"...suspicious...convenient...we shouldn’t imagine this as just a cynical leadership fabricating prophecies...it’s just natural to interpret an ambiguous location to refer to Syria if you are already fixated on the idea that your group is the one fulfilling the prophecies"
The fact that someone believes something that is (suspiciously) convenient doesn't necessarily mean that it's cynical or fake. Scary, but I guess it's true.
But from statements Hamas have made, I don't hear them complaining about the quality of life of the Palestinians due to Israeli occupation. I do hear them citing the Hadiths and claiming the lands of Israel as sacred Islamic land that must be purged of Jews in order for the prophecy to be fulfilled.
You do know that Sinwar was imprisoned in Ashkelon prison for murdering four Palestinians he believed to be collaborating with Israel right?
And you’re saying we should sympathize with his plight of… using a communal bathroom and waiting in line for food?
“He probably became an Islamic fundamentalist to cope with life. If he had had a decent life I doubt he would’ve been attracted to it.”
I disagree with this point. The reviewed book’s subject came from a middle class Saudi family, and there are many accounts of well-off people leaving everything behind and joining ISIS.
It’s true that religion gives many hope (arguably false) through hard times, but I think what Islamist Jihadism is giving these men is **meaning**. What higher purpose is there than to fulfill the wishes of Allah and bring about His prophecy?
If my reading of random blogs is correct, Hamas is kind of trying to be everything a state is, with parts running hospitals, parts running schools (giving the kids a "patriotic" education of course), parts running grocery stores (and smuggling food in) so the people have something to eat, and then there's people like senior doctors who are technically members of The Party so they can go on saving lives but they probably keep their views about the party doctrine to themselves. Al-Qassam, the military branch, is the ones doing the abducting and torturing and shooting and bombing.
It's like in the past, being a member of the Nazi or communist party could mean many things, including "ok I'll sign up, now leave me alone".
I don’t think anti colonialism needs to be concerned with improving quality of life for the locals. Many anti colonial projects resulted in quality of life going down for them.
If I was colonized, I definitely wouldn't give two shits about "quality of life" considerations. Better to live free in hovel then chained up in a luxury mansion. I fully realize expelling a colonial occupier is no guarantee of living free. But that's the base reasoning and I totally get it. (Edit: I have a separate, unrelated ethic that I'd rather live under domestic tyranny than foreign tyranny)
I wonder to what degree this discussion of jihadis wanting to fulfill prophecies applies to Hamas as well as traditional jihadi groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda.
You’re basically asking, “How extreme is Hamas in their Islamist orthodoxy?”
From what we’ve seen I’d say pretty extreme. But ISIS supposedly considers Hamas blasphemous for engaging in political processes and for not prioritizing the “global jihad”.
I don't think that's quite what I'm asking. Both the Catholics and the Protestants can be extreme Christians, but the Protestants tend to take Biblical end-time prophecy much more seriously, and there are many 100% extreme Christians who wouldn't dream of making decisions based on it.
True, though I’m not sure the comparison between Islam and Christianity is very clear.
For one, the Quran is often taken literally as God’s infallible word, whereas Christianity is taken as a collection of accounts (and often as morality tales). Another is that the prophecies are often describing the actual places where these people live, and the conditions that must be met for its fulfillment.
If the Bible was the literal word of infallible God and he proclaimed that the conditions for the end times were that an army in Philly would rise up to destroy the non-believers, maybe we’d have more radical Christians?
But this is a complex question that I don’t think I’m qualified to fully answer: Why do more muslims than christians interpret their religious dogma literally?
It's a weird interpretation to me that God is going to leave the fulfillment of prophecy to people doing it solely because it's a prophecy. It defeats the purpose.
Fortunately for humanity, there is a powerful (dominant?) strain of thought in Christianity that you are just supposed to live your life normally and let God take care of the end times prophecies himself. And that, in fact, it's sacrilegious to actively try to fulfill end times prophecies, thus essentially forcing God's hand. And tipping my own hand, I agree that it's kind of mocking God's power to think we can speed up or slow down the fulfillment of ET prophecies. (Assuming God was real and Christianity were true)
I believe this is the reason why Orthodox Jews were the last Jews to embrace Israel. At the very least, the Orthodox Israel skeptics used similar reasonings.
(Though I honestly wonder how committed Israel's Orthodox community really is. They say the right words, but they generally refuse to fight in the IDF, and actions speak louder than words)
I’m not sure more Muslims do. I’ve been to a lot of different churches, and there are a lot of Biblical Literalists. It’s hard to get a precise measure of this, but the best test is probably Young Earth Creationism. It only really exists because of a literal reading of Numbers and an estimate by a priest on approximately how long ago Adam and Eve would have lived if those are literally true. No Christian I know that does not take the Bible literally believes in YEC, because it’s well contradicted by scientific evidence.
So what percentage of Christians are YEC? About 40%. That’s a huge amount more than Muslims that become jihadists, though obviously not every Quran literalists becomes a jihadist. The big difference is that being a Christian Literalists makes people argue against religion, not wage a holy war.
> So what percentage of Christians are YEC? About 40%.
That doesn't sound right. YECs are almost exclusively Protestant, and only 40% of Christians are Protestant, and I don't think the vast majority of Protestants are YECs. Maybe that number is for the US?
But even the most hardcore Biblical Literalist do not believe that God wrote, say, the 13 books of the Bible who claim to be written by someone named "Paul" (some of which-eg 1 Cor 7-have notes distinguishing between "Paul's" view and what "Paul" proclaims to be God's view" were in fact written by God dictating to Paul; Muslims would actually believe this. This is a key difference (divine inspiration is a lower standard of interpretation; that's one reason Christians don't think you have to learn Ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek to read the Bible).
I have heard that the Christian equivalent to Quran is not the Bible but Jesus himself. For Muslims, Quran is the intermederiary between Allah and Man like Christ is between God and Man for Christians. Quran was also uncreated, existing alongside Allah forver. I think this is why Muslims take Quran more seriously than Christians take the Bible.
I don't think this explanation is adaquete. There are lots of Christians who take the Bible to be the literal word of infallibale God, but they don't seem to have a military wing taking a similar approach to the jihadits.
(Also 'morality tales' is a perfectly plausible account of Job and Jonah, and of course the parables are explicitly morality tales, but I don't understand how someone could read the monarchy period history books, let alone the gospels and Acts as morality tales. What moral could require this complex mess of historical details? Why would it overlap with a bunch of details we know from other historical sources, and what kind of a monster puts genealogies in a morality tale? I completely accept that lots of people who haven't read the Bible think it's all morality tales, but I don't think that can be relevant to how our hardcorers are reacting.)
The thing with Protestantism (and Islam) is that if you don't think the local priest is going far enough, in the end you split off to your own denomination.
Catholics that are "too extreme" eventually end up as not Catholics - they get anathematized.
Hamas cooperates with Iran while ISIS attacks Iran. Hamas is unusual in being a Sunni group that cooperates with Iran, but still, sounds pretty heretical.
As far as I understand, Hamas is the Palestinan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose aim is a Caliphate under Sharia law. Much more about changing the world as it is, than bring about the end of times. Sure, they're extreme in many ways and anyone who's not a straight man would probably be much worse off if they ever properly took over (which some of the elite-woke college students seem to have missed). But they're not "accelerationist".
Interesting article from an Israeli journalist who snuck into Gaza right before the 2008 war. Interviews a lot of Palestinians re Hamas motivations https://archive.md/VF10W
The religious West is generally fine with Israel's claim on the "promised land" though. It's interesting that the two most prominent wars currently are Russian 19th century imperialism reenactment and the literal Holy War for the Holy Land.
Everybody who was in it for the money quit the state-on-state conquest business when they realized how badly it had turned out for everyone who tried within living memory. In an industrialized context, simply buying real estate and charging rent is far more cost-effective than trying to bomb the residents into submission. What's the most recent war you can think of where the side who shot first, actually won anything they wanted?
Naturally, when some profession stops being a competitive career, diligent-professional types mostly look for their prospects elsewhere, leaving the ranks to be filled by residual fanatics (obsessed with the higher goals to the point they don't care about the money) and/or perverts (in it for the side benefits - violent cruelty in the case of terrorism, mostly sex stuff in the case of Catholic priesthood, etc.)
> What's the most recent war you can think of where the side who shot first, actually won anything they wanted?
This is a much lower bar than "enough to be remotely worth it," so the Iraq war probably meets it. America got an Iraqi government that's (modestly) more friendly and more democratic than Saddam Hussein was, and it hasn't collapsed yet.
>I guess it’s also a reminder that most people simply interpret the actions of others through their own lenses.
Part of the problem is certainly this, but I think if at the root of modern jihad is a genuine belief in the divine righteousness of holy violence, it means the nonIslamic world needs to respond with an ultimatum that nearly 2 billion people across the globe either edit their mortally intolerant religion or abandon it, and that is so utterly impractical and would appear so religiously intolerant that the secular west pretends the problem actually isn’t about Islam, which jihadists assure us it is.
I think the secular west’s most realistic hope is that the notion of jihad as internal spiritual metaphor gains so much traction with Islamic scholars that violent jihadists become universally shunned by their own religious leaders as heretics.
My notion is that if a better Islam happens, it will be because a Muslim and native speaker of Arabic creates a positive vision which includes treating people better. It won't just be reinterpreting jihad.
This is the "Islam needs a Reformation" view. I believe it is mistaken because the ones you're worried about are the ones actually reading their scripture instead of trusting to the "living document"-style interpretations of modern Islamic scholarship.
They're different levels of causality. The "mental illness" (ie "beliefs") may have been the proximate cause, by why those beliefs? Because of emotions arising from decades of oppression. Emotions are real, but they're hard to convey, so when asked, what's given instead is a justification FOR the emotions, in terms of colonial resistance.
Anyway, if one person's justification from religious beliefs are just another's mental illness, well, Israel's existence justified on the same grounds.
You've got the causality backwards. Why these beliefs? Because these are core doctrines of the religion that has been taught to almost everyone in the region for more than 1000 years. It's the oppression that is the consequence of the beliefs - either the djihadists are in power and oppress the opposition, or they aren't and the ruling power sees a strong need to oppress them. You saw on Oct 7 what happens when you're not thorough enough with that.
No, I think, you do. Every pantheon of beliefs has peaceful and noble ideals it reaches for in times of safety, and vengeful violent ones it can reach for in times of oppression. Christians, liberals, communists, Buddhists, whoever. The emotion comes first, the ideology second, and a population will come up with an ideology to justify their emotional needs if their existing body of beliefs doesn't provide one. This can be seen as a fitness criteria for beliefs themselves: true pacifism fails to reproduce. To essentialize this kind of violence is a grave error, usually committed to confirm a bias: it's far easier to imagine one's enemies are evil than to see them as pushed beyond a breaking point.
Maybe true pacificsm doesn't reproduce, but religiously mandated authoritarianism and belligerence apparently does.
Just a couple of thoughts:
- broadly speaking, the Muslim world in the Middle East and North Africa was the hammer rather than the nail for 1000 years or so. Did that cause them to mellow out?
- if suffering and oppression are the root causes, why don't we hear of Native American suidice bombers, or Australian Aboriginal ones? When African refugees go on killing sprees in European cities, why do they yell "Allahu akbar" and not "In the name of Jesus Christ!"?
- who were the people who signed up to do the 9/11 attacks? Were they the poor, downtrodden, oppressed, or (by the standards of the region) rather well-off, educated, privileged individuals?
I think Palestinian supporters in the West are just using whatever argument they think might work. "Israel needs to be managed by muslims" doesnt speak to a lot of Americans. "Palestinians are browns fighting against racist whites" gets some traction.
The most parsimonious explanation for October 7th (taking into account timing) is probably Hamas trying to freeze (successfully, so far) the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unresolved.
In that one-step-removed sense, it was part of colonial resistance, refusing to let the question of Palestine fade away. Even if it's too charitable to Hamas to call it an atrocity directly borne of the surfeit of grief over Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people.
It was most certainly not mental illness. Leaving aside the hideous immorality of what was done, matched only by the immorality of Israel's response, it was fairly rational.
The least rational part is the ideological blind spot that thinks they can win decisively. That it is just a matter time before the jews are defeated and driven from the land one way or another. This prevents many types of compromise.
It is really strange to see a religion being so alive somewhere else, when religion all around me is dying. But I have to remind myself: Christianity is also only dying in the West, it is doing great in Africa or Asia.
It is highly interesting why. I think people everywhere in the world have similar education, similar social media access and so on. And religion started to die in Europe in the 19th century when the poor did not really have much education. It was clearly not caused by the spread of a scientific worldview or anything like that.
Yeah, that's new money and signaling. But Africa used to have many state churches before the Islamic Conquest, and right now it has zero (even the venerable Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church isn't a state religion) although there were a few in colonial times. There are a lot of Christians in Africa, but that's a doubtful and syncretistic percentage of even more Africans. Of the parts of Christianity that actually demonstrate commitment to unadulterated Christiantity, like monasteries, Africa has very little.
before the Islamic Conquest Christianity was present in the North African roman provinces, Sudan and Ethiopia. Not that many places compared with today.
I absolutely disagree that monasteries represent unadulterated Christianity, or that nations are Supposed To have a state religion. I agree with The_Archduke that this sounds like thinly veiled "Protestantism isn't true Christianity" polemics.
Pointing out lack of state churches and monasteries as reasons that actually African Christians are not Christians is pretty specious reasoning; neither of these things featured in early Christianity nor do they feature in the dominant strains of Christianity in many non-African countries—the same strains that are responsible for most of the evangelism and missions work that has resulted in burgeoning African Christianity. What gives?
Christianity is a state religion in Zambia. And as someone who's lived in (broadly speaking) Africa, I think the degree of syncretism is greatly exaggerated.
According to Pew, Christianity is the largest religion in Africa by a significant margin. Islam is growing faster than Christianity, but Pew estimates that by 2050 Africa will be 58% Christian and 35% Muslim. That's pretty Christian!
On the other hand, the United States (where Christianity is "dying") is still currently 63%% Christian, and Pew estimates in 2050 there it will be 51% Christian still. So at this exact moment, the USA is a bit more Christian than Africa.
Meanwhile over in East Asia most people aren't particularly religious at all compared to the USA or Africa. However, of the religions there Christianity and Buddhism predominate. It's spread unevenly, Japan is only 2% Christian, while nearby South Korea is the most Christian at 32% of the population.
But most of the Christian focus on Asia is about China these days. Not because China is particularly Christian, as they probably take up about 7.4% of the population, but because of the rapid growth in Christianity over time. When the whole communist revolution thing happened all the missionaries got kicked out, and through the 70s it was generally understood that China was not a viable missions field: the few missionaries that managed to get in found people who were not interested in Christ (who needs him when you have the Party!). However over the last few decades a large underground Christian movement has been taking off. 7.4% doesn't seem like much, but it's over 100 million Chinese Christians, and 40 years ago there was maybe 1 million of them. It's probably the fastest growing region in the world when it comes to Christianity.
In East Germany, the opposition mostly met in church buildings, because the church had the only large rooms in the country that were not, directly or indirectly, controlled by the state. My parents participated in the opposition (evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_B%C3%B6ttger ) and these meetings had good childcare, so I was there many times. Everyone was nominally Christian (because the church would get in trouble if not) and there were indeed some half-hearted prayers, but people were there because it was the only kind of place to plan how to reform, escape or overthrow the Socialist Party. Maybe Christianity in China is similar. Like Falun Gong.
My understanding of the situation in China (and I am not an expert, though I've looked into it more than the average man off the street) is that there are several "official" Christian churches that are legal to be a part of. Those churches need to register with the state, and have to comply with the state policy of "sinicization" which means they have to align their teachings and practices with Chinese culture, as defined by the state. What that means varies depending on the province or even the city, as local governments have a broad mandate on interpreting the policy. So that means in some places the official churches are a lot like regular churches (though you'll never hear any sermons criticizing the CCP, that's for sure), while in other places churches aren't allowed to have crosses, or steeples, service times are strictly regulated, and every sermon needs to be approved in advance by the local Party official. The state also regulates the printing of Bibles: there is only one Chinese version that can be legally printed or sold in China, the Chinese Union Version, and bibles can only be sold in official churches or bookstores that are registered with the state to do so. The state regulates how many bibles can be printed each year, and Chinese Christians often report it being difficult to find bibles because not enough are printed to meet demand. The Great Firewall also blocks off access to bible websites online. If you are found with an unregistered bible, you will get in trouble. How much trouble that is depends on the province you're in and how hard the local Party officials are cracking down on Christians; in some places you'll just pay a fine or need to bribe your way out, in others you get thrown in jail.
It's also the case that in China it is illegal (constitutionally prohibited!) for children to have any formal religious affiliation. That means that if you bring your kid to church, you could get in trouble. Whether you do, again, depends on how strict the local Party officials are.
Because of all these restrictions the official Christian churches are not very popular among Chinese Christians. This has lead to a very large "house church" or "underground church" movement. These churches are not registered with the government and usually meet secretly in people's homes or other private places. They are illegal, though if they're small enough (a couple dozen people or so) the state rarely cracks down on them. Though in 2018 the CCP added a bunch of new religious regulations, and that same year a house church paster was sentenced to 9 years in prison, so it seems like we might currently be in a stricter period of time when it comes to religion in China.
It's hard to get good data on how many Chinese are in unregistered churches vs registered ones (for obvious reasons), but estimates range from 30-70% of all Chinese Christians being part of underground churches.
Oh, interesting. Thanks. That sounds very different from East Germany. But "house churches" were common in some areas and eras of Europe's history too. Including East Germany, especially but by definition they didn't have large rooms, so we didn't go there. The "Hauskreise" (literally "house circles") I heard of were usually Pietist.
A cursory Google search doesn't give me derivative-with-respect-to-time information, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Africa says 49% of Africa's population is Christian, which sounds very substantial to me.
I'm a Quaker, which is a sect of Christianity that was very significant in early American history but so obscure in the US today that people are often surprised we still exist.
The country with the largest number of Quakers today is Kenya.
A lot of our ideas - maybe don't haggle over the price of groceries? - have become so mainstream that we aren't particularly relevant as a district religious group. Our decline after that is to be expected.
But we're growing, globally. We're fading into irrelevancy in the west, but growing faster in Africa than our decline.
Christians are a minority in most African countries, but Africa is becoming Christian faster than the West is becoming secular. Quakers are just an example.
I am not sure Islam is that successful outside some peripheral areas like the Sahel and Afghanistan. In places like Egypt,Iran, Bosnia etc things like mosque attendance are falling rapidly.
Also a little confused about why you would think education in, say, Saudi Arabia is similar to education in France (a state that has been formally committed to secularism for 150 years)
No! Wrong! Jesus will not rule beside the Mahdi, because the Mahdi will die shortly after Jesus' return. It is believed that the Mahdi will fight but only manage to stalemate the evil Dajjal; Iesa (Jesus), on the other hand, will actually be able to defeat the Dajjal once he arrives.
(...IIRC hopefully I didn't misremember something while correcting someone—)
Question about the claim that the Day of Judgment will take place after Jesus rules benevolently for a long time - wouldn't you figure out which way the wind is blowing after Jesus returns to Earth and starts ruling benevolently, and convert to Islam (or act virtuously) then, regardless of what you'd done before? What stops people from trying this hack?
My understanding is that this is, in fact, exactly what IS expected to occur—though you might not want to take the chance of holding off till then, because there will be lots of fighting before Jesus actually shows up... so if you don't make it quite the whole way, you could well perish in a state of kufr! Astaghfirallah!
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I. State of Play
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The fighting will be due to the Dajjal (an antichrist-like figure) misleading many—probably mainly all the degenerate filthy post-modernists & atheists & the like, is the feeling—and gathering together armies of the people he has thus tricked. This will be done, in part, by his performing deeds such as "causing the earth to bring forth its bounty" (unclear if done by the power of sihr & djinni, or technological).
There will be despair in the Ummah, until the Mahdi is identified & begins to gather together armies of the righteous; these will fight the armies of the Dajjal¹—but, though the Mahdi will be a just ruler & righteous man, and so forth, he's not supernatural & will, at best, reach a stalemate; or—more likely—will be slowly but consistently losing the war.
...until Iesa-Jesus descends (in... Damascus? don't quote me on that one)! He will "break the cross" (+ "kill the pigs"²), symbolically showing that He³ doesn't approve of what His followers have been doing, and then easily overpower & destroy the Dajjal—though, unfortunately, our amigo the Mahdi will die shortly thereafter.
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II. Scott's Hack
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...will, seemingly, actually work! That is, the Christians & Jews will—naturally, what with the cross-breaking & descending from Jannah in saffron robes & whatnot—immediately see that Jesus is endorsing the Truth Faith, and convert en masse.
Thereupon, Jesus-Iesa shall rule over a world of peace & justice, and entirely Muslim, for forty years (IIRC). I don't think it's explicitly mentioned that anyone except Christians & Jews will convert upon His return; but—since the fighting will end (& since Iesa will obviously be a highly miraculous sort of ruler)—it seems the *implication* is that even the disbelievers & polytheists & other lovers-of-evil will finally recognize that Islam is The Truth.™
(Interestingly, there is some debate over whether this is because Jesus will give them a "convert or die" ultimatum, or merely because it will be so obvious that He's, well, Jesus.)
.
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III. (Footnotes, for some reason)
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¹: (although there's a hadith about how actually "the Romans"—i.e., Euro-Westerners—as a whole will join with the armies of the Mahdi to fight "an army of the East"—sometimes interpreted as an army of Chinamen, determined to stamp out all religion in their godless commie fervor–)
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²: (???)
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³: (felt disrespectful not to capitalize the pronoun, though I think this is, Islamically-speaking, Not Cool.)
Depends on what actually happens. There will be people who will doubt this, no matter the evidence. Thomas believed after putting his hands in the holes; there are people even more skeptical today.
I’m Christian, but if Jesus descends from sky and says the Muslims were right about everything, I’m going to my nearest Mosque to convert ASAP. I’m sure there are a lot of Muslims that would do it in reverse if he says he’s Christian. Christian Jesus would likely be hoping this would happen.
Of course the real problem is the end times are unlikely to happen in any individual person’s lifetime, so that hack won’t be available to most people.
Of all the reviews so far, I think this is both the best and the one that sounds most like Scott's voice. I don't know how closely those two things are related. Either way, an extremely enjoyable and interesting read, bravo.
Oh that's interesting. I had not drawn the parallel, it does sound a bit like Scott's style. And of the ones presented so far, it is clearly superior. I guess we really are all here for a reason.
Scott wouldn't tease a "More than you wanted to know" piece like that. The author is baiting us all to write that, of course, but if this was Scott it'd be an announcement.
Imitating Scott's style seems likely to have a tradeoff with review quality. In combination with Scott's writing already being popular with most voters, and thus disproportionately likely to make the finals, I think it's more likely than not that the most Scott-like finalist was written by Scott.
I don't think Scott would go to serious effort to disguise his style. Mainly because I don't think he'd think it's a good use of his time. Secondly, he might have reasoned that his readers will pay more attention to these reviews (in future years) if they think they have a decent chance of discovering Scott's.
Scott didn’t really try to disguise himself in his Njal’s Saga’s review, which I successfully guessed was his. This one I don’t have the same feel, likely since it’s missing his micro humor. Regardless, it’s my favorite review so far.
I agree with most of this thread (great review, alluding to Scott) but I can not imagine Scott wishing to do a long piece about the qualities ot diverse Hadiths, Fatwas, Prophesies and what not. There is a mountain, nay, mountains of literature about that, by ppl who are fluent in Quran Arabic. And from all sides. A former colleague of mine teaches at a German university and she wrote e.g. how the hadith about "more women in hell than men" is a) likely a 'strong' hadith, but also b) possibly meant as a joke: - With regard to the reason why women form the majority of Hell, the Prophet was asked about it and he explained the reason in these words: “Because of their ingratitude.” It was said, “Are they ungrateful to Allah?” He said, “They are ungrateful to their husbands and ungrateful about good treatment. If you are kind to one of them for a lifetime then she sees one (undesirable) thing in you, she will say, `I have never had anything good from you.’” - quote from a humorless website.
The orthodox understanding is that Muhammad (ﷺ)—although he did have a sense of humor, which is of course the best of all senses of humor—was *incapable* of making a joke that involved an untruth.
..............
Wry observation? Absolutely!
Just kidding? Astaghfirallah! Quickly, ‘akhi, make du'a of Salat at-Tawbah for listening to that witch, for—Wallahi, I tell you this!—she is upon the waswasa of shayatin to dare say (astaghfirallah, even to *write*) that the Rasul-Allah (ﷺ)—al-Haq, as-Sadiq, al-Amin, al-Insan al-Kamil!—would misguide his Ummah to tell a filthy /joke/!
"According to a Pew Research poll, more than half of Muslims believe that the Mahdi will arrive within their lifetime, and this belief is universally accepted among jihadists"
Curiously, haredim also believe we live in the end of times and the coming of the moshiah is imminent
I suspect the proportion of people who believe we live in their ideology's version of the end times is quite high, or at least is well above lizardman's constant. Consider the singularity, people who say late-stage capitalism as if to imply it will end soon, or the rapture.
I also used to think "late-stage capitalism" inherently meant "the end of capitalism is coming soon," too, and I mocked that mercilessly. Turns out that it mainly means "capitalism in its mature or fully developed state," and anti-capitalists are divided on whether this means the end of capitalism is nigh, or if capitalism can sustain itself in this mature state for centuries to come.
I originally wrote just "late-stage capitalism" then tried to correct it to "people who say late-stage capitalism as if to imply it will end soon" to make it clear which group I was referring to, but that's equally bad. I meant to refer specifically to the people who like to talk about escalating crises of capitalism.
It occurs to me that extreme runaway climate change is another example and might be even more popular with the same crowd.
The idea that current capitalism is the most fully developed stage seems... surprisingly optimistic from an anti-capitalist?
In the critiques of capitalism I read, it's currently not so bad but getting a whole lot worse as everything approaches a more optimal (from big companies' point of view) state.
I never said any anti-capitalism ideology makes sense. It doesn't. It just beats Free Market ideology by a mile.
I don't know what a truly great political ideology would look like. That's above my pay grade. It could be a great political tendency doesn't even exist yet. I don't know why we assume it's already been invented.
Rare indeed are the people who (a) believe a particular set of prophecies is true but also (b) believe that they all refer to something happening way off in the future with no connection to the present.
I remember being really amazed when I read about one Christian writer circa 1600 who expected the world to end in 2000. That basically *never* happens.
Short answer, Haredim don’t really believe that there are any specific signs of imminent messiah right now. Rather there is just a general obligation to be excited about.
The most messiah obsessed sect (Chabad) believed/believes that their leader is the Messiah (but it’s common practice in Chassidic sects to believe that your Rebbe is the messiah so it’s nothing special apart from the particular enthusiasm and his big impact compared to other Rebbes). In fact, probably the most obvious thing to be interpreted as a sign of the imminent Messiah - the return to Israel - is denounced by Chabad as definitely NOT a sign
of anything special, to the extent that when the occasional Chabad cantor gets roped into saying the prayer for the welfare of the state of Israel, they will often subtly omit the words which describe the state as an “early flowering of our redemption/reshit smichat geulataynu” (and they won’t say this prayer at all in pure Chabad synagogues).
Religious Zionists (not Haredim) on the other hand generally believe that the return to Israel is an early sign of redemption and there is some work going on to prepare (surprisingly they managed to find a couple of pure red heifers in Texas
which supposedly haven’t been seen in thousands of years, but the Haredim basically ignore it).
And then there's the Christians who have signed up for a service where an atheist looks after their pet dog when they get caught up in the Rapture.
Mind you, there have been Christian end-time preachers since before the Romans destroyed Jerusalem (that was also generously supplied with Jewish end-timers at the time). The first generation of such preachers, if you interpret "the world" to mean "all the land of Israel/Judaea", was technically correct.
What a fantastic review, yes I will now have to read this book if only to see how far popular media conceptions of "spys" and "the deep state" is from reality.
This is an excellent review. I read it during the initial round and gave it a high score. Just now I re-read the whole thing.
It would be nice if some of our warmongers read this review, the book itself, and get a little more serious about stopping all the murdering and terrorising.
I do admit I feel a little cynicism there, though, since I'm pretty sure those who are making trillions of dollars making and selling weapons are perfectly happy with fully misunderstanding the enemy, because it means we need way more trillions of dollars of weapons.
So we need to force the understanding from the grassroots on up.
One of the problems with selling arms is that many places just want the weapons.
If you want the weapons to keep working and your soldiers to be able to use them, there's maintenance and training. This adds up to far more over time than purchase cost.
But most places want more weapons. And when they break they get more instead.
Training? What's that? We want the soldiers to be able to goose-step! In a colorful camouflage uniform! (Orange and purple anyone?) That's what a soldier does!
So yeah. In terms of money spent on arms, you have a few places that will spend out on maintenance, but for most of the market it's just "can we ship them more?"
Even in the US, the contracts for the next gen stuff probably get much more publicity and get more politicians' speeches than the contract renewal for repairs.
Learning to march in step is a super practical training tool to help develop disciplined infantry that can do well in combat. The US military teaches marching in step for mainly practical reasons.
The Potemkin militaries that buy our weapons but can't fight, like the Saudi military, are not especially good at marching in step. Conversely, we can infer that those parading North Korean troops who can march perfectly in step are likely to be relatively effective fighters on the battlefield. I have no idea if these are show troops or if they adequately represent the North Korea's entire infantry.
Of course, even if Saudi privates were expertly trained, they would still continue to underperform on the battlefield, due to serious pathologies in officer recruitment and advancement. This dynamic plagued the Ottoman Empire to no end.
What we need is societal-level incentives such that the smart and motivated people apply their energies toward understanding enemies, and bringing about peace and prosperity.
Somehow we've painted ourselves into a corner where a lot of smart and motivated people are creating weaponry and then causing instability in the world to sell their wares to all sides.
We need to get all those people back on track. Probably using incentives.
If one solution is: "spend the better part of a large country's GDP on weapons, then spend years destroying kids' lives while they romp around in a foreign country murdering" and the other solution is "have a few dozen really genius people understand the enemy, convince the enemy to become peaceful and productive part of society" then we have winning.
Of course we can never get EVERY SINGLE person out of of the situation, so there will always be SOME weapons and SOME psychopaths stirring up trouble. But if we could get 50% of the way to the ideal... that'd be nice. And I suspect with proper incentives in place, we could probably get 90% of the way to the ideal.
Smart and motivated people in the west come to the conclusion that their enemies are anything that is anti democracy or otherwise definable as reactionary, and they are happy to put their energy into creating weapons and propaganda to destroy those enemies. If you want to change this you will find yourself pitted against most of the richest and smartest people in the world. Good luck aligning incentives.
You underestimate how many smart and rich people in the United States are non-interventionist or full-blown isolationist. Do they dominate US policy today? No. But they are a real and significant force and they had much more influence during different times in history. I wouldn't count them out as a spent force. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Of course, interventionists LOVE interpreting history to make their side sound like the Only Game In Town. For example, there's a super common idea that American isolationists Lost the National Debate in the runup to WW2. That's not exactly "true" or "false," just a highly debatable take. It's a more plausible take that the isolationists did not Lose, it's just that the Axis attacking us made the debate moot. Self-defense is actually totally acceptable under isolationism.
Whelp, I think interventionism is literally evil, and so when you say "good luck with that," what I hear is "good luck with fighting evil."
Do you see how from my perspective, "good luck with that" just degrades the conversation? I have no illusions that murder or pedophilia or domestic violence are going away in my lifetime. But I really don't see the utility in saying, "good luck with that" to a group dedicated to fighting domestic violence .
What would you suggest? I can think a few potential options: 1) Going into international relations. Institutions like the UN are at least intended to provide avenues to avoid direct conflict. I'd like to think they've had _some_ impact even if it doesn't prevent all war. 2) Technology enabling abundance. It seems to me that war is less likely, outside of strong ideologically driven scenarios when everyone has abundant resources. 3) Direct engagement with ideologies. This book review suggest that avenue. Maybe this can be done with funding or amplification rather than becoming a direct scholar in various aggressive groups.
> Somehow we've painted ourselves into a corner where a lot of smart and motivated people are creating weaponry and then causing instability in the world to sell their wares to all sides.
Wait, you think weapons manufacturers in the US literally use analysis and lobbying to induce demand by creating more instability in the Middle East or something?
I don't think we're actually good or smart enough to reliably do that, in terms of understanding political and crowd dynamics, and then in terms of being able to successfully execute exactly the intended intervention. Like, this is a level of competence far, far above anything we've seen with the CIA's cack-handed attempts to intervene in any other country's politics. And it's certainly far above almost every corporations' competence.
I mean, think of Google, which literally has tens of thousands of extremely smart Phd's and knows literally everything about everyone via apps and the search engine and Chrome browser and Android phones - how intelligently do they use that data? How often do you see online ads you actually click on or buy anything from? Approximately never? Well, the CIA's level of talent is far, far below Google's.
I really think the level of "demand" for weapons is organic.
> We need to get all those people back on track. Probably using incentives.
How would this even work? Like, you get a job offer from a weapons manufacturer or DOD consulting co, and you take it to your fund and they'll pay you more not to do it? How would this not just straightforwardly increase the comp for working for DOD and weapons corps, thereby incentivizing even MORE people to apply for them?
> How often do you see online ads you actually click on or buy anything from?
That's not Google's success criterion - they just need the advertiser to think you might, and thus pay for the opportunity.
> Wait, you think weapons manufacturers in the US literally use analysis and lobbying to induce demand by creating more instability in the Middle East or something?
i think there was a retroactively-famous interview with Dick Cheney - you may be able to find it on Youtube - from shortly after Bush Senior's war in defense of Kuwait, explaining how they didn't topple Saddam's regime because it would be a horrible quagmire and, ultimately, destabilize the entire region.
Then Bush Junior actually did that, and sure enough it was a horrible quagmire destabilizing the entire region, from which certain defense contractors profited.
> That's not Google's success criterion - they just need the advertiser to think you might, and thus pay for the opportunity.
It does go one level deeper though - there's tons of analytics available when you buy Google ads, and everyone who buys them *very much* pays attention to their conversion funnels. So they look at how many pause over the ad, how many click, how many add an item to a cart, how many complete a purchase, etc, and that informs what they're willing to pay for any ads in the future.
And that conversion-funnel info is coming pretty much exclusively through Google, so they're free to lie about it, or (more deniably) create a safe ecological niche for bots and automated bullshit generators to lie on their behalf. Or, with monopoly power, simply tweak the algorithm to conceal those who refuse to pay. "Nice SEO you've got there. Be a shame if something... happened to it."
And indeed, if the best option to sellers is a conversion funnel where maybe 1 in 1000 people seeing the ad will buy something on a good day, that's where they put their money.
If there was some other more cost-efficient way of getting sales, everyone would switch.
"Wait, you think weapons manufacturers in the US literally use analysis and lobbying to induce demand by creating more instability in the Middle East or something?"
It's actually incredibly simple to increase instability in a region. You don't have to know exactly how things will play out! No precise outcomes needed. Just stir the nest and wait for the arms orders to come in. It doesn't really matter who makes the orders when, just as long as the orders keep coming.
The great thing is that you can destabilize for profit while you're simultaneously pursuing specific policy goals for the American government that you are deeply connected to. Even if most of the specific policy goals are left incomplete, you're always marketing for your weapons, so no effort is wasted.
Of course, this is just a theory and I can't prove it! But a lot of knowledgeable people have endorsed this theory or something like it. See President Eisenhower's legendary speech warning against America's military-industrial complex.
I'm guessing there's an 80 percent chance this theory about the US defense industry is true. That leaves plenty of room for doubt, but it matters less than you might think whether the theory is true or not.
Let's say the military-industrial complex is so reckless and irresponsible that they're accidentally causing instability around the world. Even in that case, the leaders of the complex are so dangerous to humanity that they need to be separated from any lever of power, public or private. Maybe removed from society altogether.
My alternative view is not that agents for arms dealers are performing international destabilization but rather:
1) The US will meddle in regimes it doesn't like. Sometimes this works out, but usually this just causes destabilization and the chaos may end up being a better situation (for the US) or might not - hard to tell with chaos.
2) Weapons manufactures are going to try to sell their wares wherever they can. If the US likes a country, they can sell there. If the US starts meddling with a country, there will be some way found to fund an opposition that supports the US, and that group will be able to use those funds to buy weapons. In fact that usually is how it is structured - no aid in the sense of a cash or a check is deposited in a foreign bank. The money is held in US accounts that go to purchasing weapons. So basically the US government is buying the weapons and giving them away even if things aren't legally structured that way.
But this condition doesn't require direct action from the arms manufactures ... except in the indirect sense of funding and supporting a congress supportive of the overall system.
Have it your way. Whether I'm right or you are, very nasty things need to happen to the leading lights of the military-industrial complex. What do you call it when you do reckless endangerment on a grand scale and a million people die? We don't have a specific term for that, but if you cause an accident on that scale, you need to be treated like a criminal. (I'm talking about decision makers mind you, and I'm including Congresspeople.) "Who has the right to do that?" I don't know, anyone who can? There's a lot at stake. One of these days, the reckless process you describe will trigger a nuclear war and devastate humanity. If it is mere "recklessness."
Fascinating. What's also fascinating and scary at the sand time is that it seems that the jihadi don't fight to win, in a conventional sense.Their aim is eschatological, not worldly political. "Winning" happens in the "empty 4".
This all reminds me (toutes proportions gardées) of the way some pro abortion activists seem completely unable to accept the moral argument of the anti abortion ones (it's not an argument I agree with at all but I don't find it difficult to believe that yes, they really do genuinely believe it's killing). And in the same way as I am 100% certain the jihadis (or, for that matter, any other theist) are wrong, I absolutely believe that many actually genuinely are motivated by the beliefs that to me seem completely, obviously, clearly wrong. The counter radicalisation efforts must surely take this into account: it must be easier to persuade someone that the voice of the prophet was falsified or misinterpreted than that the prophet was not a prophet and theres no god.
I wonder if you could bargain with the jihadis to let them fulfill their prophecies in harmless ways. Like tell ISIS "If you promise to knock off the brutality, we'll send some marines to Dabiq, hang around for a few hours, then retreat once you show up."
And Rome will probably became Muslim-majority relatively peacefully soon enough without any further jihadist involvement. Is there the full authoritative list of prophecies available somewhere?
If they gathered within the municipal boundaries of Rome, would that do? Or if the municipal boundary of Rome was redefined to be a couple of blocks (for Islamic theological versions of "defined" - is there anything like an Eruv in Islam?...).
( How far into "fulfilled via a technicality can one go before it turns into mocking? :-) )
So the complement of the expanded Vatican City becomes the revised Rome, which is majority Muslim. Can gerrymanders be nonplanar, to allow both to claim to be contiguous areas?
Sahih al-Bukhari is the most definitive collection of ahadith for Sunnis, and Sahih Muslim is considered a close second. You'll want Sahih al-Bukhari 92 & Sahib Muslim 52 & 54, I believe.
Anyone writing about "The Romans" in 7th century Arabia was probably thinking about New Rome, not the ruins of Old Rome. So this one was achieved about 600 years ago.
Akshually *pushes glasses farther up bridge of nose* in SOME cases, they *did* distinguish between "(the city of) Rome" (Rūm[a]) and "Constantinople" (al-Qustantiniyyah)—although I am aware of only a single instance in which this is for sure & explicit: a hadith wherein the Prophet (...ﷺ)¹ is asked which shall fall first, Constantinople or Rome (he responds that "the city of Heraclius will fall first").
You're correct, though, in that references to "Rūm(a)" mostly DO seem to refer either to the Eastern Empire as a whole, or else to the area around Syria & Lebanon... this latter of which, as it has been decided, being what the Prophet ﷺ /really/ meant* when he said that Rūm would be conquered.
(Or, possibly, that he meant this area when he Rūm some times, but in the hadith prophesying that upon Rūm's conquest it would rise up again & this is a sign of the End Times he meant the entire thing.)
*This is, as far as I can tell, is based upon A) one of the Companions is recorded to have listed the conquest of Rūm as one of the five signs (separate from the conquest of Constantinople, which might be another one of the five—IIRC) that had already come to pass, but that was only after the Roman provinces in the Middle East had been conquered— therefore...; and B), some other narrations don't sound so accurate, given the timelines therein, if Rūm wasn't conquered a long time ago—therefore...
There is indeed some debate in Islamic circles over whether this is allowed, or whether it equates to sort of trying to "rush God into doing things before He's ready".
I found that there's actually surprisingly little information, online, about this sort of thinking, considering the huge influence & long track-record it has had.¹
Like, I was watching a YouTube video, from a big-name creator famous for doing "deep dives", on unusual splinter groups/cults/fringe sects; it had a section on the 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca—and to my surprise, there was no mention of /why/ Juhayman al-Otaybi chose to do many of the things he did!
E.g., the creator noted that he had made sure to enter Mecca from the north, but wasn't clear on exactly why; and there was no mention at all of his brother-in-law... but both of these things are super important to understanding the motivation:
• Ahadith state that the Mahdi will enter Mecca from the north, fleeing unrighteous persecution, and take shelter in the Ka‘abah;
• The Mahdi is supposed to be named Muhammad bin Abdullah: Muhammad, son of Abdullah—since ahadith state that the Prophet (...S.A.W.) said the Mahdi would share his name & his father would share his father's name;
• You'll never guess the brother-in-law's name... unless you might guess it to be something like "Muhammad bin Abdullah al-Qahtani"! (Well, okay, that last bit would be hard to guess, I suppose—but you know what I mean, alright.)
• Ahadith /also/ say that when the righteous man (i.e. Mahdi—cannot remember if this identification is made explicit in some or if it's just the accepted interpretation, though) fleeing the evil armies enters Mecca from the north ("as if coming from Medina"), and takes shelter in the Ka‘abah, Allah will thence cause "the earth to swallow up" the pursuers... and then the End Times will really get crackin'!
Hence, al-Otaybi was actively setting out to create conditions under which the ahadith about the beginning of the End Times would be fulfilled. At the time I was watching the video, almost none of this was on Wikipedia (which is probably why the creator missed it, heh)—and I think even now only the bit about the name is on there.
(Interestingly: I cannot swear to it—don't recall the source; if there's interest I can try to find it again to verify, though—but I have read /somewhere/ that al-Otaybi & al-Qahtani & co. were extremely dispirited by the failure of Allah to cooperate in their plan, and that this is one of the reasons they began releasing hostages & didn't put up as much of a fight—at the last—as they could have, surrendering after less fighting than had been expected... though the ultimate bill was still pretty costly, in terms of lives.)
Understandably, the Saudi authorities were not too happy about the attack, and IIRC some sheikhs expounded fatwas against this sort of thing—"Allah knows best, it is on His schedule not yours, you cannot trick or manipulate the Most High, this is not righteous to do", etc. (But, of course, there are always clerics ready to take the other side, and I'm not sure how eminent the fatwas against were/have been, or how effective.)
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¹: (likewise, some of the comments herein have surprised me by the things /they/ were surprised about—e.g., SkinSallow's right above this; I forget that I consume an unusual amount of Islamic media, and from unusual sources—for a degenerate kafir, I mean–)
Yasir Qadhi did a thing on it (in opposition to the idea)—I can't remember the title, but I'll know it if I see it again, so if you'd be interested in hearing a lecture (rather than reading) about it I can probably find it again pretty quickly.
The /support/ for the "rules lawyering" I've seen is mostly second-hand, either through people on e.g. Reddit claiming that this or that sheikh said it's fine actually, or through inferring that some group thinks it's fine by their... well... trying to do so in practice, heh. (Unfortunately, I have been hampered in trying to track down the primary sources referenced because my Arabic is execrable... but in another ten or twenty years I'm pretty sure I'll finally be able to read al-fusHa without looking at a grammar textbook more than every /fifth or sixth/ word!—)
Committing up front to have the marines retreat when challenged would mean they weren't truly defeated. Better for morale might be something like... build a sports field, then set up a nonfatal, semi-ritualized battle, planned to repeat 'til they win hard enough to consider the prophecy fulfilled. Maybe an annual marines-vs.-jihadis rugby match?
As a practicing theist, I feel like this wouldn't be acceptable. But for the same reason I don't think it makes sense to try to game the system by fighting an actual war there either.
God is going to move when he's ready, and trying to create a battle in a particular place or breed a red heifer (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/readings/forcing.html) both seem equally incompatible with God being sovereign. If it's the right time, and the prophecy is true, then nothing man can do can stop it. If it's not the right time, or the prophecy is false, then man isn't creating it either.
Of course, inasmuch as I don't believe in their prophecy, if they were willing to accept that kind of compromise, I'm all for it! I don't think they would accept it either though, as that sounds like a sham and they're expecting a real battle as part of a real Holy War.
> It’s kind of surprising that so many different ideologies converged on this counter-intuitive strategy that didn’t really work for any of them
I am suprised this is hard for some people to answer, the author focused on the groups who did this (which are a small contingent of communists, nazis and even jihadists).
Hitler held until the bitter end, Himmler surrendered. Russian terrorists tried to bring out communism quickly but vanguardists relatively bided their time, mensheviks compromised. Plenty of Islamist organizations in Europe who hold extreme views but relatively limit themselves to just preaching.
Cruelty thesis is ok, why not. Its not a good full picture.
Putin's (non-) role in the bombings is the consensus view for people actually familiar with contemporary Russia. The enormous Short biography recently released argues for it very convincingly. It is only really Westerners and the more conspiranoical bits (or chunks) of the Russian opposition that claim otherwise.
Wikipedia at this moment claims that false flag is the "hypothesis favored by experts". Of course, that Wikipedia is ideologically captured isn't really news, but I was surprised by the recent report of how much influence one malicious actor could wield in his area of interest. (Reliable Sources by TracingWoodgrains, for those interested).
Quick note on the bomb soaked in rat poison: this sounds simple and juvenile but ended up being surprisingly effective. Whether the bomb-makers fully planned out the end results or just grabbed the nastiest stuff under the sink, the chemical was a powerful anti-coagulant, and it had serious knock-on effects for the victims and medical infrastructure. Because of the poison, many victims bled out through relatively minor shrapnel wounds and doctors used up a shocking amount of Israel's blood bank reserves keeping people alive before they figured out what was going on.
Not a suggestion please, but is there a reason anti coagulants (rat poison is super cheap) aren't used more generally as an additive in grenades or bullets? Is it the same logic that says giant mines are fine but expanding bullets aren't?
From a military perspective, there isn’t a huge difference between wounded and KIA. Those wounded by grenades and bullets are usually out of the fighting for good.
Maybe tactically in terms of relevance for a battle. But it makes a very big difference for fighting a longer war whether, say, pilots who bail out survive to fly again later vs getting killed or captured in enemy territory.
Militaries would probably prefer that their methods for downing planes have a better chance of injuring the pilot, but I think the calculus is still that anything likely to kill the pilot is likely to just injure them enough to never fly again, and narrowing the gap between wounded and killed is usually not worth the extra complications
I've heard a claim that injuring is sometimes better than killing - building hospitals and hiring doctors to work in them to maybe eventually get a soldier back into fighting shape can be more expensive than just recruiting and training a new soldier.
I think pilots who bail out may be a unique circumstance where it's plausible to be taken out of the fight while not being injured at all. A pilot is back in the fight as soon as they have a plane, and a new pilot needs a plan as well.
I think that depends on how expensive the training is. During WW2, the Axis nations had to skimp on flight training late in the war and their novice pilots got killed off en masse in "turkey shoots".
The problem with this idea is that it's hard enough to shoot down a plane that trying to tweak it specifically to also kill the pilots gets to be wasteful, unless you move to the logical step of "just capture and kill the pilot, who cares if he's hors d'combat or not", which is a bit too far for Western militaries.
Wounding can even be preferred to killing, because taking care of a wounded soldier is more expensive than burying a dead one. The SS murdered wounded German soldiers for this reason.
I suspect the real reason no one has decided to infringe that requirement is that it would be more trouble than it would be worth. I think we can safely assume that Hitler, Stalin, Putin etc were not bothered by moral issues.
I found this one of the most interesting ones to date - I am not sure it is the best book review, but it is the one I got most from, so maybe that is enough?
"We have all since learned that journalists are strangely committed to sharing people’s real names, but I wouldn’t have expected it to extend to literal spies inside al-Qaeda."
Journalists get their satisfaction from 'getting the story out'. The more details, the better the story.
Other people's livelihoods or even lives are often secondary to that.
You tell a journalist something secret. Maybe they don't put it in the story, maybe they do. There's a balance there. Can you get them other stories, and will what they put in the story affect your ability and willingness to do so?
In this case, some other person told the journalist too much. That journalist owed nothing to Dean. At most the journalist considered whether there were more stories in that insider, and it ended up being "nah". So, publish away.
In this particular case, it's a shame this journalist outed this particular agent.
But I don't believe in a general right to anonymity. If I am doxxed and I lose my job for something I wrote here, I'll put the blame primarily on my shoulders for posting carelessly.
Would I have a negative view of my doxxer? Absolutely, but in my case, I'd be constrained from using any more serious ad hominem then "busybody." I have a different attitude about different individual cases of doxxing.
I do not have a blanket view on doxxing in general, and I don't see why ANYONE should. The devil is in the details with this issue.
I think a right on the line of 'nobody should ever be doxxed, ever' is about as enforceable as a right 'nobody should ever be yelled at in the streets, ever'.
For neither one would I support a minimum sentence of one year of jail.
But we have softer norms than laws. If you yell at people in the street, that generally makes you an asshole. If you doxx people, that also generally makes you an asshole. Society practically depends on most of the people following most of the norms most of the time, we do not have the state capacity to enforce laws for any trivial infraction everywhere and always.
I believe anonymity in the marketplace of ideas to be net good, so I encourage norms to preserve anonymity.
> I do not have a blanket view on doxxing in general, and I don't see why ANYONE should. The devil is in the details with this issue.
I have a blanket view on doxxing to the same degree I have a blanket view on shooting people in the face: in most circumstances, either is bad.
However, just like there sometimes arise facts which make shooting someone in the face good and virtuous, there can be circumstances where determining the identity of an anonymous voice is good. For example, if an anon claims to be a kindergarden teacher and also campaigns for legalizing sex with kids, then their employer should probably be aware of their online persona. (I would prefer if they just monitored that person really closely instead of summarily firing them, but think that is unlikely given their incentive landscape.) Or if a celebrity is arguing with an anon voice ('you won't believe what my outgroup says!'), and it turns out that that anon voice is a sock puppet of them, I would think it justified to proclaim that fact, even though that would technically doxx that anon voice.
But the central case of doxxing is some twitter mob figuring out the identity of someone who said something outrageous but legal on twitter, and getting them fired from their job at home depot, and that is net negative and we should have social norms around it, no matter if the left or right are doing it.
The main fault is with the member of the intelligence community who leaked info to a journalist.
Now, I have quite some sympathy for whistleblowers. If Edward Snowden thinks that his agency is doing wrong and the public has to know about it, and sacrifices his career and ability to stay in the western world over it, that is one thing.
Nor do I have a strong position on political leaks. If whatever embarrassing tidbits from the Trump White House or the Dobbs decision are leaked, that is just Washington.
But if you work in an intelligence agency and think it is a good idea to (a) talk to a journalist and (b) mention details about active intelligence assets in terrorist groups, then you have failed so hard on opsec -- which is a core part of your profession -- that you should have picked a job with lower opsec requirements, like a cashier. Whatever good you did during your career, you have just turned net negative. At the end of the day, pencil pushers in Langley, even genius level ones, are not in limited supply. Jihadi assets very much are.
I mean, I can get the urge to talk to the press. Your team is doing important work, sometimes thrilling, and at if you succeed you will be unsung heroes apart from some very redacted presidential press releases until the details get declassified 50 years later, perhaps. But that was in the fucking job description. If you can't control your urge to talk then you are as unfit for your job as a pope who can't control his urge visit brothels would be.
Of course, the other failure is that US intelligence attempted to deduce who the British informant was in the first place. For practical purposes, knowing that the one out of a group of ten is likely an informant, and you should keep the Brits in the loop if you drone strike any of them is likely enough. Trust your colleagues on the other side of the pond to have calculated the various risks to their asset and given you the appropriate level of information. Instead, it looks like the Americans used their intelligence capabilities to actively connect the dots, perhaps calculating the Pearson coefficient between receiving info and the suspected asset being in the UK, or whatever.
If your group is 100% leak-free, then this would be correct. But you never know this. So you should take a page from the book of terrorist cells and practice compartmentalization, and strategically not investigate knowledge which you are not meant to have. If the next group down the hallway is not allowed to tell you their source, then you should look the other way, not use your intelligence training to steal their secrets like they are your enemy. This also applies if you are separated by the Atlantic. Yes, depending on someone else's assets will hurt your ego, but that should also be part of the fucking job.
I mean, the British likely ended up wishing they had redacted their intelligence more thoroughly -- that is make it less actionable. This is not the equilibrium you want.
Of course, the more cynical take is that the leak was not an accident, but intentional, a causality of office politics. 'At the moment, the Brits are the prima donna because they are closest to that group, but if they were to lose their informant, our asset (some local driver not present for the important discussions) would be the most valuable one, which would greatly increase the importance of our group and improve my promotion prospects.'
I don't think viewing the US–UK relationship as a partnership of equals is helpful. The US views Britain as a vassal to whose secrets it is entitled as a matter of course, and if it's occasionally recalcitrant in turning them over, the US's intelligence agencies are quite capable of acquiring them. Risking the loss of one of the their assets is a small price to pay to keep them in their place.
The point of Britain having a nominally independent intelligence agency is so that it can be used to launder surveillance on Americans.
I dislike this review for the same reason I was deeply disappointed in ACX Dictator Book Club. It reduces foreign culture, which western readers already view with suspicion, to caricature. Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to encapsulate enough context in one book to make culture at least somewhat understandable. Which makes authors and readers concentrate on most dramatic and bizarre aspects missing how they are part of greater whole, and restrict legible motivations of foreigners to most basic and understandable for the audience.
I don't have opinion about the book itself, but however little I knew about jihadists before reading the review, I now feel like I know even less.
Maybe you're committing the typical mind fallacy? I.e., you're a rational Western person (presumably), so you're thinking, "Nobody I know could possibly be this fanatical/committed to fulfilling religious prophecy, so these guys can't be either, the author is just exoticizing them and reducing them to a caricature!"
Maybe, as depressing as it is, some people really think and feel the way these jihadis do.
By the time someone is making bombs with nails dipped in rat poison, I kind of feel morally absolved of the need to put their actions in "enough context" or whatnot.
> Maybe, as depressing as it is, some people really think and feel the way these jihadis do.
But how do they think and feel? Can you explain process by which fatwas gain and lose popularity? Do you understand how typical religious debate go among such people? Maybe give me a sneak peek on what makes them choose more fundamentalist interpretation of Islam?
I find that after reading the review most people would at once fail ideological turing test, while be certain that they learned a great deal.
> By the time someone is making bombs with nails dipped in rat poison, I kind of feel morally absolved of the need to put their actions in "enough context" or whatnot.
You mistake my call for understanding, for call for sympathy. I morally absolve you of need to portray a single thing about them in positive light, but I personally read about foreign cultures to learn and understand. Unfortunately, I find myself increasingly in minority here in this regard.
This is a really great point:
"...suspicious...convenient...we shouldn’t imagine this as just a cynical leadership fabricating prophecies...it’s just natural to interpret an ambiguous location to refer to Syria if you are already fixated on the idea that your group is the one fulfilling the prophecies"
The fact that someone believes something that is (suspiciously) convenient doesn't necessarily mean that it's cynical or fake. Scary, but I guess it's true.
I’m once again reminded of how ridiculous it was when Oct 7 was interpreted as colonial resistance instead of as Islamist mental illness.
I guess it’s also a reminder that most people simply interpret the actions of others through their own lenses. The secular west often forgets…
Why not both?
Sure, motivations are usually mixed.
But from statements Hamas have made, I don't hear them complaining about the quality of life of the Palestinians due to Israeli occupation. I do hear them citing the Hadiths and claiming the lands of Israel as sacred Islamic land that must be purged of Jews in order for the prophecy to be fulfilled.
You do know that Sinwar was imprisoned in Ashkelon prison for murdering four Palestinians he believed to be collaborating with Israel right?
And you’re saying we should sympathize with his plight of… using a communal bathroom and waiting in line for food?
“He probably became an Islamic fundamentalist to cope with life. If he had had a decent life I doubt he would’ve been attracted to it.”
I disagree with this point. The reviewed book’s subject came from a middle class Saudi family, and there are many accounts of well-off people leaving everything behind and joining ISIS.
It’s true that religion gives many hope (arguably false) through hard times, but I think what Islamist Jihadism is giving these men is **meaning**. What higher purpose is there than to fulfill the wishes of Allah and bring about His prophecy?
If my reading of random blogs is correct, Hamas is kind of trying to be everything a state is, with parts running hospitals, parts running schools (giving the kids a "patriotic" education of course), parts running grocery stores (and smuggling food in) so the people have something to eat, and then there's people like senior doctors who are technically members of The Party so they can go on saving lives but they probably keep their views about the party doctrine to themselves. Al-Qassam, the military branch, is the ones doing the abducting and torturing and shooting and bombing.
It's like in the past, being a member of the Nazi or communist party could mean many things, including "ok I'll sign up, now leave me alone".
I don’t think anti colonialism needs to be concerned with improving quality of life for the locals. Many anti colonial projects resulted in quality of life going down for them.
Why would Islamists be concerned with colonialism or anti-colonialism when there are 72 virgins waiting for them?
Before they die, perhaps they want girls and money from the colonizers. Hamas demonstrated the former.
If I was colonized, I definitely wouldn't give two shits about "quality of life" considerations. Better to live free in hovel then chained up in a luxury mansion. I fully realize expelling a colonial occupier is no guarantee of living free. But that's the base reasoning and I totally get it. (Edit: I have a separate, unrelated ethic that I'd rather live under domestic tyranny than foreign tyranny)
Perhaps they should rethink their anti-colonialism, then.
I wonder to what degree this discussion of jihadis wanting to fulfill prophecies applies to Hamas as well as traditional jihadi groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda.
You’re basically asking, “How extreme is Hamas in their Islamist orthodoxy?”
From what we’ve seen I’d say pretty extreme. But ISIS supposedly considers Hamas blasphemous for engaging in political processes and for not prioritizing the “global jihad”.
I don't think that's quite what I'm asking. Both the Catholics and the Protestants can be extreme Christians, but the Protestants tend to take Biblical end-time prophecy much more seriously, and there are many 100% extreme Christians who wouldn't dream of making decisions based on it.
True, though I’m not sure the comparison between Islam and Christianity is very clear.
For one, the Quran is often taken literally as God’s infallible word, whereas Christianity is taken as a collection of accounts (and often as morality tales). Another is that the prophecies are often describing the actual places where these people live, and the conditions that must be met for its fulfillment.
If the Bible was the literal word of infallible God and he proclaimed that the conditions for the end times were that an army in Philly would rise up to destroy the non-believers, maybe we’d have more radical Christians?
But this is a complex question that I don’t think I’m qualified to fully answer: Why do more muslims than christians interpret their religious dogma literally?
It's a weird interpretation to me that God is going to leave the fulfillment of prophecy to people doing it solely because it's a prophecy. It defeats the purpose.
That's being logical in a way that runs rather counter to psychology involved.
Fortunately for humanity, there is a powerful (dominant?) strain of thought in Christianity that you are just supposed to live your life normally and let God take care of the end times prophecies himself. And that, in fact, it's sacrilegious to actively try to fulfill end times prophecies, thus essentially forcing God's hand. And tipping my own hand, I agree that it's kind of mocking God's power to think we can speed up or slow down the fulfillment of ET prophecies. (Assuming God was real and Christianity were true)
I believe this is the reason why Orthodox Jews were the last Jews to embrace Israel. At the very least, the Orthodox Israel skeptics used similar reasonings.
(Though I honestly wonder how committed Israel's Orthodox community really is. They say the right words, but they generally refuse to fight in the IDF, and actions speak louder than words)
Or it's a really effective way of getting people to do stuff in the far future.
I’m not sure more Muslims do. I’ve been to a lot of different churches, and there are a lot of Biblical Literalists. It’s hard to get a precise measure of this, but the best test is probably Young Earth Creationism. It only really exists because of a literal reading of Numbers and an estimate by a priest on approximately how long ago Adam and Eve would have lived if those are literally true. No Christian I know that does not take the Bible literally believes in YEC, because it’s well contradicted by scientific evidence.
So what percentage of Christians are YEC? About 40%. That’s a huge amount more than Muslims that become jihadists, though obviously not every Quran literalists becomes a jihadist. The big difference is that being a Christian Literalists makes people argue against religion, not wage a holy war.
> So what percentage of Christians are YEC? About 40%.
That doesn't sound right. YECs are almost exclusively Protestant, and only 40% of Christians are Protestant, and I don't think the vast majority of Protestants are YECs. Maybe that number is for the US?
But even the most hardcore Biblical Literalist do not believe that God wrote, say, the 13 books of the Bible who claim to be written by someone named "Paul" (some of which-eg 1 Cor 7-have notes distinguishing between "Paul's" view and what "Paul" proclaims to be God's view" were in fact written by God dictating to Paul; Muslims would actually believe this. This is a key difference (divine inspiration is a lower standard of interpretation; that's one reason Christians don't think you have to learn Ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek to read the Bible).
I have heard that the Christian equivalent to Quran is not the Bible but Jesus himself. For Muslims, Quran is the intermederiary between Allah and Man like Christ is between God and Man for Christians. Quran was also uncreated, existing alongside Allah forver. I think this is why Muslims take Quran more seriously than Christians take the Bible.
I don't think this explanation is adaquete. There are lots of Christians who take the Bible to be the literal word of infallibale God, but they don't seem to have a military wing taking a similar approach to the jihadits.
(Also 'morality tales' is a perfectly plausible account of Job and Jonah, and of course the parables are explicitly morality tales, but I don't understand how someone could read the monarchy period history books, let alone the gospels and Acts as morality tales. What moral could require this complex mess of historical details? Why would it overlap with a bunch of details we know from other historical sources, and what kind of a monster puts genealogies in a morality tale? I completely accept that lots of people who haven't read the Bible think it's all morality tales, but I don't think that can be relevant to how our hardcorers are reacting.)
Do you get that actually islam has a long long history of interpretation, as opposed to literal reading of the Quran?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Islamic_jurisprudence
The 'reformist' fundamentalist view of Islam is actually from the modern, industrial era of history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salafi_movement
The thing with Protestantism (and Islam) is that if you don't think the local priest is going far enough, in the end you split off to your own denomination.
Catholics that are "too extreme" eventually end up as not Catholics - they get anathematized.
Hamas cooperates with Iran while ISIS attacks Iran. Hamas is unusual in being a Sunni group that cooperates with Iran, but still, sounds pretty heretical.
As far as I understand, Hamas is the Palestinan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose aim is a Caliphate under Sharia law. Much more about changing the world as it is, than bring about the end of times. Sure, they're extreme in many ways and anyone who's not a straight man would probably be much worse off if they ever properly took over (which some of the elite-woke college students seem to have missed). But they're not "accelerationist".
Interesting article from an Israeli journalist who snuck into Gaza right before the 2008 war. Interviews a lot of Palestinians re Hamas motivations https://archive.md/VF10W
That is an awfully long reading and small print in my phone. Could you perhaps summarize what the main motivations were ?
The religious West is generally fine with Israel's claim on the "promised land" though. It's interesting that the two most prominent wars currently are Russian 19th century imperialism reenactment and the literal Holy War for the Holy Land.
Everybody who was in it for the money quit the state-on-state conquest business when they realized how badly it had turned out for everyone who tried within living memory. In an industrialized context, simply buying real estate and charging rent is far more cost-effective than trying to bomb the residents into submission. What's the most recent war you can think of where the side who shot first, actually won anything they wanted?
Naturally, when some profession stops being a competitive career, diligent-professional types mostly look for their prospects elsewhere, leaving the ranks to be filled by residual fanatics (obsessed with the higher goals to the point they don't care about the money) and/or perverts (in it for the side benefits - violent cruelty in the case of terrorism, mostly sex stuff in the case of Catholic priesthood, etc.)
> What's the most recent war you can think of where the side who shot first, actually won anything they wanted?
This is a much lower bar than "enough to be remotely worth it," so the Iraq war probably meets it. America got an Iraqi government that's (modestly) more friendly and more democratic than Saddam Hussein was, and it hasn't collapsed yet.
The second and third Karabakh wars.
>I guess it’s also a reminder that most people simply interpret the actions of others through their own lenses.
Part of the problem is certainly this, but I think if at the root of modern jihad is a genuine belief in the divine righteousness of holy violence, it means the nonIslamic world needs to respond with an ultimatum that nearly 2 billion people across the globe either edit their mortally intolerant religion or abandon it, and that is so utterly impractical and would appear so religiously intolerant that the secular west pretends the problem actually isn’t about Islam, which jihadists assure us it is.
I think the secular west’s most realistic hope is that the notion of jihad as internal spiritual metaphor gains so much traction with Islamic scholars that violent jihadists become universally shunned by their own religious leaders as heretics.
My notion is that if a better Islam happens, it will be because a Muslim and native speaker of Arabic creates a positive vision which includes treating people better. It won't just be reinterpreting jihad.
This is the "Islam needs a Reformation" view. I believe it is mistaken because the ones you're worried about are the ones actually reading their scripture instead of trusting to the "living document"-style interpretations of modern Islamic scholarship.
That's the "jihadism *is* the Islamic Reformation" view!
Pretty much, yeah, though I might say Wahhabism instead.
I thought about that, but I don't think all jihadists are Wahhabis.
They're different levels of causality. The "mental illness" (ie "beliefs") may have been the proximate cause, by why those beliefs? Because of emotions arising from decades of oppression. Emotions are real, but they're hard to convey, so when asked, what's given instead is a justification FOR the emotions, in terms of colonial resistance.
Anyway, if one person's justification from religious beliefs are just another's mental illness, well, Israel's existence justified on the same grounds.
You've got the causality backwards. Why these beliefs? Because these are core doctrines of the religion that has been taught to almost everyone in the region for more than 1000 years. It's the oppression that is the consequence of the beliefs - either the djihadists are in power and oppress the opposition, or they aren't and the ruling power sees a strong need to oppress them. You saw on Oct 7 what happens when you're not thorough enough with that.
No, I think, you do. Every pantheon of beliefs has peaceful and noble ideals it reaches for in times of safety, and vengeful violent ones it can reach for in times of oppression. Christians, liberals, communists, Buddhists, whoever. The emotion comes first, the ideology second, and a population will come up with an ideology to justify their emotional needs if their existing body of beliefs doesn't provide one. This can be seen as a fitness criteria for beliefs themselves: true pacifism fails to reproduce. To essentialize this kind of violence is a grave error, usually committed to confirm a bias: it's far easier to imagine one's enemies are evil than to see them as pushed beyond a breaking point.
Maybe true pacificsm doesn't reproduce, but religiously mandated authoritarianism and belligerence apparently does.
Just a couple of thoughts:
- broadly speaking, the Muslim world in the Middle East and North Africa was the hammer rather than the nail for 1000 years or so. Did that cause them to mellow out?
- if suffering and oppression are the root causes, why don't we hear of Native American suidice bombers, or Australian Aboriginal ones? When African refugees go on killing sprees in European cities, why do they yell "Allahu akbar" and not "In the name of Jesus Christ!"?
- who were the people who signed up to do the 9/11 attacks? Were they the poor, downtrodden, oppressed, or (by the standards of the region) rather well-off, educated, privileged individuals?
I think Palestinian supporters in the West are just using whatever argument they think might work. "Israel needs to be managed by muslims" doesnt speak to a lot of Americans. "Palestinians are browns fighting against racist whites" gets some traction.
The most parsimonious explanation for October 7th (taking into account timing) is probably Hamas trying to freeze (successfully, so far) the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unresolved.
In that one-step-removed sense, it was part of colonial resistance, refusing to let the question of Palestine fade away. Even if it's too charitable to Hamas to call it an atrocity directly borne of the surfeit of grief over Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people.
It was most certainly not mental illness. Leaving aside the hideous immorality of what was done, matched only by the immorality of Israel's response, it was fairly rational.
The least rational part is the ideological blind spot that thinks they can win decisively. That it is just a matter time before the jews are defeated and driven from the land one way or another. This prevents many types of compromise.
It is really strange to see a religion being so alive somewhere else, when religion all around me is dying. But I have to remind myself: Christianity is also only dying in the West, it is doing great in Africa or Asia.
It is highly interesting why. I think people everywhere in the world have similar education, similar social media access and so on. And religion started to die in Europe in the 19th century when the poor did not really have much education. It was clearly not caused by the spread of a scientific worldview or anything like that.
Asia is a big place, I can't rule out the possibility you're right, but for Africa, you're just wrong about Christianity doing great.
How so? My impression is Nigeria has some utterly absurd megachurches.
Yeah, that's new money and signaling. But Africa used to have many state churches before the Islamic Conquest, and right now it has zero (even the venerable Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church isn't a state religion) although there were a few in colonial times. There are a lot of Christians in Africa, but that's a doubtful and syncretistic percentage of even more Africans. Of the parts of Christianity that actually demonstrate commitment to unadulterated Christiantity, like monasteries, Africa has very little.
before the Islamic Conquest Christianity was present in the North African roman provinces, Sudan and Ethiopia. Not that many places compared with today.
I don't think we know enough about the history of Subsaharan Africa to say that.
Isn't this just a complaint that Catholicism and Orthodoxy aren't doing well in Africa vis a vis Protestants who are?
I absolutely disagree that monasteries represent unadulterated Christianity, or that nations are Supposed To have a state religion. I agree with The_Archduke that this sounds like thinly veiled "Protestantism isn't true Christianity" polemics.
Pointing out lack of state churches and monasteries as reasons that actually African Christians are not Christians is pretty specious reasoning; neither of these things featured in early Christianity nor do they feature in the dominant strains of Christianity in many non-African countries—the same strains that are responsible for most of the evangelism and missions work that has resulted in burgeoning African Christianity. What gives?
Aren't there a lot more Christians than there were in the period of state churches?
Yes. And more non-Christians too.
Christianity is a state religion in Zambia. And as someone who's lived in (broadly speaking) Africa, I think the degree of syncretism is greatly exaggerated.
According to Pew, Christianity is the largest religion in Africa by a significant margin. Islam is growing faster than Christianity, but Pew estimates that by 2050 Africa will be 58% Christian and 35% Muslim. That's pretty Christian!
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/sub-saharan-africa/
On the other hand, the United States (where Christianity is "dying") is still currently 63%% Christian, and Pew estimates in 2050 there it will be 51% Christian still. So at this exact moment, the USA is a bit more Christian than Africa.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/projecting-u-s-religious-groups-population-shares-by-2070/
Meanwhile over in East Asia most people aren't particularly religious at all compared to the USA or Africa. However, of the religions there Christianity and Buddhism predominate. It's spread unevenly, Japan is only 2% Christian, while nearby South Korea is the most Christian at 32% of the population.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/06/17/religious-landscape-and-change-in-east-asia/
But most of the Christian focus on Asia is about China these days. Not because China is particularly Christian, as they probably take up about 7.4% of the population, but because of the rapid growth in Christianity over time. When the whole communist revolution thing happened all the missionaries got kicked out, and through the 70s it was generally understood that China was not a viable missions field: the few missionaries that managed to get in found people who were not interested in Christ (who needs him when you have the Party!). However over the last few decades a large underground Christian movement has been taking off. 7.4% doesn't seem like much, but it's over 100 million Chinese Christians, and 40 years ago there was maybe 1 million of them. It's probably the fastest growing region in the world when it comes to Christianity.
https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-report-on-international-religious-freedom/china/
In East Germany, the opposition mostly met in church buildings, because the church had the only large rooms in the country that were not, directly or indirectly, controlled by the state. My parents participated in the opposition (evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_B%C3%B6ttger ) and these meetings had good childcare, so I was there many times. Everyone was nominally Christian (because the church would get in trouble if not) and there were indeed some half-hearted prayers, but people were there because it was the only kind of place to plan how to reform, escape or overthrow the Socialist Party. Maybe Christianity in China is similar. Like Falun Gong.
My understanding of the situation in China (and I am not an expert, though I've looked into it more than the average man off the street) is that there are several "official" Christian churches that are legal to be a part of. Those churches need to register with the state, and have to comply with the state policy of "sinicization" which means they have to align their teachings and practices with Chinese culture, as defined by the state. What that means varies depending on the province or even the city, as local governments have a broad mandate on interpreting the policy. So that means in some places the official churches are a lot like regular churches (though you'll never hear any sermons criticizing the CCP, that's for sure), while in other places churches aren't allowed to have crosses, or steeples, service times are strictly regulated, and every sermon needs to be approved in advance by the local Party official. The state also regulates the printing of Bibles: there is only one Chinese version that can be legally printed or sold in China, the Chinese Union Version, and bibles can only be sold in official churches or bookstores that are registered with the state to do so. The state regulates how many bibles can be printed each year, and Chinese Christians often report it being difficult to find bibles because not enough are printed to meet demand. The Great Firewall also blocks off access to bible websites online. If you are found with an unregistered bible, you will get in trouble. How much trouble that is depends on the province you're in and how hard the local Party officials are cracking down on Christians; in some places you'll just pay a fine or need to bribe your way out, in others you get thrown in jail.
It's also the case that in China it is illegal (constitutionally prohibited!) for children to have any formal religious affiliation. That means that if you bring your kid to church, you could get in trouble. Whether you do, again, depends on how strict the local Party officials are.
Because of all these restrictions the official Christian churches are not very popular among Chinese Christians. This has lead to a very large "house church" or "underground church" movement. These churches are not registered with the government and usually meet secretly in people's homes or other private places. They are illegal, though if they're small enough (a couple dozen people or so) the state rarely cracks down on them. Though in 2018 the CCP added a bunch of new religious regulations, and that same year a house church paster was sentenced to 9 years in prison, so it seems like we might currently be in a stricter period of time when it comes to religion in China.
It's hard to get good data on how many Chinese are in unregistered churches vs registered ones (for obvious reasons), but estimates range from 30-70% of all Chinese Christians being part of underground churches.
Oh, interesting. Thanks. That sounds very different from East Germany. But "house churches" were common in some areas and eras of Europe's history too. Including East Germany, especially but by definition they didn't have large rooms, so we didn't go there. The "Hauskreise" (literally "house circles") I heard of were usually Pietist.
Wow, your father seems to be an impressive person ! Even a classical music composer on the top of it all !
Hell yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_B%C3%B6ttger
A cursory Google search doesn't give me derivative-with-respect-to-time information, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Africa says 49% of Africa's population is Christian, which sounds very substantial to me.
I'm a Quaker, which is a sect of Christianity that was very significant in early American history but so obscure in the US today that people are often surprised we still exist.
The country with the largest number of Quakers today is Kenya.
Wikipedia says there are 146,300 Quakers in Kenya, or 2,79% of the population.
That that's your largest number says more about Quakers than it says about Kenya.
A lot of our ideas - maybe don't haggle over the price of groceries? - have become so mainstream that we aren't particularly relevant as a district religious group. Our decline after that is to be expected.
But we're growing, globally. We're fading into irrelevancy in the west, but growing faster in Africa than our decline.
Christians are a minority in most African countries, but Africa is becoming Christian faster than the West is becoming secular. Quakers are just an example.
I am not sure Islam is that successful outside some peripheral areas like the Sahel and Afghanistan. In places like Egypt,Iran, Bosnia etc things like mosque attendance are falling rapidly.
Excuse me, Christianity is dying in *Europe*.
—Sent from Indiana
Also a little confused about why you would think education in, say, Saudi Arabia is similar to education in France (a state that has been formally committed to secularism for 150 years)
No! Wrong! Jesus will not rule beside the Mahdi, because the Mahdi will die shortly after Jesus' return. It is believed that the Mahdi will fight but only manage to stalemate the evil Dajjal; Iesa (Jesus), on the other hand, will actually be able to defeat the Dajjal once he arrives.
(...IIRC hopefully I didn't misremember something while correcting someone—)
Question about the claim that the Day of Judgment will take place after Jesus rules benevolently for a long time - wouldn't you figure out which way the wind is blowing after Jesus returns to Earth and starts ruling benevolently, and convert to Islam (or act virtuously) then, regardless of what you'd done before? What stops people from trying this hack?
Why is it a hack and what's wrong with most people being saved? 🤷
My understanding is that this is, in fact, exactly what IS expected to occur—though you might not want to take the chance of holding off till then, because there will be lots of fighting before Jesus actually shows up... so if you don't make it quite the whole way, you could well perish in a state of kufr! Astaghfirallah!
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I. State of Play
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The fighting will be due to the Dajjal (an antichrist-like figure) misleading many—probably mainly all the degenerate filthy post-modernists & atheists & the like, is the feeling—and gathering together armies of the people he has thus tricked. This will be done, in part, by his performing deeds such as "causing the earth to bring forth its bounty" (unclear if done by the power of sihr & djinni, or technological).
There will be despair in the Ummah, until the Mahdi is identified & begins to gather together armies of the righteous; these will fight the armies of the Dajjal¹—but, though the Mahdi will be a just ruler & righteous man, and so forth, he's not supernatural & will, at best, reach a stalemate; or—more likely—will be slowly but consistently losing the war.
...until Iesa-Jesus descends (in... Damascus? don't quote me on that one)! He will "break the cross" (+ "kill the pigs"²), symbolically showing that He³ doesn't approve of what His followers have been doing, and then easily overpower & destroy the Dajjal—though, unfortunately, our amigo the Mahdi will die shortly thereafter.
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II. Scott's Hack
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...will, seemingly, actually work! That is, the Christians & Jews will—naturally, what with the cross-breaking & descending from Jannah in saffron robes & whatnot—immediately see that Jesus is endorsing the Truth Faith, and convert en masse.
Thereupon, Jesus-Iesa shall rule over a world of peace & justice, and entirely Muslim, for forty years (IIRC). I don't think it's explicitly mentioned that anyone except Christians & Jews will convert upon His return; but—since the fighting will end (& since Iesa will obviously be a highly miraculous sort of ruler)—it seems the *implication* is that even the disbelievers & polytheists & other lovers-of-evil will finally recognize that Islam is The Truth.™
(Interestingly, there is some debate over whether this is because Jesus will give them a "convert or die" ultimatum, or merely because it will be so obvious that He's, well, Jesus.)
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III. (Footnotes, for some reason)
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¹: (although there's a hadith about how actually "the Romans"—i.e., Euro-Westerners—as a whole will join with the armies of the Mahdi to fight "an army of the East"—sometimes interpreted as an army of Chinamen, determined to stamp out all religion in their godless commie fervor–)
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²: (???)
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³: (felt disrespectful not to capitalize the pronoun, though I think this is, Islamically-speaking, Not Cool.)
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.
(...And Allah knows best.)
Re: "kill the pigs", maybe He'll make everyone stop eating pork by wiping out the supply chain?
Depends on what actually happens. There will be people who will doubt this, no matter the evidence. Thomas believed after putting his hands in the holes; there are people even more skeptical today.
I’m Christian, but if Jesus descends from sky and says the Muslims were right about everything, I’m going to my nearest Mosque to convert ASAP. I’m sure there are a lot of Muslims that would do it in reverse if he says he’s Christian. Christian Jesus would likely be hoping this would happen.
Of course the real problem is the end times are unlikely to happen in any individual person’s lifetime, so that hack won’t be available to most people.
I agree but...
How would we know it's Jesus and not the Antichrist? I doubt we'd recognize him from his long hair, light brown beard, and Caucasian facial features.
This is fabulous. Only review so far that makes me want to read the book.
Of all the reviews so far, I think this is both the best and the one that sounds most like Scott's voice. I don't know how closely those two things are related. Either way, an extremely enjoyable and interesting read, bravo.
Oh that's interesting. I had not drawn the parallel, it does sound a bit like Scott's style. And of the ones presented so far, it is clearly superior. I guess we really are all here for a reason.
Scott wouldn't tease a "More than you wanted to know" piece like that. The author is baiting us all to write that, of course, but if this was Scott it'd be an announcement.
Imitating Scott's style seems likely to have a tradeoff with review quality. In combination with Scott's writing already being popular with most voters, and thus disproportionately likely to make the finals, I think it's more likely than not that the most Scott-like finalist was written by Scott.
I don't think Scott would go to serious effort to disguise his style. Mainly because I don't think he'd think it's a good use of his time. Secondly, he might have reasoned that his readers will pay more attention to these reviews (in future years) if they think they have a decent chance of discovering Scott's.
Scott didn’t really try to disguise himself in his Njal’s Saga’s review, which I successfully guessed was his. This one I don’t have the same feel, likely since it’s missing his micro humor. Regardless, it’s my favorite review so far.
I agree with most of this thread (great review, alluding to Scott) but I can not imagine Scott wishing to do a long piece about the qualities ot diverse Hadiths, Fatwas, Prophesies and what not. There is a mountain, nay, mountains of literature about that, by ppl who are fluent in Quran Arabic. And from all sides. A former colleague of mine teaches at a German university and she wrote e.g. how the hadith about "more women in hell than men" is a) likely a 'strong' hadith, but also b) possibly meant as a joke: - With regard to the reason why women form the majority of Hell, the Prophet was asked about it and he explained the reason in these words: “Because of their ingratitude.” It was said, “Are they ungrateful to Allah?” He said, “They are ungrateful to their husbands and ungrateful about good treatment. If you are kind to one of them for a lifetime then she sees one (undesirable) thing in you, she will say, `I have never had anything good from you.’” - quote from a humorless website.
The orthodox understanding is that Muhammad (ﷺ)—although he did have a sense of humor, which is of course the best of all senses of humor—was *incapable* of making a joke that involved an untruth.
..............
Wry observation? Absolutely!
Just kidding? Astaghfirallah! Quickly, ‘akhi, make du'a of Salat at-Tawbah for listening to that witch, for—Wallahi, I tell you this!—she is upon the waswasa of shayatin to dare say (astaghfirallah, even to *write*) that the Rasul-Allah (ﷺ)—al-Haq, as-Sadiq, al-Amin, al-Insan al-Kamil!—would misguide his Ummah to tell a filthy /joke/!
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*ahem* or it's like whatever who knows I mean—
I'd call it a toned down version of Scott's voice. The humor is there, but with less hyperbole.
"According to a Pew Research poll, more than half of Muslims believe that the Mahdi will arrive within their lifetime, and this belief is universally accepted among jihadists"
Curiously, haredim also believe we live in the end of times and the coming of the moshiah is imminent
I suspect the proportion of people who believe we live in their ideology's version of the end times is quite high, or at least is well above lizardman's constant. Consider the singularity, people who say late-stage capitalism as if to imply it will end soon, or the rapture.
Completely agree. The are a bunch of different flavors of "immanentize the eschaton" at play.
I also used to think "late-stage capitalism" inherently meant "the end of capitalism is coming soon," too, and I mocked that mercilessly. Turns out that it mainly means "capitalism in its mature or fully developed state," and anti-capitalists are divided on whether this means the end of capitalism is nigh, or if capitalism can sustain itself in this mature state for centuries to come.
I originally wrote just "late-stage capitalism" then tried to correct it to "people who say late-stage capitalism as if to imply it will end soon" to make it clear which group I was referring to, but that's equally bad. I meant to refer specifically to the people who like to talk about escalating crises of capitalism.
It occurs to me that extreme runaway climate change is another example and might be even more popular with the same crowd.
The idea that current capitalism is the most fully developed stage seems... surprisingly optimistic from an anti-capitalist?
In the critiques of capitalism I read, it's currently not so bad but getting a whole lot worse as everything approaches a more optimal (from big companies' point of view) state.
I never said any anti-capitalism ideology makes sense. It doesn't. It just beats Free Market ideology by a mile.
I don't know what a truly great political ideology would look like. That's above my pay grade. It could be a great political tendency doesn't even exist yet. I don't know why we assume it's already been invented.
<mildSnark>
The whole end times discussion sounds so https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism :-)
</mildSnark>
Rare indeed are the people who (a) believe a particular set of prophecies is true but also (b) believe that they all refer to something happening way off in the future with no connection to the present.
<mildSnark>
Does expecting the Sun to become a Red Giant count? :-)
4,000,000,000 , 3,999,999,999 , 3,999,999,998 , only 3.999.999.997 eons to go!
</mildSnark>
I remember being really amazed when I read about one Christian writer circa 1600 who expected the world to end in 2000. That basically *never* happens.
What arguments would the haredim give for this?
The Rambam wrote a bit about it - it's one of the 13 principles core to Judaism that he enunciated. They see the signs he described as everywhere
Chabadniks would refer to comments made by the rebbe also (and they low key believe the rebbe was the mashiah)
Rambam says the Messiah will come, but he certainly doesn't say "...in the early 21st century". I'm curious what the arguments for it being *now* are.
Good question - I’m digging into this with a few rabbis to make sure I do their argument justice. Might pull it into a post and share with you.
Short answer, Haredim don’t really believe that there are any specific signs of imminent messiah right now. Rather there is just a general obligation to be excited about.
The most messiah obsessed sect (Chabad) believed/believes that their leader is the Messiah (but it’s common practice in Chassidic sects to believe that your Rebbe is the messiah so it’s nothing special apart from the particular enthusiasm and his big impact compared to other Rebbes). In fact, probably the most obvious thing to be interpreted as a sign of the imminent Messiah - the return to Israel - is denounced by Chabad as definitely NOT a sign
of anything special, to the extent that when the occasional Chabad cantor gets roped into saying the prayer for the welfare of the state of Israel, they will often subtly omit the words which describe the state as an “early flowering of our redemption/reshit smichat geulataynu” (and they won’t say this prayer at all in pure Chabad synagogues).
Religious Zionists (not Haredim) on the other hand generally believe that the return to Israel is an early sign of redemption and there is some work going on to prepare (surprisingly they managed to find a couple of pure red heifers in Texas
which supposedly haven’t been seen in thousands of years, but the Haredim basically ignore it).
This quote made me curious about the comparable number in American Christianity, so I looked it up: 14% of American Christians believe that Jesus will come back in their lifetime (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/08/about-four-in-ten-u-s-adults-believe-humanity-is-living-in-the-end-times/ft_22-12-08_endtimes_03-png/)
And then there's the Christians who have signed up for a service where an atheist looks after their pet dog when they get caught up in the Rapture.
Mind you, there have been Christian end-time preachers since before the Romans destroyed Jerusalem (that was also generously supplied with Jewish end-timers at the time). The first generation of such preachers, if you interpret "the world" to mean "all the land of Israel/Judaea", was technically correct.
What a fantastic review, yes I will now have to read this book if only to see how far popular media conceptions of "spys" and "the deep state" is from reality.
I was all exciting, hoping that ACX finally would start to look at things fromt he feline perpsective.
Meow!
Chirrup!
:-)
Someone needs to review Natsume Sōseki's "I Am a Cat".
I don't need to read a book about being a cat.
This is an excellent review. I read it during the initial round and gave it a high score. Just now I re-read the whole thing.
It would be nice if some of our warmongers read this review, the book itself, and get a little more serious about stopping all the murdering and terrorising.
I do admit I feel a little cynicism there, though, since I'm pretty sure those who are making trillions of dollars making and selling weapons are perfectly happy with fully misunderstanding the enemy, because it means we need way more trillions of dollars of weapons.
So we need to force the understanding from the grassroots on up.
One of the problems with selling arms is that many places just want the weapons.
If you want the weapons to keep working and your soldiers to be able to use them, there's maintenance and training. This adds up to far more over time than purchase cost.
But most places want more weapons. And when they break they get more instead.
Training? What's that? We want the soldiers to be able to goose-step! In a colorful camouflage uniform! (Orange and purple anyone?) That's what a soldier does!
So yeah. In terms of money spent on arms, you have a few places that will spend out on maintenance, but for most of the market it's just "can we ship them more?"
Even in the US, the contracts for the next gen stuff probably get much more publicity and get more politicians' speeches than the contract renewal for repairs.
Learning to march in step is a super practical training tool to help develop disciplined infantry that can do well in combat. The US military teaches marching in step for mainly practical reasons.
The Potemkin militaries that buy our weapons but can't fight, like the Saudi military, are not especially good at marching in step. Conversely, we can infer that those parading North Korean troops who can march perfectly in step are likely to be relatively effective fighters on the battlefield. I have no idea if these are show troops or if they adequately represent the North Korea's entire infantry.
Of course, even if Saudi privates were expertly trained, they would still continue to underperform on the battlefield, due to serious pathologies in officer recruitment and advancement. This dynamic plagued the Ottoman Empire to no end.
Weapons manufacturers could simply make trillions of dollars by selling to foreign buyers if they were allowed.
What we need is societal-level incentives such that the smart and motivated people apply their energies toward understanding enemies, and bringing about peace and prosperity.
Somehow we've painted ourselves into a corner where a lot of smart and motivated people are creating weaponry and then causing instability in the world to sell their wares to all sides.
We need to get all those people back on track. Probably using incentives.
If one solution is: "spend the better part of a large country's GDP on weapons, then spend years destroying kids' lives while they romp around in a foreign country murdering" and the other solution is "have a few dozen really genius people understand the enemy, convince the enemy to become peaceful and productive part of society" then we have winning.
Of course we can never get EVERY SINGLE person out of of the situation, so there will always be SOME weapons and SOME psychopaths stirring up trouble. But if we could get 50% of the way to the ideal... that'd be nice. And I suspect with proper incentives in place, we could probably get 90% of the way to the ideal.
Smart and motivated people in the west come to the conclusion that their enemies are anything that is anti democracy or otherwise definable as reactionary, and they are happy to put their energy into creating weapons and propaganda to destroy those enemies. If you want to change this you will find yourself pitted against most of the richest and smartest people in the world. Good luck aligning incentives.
You underestimate how many smart and rich people in the United States are non-interventionist or full-blown isolationist. Do they dominate US policy today? No. But they are a real and significant force and they had much more influence during different times in history. I wouldn't count them out as a spent force. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
Of course, interventionists LOVE interpreting history to make their side sound like the Only Game In Town. For example, there's a super common idea that American isolationists Lost the National Debate in the runup to WW2. That's not exactly "true" or "false," just a highly debatable take. It's a more plausible take that the isolationists did not Lose, it's just that the Axis attacking us made the debate moot. Self-defense is actually totally acceptable under isolationism.
Isolationism is a popular philosophy, but not among educated minorities with wealth and power who decide policy
Whelp, I think interventionism is literally evil, and so when you say "good luck with that," what I hear is "good luck with fighting evil."
Do you see how from my perspective, "good luck with that" just degrades the conversation? I have no illusions that murder or pedophilia or domestic violence are going away in my lifetime. But I really don't see the utility in saying, "good luck with that" to a group dedicated to fighting domestic violence .
What would you suggest? I can think a few potential options: 1) Going into international relations. Institutions like the UN are at least intended to provide avenues to avoid direct conflict. I'd like to think they've had _some_ impact even if it doesn't prevent all war. 2) Technology enabling abundance. It seems to me that war is less likely, outside of strong ideologically driven scenarios when everyone has abundant resources. 3) Direct engagement with ideologies. This book review suggest that avenue. Maybe this can be done with funding or amplification rather than becoming a direct scholar in various aggressive groups.
What else?
> Somehow we've painted ourselves into a corner where a lot of smart and motivated people are creating weaponry and then causing instability in the world to sell their wares to all sides.
Wait, you think weapons manufacturers in the US literally use analysis and lobbying to induce demand by creating more instability in the Middle East or something?
I don't think we're actually good or smart enough to reliably do that, in terms of understanding political and crowd dynamics, and then in terms of being able to successfully execute exactly the intended intervention. Like, this is a level of competence far, far above anything we've seen with the CIA's cack-handed attempts to intervene in any other country's politics. And it's certainly far above almost every corporations' competence.
I mean, think of Google, which literally has tens of thousands of extremely smart Phd's and knows literally everything about everyone via apps and the search engine and Chrome browser and Android phones - how intelligently do they use that data? How often do you see online ads you actually click on or buy anything from? Approximately never? Well, the CIA's level of talent is far, far below Google's.
I really think the level of "demand" for weapons is organic.
> We need to get all those people back on track. Probably using incentives.
How would this even work? Like, you get a job offer from a weapons manufacturer or DOD consulting co, and you take it to your fund and they'll pay you more not to do it? How would this not just straightforwardly increase the comp for working for DOD and weapons corps, thereby incentivizing even MORE people to apply for them?
> How often do you see online ads you actually click on or buy anything from?
That's not Google's success criterion - they just need the advertiser to think you might, and thus pay for the opportunity.
> Wait, you think weapons manufacturers in the US literally use analysis and lobbying to induce demand by creating more instability in the Middle East or something?
i think there was a retroactively-famous interview with Dick Cheney - you may be able to find it on Youtube - from shortly after Bush Senior's war in defense of Kuwait, explaining how they didn't topple Saddam's regime because it would be a horrible quagmire and, ultimately, destabilize the entire region.
Then Bush Junior actually did that, and sure enough it was a horrible quagmire destabilizing the entire region, from which certain defense contractors profited.
> That's not Google's success criterion - they just need the advertiser to think you might, and thus pay for the opportunity.
It does go one level deeper though - there's tons of analytics available when you buy Google ads, and everyone who buys them *very much* pays attention to their conversion funnels. So they look at how many pause over the ad, how many click, how many add an item to a cart, how many complete a purchase, etc, and that informs what they're willing to pay for any ads in the future.
And that conversion-funnel info is coming pretty much exclusively through Google, so they're free to lie about it, or (more deniably) create a safe ecological niche for bots and automated bullshit generators to lie on their behalf. Or, with monopoly power, simply tweak the algorithm to conceal those who refuse to pay. "Nice SEO you've got there. Be a shame if something... happened to it."
And indeed, if the best option to sellers is a conversion funnel where maybe 1 in 1000 people seeing the ad will buy something on a good day, that's where they put their money.
If there was some other more cost-efficient way of getting sales, everyone would switch.
"Wait, you think weapons manufacturers in the US literally use analysis and lobbying to induce demand by creating more instability in the Middle East or something?"
It's actually incredibly simple to increase instability in a region. You don't have to know exactly how things will play out! No precise outcomes needed. Just stir the nest and wait for the arms orders to come in. It doesn't really matter who makes the orders when, just as long as the orders keep coming.
The great thing is that you can destabilize for profit while you're simultaneously pursuing specific policy goals for the American government that you are deeply connected to. Even if most of the specific policy goals are left incomplete, you're always marketing for your weapons, so no effort is wasted.
Of course, this is just a theory and I can't prove it! But a lot of knowledgeable people have endorsed this theory or something like it. See President Eisenhower's legendary speech warning against America's military-industrial complex.
I'm guessing there's an 80 percent chance this theory about the US defense industry is true. That leaves plenty of room for doubt, but it matters less than you might think whether the theory is true or not.
Let's say the military-industrial complex is so reckless and irresponsible that they're accidentally causing instability around the world. Even in that case, the leaders of the complex are so dangerous to humanity that they need to be separated from any lever of power, public or private. Maybe removed from society altogether.
My alternative view is not that agents for arms dealers are performing international destabilization but rather:
1) The US will meddle in regimes it doesn't like. Sometimes this works out, but usually this just causes destabilization and the chaos may end up being a better situation (for the US) or might not - hard to tell with chaos.
2) Weapons manufactures are going to try to sell their wares wherever they can. If the US likes a country, they can sell there. If the US starts meddling with a country, there will be some way found to fund an opposition that supports the US, and that group will be able to use those funds to buy weapons. In fact that usually is how it is structured - no aid in the sense of a cash or a check is deposited in a foreign bank. The money is held in US accounts that go to purchasing weapons. So basically the US government is buying the weapons and giving them away even if things aren't legally structured that way.
But this condition doesn't require direct action from the arms manufactures ... except in the indirect sense of funding and supporting a congress supportive of the overall system.
Have it your way. Whether I'm right or you are, very nasty things need to happen to the leading lights of the military-industrial complex. What do you call it when you do reckless endangerment on a grand scale and a million people die? We don't have a specific term for that, but if you cause an accident on that scale, you need to be treated like a criminal. (I'm talking about decision makers mind you, and I'm including Congresspeople.) "Who has the right to do that?" I don't know, anyone who can? There's a lot at stake. One of these days, the reckless process you describe will trigger a nuclear war and devastate humanity. If it is mere "recklessness."
Fascinating. What's also fascinating and scary at the sand time is that it seems that the jihadi don't fight to win, in a conventional sense.Their aim is eschatological, not worldly political. "Winning" happens in the "empty 4".
This all reminds me (toutes proportions gardées) of the way some pro abortion activists seem completely unable to accept the moral argument of the anti abortion ones (it's not an argument I agree with at all but I don't find it difficult to believe that yes, they really do genuinely believe it's killing). And in the same way as I am 100% certain the jihadis (or, for that matter, any other theist) are wrong, I absolutely believe that many actually genuinely are motivated by the beliefs that to me seem completely, obviously, clearly wrong. The counter radicalisation efforts must surely take this into account: it must be easier to persuade someone that the voice of the prophet was falsified or misinterpreted than that the prophet was not a prophet and theres no god.
I wonder if you could bargain with the jihadis to let them fulfill their prophecies in harmless ways. Like tell ISIS "If you promise to knock off the brutality, we'll send some marines to Dabiq, hang around for a few hours, then retreat once you show up."
I feel a sequel to Unsong coming along..?
And Rome will probably became Muslim-majority relatively peacefully soon enough without any further jihadist involvement. Is there the full authoritative list of prophecies available somewhere?
Muslims make up 2.3% of the population of Italy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Italy#Present_day So I don't think that soon.
If they gathered within the municipal boundaries of Rome, would that do? Or if the municipal boundary of Rome was redefined to be a couple of blocks (for Islamic theological versions of "defined" - is there anything like an Eruv in Islam?...).
( How far into "fulfilled via a technicality can one go before it turns into mocking? :-) )
Just expand Vatican City to cover all of Rome except majority-Muslim neighborhoods.
Elegant! Many Thanks!
So the complement of the expanded Vatican City becomes the revised Rome, which is majority Muslim. Can gerrymanders be nonplanar, to allow both to claim to be contiguous areas?
Sahih al-Bukhari is the most definitive collection of ahadith for Sunnis, and Sahih Muslim is considered a close second. You'll want Sahih al-Bukhari 92 & Sahib Muslim 52 & 54, I believe.
Are we sure the "Rome" in prophecy isn't Constantinople? That one was famously conquered a while ago. There's a song and everything.
Anyone writing about "The Romans" in 7th century Arabia was probably thinking about New Rome, not the ruins of Old Rome. So this one was achieved about 600 years ago.
"Rome" cam mean Europe/Christendom in general.
Akshually *pushes glasses farther up bridge of nose* in SOME cases, they *did* distinguish between "(the city of) Rome" (Rūm[a]) and "Constantinople" (al-Qustantiniyyah)—although I am aware of only a single instance in which this is for sure & explicit: a hadith wherein the Prophet (...ﷺ)¹ is asked which shall fall first, Constantinople or Rome (he responds that "the city of Heraclius will fall first").
You're correct, though, in that references to "Rūm(a)" mostly DO seem to refer either to the Eastern Empire as a whole, or else to the area around Syria & Lebanon... this latter of which, as it has been decided, being what the Prophet ﷺ /really/ meant* when he said that Rūm would be conquered.
(Or, possibly, that he meant this area when he Rūm some times, but in the hadith prophesying that upon Rūm's conquest it would rise up again & this is a sign of the End Times he meant the entire thing.)
*This is, as far as I can tell, is based upon A) one of the Companions is recorded to have listed the conquest of Rūm as one of the five signs (separate from the conquest of Constantinople, which might be another one of the five—IIRC) that had already come to pass, but that was only after the Roman provinces in the Middle East had been conquered— therefore...; and B), some other narrations don't sound so accurate, given the timelines therein, if Rūm wasn't conquered a long time ago—therefore...
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¹: help I can't stop now
There is indeed some debate in Islamic circles over whether this is allowed, or whether it equates to sort of trying to "rush God into doing things before He's ready".
I found that there's actually surprisingly little information, online, about this sort of thinking, considering the huge influence & long track-record it has had.¹
Like, I was watching a YouTube video, from a big-name creator famous for doing "deep dives", on unusual splinter groups/cults/fringe sects; it had a section on the 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca—and to my surprise, there was no mention of /why/ Juhayman al-Otaybi chose to do many of the things he did!
E.g., the creator noted that he had made sure to enter Mecca from the north, but wasn't clear on exactly why; and there was no mention at all of his brother-in-law... but both of these things are super important to understanding the motivation:
• Ahadith state that the Mahdi will enter Mecca from the north, fleeing unrighteous persecution, and take shelter in the Ka‘abah;
• The Mahdi is supposed to be named Muhammad bin Abdullah: Muhammad, son of Abdullah—since ahadith state that the Prophet (...S.A.W.) said the Mahdi would share his name & his father would share his father's name;
• You'll never guess the brother-in-law's name... unless you might guess it to be something like "Muhammad bin Abdullah al-Qahtani"! (Well, okay, that last bit would be hard to guess, I suppose—but you know what I mean, alright.)
• Ahadith /also/ say that when the righteous man (i.e. Mahdi—cannot remember if this identification is made explicit in some or if it's just the accepted interpretation, though) fleeing the evil armies enters Mecca from the north ("as if coming from Medina"), and takes shelter in the Ka‘abah, Allah will thence cause "the earth to swallow up" the pursuers... and then the End Times will really get crackin'!
Hence, al-Otaybi was actively setting out to create conditions under which the ahadith about the beginning of the End Times would be fulfilled. At the time I was watching the video, almost none of this was on Wikipedia (which is probably why the creator missed it, heh)—and I think even now only the bit about the name is on there.
(Interestingly: I cannot swear to it—don't recall the source; if there's interest I can try to find it again to verify, though—but I have read /somewhere/ that al-Otaybi & al-Qahtani & co. were extremely dispirited by the failure of Allah to cooperate in their plan, and that this is one of the reasons they began releasing hostages & didn't put up as much of a fight—at the last—as they could have, surrendering after less fighting than had been expected... though the ultimate bill was still pretty costly, in terms of lives.)
Understandably, the Saudi authorities were not too happy about the attack, and IIRC some sheikhs expounded fatwas against this sort of thing—"Allah knows best, it is on His schedule not yours, you cannot trick or manipulate the Most High, this is not righteous to do", etc. (But, of course, there are always clerics ready to take the other side, and I'm not sure how eminent the fatwas against were/have been, or how effective.)
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¹: (likewise, some of the comments herein have surprised me by the things /they/ were surprised about—e.g., SkinSallow's right above this; I forget that I consume an unusual amount of Islamic media, and from unusual sources—for a degenerate kafir, I mean–)
Thank you very much, if this is correct it's very interesting to me.
Where can I read about this theological debate on the validity of rules lawyering the prophecies?
Yasir Qadhi did a thing on it (in opposition to the idea)—I can't remember the title, but I'll know it if I see it again, so if you'd be interested in hearing a lecture (rather than reading) about it I can probably find it again pretty quickly.
The /support/ for the "rules lawyering" I've seen is mostly second-hand, either through people on e.g. Reddit claiming that this or that sheikh said it's fine actually, or through inferring that some group thinks it's fine by their... well... trying to do so in practice, heh. (Unfortunately, I have been hampered in trying to track down the primary sources referenced because my Arabic is execrable... but in another ten or twenty years I'm pretty sure I'll finally be able to read al-fusHa without looking at a grammar textbook more than every /fifth or sixth/ word!—)
This is crazy, thanks for sharing! These prophecies do indeed drive a lot of their actions!
Some might agree. But there's always the hardliners who won't be satisfied with anything but blood.
Problem is that just lets them refocus on the rest of the checklist, and I don’t see a harmless way to give them Jerusalem.
Well... What counts as "give them Jerusalem"? Could it be reduced to a Muslim mayor?
Would they consider Jerusalem, Ohio?
Committing up front to have the marines retreat when challenged would mean they weren't truly defeated. Better for morale might be something like... build a sports field, then set up a nonfatal, semi-ritualized battle, planned to repeat 'til they win hard enough to consider the prophecy fulfilled. Maybe an annual marines-vs.-jihadis rugby match?
As a practicing theist, I feel like this wouldn't be acceptable. But for the same reason I don't think it makes sense to try to game the system by fighting an actual war there either.
God is going to move when he's ready, and trying to create a battle in a particular place or breed a red heifer (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/readings/forcing.html) both seem equally incompatible with God being sovereign. If it's the right time, and the prophecy is true, then nothing man can do can stop it. If it's not the right time, or the prophecy is false, then man isn't creating it either.
Of course, inasmuch as I don't believe in their prophecy, if they were willing to accept that kind of compromise, I'm all for it! I don't think they would accept it either though, as that sounds like a sham and they're expecting a real battle as part of a real Holy War.
This review is so good I only read the first couple of paragraphs and went and bought the book.
Almost sure this one will get my top vote. There will be more but this one seems hard to surpass.
So, can we infer that nobody has managed to bend a hadith to make it sound like it is about Ukraine?
> It’s kind of surprising that so many different ideologies converged on this counter-intuitive strategy that didn’t really work for any of them
I am suprised this is hard for some people to answer, the author focused on the groups who did this (which are a small contingent of communists, nazis and even jihadists).
Hitler held until the bitter end, Himmler surrendered. Russian terrorists tried to bring out communism quickly but vanguardists relatively bided their time, mensheviks compromised. Plenty of Islamist organizations in Europe who hold extreme views but relatively limit themselves to just preaching.
Cruelty thesis is ok, why not. Its not a good full picture.
Putin's (non-) role in the bombings is the consensus view for people actually familiar with contemporary Russia. The enormous Short biography recently released argues for it very convincingly. It is only really Westerners and the more conspiranoical bits (or chunks) of the Russian opposition that claim otherwise.
Wikipedia at this moment claims that false flag is the "hypothesis favored by experts". Of course, that Wikipedia is ideologically captured isn't really news, but I was surprised by the recent report of how much influence one malicious actor could wield in his area of interest. (Reliable Sources by TracingWoodgrains, for those interested).
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin
“Short biography” is not a great google term. Could you clarify?
https://www.amazon.com/Putin-Philip-Short/dp/1627793666
Sorry; see Mark's reply.
What an incredible and educational book. I very much enjoyed reading this review. It was illuminating.
Quick note on the bomb soaked in rat poison: this sounds simple and juvenile but ended up being surprisingly effective. Whether the bomb-makers fully planned out the end results or just grabbed the nastiest stuff under the sink, the chemical was a powerful anti-coagulant, and it had serious knock-on effects for the victims and medical infrastructure. Because of the poison, many victims bled out through relatively minor shrapnel wounds and doctors used up a shocking amount of Israel's blood bank reserves keeping people alive before they figured out what was going on.
Not a suggestion please, but is there a reason anti coagulants (rat poison is super cheap) aren't used more generally as an additive in grenades or bullets? Is it the same logic that says giant mines are fine but expanding bullets aren't?
From a military perspective, there isn’t a huge difference between wounded and KIA. Those wounded by grenades and bullets are usually out of the fighting for good.
Maybe tactically in terms of relevance for a battle. But it makes a very big difference for fighting a longer war whether, say, pilots who bail out survive to fly again later vs getting killed or captured in enemy territory.
Are pilots who bail out usually listed as casualties?
Their plane is at least counted among the losses.
Militaries would probably prefer that their methods for downing planes have a better chance of injuring the pilot, but I think the calculus is still that anything likely to kill the pilot is likely to just injure them enough to never fly again, and narrowing the gap between wounded and killed is usually not worth the extra complications
I've heard a claim that injuring is sometimes better than killing - building hospitals and hiring doctors to work in them to maybe eventually get a soldier back into fighting shape can be more expensive than just recruiting and training a new soldier.
I think pilots who bail out may be a unique circumstance where it's plausible to be taken out of the fight while not being injured at all. A pilot is back in the fight as soon as they have a plane, and a new pilot needs a plan as well.
I think that depends on how expensive the training is. During WW2, the Axis nations had to skimp on flight training late in the war and their novice pilots got killed off en masse in "turkey shoots".
There's also the "double tap" tactic: wound someone, wait for the medics to come out, then get them too.
<morbidHumor>
If there were a deity of earthquakes, aftershocks would suggest it is fond of "double tap" tactics.
</morbidHumor>
The problem with this idea is that it's hard enough to shoot down a plane that trying to tweak it specifically to also kill the pilots gets to be wasteful, unless you move to the logical step of "just capture and kill the pilot, who cares if he's hors d'combat or not", which is a bit too far for Western militaries.
Wounding can even be preferred to killing, because taking care of a wounded soldier is more expensive than burying a dead one. The SS murdered wounded German soldiers for this reason.
WIA are a bigger burden on the enemy force, this is one reason small booby traps are popular insurgent tactics.
The same treaty that prohibits expanding bullets--The Hague Convention of 1899--prohibits poisoned arms. (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/hague02.asp#art23 and )
Of course, it also prohibits using artillery shells to spread poison gas and, well, WWI.
I suspect the real reason no one has decided to infringe that requirement is that it would be more trouble than it would be worth. I think we can safely assume that Hitler, Stalin, Putin etc were not bothered by moral issues.
Yep. Explosives are simply more effective, pound for pound. https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/
This is one of those comments which adds interesting context, but pressing 'like' might get me on a watchlist
I found this one of the most interesting ones to date - I am not sure it is the best book review, but it is the one I got most from, so maybe that is enough?
I've long accepted that in the local dialect, "book review" just means "post about a book".
"We have all since learned that journalists are strangely committed to sharing people’s real names, but I wouldn’t have expected it to extend to literal spies inside al-Qaeda."
Journalists get their satisfaction from 'getting the story out'. The more details, the better the story.
Other people's livelihoods or even lives are often secondary to that.
You tell a journalist something secret. Maybe they don't put it in the story, maybe they do. There's a balance there. Can you get them other stories, and will what they put in the story affect your ability and willingness to do so?
In this case, some other person told the journalist too much. That journalist owed nothing to Dean. At most the journalist considered whether there were more stories in that insider, and it ended up being "nah". So, publish away.
In this particular case, it's a shame this journalist outed this particular agent.
But I don't believe in a general right to anonymity. If I am doxxed and I lose my job for something I wrote here, I'll put the blame primarily on my shoulders for posting carelessly.
Would I have a negative view of my doxxer? Absolutely, but in my case, I'd be constrained from using any more serious ad hominem then "busybody." I have a different attitude about different individual cases of doxxing.
I do not have a blanket view on doxxing in general, and I don't see why ANYONE should. The devil is in the details with this issue.
I think a right on the line of 'nobody should ever be doxxed, ever' is about as enforceable as a right 'nobody should ever be yelled at in the streets, ever'.
For neither one would I support a minimum sentence of one year of jail.
But we have softer norms than laws. If you yell at people in the street, that generally makes you an asshole. If you doxx people, that also generally makes you an asshole. Society practically depends on most of the people following most of the norms most of the time, we do not have the state capacity to enforce laws for any trivial infraction everywhere and always.
I believe anonymity in the marketplace of ideas to be net good, so I encourage norms to preserve anonymity.
> I do not have a blanket view on doxxing in general, and I don't see why ANYONE should. The devil is in the details with this issue.
I have a blanket view on doxxing to the same degree I have a blanket view on shooting people in the face: in most circumstances, either is bad.
However, just like there sometimes arise facts which make shooting someone in the face good and virtuous, there can be circumstances where determining the identity of an anonymous voice is good. For example, if an anon claims to be a kindergarden teacher and also campaigns for legalizing sex with kids, then their employer should probably be aware of their online persona. (I would prefer if they just monitored that person really closely instead of summarily firing them, but think that is unlikely given their incentive landscape.) Or if a celebrity is arguing with an anon voice ('you won't believe what my outgroup says!'), and it turns out that that anon voice is a sock puppet of them, I would think it justified to proclaim that fact, even though that would technically doxx that anon voice.
But the central case of doxxing is some twitter mob figuring out the identity of someone who said something outrageous but legal on twitter, and getting them fired from their job at home depot, and that is net negative and we should have social norms around it, no matter if the left or right are doing it.
The main fault is with the member of the intelligence community who leaked info to a journalist.
Now, I have quite some sympathy for whistleblowers. If Edward Snowden thinks that his agency is doing wrong and the public has to know about it, and sacrifices his career and ability to stay in the western world over it, that is one thing.
Nor do I have a strong position on political leaks. If whatever embarrassing tidbits from the Trump White House or the Dobbs decision are leaked, that is just Washington.
But if you work in an intelligence agency and think it is a good idea to (a) talk to a journalist and (b) mention details about active intelligence assets in terrorist groups, then you have failed so hard on opsec -- which is a core part of your profession -- that you should have picked a job with lower opsec requirements, like a cashier. Whatever good you did during your career, you have just turned net negative. At the end of the day, pencil pushers in Langley, even genius level ones, are not in limited supply. Jihadi assets very much are.
I mean, I can get the urge to talk to the press. Your team is doing important work, sometimes thrilling, and at if you succeed you will be unsung heroes apart from some very redacted presidential press releases until the details get declassified 50 years later, perhaps. But that was in the fucking job description. If you can't control your urge to talk then you are as unfit for your job as a pope who can't control his urge visit brothels would be.
Of course, the other failure is that US intelligence attempted to deduce who the British informant was in the first place. For practical purposes, knowing that the one out of a group of ten is likely an informant, and you should keep the Brits in the loop if you drone strike any of them is likely enough. Trust your colleagues on the other side of the pond to have calculated the various risks to their asset and given you the appropriate level of information. Instead, it looks like the Americans used their intelligence capabilities to actively connect the dots, perhaps calculating the Pearson coefficient between receiving info and the suspected asset being in the UK, or whatever.
If your group is 100% leak-free, then this would be correct. But you never know this. So you should take a page from the book of terrorist cells and practice compartmentalization, and strategically not investigate knowledge which you are not meant to have. If the next group down the hallway is not allowed to tell you their source, then you should look the other way, not use your intelligence training to steal their secrets like they are your enemy. This also applies if you are separated by the Atlantic. Yes, depending on someone else's assets will hurt your ego, but that should also be part of the fucking job.
I mean, the British likely ended up wishing they had redacted their intelligence more thoroughly -- that is make it less actionable. This is not the equilibrium you want.
Of course, the more cynical take is that the leak was not an accident, but intentional, a causality of office politics. 'At the moment, the Brits are the prima donna because they are closest to that group, but if they were to lose their informant, our asset (some local driver not present for the important discussions) would be the most valuable one, which would greatly increase the importance of our group and improve my promotion prospects.'
I don't think viewing the US–UK relationship as a partnership of equals is helpful. The US views Britain as a vassal to whose secrets it is entitled as a matter of course, and if it's occasionally recalcitrant in turning them over, the US's intelligence agencies are quite capable of acquiring them. Risking the loss of one of the their assets is a small price to pay to keep them in their place.
The point of Britain having a nominally independent intelligence agency is so that it can be used to launder surveillance on Americans.
“The US views Britain as a vassal to whose secrets it is entitled as a matter of course”
How do you know this?
I dislike this review for the same reason I was deeply disappointed in ACX Dictator Book Club. It reduces foreign culture, which western readers already view with suspicion, to caricature. Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to encapsulate enough context in one book to make culture at least somewhat understandable. Which makes authors and readers concentrate on most dramatic and bizarre aspects missing how they are part of greater whole, and restrict legible motivations of foreigners to most basic and understandable for the audience.
I don't have opinion about the book itself, but however little I knew about jihadists before reading the review, I now feel like I know even less.
This book was at least a guy talking about his own life in that culture.
Maybe you're committing the typical mind fallacy? I.e., you're a rational Western person (presumably), so you're thinking, "Nobody I know could possibly be this fanatical/committed to fulfilling religious prophecy, so these guys can't be either, the author is just exoticizing them and reducing them to a caricature!"
Maybe, as depressing as it is, some people really think and feel the way these jihadis do.
By the time someone is making bombs with nails dipped in rat poison, I kind of feel morally absolved of the need to put their actions in "enough context" or whatnot.
> Maybe, as depressing as it is, some people really think and feel the way these jihadis do.
But how do they think and feel? Can you explain process by which fatwas gain and lose popularity? Do you understand how typical religious debate go among such people? Maybe give me a sneak peek on what makes them choose more fundamentalist interpretation of Islam?
I find that after reading the review most people would at once fail ideological turing test, while be certain that they learned a great deal.
> By the time someone is making bombs with nails dipped in rat poison, I kind of feel morally absolved of the need to put their actions in "enough context" or whatnot.
You mistake my call for understanding, for call for sympathy. I morally absolve you of need to portray a single thing about them in positive light, but I personally read about foreign cultures to learn and understand. Unfortunately, I find myself increasingly in minority here in this regard.
Hmm... I read it as being similar to what Western culture used to do a few centuries ago. T