I think Islam is the smallest part of why it's an awful place. I'm remembering something P.J. O'Rourke said about Yugoslavia - all of history's barbarians sent their most objectionable people around a corner while they sneaked off or somesuch, leaving behind today's population. Afghanistan is no different.
I think Islam is the smallest part of why it's an awful place. I'm remembering something P.J. O'Rourke said about Yugoslavia - all of history's barbarians sent their most objectionable people around a corner while they sneaked off or somesuch, leaving behind today's population. Afghanistan is no different.
I think O'Rourke is ignoring the fact that prior to the overthrow of the Afghan Shah in 1973, the predominant form of Islam in Afghanistan was Sufism- a sect that's liberal to the point of being considered heretic by many more orthodox Muslims. Also, there was very little opium in the region until it was transformed into a cash crop to fund the anti-Soviet resistance by the Western coalition. It must have seemed like a neat idea to corrupt old fossils like Count Marenches and Bill Casey, in the Reagan era; the Carter administration had already looked the other way on hashish smuggling, but there's no real money in that, compared to the heroin trade. And then of course the Saudis had to get involved, for the juice of it, and along with all of the money they sluiced into Pakistan, they also exported Wah'habi fundie Islam to the feral orphans and refugees of the resettlement camps, who grew up getting their only schooling in Wah'habi madrassas, drilled with verses of the Koran in the original Arabic, a language they neither spoke or understood. So they literally had to take the word of their matinent arch-Salafist Arab tutors about what Allah meant. Right and wrong. Right or wrong.
I don't view a foreign troop presence as helping that situation. I wish something could. I find it conceivable that even the Taliban are sick and tired of it. But as long as foreign invaders are on their soil, they probably feel entirely justified in devoting their lives to war. One terrible thing about PTSD is that if there is actually a war on, the stress has a way of making some of the afflicted people feel like the condition is normal, and adaptive.
There are millions of adult women who have had their genitals mutilated from another continent, child brides, forced marriages, etc that convince me otherwise.
Islam is, as Maher has observed, the mother lode of bad ideas.
You know, I have to observe that if there were millions of boy children grown to manhood whose dick was sliced off at the root... the big balled genius opining Russel Brand like cowards on this board might have a problem with Islam.
As it is, we have Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a lonely voice in the wilderness and a bunch of cowards bloviating like men.
For what it's worth, I've heard similar opinions voiced about the American state of Georgia, which was first settled by parolees from debtor's prison. Great Britain was grappling with over-incarceration as early as the late 17th century; eventually, they settled on overseas exile as a solution for many of the petty criminals. (British laws in that era were HARSH. For, like, nothing. A little-known legacy that probably deserves more scrutiny, as a way of explaining what happened to Patrick Garner and George Floyd. Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence may have had a lot of rights the accused this and due process that, which is a worthy legacy. But up until about the mid-19th century, the British would also flog the muscles right off of your back for stealing a watch, or send you to a dungeon for being a runaway girl. And we're talking all whiteys here.) That's how Australia got founded (read The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, which is also where I got most of the information imparted above.) But before the era of the Australian Transportation, the British Crown sent a lot of their miscreant and lumpenproletariat class to the American and Caribbean Colonies, as indentured servants. And they dealt with others by impressing them into His Majesty's Royal Navy, as "able seamen."
Very few of our ancestors were ladies and gentlemen; few of them could afford to be, and even most of the ones who could behaved terribly. Which is why I'm constantly on people to read history. To learn how horrible everything used to be, everywhere. Which, by corollary, can provide an inkling of how good we have it nowadays.
I mean, we don't want to blow this scene up. People need to put a check on their sense of entitlement over every little imagined slight. And have patience. You finish reading a book like The Fatal Shore and you look around and realize: everything is amazing, and what up? People are complaining and threatening insurrection, because they had to do 12 months easy time wearing a face mask?
The Australians refer to George Washington as the father of their country for just that reason. He won the revolution that resulted in many of the criminals that once came to America being redirected to Australia.
I agree we should read history, but I'm not sure the conclusion is things have improved, rather than history is a circle without end.
We have certainly changed the names. We now call slavery and indentured servitude incarceration. We have replaced lepers with the sex offender registry. The kind of criminals you cite who built this country would be unforgivable pariah's in today's America confined to the lowest wage jobs in America that do not do background checks and unable get access housing because they did something wrong 40 years ago. They died earlier, but had nothing like we understand as the surveillance state. Where you see progress I see trade-offs and old institutions given more acceptable names.
I have no problem wearing a mask, but if you think that is the the motivation behind those who threatening insurrection I would look again.
I will never, never accede to the "cyclical theory of history." No matter how popular it is- and I fully realize that it's commonly provided legitimacy in academia, to the extent that it arguably prevails over what's commonly derided as "the myth of progress."
Notice how the cyclical framing is granted the status of Theory, whereas the idea of human progress is dismissed as a Myth.
I don't believe in the unending forward march of Progress advancing through Time, the way the notion is most commonly caricatured by those who dismiss it. I'm not a naif.
But the Cyclical Theory is so despairing that it writes off all of human advance as illusory, and hence all effort as futile. Of all the fucked-out, elite, lazy, cowardly, capitulationist paradigms...only an ivory tower stance of entitlement imagines that it can afford to think that way. And it's been poisoning the minds of the youth for decades, like some unholy amalgam of Oswald Spengler and Jean Paul Sartre. If that's the best a social philosophy of history can do, it's no wonder guys like Julius Evola retain an appeal for young people in the West, trying to resolve the alienation they've been prompted to cultivate.
I'm realistic. I know that there's a risk of things going bad. That's a long way from the stance that things HAVE to go bad,. A stance held in common by both the effete faux liberal adherents of the Cyclical Theory, and the adherents to more militantly apocalyptic visions- ideological, theological, or even both- that theorize that the conditions have to degenerate to the point of utter chaos, decadence,and destitution before the Final Transformation. If we can't do better than that, then why care about any of it? But that's what some elements are angling for; maximizing the number of people who sink into uncaring cynicism.
"The kind of criminals you cite who built this country would be unforgivable pariah's in today's America confined to the lowest wage jobs in America that do not do background checks and unable get access housing because they did something wrong 40 years ago."
We got rid of flagellation. We can take the albatross off of the necks of the people you speak of, too. We still have dungeons- but not as many as in that bad old days. we know damn well we can do better. Our problems are solvable. A disproportionate amount of them consist of long-term collateral damage from orienting our domestic priorities to make room for the War on Drugs, the dry rot of public policy solutions. A public policy so bad that it enabled the rise of a parallel economy to replace the one that was being hollowed out by the abandonment of even elementary regard for keeping the wages of working people above poverty level, and their economic prospects at a level more secure than precarity.
That isn't about the inevitability of some Cycle of History, it's about bad policies that can be reversed. But the first step is to admit the sources of the problem. Including the fact that you can't make an exception for passively accepting the status quo of the War on Drugs; it's the single feature that's made so many of the other attempts to use public policy in a pro-social way ineffective.
Beyond that: one of the unexamined premises of the Cyclical Theory is that the glass never gets to be more than half full. I think it's important to read history from the standpoint of an honest appraisal, of appreciating just how full our glass really is, at present. I can easily fill as many column inches with a recounting of the ills of the present day as I could be compiling a list from the 14th century (I'm currently reading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, for the first time.) But for me to simply conclude that I live in a slightly more comfortable respite that's only a surface condition, and that underneath it all, things are as bad as they've ever been- that's just plain entitled ingratitude. Not warranted by the facts.
You are far more familiar with modern theory on cyclical history than I am. Correct me if I am wrong, but I sense you think of a cyclical view of history as trendy modern take that deviates from a more traditional linear view?
The first time I read about cyclical history was Ecclesiastes, but I've since learned the concept goes back further to the Mesopotamian conception of the Universe. You see it in Buddhism and Hinduism as well as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who re-popularized the idea in the West. I have no idea how their arguments for circular history relate to what you call the "effete faux liberal adherents of the Cyclical Theory." I never really considered the political position of Buddhism on cyclical history.
For me it's an ought/is argument. I'm not interested in the political implications so much as the accuracy of the model. I could be wrong, but I see far more proof of a cyclical pattern where we rebranding older ideas and call it progress.
Did we get rid of flagellation? Have you read Kendi or DiAngelo?
Not only do we still have dungeons, but we actually have far more of them capable of an exquisite science driven torture our ancestors with their iron maidens could have only dreamed of, but certainly would have implemented if they had known. The type of CIA inspired and directed torture used at Abu Ghraib (worth reading McCoy's "A question of Torture" if you have not) is not what I consider progress. As for the enormous Gulag type imprisonment we currently run in the US? There isn't enough space here for me to document its sadistic practices.
Our problems may be solvable, but our human nature is not. In the early 1900's we launched a moral panic driven war against "White Slavery" along with a series of deeply xenophobic laws due to fear over Asian workers that specifically targeting Asian sex workers and black men who had sex with white women. Since then we have had a war on alcohol, a war on gambling, a war on drugs and recently we have returned to the deeply xenophobic war on sex work again literally using the same racists tropes against the exact same Asian women and interacial couples we targeted over 110 years ago when we passed the White Slavery Mann Act of 1910.
The biggest difference is that a conviction for a black man having sex with a white sex worker in the 1910's got you a max of 10 years as black world champion boxer Johnson showed us at the time. Now it will get 40-50 years and is largely aimed at the same ethnic groups for the same reasons under different branding. It that the progress you are referring too?
The war on drugs is a symptom of the human condition, not the cause. Humans are incapable of not weaponizing laws against marginalized communities who behave in ways we don't approve of. That weaponization has only increased over time. The urge to censor and punish are stronger even than our urge to procreate and we are only getting better at it.
Entitled gratitude is a bad thing and we should all avoid it, but I don't think a religious belief in linear progress is needed to avoid that pitfall. In the end entitlement is about how we respond to life, not whether history is cyclical or not.
Like I said, I could write a compilation of like that, too. Book length. All you're demonstrating is that you don't realize how much worse things have been over the course of the history of the US. To say nothing of the history of the continental regions we refer to as North America and MesoAmerica, prior to European contact. And, for the widest context, world history.
For example, as bad as Riker's Island is these days, there's no valid comparison to be made between Riker's nowadays and what it was c.1900. Beginning with the cubic feet allotment for each cell. For that matter, there's no comparison between the crime, gang activity, and poverty in the worst neighborhoods in this country at the lowest nadir of the crack epidemic and the Five Points district of NYC at the turn of the 19th-20th century (a "neighborhood" from which the black population and Latino was noticeably absent.) Forget Scorcese's cleaned-up "Gangs Of New York"; read the book The Heroic Gangster, by Neil Hanson. Five Points was so much more brutal and lawless in those days that I'm amazed that New York City ever dug itself out of the mire of that time.
From what I've read of Ibram Kendi, he writes reasonably good history- as long as he isn't insisting on his polemical frame, which is considerably shakier (as is typical of any polemical frame; it's practically impossible to avoid the temptation of using them as Procrustean bed.) Unfortunately, his polemical bias is asserted from the outset. Then he allows history to speak for itself for a good long while, quite effectively. But the gratuitous polemicism re-emerges at points, and gets more pronounced as his historical accounting advances toward the present day. Which eventually results in turning the book I read, Stamped From The Beginning, into a seriously flawed work. Which is unfortunate, because the actual history is for the most part presented with unvarnished accuracy, and it's important to learn. (I'm an uncommon sort; I actually read books. I devour history books. I've been reading history books on the topic of American racism since I was in my early teens, and literature by black American authors as well. Even given my previous reading, I learned a few new things from Kendi's historical researches. I'm less impressed with other features of his work.)
However, in order to obtain the insight that the caprice and draconian punitive morality found in American law enforcement and penology wasn't directed exclusively toward nonwhite populations, one needs to read more widely. As an introduction, I'd recommend Hellfire Nation by James A. Morone, and The War On Alcohol by Lisa McGirr- two books that grant ample consideration to the role of racism in the history of American crime and punishment without insisting that the conversation revolve around Racism as its central sun.
"Our problems may be solvable, but our human nature is not."
When considered at the individual level, that's a reminder for people who seek to cultivate their values as a project of integrity to remain vigilantly self-aware. Because a lot of pro-social behavior really isn't instinctive; it requires a conscious hack, a check on bugs in our programming like the Ego, what with the tendency toward solipsism (about Me and Mine) and obliviousness (about the rest of it) if the Ego is allowed to run without restraint. (And it is possible to acknowledge that situation and its challenges without lamenting it, the way Freud did.)
But when that statement is elided to extend to the scope of human society, the framing is just hopeless. Anyway, unless the Cyclic Theory can point to some previous peak in human history that's even approached the current moment, they got nothing.
Not that the stakes aren't higher than ever nowadays. But I've always had ample evidence that would be the case.
"Humans are incapable of not weaponizing laws against marginalized communities who behave in ways we don't approve of."
Why should I buy that claim?
At any rate, anyone who thinks that the War on Drugs was intended primarily for the purpose of "oppressing minorities" needs to explain how that narrative accounts for its embrace by national regimes like Duterte's rule of the Philippines. Granted, as a dodge to keep from grappling with the challenges of crafting a policy that ends the War without, say, allowing over the counter sales of fentanyl, it's a splendid evasion: "Yes, we'll do a comprehensive overhaul of the laws to replace the War on Drugs- just as soon as we're done eradicating Racism."
And in the meantime, let the unproductive cognitive-dissonance based twisted arguments rage on, in regard to the statistical measures that demonstrably link some nonwhite populations with a disproportionate incidence of criminal behavior. White supremacists get to claim that the cause of that problem resides in the genes of Africans and Indios; liberals get to deny that the situation even exists, and that the real problem is racist police; and the argument gets to keep spiraling into the abyss. Along with the array of problems that particular acrimonious conversation pretends to discuss, but in actuality pointedly avoids.
"That weaponization has only increased over time. The urge to censor and punish are stronger even than our urge to procreate and we are only getting better at it."
No, it has not. And I can't even begin to conjecture who you might mean by "we."
"Entitled gratitude is a bad thing and we should all avoid it, but I don't think a religious belief in linear progress is needed to avoid that pitfall."
First, my phrase was "entitled IN-gratitude."
I'm not the person making the dogmatic assertions in this conversation. And I don't even know what a "religious belief in linear progress" looks like. It isn't a feature of any religion I know of. I'm simply providing my empirical assessment of the evidence. I don't think progress- linear or otherwise- is inevitable. But I see no evidence to foreclose the possibility of future progress altogether.
My initial instinct was to go through your points and respond with what I believe is needed context, but I expect you would do the same in response and in similar fashion.
Where you see objective improvements in society I see narrative fallacy driven by cherry picking, false pattern recognition and selective data mining of historical events and time points. No doubt you would view my response the same. These comparisons can be interesting and educational to a point. Thanks for playing.
I do have one final question. This earlier paragraph confused me:
тАЬBut the Cyclical Theory is so despairing that it writes off all of human advance as illusory, and hence all effort as futile. Of all the fucked-out, elite, lazy, cowardly, capitulationist paradigms...only an ivory tower stance of entitlement imagines that it can afford to think that way. тАЬ
I donтАЩt find the cyclical theory of history despairing at all. It doesn't rob me of the ability to make decisions and act. I could just as easily assert that the linear model of history leads to a Leibniz style тАЬthe best of all possible worldsтАЭ approach mocked so effectively by VoltaireтАЩs in Candida. WhereтАЩs the motivation to improve our lot if we do nothing but focus on how much better everything is compared to the past? It could lead to strange place where a person becomes complacent about injustice because the current state of affairs is better than a cherry picked out of context high point from the past.
It would be a mistake and a gross generalization to assert that is your position. I don't believe it is unless you say otherwise.
Generalizations, particularly moral ones are destructive when they lead to false assumptions instead of better questions. At no point did I dismiss the theory of human progress as a myth as you said some academics do. The theory of linear history is a serious position that is counter to the older circular theory of history. It's a debate that goes back literally to the dawn of philosophy. It would be a mistake to turn all philosophy and debate over to the definitions imposed by modern academia.
I have the general sense with that entire area of your comments that you are debate someone, or something you morally object to who is not part of this conversation. Am I wrong?
Yes, IтАЩm a Virginia native and we were taught all the regular stuff about the VA colony. Once I got to college I learned the only women they could get to colonize were brought from the prions or whorehouses. No genteel woman was going to leave her comfortable home. Our first governors were blue bloods but disgraced family members, exiled to a savage country. Americans are mostly clueless about and think theyтАЩre special.
Understand exactly what you mean. My battle buddy (Mark) in Iraq spent a couple years being a FSR fixing satellite kits with two Sikh bodyguards in Afghanistan (yes, they did carry daggers), and said he loved it. I liked Iraqis too, which is not a sentiment I get a lot from others who have been there. Never did Yugoslavia and it's probably not the same now, but Mark was part of the Kosovo deployment and had a broadly similar view.
I think Islam is the smallest part of why it's an awful place. I'm remembering something P.J. O'Rourke said about Yugoslavia - all of history's barbarians sent their most objectionable people around a corner while they sneaked off or somesuch, leaving behind today's population. Afghanistan is no different.
I think O'Rourke is ignoring the fact that prior to the overthrow of the Afghan Shah in 1973, the predominant form of Islam in Afghanistan was Sufism- a sect that's liberal to the point of being considered heretic by many more orthodox Muslims. Also, there was very little opium in the region until it was transformed into a cash crop to fund the anti-Soviet resistance by the Western coalition. It must have seemed like a neat idea to corrupt old fossils like Count Marenches and Bill Casey, in the Reagan era; the Carter administration had already looked the other way on hashish smuggling, but there's no real money in that, compared to the heroin trade. And then of course the Saudis had to get involved, for the juice of it, and along with all of the money they sluiced into Pakistan, they also exported Wah'habi fundie Islam to the feral orphans and refugees of the resettlement camps, who grew up getting their only schooling in Wah'habi madrassas, drilled with verses of the Koran in the original Arabic, a language they neither spoke or understood. So they literally had to take the word of their matinent arch-Salafist Arab tutors about what Allah meant. Right and wrong. Right or wrong.
Also: by now, a half-century of mass PTSD in the Afghan population. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15292083/
I don't view a foreign troop presence as helping that situation. I wish something could. I find it conceivable that even the Taliban are sick and tired of it. But as long as foreign invaders are on their soil, they probably feel entirely justified in devoting their lives to war. One terrible thing about PTSD is that if there is actually a war on, the stress has a way of making some of the afflicted people feel like the condition is normal, and adaptive.
There are millions of adult women who have had their genitals mutilated from another continent, child brides, forced marriages, etc that convince me otherwise.
Islam is, as Maher has observed, the mother lode of bad ideas.
You know, I have to observe that if there were millions of boy children grown to manhood whose dick was sliced off at the root... the big balled genius opining Russel Brand like cowards on this board might have a problem with Islam.
As it is, we have Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a lonely voice in the wilderness and a bunch of cowards bloviating like men.
For what it's worth, I've heard similar opinions voiced about the American state of Georgia, which was first settled by parolees from debtor's prison. Great Britain was grappling with over-incarceration as early as the late 17th century; eventually, they settled on overseas exile as a solution for many of the petty criminals. (British laws in that era were HARSH. For, like, nothing. A little-known legacy that probably deserves more scrutiny, as a way of explaining what happened to Patrick Garner and George Floyd. Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence may have had a lot of rights the accused this and due process that, which is a worthy legacy. But up until about the mid-19th century, the British would also flog the muscles right off of your back for stealing a watch, or send you to a dungeon for being a runaway girl. And we're talking all whiteys here.) That's how Australia got founded (read The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, which is also where I got most of the information imparted above.) But before the era of the Australian Transportation, the British Crown sent a lot of their miscreant and lumpenproletariat class to the American and Caribbean Colonies, as indentured servants. And they dealt with others by impressing them into His Majesty's Royal Navy, as "able seamen."
Very few of our ancestors were ladies and gentlemen; few of them could afford to be, and even most of the ones who could behaved terribly. Which is why I'm constantly on people to read history. To learn how horrible everything used to be, everywhere. Which, by corollary, can provide an inkling of how good we have it nowadays.
I mean, we don't want to blow this scene up. People need to put a check on their sense of entitlement over every little imagined slight. And have patience. You finish reading a book like The Fatal Shore and you look around and realize: everything is amazing, and what up? People are complaining and threatening insurrection, because they had to do 12 months easy time wearing a face mask?
The Australians refer to George Washington as the father of their country for just that reason. He won the revolution that resulted in many of the criminals that once came to America being redirected to Australia.
I agree we should read history, but I'm not sure the conclusion is things have improved, rather than history is a circle without end.
We have certainly changed the names. We now call slavery and indentured servitude incarceration. We have replaced lepers with the sex offender registry. The kind of criminals you cite who built this country would be unforgivable pariah's in today's America confined to the lowest wage jobs in America that do not do background checks and unable get access housing because they did something wrong 40 years ago. They died earlier, but had nothing like we understand as the surveillance state. Where you see progress I see trade-offs and old institutions given more acceptable names.
I have no problem wearing a mask, but if you think that is the the motivation behind those who threatening insurrection I would look again.
I will never, never accede to the "cyclical theory of history." No matter how popular it is- and I fully realize that it's commonly provided legitimacy in academia, to the extent that it arguably prevails over what's commonly derided as "the myth of progress."
Notice how the cyclical framing is granted the status of Theory, whereas the idea of human progress is dismissed as a Myth.
I don't believe in the unending forward march of Progress advancing through Time, the way the notion is most commonly caricatured by those who dismiss it. I'm not a naif.
But the Cyclical Theory is so despairing that it writes off all of human advance as illusory, and hence all effort as futile. Of all the fucked-out, elite, lazy, cowardly, capitulationist paradigms...only an ivory tower stance of entitlement imagines that it can afford to think that way. And it's been poisoning the minds of the youth for decades, like some unholy amalgam of Oswald Spengler and Jean Paul Sartre. If that's the best a social philosophy of history can do, it's no wonder guys like Julius Evola retain an appeal for young people in the West, trying to resolve the alienation they've been prompted to cultivate.
I'm realistic. I know that there's a risk of things going bad. That's a long way from the stance that things HAVE to go bad,. A stance held in common by both the effete faux liberal adherents of the Cyclical Theory, and the adherents to more militantly apocalyptic visions- ideological, theological, or even both- that theorize that the conditions have to degenerate to the point of utter chaos, decadence,and destitution before the Final Transformation. If we can't do better than that, then why care about any of it? But that's what some elements are angling for; maximizing the number of people who sink into uncaring cynicism.
"The kind of criminals you cite who built this country would be unforgivable pariah's in today's America confined to the lowest wage jobs in America that do not do background checks and unable get access housing because they did something wrong 40 years ago."
We got rid of flagellation. We can take the albatross off of the necks of the people you speak of, too. We still have dungeons- but not as many as in that bad old days. we know damn well we can do better. Our problems are solvable. A disproportionate amount of them consist of long-term collateral damage from orienting our domestic priorities to make room for the War on Drugs, the dry rot of public policy solutions. A public policy so bad that it enabled the rise of a parallel economy to replace the one that was being hollowed out by the abandonment of even elementary regard for keeping the wages of working people above poverty level, and their economic prospects at a level more secure than precarity.
That isn't about the inevitability of some Cycle of History, it's about bad policies that can be reversed. But the first step is to admit the sources of the problem. Including the fact that you can't make an exception for passively accepting the status quo of the War on Drugs; it's the single feature that's made so many of the other attempts to use public policy in a pro-social way ineffective.
Beyond that: one of the unexamined premises of the Cyclical Theory is that the glass never gets to be more than half full. I think it's important to read history from the standpoint of an honest appraisal, of appreciating just how full our glass really is, at present. I can easily fill as many column inches with a recounting of the ills of the present day as I could be compiling a list from the 14th century (I'm currently reading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, for the first time.) But for me to simply conclude that I live in a slightly more comfortable respite that's only a surface condition, and that underneath it all, things are as bad as they've ever been- that's just plain entitled ingratitude. Not warranted by the facts.
That's an interesting and thoughtful take.
You are far more familiar with modern theory on cyclical history than I am. Correct me if I am wrong, but I sense you think of a cyclical view of history as trendy modern take that deviates from a more traditional linear view?
The first time I read about cyclical history was Ecclesiastes, but I've since learned the concept goes back further to the Mesopotamian conception of the Universe. You see it in Buddhism and Hinduism as well as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who re-popularized the idea in the West. I have no idea how their arguments for circular history relate to what you call the "effete faux liberal adherents of the Cyclical Theory." I never really considered the political position of Buddhism on cyclical history.
For me it's an ought/is argument. I'm not interested in the political implications so much as the accuracy of the model. I could be wrong, but I see far more proof of a cyclical pattern where we rebranding older ideas and call it progress.
Did we get rid of flagellation? Have you read Kendi or DiAngelo?
Not only do we still have dungeons, but we actually have far more of them capable of an exquisite science driven torture our ancestors with their iron maidens could have only dreamed of, but certainly would have implemented if they had known. The type of CIA inspired and directed torture used at Abu Ghraib (worth reading McCoy's "A question of Torture" if you have not) is not what I consider progress. As for the enormous Gulag type imprisonment we currently run in the US? There isn't enough space here for me to document its sadistic practices.
Our problems may be solvable, but our human nature is not. In the early 1900's we launched a moral panic driven war against "White Slavery" along with a series of deeply xenophobic laws due to fear over Asian workers that specifically targeting Asian sex workers and black men who had sex with white women. Since then we have had a war on alcohol, a war on gambling, a war on drugs and recently we have returned to the deeply xenophobic war on sex work again literally using the same racists tropes against the exact same Asian women and interacial couples we targeted over 110 years ago when we passed the White Slavery Mann Act of 1910.
The biggest difference is that a conviction for a black man having sex with a white sex worker in the 1910's got you a max of 10 years as black world champion boxer Johnson showed us at the time. Now it will get 40-50 years and is largely aimed at the same ethnic groups for the same reasons under different branding. It that the progress you are referring too?
The war on drugs is a symptom of the human condition, not the cause. Humans are incapable of not weaponizing laws against marginalized communities who behave in ways we don't approve of. That weaponization has only increased over time. The urge to censor and punish are stronger even than our urge to procreate and we are only getting better at it.
Entitled gratitude is a bad thing and we should all avoid it, but I don't think a religious belief in linear progress is needed to avoid that pitfall. In the end entitlement is about how we respond to life, not whether history is cyclical or not.
Like I said, I could write a compilation of like that, too. Book length. All you're demonstrating is that you don't realize how much worse things have been over the course of the history of the US. To say nothing of the history of the continental regions we refer to as North America and MesoAmerica, prior to European contact. And, for the widest context, world history.
For example, as bad as Riker's Island is these days, there's no valid comparison to be made between Riker's nowadays and what it was c.1900. Beginning with the cubic feet allotment for each cell. For that matter, there's no comparison between the crime, gang activity, and poverty in the worst neighborhoods in this country at the lowest nadir of the crack epidemic and the Five Points district of NYC at the turn of the 19th-20th century (a "neighborhood" from which the black population and Latino was noticeably absent.) Forget Scorcese's cleaned-up "Gangs Of New York"; read the book The Heroic Gangster, by Neil Hanson. Five Points was so much more brutal and lawless in those days that I'm amazed that New York City ever dug itself out of the mire of that time.
From what I've read of Ibram Kendi, he writes reasonably good history- as long as he isn't insisting on his polemical frame, which is considerably shakier (as is typical of any polemical frame; it's practically impossible to avoid the temptation of using them as Procrustean bed.) Unfortunately, his polemical bias is asserted from the outset. Then he allows history to speak for itself for a good long while, quite effectively. But the gratuitous polemicism re-emerges at points, and gets more pronounced as his historical accounting advances toward the present day. Which eventually results in turning the book I read, Stamped From The Beginning, into a seriously flawed work. Which is unfortunate, because the actual history is for the most part presented with unvarnished accuracy, and it's important to learn. (I'm an uncommon sort; I actually read books. I devour history books. I've been reading history books on the topic of American racism since I was in my early teens, and literature by black American authors as well. Even given my previous reading, I learned a few new things from Kendi's historical researches. I'm less impressed with other features of his work.)
However, in order to obtain the insight that the caprice and draconian punitive morality found in American law enforcement and penology wasn't directed exclusively toward nonwhite populations, one needs to read more widely. As an introduction, I'd recommend Hellfire Nation by James A. Morone, and The War On Alcohol by Lisa McGirr- two books that grant ample consideration to the role of racism in the history of American crime and punishment without insisting that the conversation revolve around Racism as its central sun.
"Our problems may be solvable, but our human nature is not."
When considered at the individual level, that's a reminder for people who seek to cultivate their values as a project of integrity to remain vigilantly self-aware. Because a lot of pro-social behavior really isn't instinctive; it requires a conscious hack, a check on bugs in our programming like the Ego, what with the tendency toward solipsism (about Me and Mine) and obliviousness (about the rest of it) if the Ego is allowed to run without restraint. (And it is possible to acknowledge that situation and its challenges without lamenting it, the way Freud did.)
But when that statement is elided to extend to the scope of human society, the framing is just hopeless. Anyway, unless the Cyclic Theory can point to some previous peak in human history that's even approached the current moment, they got nothing.
Not that the stakes aren't higher than ever nowadays. But I've always had ample evidence that would be the case.
"Humans are incapable of not weaponizing laws against marginalized communities who behave in ways we don't approve of."
Why should I buy that claim?
At any rate, anyone who thinks that the War on Drugs was intended primarily for the purpose of "oppressing minorities" needs to explain how that narrative accounts for its embrace by national regimes like Duterte's rule of the Philippines. Granted, as a dodge to keep from grappling with the challenges of crafting a policy that ends the War without, say, allowing over the counter sales of fentanyl, it's a splendid evasion: "Yes, we'll do a comprehensive overhaul of the laws to replace the War on Drugs- just as soon as we're done eradicating Racism."
And in the meantime, let the unproductive cognitive-dissonance based twisted arguments rage on, in regard to the statistical measures that demonstrably link some nonwhite populations with a disproportionate incidence of criminal behavior. White supremacists get to claim that the cause of that problem resides in the genes of Africans and Indios; liberals get to deny that the situation even exists, and that the real problem is racist police; and the argument gets to keep spiraling into the abyss. Along with the array of problems that particular acrimonious conversation pretends to discuss, but in actuality pointedly avoids.
"That weaponization has only increased over time. The urge to censor and punish are stronger even than our urge to procreate and we are only getting better at it."
No, it has not. And I can't even begin to conjecture who you might mean by "we."
"Entitled gratitude is a bad thing and we should all avoid it, but I don't think a religious belief in linear progress is needed to avoid that pitfall."
First, my phrase was "entitled IN-gratitude."
I'm not the person making the dogmatic assertions in this conversation. And I don't even know what a "religious belief in linear progress" looks like. It isn't a feature of any religion I know of. I'm simply providing my empirical assessment of the evidence. I don't think progress- linear or otherwise- is inevitable. But I see no evidence to foreclose the possibility of future progress altogether.
My initial instinct was to go through your points and respond with what I believe is needed context, but I expect you would do the same in response and in similar fashion.
Where you see objective improvements in society I see narrative fallacy driven by cherry picking, false pattern recognition and selective data mining of historical events and time points. No doubt you would view my response the same. These comparisons can be interesting and educational to a point. Thanks for playing.
I do have one final question. This earlier paragraph confused me:
тАЬBut the Cyclical Theory is so despairing that it writes off all of human advance as illusory, and hence all effort as futile. Of all the fucked-out, elite, lazy, cowardly, capitulationist paradigms...only an ivory tower stance of entitlement imagines that it can afford to think that way. тАЬ
I donтАЩt find the cyclical theory of history despairing at all. It doesn't rob me of the ability to make decisions and act. I could just as easily assert that the linear model of history leads to a Leibniz style тАЬthe best of all possible worldsтАЭ approach mocked so effectively by VoltaireтАЩs in Candida. WhereтАЩs the motivation to improve our lot if we do nothing but focus on how much better everything is compared to the past? It could lead to strange place where a person becomes complacent about injustice because the current state of affairs is better than a cherry picked out of context high point from the past.
It would be a mistake and a gross generalization to assert that is your position. I don't believe it is unless you say otherwise.
Generalizations, particularly moral ones are destructive when they lead to false assumptions instead of better questions. At no point did I dismiss the theory of human progress as a myth as you said some academics do. The theory of linear history is a serious position that is counter to the older circular theory of history. It's a debate that goes back literally to the dawn of philosophy. It would be a mistake to turn all philosophy and debate over to the definitions imposed by modern academia.
I have the general sense with that entire area of your comments that you are debate someone, or something you morally object to who is not part of this conversation. Am I wrong?
That's some good posts there. Based on actual information, informed opinion, and largely respectful. Thanks.
Well I'm so glad you approve of the tone of the debate.
I will sleep better now.
Yes, IтАЩm a Virginia native and we were taught all the regular stuff about the VA colony. Once I got to college I learned the only women they could get to colonize were brought from the prions or whorehouses. No genteel woman was going to leave her comfortable home. Our first governors were blue bloods but disgraced family members, exiled to a savage country. Americans are mostly clueless about and think theyтАЩre special.
Alexander the Great thought the same thing about Afghanistan before Islam or Christianity were invented.....
It's a real opinion, not a bunch of mealy-mouthed horseshit devoid of meaning.
I kind of enjoyed The Artist Formerly Known as Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. They're like the biker bars of countries. Not for everybody.
Understand exactly what you mean. My battle buddy (Mark) in Iraq spent a couple years being a FSR fixing satellite kits with two Sikh bodyguards in Afghanistan (yes, they did carry daggers), and said he loved it. I liked Iraqis too, which is not a sentiment I get a lot from others who have been there. Never did Yugoslavia and it's probably not the same now, but Mark was part of the Kosovo deployment and had a broadly similar view.
[puts on Will Rogers hat]
Never met an Afghan I didn't like, to include the Talibans.
Fucking with a Sikh is a bad idea.