Quote: (01-18-2015 03:14 AM)Darius Wrote:
Edward Bernays "Propaganda" should be required reading.
When I replied to this, I was thinking of some propaganda training I got when I was in the military, which followed this outline:
Propaganda definitions from US Army Psyops Manual
Saying Islam is "feminine" is an example mostly of "name calling," with a bit of "assertion," "bandwagoning" and "card stacking."
It reminds me of Bill Maher getting shit on when he questioned the dominant description of the 9/11 hijackers as "cowards." When he dissented from that "bandwagon" view by saying hell no, you can call them murderers, fanatics, evil, or whatever, but they were brave mo-fos, he got ripped for days, even though what he said seemed to be common sense to me. Propaganda: it's not enough that your enemies do bad things; they have to be essentially bad, and bad in every way.
With all respect to Matt, I can't blame him for having absorbed the dominant propaganda narrative in the West for years, even before 9/11, but his thesis bears little relation to reality. It's like the Aesop's fable of the blind men feeling different parts of an elephant and variously saying it's like a tree, a wall, or a snake.
Human societies evolve over hundreds of years as the result of billions of decisions. They are responding to elemental human needs in one way or another, and are the product of multiple struggles between dialectical views.
With regard to the male/female dialectic, I take Rollo Tomassi's writings and their basis in evolutionary psychology as true. Men and women have different sexual strategies, and what Rollo calls The Feminine Imperative is always seeking to free itself. This struggle is one of the things which form human societies. We talk about that a lot here.
So, where is the expression of The Feminine Imperative of hypergamy and hegemony over all spaces most dominant? Here in the Arab/Islamic world, men get to marry four wives. If a woman is too free exercising her hypergamy, she might be killed; she is almost certainly going to be shamed and disowned. Men dominate politics and business. Men have multiple public spaces of their own, like the coffee shops which are informal men's clubs, and even the mosques.
Yet somehow Islam is feminine? Compared to what? Because of the moon stuff?
Quote: (01-18-2015 05:23 AM)turkishcandy Wrote:
I'm glad you asked that question. Islam, in its core, is just a manifesto of Arab culture and values. Let's call things what they are. God didn't choose Saudi Arabs to spread the truth throughout the world. They invented this set of norms and spread it by sword. Therefore it's impossible to surgically remove the Arabic culture and values from Islam. Islam teaches you to live and think like Arabs, and submit to the Arabic understanding of God. There is no truly non-Arab oriented Islam.
The closest to a non-Arab version of Islam was Ottoman Empire, because the Central Asian Turkish culture (where Turkish race was born) was too dominant to be dominated by Arabic culture. That's why the Ottomans somehow found the midpoint between Arab oriented Islamic culture and the original non-Islamic Turkish culture. It also helped that Ottomans were in war with Arabs.
Today, Islam IS Arabic in its core. But that doesn't mean those people are doing it because of being Muslim. Islam is just a front for Arabic aggression and its dominant culture. If you saw an Italian Christian organizing Mafia and bringing his family members to join, would you attribute that to him being Christian or him being Italian? That's how it's like with Muslim Arabs.
If you actually put all the religious norms aside and analyze religion as a historian and sociologist, you will come to realize that Islam is just a big cover up for Arabic Imperialism.
This is true. The dominance of Arabic and Arab culture in Islam is much greater than any cultural dominance in any other world religion, except for their cousins the Jews with Hebrew texts and cultural norms. Christianity abandoned Latin and European cultural norms years ago, Buddhism was universalist from the beginning.
But in addition to that, a lot of what happens in these societies is also the product of foreign influence and interference not related to Islam or Arab culture. It's possible but not always evident to see the overlays of Turkish Ottoman, French, British, Soviet and American culture and law in various Arab and Muslim countries.
One thing I think about political, economic and cultural reform of societies: it's not rocket science, it's 100 times more complicated.