inroads in the Middle East and Northern Africa due to Colonialism.

When the west abdicated governance of those kingdoms and left them to local management, modernity left the building, with it's daddy *the rule of law*.

http://www.economist.com/node/10849115

In his interview with her this week, "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart worried that "people single out Islam," when Christianity underwent its own difficult reconciliation with modernity.

----

I share Stewart's concern. It's wrong for people to single out Islam when Buddhists were responsible for the horrors of 9/11, Lutherans slaughtered 190 people with bombings in Madrid, Daoists killed 200 people in a Bali nightclub, Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death by an enraged Sikh, Hindus have kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria, Jews murdered Parisian cartoonists for depicting Moses, Southern Baptists are committing suicide bombings, Zoroastrians are beheading journalists, a blogger who spoke out against Shinto extremism was recently hacked to death in Kyoto and sixteen percent of Mormons believe that anyone who leaves their faith should be killed.

----

I share Stewart's concern. It's wrong for people to single out Islam when Buddhists were responsible for the horrors of 9/11, Lutherans slaughtered 190 people with bombings in Madrid, Daoists killed 200 people in a Bali nightclub, Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death by an enraged Sikh, Hindus have kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria, Jews murdered Parisian cartoonists for depicting Moses, Southern Baptists are committing suicide bombings, Zoroastrians are beheading journalists, a blogger who spoke out against Shinto extremism was recently hacked to death in Kyoto and sixteen percent of Mormons believe that anyone who leaves their faith should be killed.

Posted by: JD at March 29, 2015 1:34 PM

Selection bias is a wonderful tool for reaching a foregone conclusion, isn't it?

Even if Islam was the cause of this, what is your point?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law

> This is the point where
> we disagree.

What, not even "most"? Exactly what proportion do you want?

I'm ready to kill people on modernity's behalf, but I think a lot of visitors to this blog are panicked as a function of ignorance or are looking for an excuse to kill people anyway.

There are 1.6 billion Muslims out there. Figger maybe 100 million of them are really, really going to be a problem… So how many of the remainder do you want to kill? Plug your own numbers into the spreadsheet, but we'll be looking at your bottom line.

This was from Reynolds, writing by pseudonym shortly after the attacks:

The United States is composed of people who left other parts of the world to get away from this kind of thing. That's certainly true of every part of my family except for the Cherokee ancestors -- and there was probably some heavy sh*t going down in Siberia 20,000 years ago to start that migration going, too. This is one reason for the "not in America" reaction.

But it's not really arrogance. It's more like a feeling that once again our forbearance is being presumed upon. After an attack of this magnitude, most great nations would do as Rome did to Carthage.

The United States absolutely could do that. It could kill pretty much everyone in every Muslim country in the world, with an effort less than it put out in World War Two. Nobody could stop it, and nobody could do much about it. (Or, to be brutally honest, would bother to try). A billion people dead, and a desert we could call peace. Islam as a culture exists entirely on American sufferance at this point.

Now be clear: not only am I not advocating that, but no American (except maybe Ann Coulter) is either. But every American knows that the only reason that this isn't happening is because we don't want it to happen. If Russia, or Germany, or France, or even Britain (remember the Boer War?) were the sole world superpower, do you think that they would hold back as much as the United States has under these circumstances? We haven't dropped a single bomb yet, and when we do it will be much more narrowly targeted.

> Even if Islam was the cause of
> this, what is your point?

Verily, people can't handle this. They can't understand that others aren't living in the fat, warm, clean connectedness of the modern world. They can't imagine have as few career, life, sex or behavior options as an illiterate villager in West Java or Sudan.

Americans are truly that short-sighted: They want to call all of it "Islam," so they'll know what to hate.

And then, maybe, what to kill.

Pffffft.

I'm ready to kill people on modernity's behalf, but I think a lot of visitors to this blog are panicked as a function of ignorance or are looking for an excuse to kill people anyway.

The number of people you have to kill is inversely proportional to the number of boots you are willing to put on the ground.

No boots on the ground, you have to kill millions.

A lot of boots on the ground, then you can get away with just killing the ones who are actually shooting at you....

Being the good guy is not signing an agreement and taking pictures of the handshakes at the happy conference.

The Arabs know something Obama seems not to (those pieces of diplomatic paper are worthless).

It is being willing to enforce those agreements, and establish the rule of law where there isn't any that counts.

When people think they have the ability to keep what they earn in this life, Religion becomes less of a concern.

> The number of people you have to
> kill is inversely proportional to
> the number of boots you are willing
> to put on the ground.

Sheeezus. Whoa there... Slow down...

What precisely do you imagine the scope of America's project to be? Exactly how many Muslims could you presume we're going to need to kill? The tiniest fraction, I should think, in any scenario.

Islam is 1.6 Billion-with-a-B. This is why I want numbers... Reynolds (above) notwithstanding, there aren't enough cobblers in the world to nail so many boots together, even if (inconceivably) our hemisphere made a Kyoto-type project out of wanton extermination. (…Of people scattered across the planet, unified only in our name for their religion.)

...And most of the available cobblers will be Chinese. Which is convenient, because they'll also have the only bankers who could finance that kind of killing by us.

There are buffoons out here, people who presume they're thinking about the 'big picture' when they're just wickedly naive. A few years ago, one on this blog speculated wistfully about "burning Kandahar and its environs to the ground"; That's four million. It would have been an unthinkable act of savagery, indicting the human enterprise itself, let alone Western Civ. It would have been unspeakably EVIL.

The vast, vast majority of Muslims, constituting 20 percent of humanity, are typically decent and peaceful. We want them clothed, fed, educated and cared for, and we want them to be around. Which is great, because they ARE going to be here, praying as they fucking well please.

This is why Amy's simpleminded chatter about Moozlims! is so distasteful. With her lunchtime schoolgirl 'expertise,' she nourishes the fantasy that Islam's a problem which can be solved. No decency, no demographics, no morality, no fucking human beings can penetrate her self-aggrandizing calculus.

Well.

Here's what's actually going to happen, and thanks for asking:

The Chinese have $28 trillion of debt of their own— It's increased fourfold in the last seven years. They're probably not going to lend us the money we'll need to patrol the South China Sea, let alone go after the whole of, or even a meaningful part of, Islam.

But that's OK, because the Middle East and Southern Asia are going to be China's problem. And India's. Not ours. Theirs. It's Chindia who needs the resource flows which militant Islam threatens... It's time for Chindian blood and treasure to be risked for it, leaving American soldiers in East L.A. and Southside Chicago where they belong. And Chindia's somewhat better poised geographically, socially, historically and racially to deal with those problems in the decades ahead.

America, you'll have noticed, has lost it's wartime hard-on, even if we're still the greatest in the sack as a military power. There will be plenty for America to do without encouraging fantasies of bloodlust in our underemployed populace.

I stole all that from the usual suspects.

(KaganKaplanPinkerBarnettEtAl)

Duzzenmadder: I still tingle with delight at being perfectly correct.

"What precisely do you imagine the scope of America's project to be? Exactly how many Muslims could you presume we're going to need to kill? The tiniest fraction, I should think, in any scenario."

You can't save everyone.

But if you want to tamp down the violence and the instability you need boots on the ground in the Middle East.

We won the war, and then we failed to follow it up by winning the occupation.

We are headed into a new chapter in the Middle East. It is going to be the mercenary wars, possibly followed by World War III if Iran is allowed to develop a bomb.

You know Crid that I don't simplistically see Muslims as the problem. Right now, it is primarily the Arabs and the Persians,

Obama et al has created a power vacuum there that a lot of unsavory elements are rushing in to fill.

"This is why Amy's simpleminded chatter about Moozlims! is so distasteful. With her lunchtime schoolgirl 'expertise,' she nourishes the fantasy that Islam's a problem which can be solved. No decency, no demographics, no morality, no fucking human beings can penetrate her self-aggrandizing calculus."

I see this a little differently. I think people want to blame Islam because of a couple of reasons.

They haven't done enough reading about the history of the Middle East to have even the faintest notion of the sectarian nature of the conflict there,

And second, because it is both easy, and pointless to blame Islam, something you can do nothing about nor do you need to.
It is like blaming the weather.

Is absolves you of the responsibility to do anything at all.

It's an impotent rant.

Religion is not to BLAME for violence. It is however a force multiplier.

Humans are pack animals. 150 upper limit in our closest circle.

It explains why people are on occasion willing to kill the fans of rival sports teams.

Religion is the only group cohesion that surpasses class and country. And given its promise of eternal salvation and paradise many people are more loyal to their faith than their country, and sometimes even their family.

So while Islam may not be the CAUSE of the violence, it does allow its followers to visit the worst atrocities on their enemies with a clean conscience and assurance that they are doing the "right" thing.

> I don't simplistically see Muslims
> as the problem.

Of course, of course.

> It is like blaming the weather.

Exactly.

But I think Amy's abject and arrogant disregard for practically and humanist considerations pushes us into a rhetorical corner where things get stoopit.

Amy's okay with that. I am not.

Practicality, not practically.

Sorrydoodle.

absolves you of the responsibility to do anything at all.

It's an impotent rant.

Posted by: Isab at March 30, 2015 7:58 AM

I have no idea what I can do, other than not be a bigoted asshole. Suggestions?

Yes! I have suggestions, and thanks for asking!

[1.] Don't be bigoted.

The fact that they make no room for humility in these daydreams is becoming a problem.

But anyway... I'm confident you, as a sensible blog-comment reader, know what genuine bigotry is, and why it's to be resisted. Let's move forward.

[2.] Don't be an asshole.

You have to read things you don't want to read, which takes time and effort. You have to keep reading past that moment where you have a half-formed impulse to correct what's being said to you with a smart-aleck teenage response. You have to read as if it's written for someone other than yourself, as if there were codes within for those who already agree, as there so often are.

You have to read especially closely if it's written by someone smarter or more worldly than you are. (And no matter how big you think your dick is, those fuckers are everywhere.) And when the bright people are playing ball over your head, you have to read it AGAIN, and maybe still again, to be certain that you've gotten every shred of meaning that you possibly can get out of it.

You have to read as if every word might completely invalidate the effort you've put into everything you've read theretofore, evermore, all the time, until the day you die. You were born to this world naked and friendless, with allegiance to nothing but the most decent planet you can imagine. Because I swear to God— Even when your big-milktitty momma, screaming in pain, took her first look at your slimy ass, before they even cut the cord, she was thinking I coulda done better. You are alone with your courage.

And —this is the Big One, the Biggest of the Big— you must always remember that others have had experiences that you have not had, and that the stupidest motherfucker you'll ever meet has internalized profound truths that you won't see even if you live to be ten thousand years old. (And I promise, you won't.) That includes the hillbillies. And the Moozlims.

That's how not to be an asshole. Live to give your resentment briskly to cowards and not merely to fools.

Got it.

Thank you.

Nine minutes.

The Internet.