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).
"...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.
Huh that's an interesting idea. Spiritual trade! I wonder if I could give someone 10 bucks now and get back 1 million dollars post-singularity, for people who think singularity is impossible (or definitely doomed).
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.
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.
Hmm... I read it as being similar to what Western culture used to do a few centuries ago. The notion of "checking off" very specific items before some religious event happens sounds just like these guys: https://templeinstitute.org/red-heifer-the-ceremony/
Personally, I'm skeptical of all religions. What personally strikes me as even stranger about all of these checklists is - ok, you think you have a deity that controls all of time and space. And it is very specifically concerned about what happens in a few hundred square meters? Really???
Given a supernatural being who cares about humanity and this particular planet at all, extremely specific geopolitical agendas don't seem particularly weird. There might be some larger reason for it, beyond our current comprehension, or it might be a personal whim.
Imagine a police dog who checks for drugs or explosives, and a circus dog who works some acrobatic routine. They're both off-duty, talking to each other, trying to guess which of them has the more important job, based on the complexity and specificity of what humans are asking them to do, how many people watch them do it, and whatever other information is available to them. They'd never figure it out, right? Too many missing pieces.
Somebody who's seriously hardcore into "God works in mysterious ways" considers themselves to be in roughly that same situation. No point trying to figure out *why* the Lord cares about some particular stick being repeatedly retrieved. Just do it, and maybe get a treat. https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1037.html
>Given a supernatural being who cares about humanity and this particular planet at all,
Yes, that does indeed already encompass much of the weirdness, Many Thanks! Perhaps the less counterintuitive way to think of it is to think of the control of all of space and time as being overreach, and that what's being posited is better thought of as just a terrestrial deity. It isn't as if iron age scripture authors had any idea of the scale of the cosmos, so it would be unreasonable to expect them to make a sharp distinction between "master of the Earth" and "master of everything".
All people act on beliefs they have, the hard part is how beliefs are shaped by society and how they shape it in turn. If you are satisfied with understanding which explains none of it, I don't think there is any point in continuing this discussion.
The book is about one dude and his experience; it's not about the entire Middle East. You're complaining that this guy didn't review a book that the author never wrote.
You are right, I should've worded my complaint better. If reviewer stuck to narrow interpretation of authors personal experience, it would be alright. But he decided to make review not just about half of Middle East, but also invent new "Accelerationist" category to draw conclusions about the rest of the world too.
Yes, e/acc wasn't invented by review, but category of accelerationists ideologies was. As broad generalization that wasn't in the book, it's definitely not "about one dude and his experience"
Accelerationism as a strain of (idiot) leftist thought is my primary familiarity with the word and the comparison used in the review made total sense to me. It's apparently a much younger term, but the thought process goes back a long ways, e.g. "After Hitler, our turn".
> Yes, e/acc wasn't invented by review, but category of accelerationists ideologies was.
I think you're just wrong on a factual level here. Political accelerationism is definitely an existing thing that's more established and better known than e/acc (which is very niche).
I disagree with both your assessment of the review and the Dictator Book Club.
The book and the review were very much not trying to give a broad overview of Muslim culture over the world, but focused on the beliefs of the tiny minority of Muslims who try to use terror for religious reasons.
Personally, I found the claim that prophecies are an important input in the decision process of terrorist groups very insightful -- it is not talked very much about in the west.
If you were saying 'I have lived in Yemen all my life, and only two percent believe that the end times are near and nobody talks about prophecies', then I would update towards the review being wrong.
Instead, your complaint seems to be 'this vaguely pattern-matches against stereotypes, and is in any case less comprehensive than a five year course on Islamic culture, hence we should not update on it'.
You might as well claim that the reporting on the presidential election is not painting a representative picture of US culture at all, but only a caricature. If someone who knows little about the US reads ten minutes about that election, they will learn some important facts about the US, e.g.
(1) There are two opposing parties
(2) They disagree on some key issues and have different demographics
(3) The US is a federal state with different levels of government
That is all knowledge which is helpful to understand the US. Of course, it would be bad to assume 'what I know is all there is to know'. One might mistake a high school football match to be about party politics because one side is dressed in blue and one is dressed in red. Or one might ask in a murder case if the victim was Republican and the murderer a Democrat, or if it was the other way round. Or express surprise that a Texan married a Californian even though one is from a red state and the other from a blue state.
But if one avoids these pitfalls (and has read a decent article which neither distorts the facts nor assumes a ton of prior knowledge), one will come away after ten minutes with a better understanding of one of the facets which shape life in the US.
My argument is that we should be very careful updating on material that has three properties:
1. Closely matches several of your priors
2. Contain novel insight that allow simple explanation for something you thought complex
3. Provide answers to a lot of open questions that are obvious approximations of real answers but deficient in a way you can't immediately grasp
It will get your priors stuck by convincing you the subject is not very deep and you have already mostly got it. Notice that novel insight can be genuine, and your really understand more than before, but the presentation and your mindset made it seem like profound revelation and not just another step on the road of learning.
Let me show you the difference between the review and your analogy with US presidential election using criteria described above:
1. few people would have their priors confirmed by this simplified US model
2. it doesn't provide neat explanation for something complex (if you know enough about US behavior to consider it complex, you already know about elections)
3. It may provide a lot of answers to open (for audience) questions - depends on presentation, if e.g. we got ten minutes of recent debates, it would raise far more questions that answers
So review has 3/3 danger signs, while 10 minutes of content about US election at most 1/3.
To conclude, its actually super hard not to "assume 'what I know is all there is to know'", and we regularly fail at this by thinking that we know enough to make judgements. Dunning-Kruger is everywhere, so we should try to avoid intentionally courting danger. This review certainly doesn't
Many people here have said that the information in the review was surprising, that they learned a lot about the jihadi mindset they didn't know before. I agree with them. I also didn't know, for example, about the importance of prophecy fulfilment in motivating jihadists. Another part of the review that definitely didn't match my priors (and probably the priors of most Westerners) is where it said most jihadists are not evil or psychopathic:
"But the majority don’t seem to fall into this category, or at least they don’t start out like this. I remember that it hit me as a surprise when the book first used the word “psychopath”. It was 100 pages in. Dean had already been hanging out for years with al-Qaeda fighters, he had seen Serbian prisoners of war being beheaded with blunt knives, and this is the first time he said of someone “Wow, this guy is a psycho”. Apparently, most of them weren’t like that."
"2. Contain novel insight that allow simple explanation for something you thought complex"
While there is plenty of novel insight in the book, no simple explanation is to be found. The review says "from the book, you can glimpse three primary motivations for taking up jihad", and then summarizes the three motivations: some are evil, some want to be heroes, some just take their religion very seriously and literally. Note the word "glimpse", which implies that even this non-simple mix of motivations is the reviewer's simplification of what the author said.
"3. Provide answers to a lot of open questions that are obvious approximations of real answers but deficient in a way you can't immediately grasp"
You've just described all of the humanities--and in fact, all of the sciences as well. All models are wrong; some are useful. The world has fractal complexity, and if a book can provide approximations of real answers to open questions, it's doing pretty well.
> "But the majority don’t seem to fall into this category, or at least they don’t start out like this. I remember that it hit me as a surprise when the book first used the word “psychopath”. It was 100 pages in"
It should be obvious if you think about it. Infants aren't born evil, even "psychopath" ones, so of course "they don't start out like this".
> "this is the first time he said of someone “Wow, this guy is a psycho”. Apparently, most of them weren’t like that"
In any group of people there would be always the one who is most unhinged. Pointing out that not all people in the group would behead prisoners with a blunt knife is very low bar. Even literal Nazi party managed to beat it. So no surprise here either.
"2. Contain novel insight that allow simple explanation for something you thought complex"
> Note the word "glimpse", which implies that even this non-simple mix of motivations is the reviewer's simplification of what the author said.
Some thing cannot be simplified, especially if don't explicitly highlight the complex parts which simplified explanation doesn't cover. Either review should have included a lot more details and made review longer, or at least explicitly said what they didnt have space to cover. Jaunty and cynical tone only exacerbates the issue.
"3. Provide answers to a lot of open questions that are obvious approximations of real answers but deficient in a way you can't immediately grasp"
> You've just described all of the humanities--and in fact, all of the sciences as well.
In physics we explicitly assume parts of the world away - like zero friction and air resistance. The answers model provides are wrong, but you have likely culprits and a lot of new open questions - what would happen in model if we do include friction in it?
Humanities usually try to beat it by providing a lot of examples, some of which show the limits of the theory or teaching several different theories covering similar ground.
You know even less about jihadists after reading a book review of a book written by a former jihadist. In what sense is this coherent?
Is it more likely that what you thought you knew was incorrect and you now actually know more? Perhaps this is what learning feels like from the inside?
Or is it your stance that the review of a book by a jihadist has caused you to lose prior information you had on the subject of jihadists through some sort of metaphysical concussive effect?
In my view this review strongly encourages Dunning-Kruger while indeed providing a bit of novel insight. I recognize feeling of learning and it was certainly not it. It was more like browsing popsci reddit in grade school - you learn some cool facts but think that learned the Science (tm), when you've just wasted time. Popsci at least inspires you to try to do real science, but I bet after the review most readers are discouraged from learning more about Middle East.
I absolutely agree that the review was shallow and facile.
I hope I don't get in trouble with admin for saying this, but this review shows the limitations of ACX culture. ACX culture encourages out-of-the-box thinking when it comes to a lot of things.
But when it comes to foreign affairs and US foreign policy, ACX culture rewards hewing closely to tired, mainstream narratives.
How anyone could read the whole review and not learn anything from it is hard to fathom! It sounds like the author's jaunty and in places slightly cynical style somehow disguised to you the plethora of facts in it, and these were specific facts not just vague generalizations.
You've just described popsci reddit - lots of facts but no real framework behind them and no obvious way to dive deeper. I'd argue that for a lot of people popsci is actually bad - they become convinced that it's real Science (tm), and they can learn it by scrolling, while they are just wasting time. I feel the same way about this review - it has some insight but on balance it's bad for people without at least some background in ME affairs (which, to be clear, includes me)
One thing that strikes me ia how literalist they are as opposed to being spiritual, it is not about the glory of fighting the west but trying to make an engagement with western ground forces in one specific village; WMD aren't about scaring or killing people or getting attention, it is about fulfilling the definition as laid out in the WHO handbook presumably written by Western secular doctors. It seems an odd thing to say but for passionate fanatics they seem oddly non-poetic and vaguely autistic.
> I have a theory that "radical Islam" is not native Islam, but Westernized Islam. Over half of 75 Muslim terrorists studied by Bergen & Pandey 2005 in the New York Times had gone to a Western college. (Only 9% had attended madrassas.) A very small percentage of all Muslims have received a Western college education. When someone lives all their life in a Muslim country, they're not likely to be hit with the urge to travel abroad and blow something up. But when someone from an Islamic nation goes to Europe for college, and comes back with Enlightenment ideas about reason and seeking logical closure over beliefs, and applies them to the Koran, then you have troubles. They have lost their cultural immunity.
That might certainly be true. It may also be true that they had culture shock from the decadent and sinful western societies they witnessed, and came to the conclusion that such societies were evil and needed to be eliminated.
Engineers have always been vastly overrepresented in Al Qaeda. Considering the level of vitriol in political discourse, I totally get why a deeply literal person might be drawn to political violence.
It is notable that far left and far right Millernarians are also absolutely obsessed with Israel. Maybe they all reflect a common abrahamic source.
Or possibly all three were influenced by people who read lots of late 19th century antisemitic literature. Do Islamist extremists talk about the Freemasons?
This is long and I haven't read the whole thing yet but the that idea that making things worse until there's a collapse and you come out on top is not that ahistorical. Usually it's outside factors that cause the disasters, but it's a pattern in history. In the French revolution, the incompetence and insolvency of the crown is what led the revolutionaries to be able to seize power, and later Napoleon seizing power from the directorate. In Russia WW1 and the Tzar's incompetence is what let the Bolsheviks take power. In China the collapse of the ancient governments and the growth of warlords as well as foreign invasions is what created an opportunity for Mao.
It shouldn't be too surprising that so many movements converge on accelerationism, and it has nothing to do with morality. It's because they know they can't win by conventional means. They sow chaos, hoping it can weaken the enemy enough to give them a chance at victory. Like a cornered animal lashing out. That's why it's important to put them down quickly.
And I wouldn't say it never works out. The civil rights movement can be described as accelerationist in some aspects, mostly the Malcolm X side of things, and the far-right seems to have a good chance of fulfilling their ambitions.
In any conflict which is not perfectly symmetric, and which involves some persistent "state of play" rather than clean-slate iterations, whoever's currently in the lead will choose tactics which produce less variability, in order to preserve the status quo, while underdogs take risks.
> That's why it's important to put them down quickly.
They're already down - that's why they're lashing out. Killing them all would be both unconscionable and logistically infeasible. The best way to get them to chill and stop killing people probably involves pointing out logical inconsistencies in the pro-violence ideology, and giving them some positive stake in the status quo so they can flex that virtus https://acoup.blog/2024/03/29/fireside-friday-march-29-2024-on-roman-values/ through the medium of, say, solar panel installation instead of bombs.
Acceleration also has the tendency to point out the internal contradictions of a philosophy or way of life. It was very hard for the US to tell the USSR that we were a freedom loving people when 10%+ of our population were literal second-class citizens. Malcolm X provided a foil for comparison, but MLK and other peaceful protesters were even more accelerationist, they just did it in ways that were less directly violent. "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal..." rings hollow if a black man can't eat at a local diner or use a water fountain.
Similarly, Ghandi was able to point out the contradictions in a lot of British thinking through peaceful accelerationism. When a non-violent crowd is beaten up or shot, it makes it hard to say the British were the righteous ones. Or when Ghandi got arrested for making salt at the ocean with a wooden bowl. It was illegal and needed to be illegal in order to prop up the salt market, but it was obviously illegitimate to forbid individuals from walking to the ocean to get a private amount of salt. They weren't doing it for sanitary reasons, and everyone knew it.
"The eventual victory of our ideology is inevitable, either because of divine prophecy, or some “arc of history”. But in the current world order, we are severely overpowered, and there is no clear way how we could win. So we make things worse for everyone until everything breaks down, and our ideology will inevitably emerge victoriously from the chaos. What could go wrong?"
It should say severely underpowered, not overpowered, as overpowered doesn't make sense in context.
This is the type of review I like to see. An informative window into a world I didn't know about before. And "More than you wanted to know: Jihad Prophecies" is way better than the usual EA/Rat plugs.
>It’s easy to notice how eerily similar the jihadists’ thinking is to communist and far-right accelerationism.
Indeed. My interpretation is that it's easier to cast yourself in the role of hero if you are doing something that feels heroic. "Integration from within" is no fun, even if it stands a good chance of success.
I appreciated this review, I feel there was some tension between "jihadists really believe in their religion" and "some people are just evil and will grasp for any ideology which allows them to be evil". I tend towards the former - zeal is an effect of love, excessive zeal is certainly evil but starting with the evil confuses cause and effect.
I'm assuming they're using the more contemporary, right-wing meaning of the term. From Wikipedia:
> While originally used by the far-left, the term has, in a manner strongly distinguished from original accelerationist theorists, been used by right-wing extremists such as neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and white supremacists to increasingly refer to an "acceleration" of racial conflict through assassinations, murders and terrorist attacks as a means to violently achieve a white ethnostate.
Why do you consider it a misuse of the concept? I thought the review's was fair interpretation; I wouldn't consider it _Evil,_ but that's reasonable editorializing.
Accelerationism is support for technological capitalism by its opponents who see it as a evil but necessary stage. By supporting it they want to accelerate its demise. The important part is that accelerationists support the existing order at least in short term not try to blow it up. AQ is more like the original anarchists which were big on wanton bombings and assassinations.
>After some time, there might be no one left alive who even knows if the prophecies were massaged for strategic purposes.
My favorite definition of the difference between a cult and a religion is that with a cult there's somebody on top who knows it's a scam, while with a religion that person is dead.
Given that photographic memories (likely) don’t exist (or, if they do exist, are so rare as to be essentially unheard of), and given the high percentage of fabulists who claim to possess this particular gift, I would regard the rest of his claims with some skepticism.
I don't know how literally to take such claims anymore...several people have claimed I have a "photographic memory", even though I'd hardly claim the same myself, and mostly it just seems to be hyperbolic parlance for "better than average memory". Which gets easier and easier these days as phones turn more peoples' recollection into goldfish. Or like, autists get a +status bonus to certain Knowledge checks, which can look impressive to the right audience, but only cause they aren't testing on all the other domains we didn't inexplicably latch onto - like face blindness, which I'd definitely expect a so-called photographic memory to not have.
That jihadists are more often dissuaded from jihadism when they discover theological inconsistencies in their own belief system, rings true based on my personal experiences.
In younger days, I knew a few dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-Leninists who could potentially have joined groups set on killing leading politicians and capitalists, and generally do “crisis-maximizing”. They lost their faith in Communism not due to becoming aware of communist mass killings in China, Cambodia and elsewhere (they were aware, but that stuff could be defended as “unfortunate but necessary”).
They instead lost their faith due to becoming convinced that Marx’ theory of the inevitability of the falling rate of profit was not internally consistent, i.e. the theory was wrong. Removing the bottom plank in Marx’ theory that the collapse of capitalism is a “scientific inevitability”.
…which goes to show the fruitfulness of taking the theology of believers seriously, if you want to turn them.
What specific evidence did they find convincing? Moreover, mainstream media seems to still push some form of efficient market hypothesis, which has a big overlap with the falling rate of profit contention, so it's not obvious to me what the mechanism is for conveying that evidence.
In my experience, the same nonsensical anti-capitalist statements I heard in 1985 are still regurgitated by the same fringe of (not the same) young people in my (West-German) hometown.
"Rawls versus Marx" is a different ball game. Then you are referring to Marx as a moral philosopher (as Rawls is a moral philosopher). And sure, there are Marxists who believe economics & politics has something to do with "morals". But not the type of Marxists who believe in the inevitability of the falling rate of profit, and the corresponding inevitability that capitalism is doomed. This type of Marxists think of themselves as "scientists", not as moral philosophers. And they usually only smirk when someone comes along talking of "bad moral" related to capitalism, or abstract notions of "moral" at all.
...more generally, science-oriented Marxists - who tend to be STEM-type people - have a rather aloof attitude to moral-oriented Marxists, who tend to be Humanities-type people (while Social Science-type people, Psychologists and Health Science-people tend to fall in-between). This is due to "morals" - according to classical Marxism - being part of the less-important Superstructure of society (= superficial surface phenomena). The Deep, Real Action instead takes place in the underlying Basis (= ongoing technological changes in the productive forces, and corresponding changing relationships between the factors of production - including changing factors influencing human reproduction). In a classic Marxist worldview, being concerned with "moral theory" signifies that you are a well-meaning but not very intelligent person, since you fail to understand where The Real Mover of Things is located.
When I was immersed in this internal culture war in my younger days, moral-oriented Marxists were called "honest progressives" by the science-oriented Marxists. They did not mean it as a compliment.
Rawls would get a similar label: A well-meaning academic professor whose ideas are decoupled from the lived experiences of people, and therefore not connected to any struggle that is actually going on.
I do not share this smirky attitude to Rawls myself, just to make that clear. (Although I do notice that his ideas have had limited impact in the design of social policies around the world, my specialized area of interest.) My point in this context is only that no, Rawls is unlikely to have killed Marx in the eyes of many Marxists.
Marx’ theory is based on a philosophical assumption that only labor produces value. This assumption (which can be traced back to Aristoteles) makes it difficult to empirically test the theory, given the type of data we have available. (This is known as the transformation problem, i.e. finding a rule by which to transform the values of commodities based on their “socially necessary labor content”, into the competitive prices of the marketplace.)
But empirical studies are not crucially important for believers in any case, so such studies hold no potential for getting believers to lose faith. Philosophical-type arguments that the theory qua theory is not internally consistent is much more likely to make believers question their belief. (Notice that - if the author of this book review is roughly right - this is parallel to how pointing out theological contradictions, rather than empirical studies trying to demonstrate that Allah/God does not exists, is what leads jihadists and others to lose their faith.)
So what are the internal contradictions in Marx’ theory that the rate of profit is determined to fall under capitalism? You find quite a lot on the subject on the internet these days. If I should do a Reader’s Digest version, I would point to three types of criticism:
1) The assumption that only labor creates value has shaky philosophical foundations.
2) If you put a parenthesis around (1), the assumption that only human labor produces surplus value (Mehrwert) is on thin ice. For example, if two slaves or workers pull a plow and are fed scraps, they produce Mehrwert for their owner (and are exploited). But if a horse pulls the same plow and is fed the same scraps, this is bookkept as “constant capital” rather than as human “variable capital”, and the horse’s work therefore does not produce Mehrwert for its owner. That this difference is a result of something more than bookkeeping is not philosophically clear.
3) Even if you put a parenthesis around (2), i.e. accept Marx’ “only human labor produces Mehrwert” – thesis, it can be shown that Marx underestimated the countervailing tendencies that can restore a falling rate of profit. Why this is so is quite complex & requires mathematical analysis, but this is the most detrimental critique. Since few strategies are more effective than showing that your intellectual opponents are wrong, even when you accept all the philosophical premises of your opponents.
Thank you for outlining your experience. If historical inevitability is removed from Marxist thought then it is just another (old and not very well empirically validated) economic theory. Sounds like an excellent way to change the terms of the discussion.
Yes, removing "historical inevitability" is the gist of it. What draws many intellecually-oriented people to Marxism is the same reason many intellectually-oriented Jihadists are drawn to theologies stating when and how the End Times comes. (Many jihadists, as well as many intellectual Marxists, come from well-off middle-class families. I believe this is not a coincidence.)
Remove the "ability to predict world-shattering events in the not-too-distant future"- allure from the theory or theology, and it loses its appeal to a certain type of intelligent people. Since then they are not among The Chosen Elite Who Understands Deep Important Things any more, but just ordinary people bumbling about as best they can. Not a type of life-narrative intellectuals want to use to describe themselves, if it can be avoided.
There are many years since I engaged in a systematic way with Marx’ Labor Theory of Value, plus the theory of the inevitability of a Falling Rate of Profit (and hence the inevitability that capitalism will self-destruct). I became convinced by the critics myself, and moved on to other topics. So unfortunately, I do not have any recent book or summary article to recommend.
If one concentrates on what I have called critique no. (3), i.e. if one accepts (for the sake of argument) Marx’ Labor Theory of Value, Heinrich (2013) gives a (fairly non-technical) account of why the long-run rate of profit under capitalism is indeterminate, rather than (necessarily) falling across time. It’s open access. See the section “The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall”- and its Failure (1865)” in Heinrich, Michael. 2013. “Crisis Theory, the Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall, and Marx’s Studies in the 1870s.” Monthly Review 64 (11). http://monthlyreview.org
…much of the debate originates with a short paper by Okishio, Nobuo. 1961. “Technical Change and the Rate of Profit.” Kobe University Economic Review 7, 85–99. The wiki page related to Okishio’s criticism of Marx’ theory is worth reading, as it gives you a flavor of the history of the debate related to the theory of the Falling Rate of Profit:
…Concerning the more philosophical criticism of the Labor Theory of Value itself, Wikipedia has a quite good page on that too, starting with the criticism voiced by good old Eugen Ritter von Böhm-Bawerk, the grandfather of all serious Marx’ critics. Including a nice presentation of the difference between the classical economists, including Marx, who focused on the labor theory of value (an “objectivist” philosophical view of what constitutes value); and the neo-classical economists who dominate today, who instead focus on the (marginal) utility of goods & services for those who buy them (a “subjectivist” philosophical view of what constitutes value). Link:
Agreed. Order is better than chaos per se but sometimes chaos is useful as a means to a better order. In this case the means are killing civilians and the end is mumble mumble prophecy, those are the weak links.
"According to a Pew Research poll, more than half of Muslims believe that the Mahdi will arrive within their lifetime."
Before we mock or feel superior, remember that the a majority of Americans think we are living in the End Times, whether they are Evangelical Christians or climate doomers.
Now it's time for some climate doomer to chime in and explain in detail why No, Actually, OUR Doomsday Prophecy is Real, Thank You Very Much.
Not sure how accurate "majority" is (climate change reliably ranks not that high in most-important-issue polling, evangelism continues its slow decline apace), but It's been a minor disappointment to me that climate catastrophizing didn't fold more after St. Thunberg stopped getting so much credulous earned media. Crushing the head of the snake doesn't work so well if the beast is actually a hydra, or something.
You know, I know you're being rhetorical, but I thought I'd look and and see how many Americans do think we're living in the end times. According to Pew, the answer is 39%. What's interesting is the breakdown of who believes it. Sure, 63% of Evangelicals believe it, and only 9% of Atheists, but one of the big outliers is "Historically Black" Christian churches, with a whopping 76% belief that we are living in the end times. If you break it down solely on race, 34% of whites believe it compared to 68% of blacks. Interesting! As someone who is not historically black, I was not aware that black churches had such a strong emphasis on eschatology.
Well, I figured that was probably the 9% of atheists and the 30% of the "nones" from the poll that seem to believe in some kind of secular end times scenario we're in the midst of. Though I suppose you would really need a separate poll to separate the climate doomers from all the other kind of doomer out there (nuclear war doom, AI doom, population doom, etc).
Yep, I think you need a separate poll. You're gonna get a lot of variance depending on how you word things.
I still hink it's fair to say that Our Eschatology tends to look reasonable and cautious and Their Eschatology tends to look batshit. It's ALL batshit to me.
“Bad things are good, because they bring forward the glorious ___. So do your thing.”
Again, it's easy to mock this as alien to Mainstream Western Thought. Until you remember Wilson's War To End All Wars and the Allies deliberately targeting masses of civilians in WW2.
They took it seriously to not resist the draft and to (largely) applaud when Eugene Debs was imprisoned for speaking out against the draft. But WW2 is a better example. FDR also more or less claimed Allied victory was the key to unlocking world peace, and I know for a fact the public ate it up. FDR may have believed hia own rhetoric, or he may have been telling a “white lie” for the greater good. But either way, the rhetoric was ludicrous.
This was...interesting. Didn't particularly like or dislike it, writing was average, engaging enough to keep me reading (though that's mostly transitive from the book contents), acceptable length. No mention of anthrax seemed a bit weird - was that a complete nothingburger like the nukes?
One reason I want to believe in the Western "economy, strategy, nationalism, fighting against oppression" angles more than It's The Religion, Stupid is that...it helps avoid having a general negative prior on Islam, which doesn't feel correct. But if Dean is to be believed (and the Pew poll isn't encouraging either, nor the events of last year), that's a Tarski penalty to my Bayes points, and I should just go ahead and make the update. This leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I find myself still wanting to walk it back to Just A Few Bad Apples instead.
Still thats why the religion in question matters. Jains would not be flying planes into two towers in Country A because it placed troops in Country B to protect it from Country C because apparently Country B contains the holy sites of their religion. But for Muslim terrorist that was an important motivating factor.
This, I think, is why Republicans haven't welcomed Muslims into the fold, despite the fact that they share so much in common with Christians when it comes to social issues. The Christians know what it is like to have a religion and believe in it, so in that way they can understand Muslims a bit better than secular Democrats. Understand them well enough to know that "live and let live" isn't likely to be a popular opinion among Muslims when it comes to Christians.
Or maybe "don't let weird foreigners" into the country has been enduringly popular throughout the ages, and since conservatives conserve things, they're conserving that, too. The GOP seems equally committed to keeping out "weird" Christian foreigners.
Sure, but once they're here they generally accept them under the big tent if they want in: unless they're Catholics, of course. But then again, that may be evidence in favor of my theory; religious people take other people's religion more seriously than seculars do.
I think it's too early to say Muslims are immune to being accepted under the big tent. That hand is still being played. I think the rapidly unfolding secularization of the Republican party is an underreported story in Democrat circles.
Sidebar: Opposition to abortion is tied way too firmly to religion by Democrats. I think a lot of it just has to do with the fact that Fetuses Seem Like Babies to a lot of us, and no amount of argument is going to change that.
Germany bans most abortions after 10 weeks, and I highly doubt it is motivated by religion. (Edit: 12 weeks)
I also think Democrats underrate how much anti-trans has to do with: how passionate we are about fashion and grooming disputes. God knows how many Americans have been beaten or killed for having long hair. There have been riots targeting men who wore straw hats off-season.
"Abortion in Germany is legal on demand during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy upon condition of mandatory counseling. The same goes later in pregnancy in cases that the pregnancy poses an important danger to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman. In the case that the abortion is because of a rape, counseling is not mandatory."
I do not "highly doubt" this due to religion. The big conservative CDU has many believers - heck, the C stand for Christian.
Just a majority agreed: a pregnant woman who wants an abortion really should be able to get her act together in 3 months, before curettage is needed.
Ah, interesting, I was only like 10 at the time so don't remember/didn't have much ability to follow that news thread...definitely remember anthrax being used as a dead horse joke for years afterwards though, which led to the mental association "wasn't A Thing". But I guess it was! That's an incredible amount of resources dedicated to solving a very small amount of direct harm, pretty good Terror ROI.. Guess it buttresses the review's point that we've indeed often Step 2'd to the Jihad Success In Five Simple Steps plan. There really is something more terrifying about CBRN threats, no matter the actual green eyeshade calculus. (Would have been interesting to explore why - wonder if the book discusses.) To mirror your catchphrase, "Many Thanks!"
Many Thanks! I was 42 at the time, so I followed it then. I guess for some reason I personally don't find CBRN threats more terrifying than other threats with the same probability of harm. Re the resources: Yup, the number of investigator-hours spent was as the same order as the total lifetime working hours of the victims, if they had lived.
Now, if it were a plausible chance that Al Qaeda had gotten hold of a nuclear _bomb_, that would have been different, since potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of us could have been killed. But anthrax in envelopes? To use a venture-capitalistism: It doesn't scale. The odds of any one of us being killed are less than the odds of our daily commute turning us into a meat pancake. Shrug.
Interesting, I am not saying it applies to you, but it always feels like Western seculars want to "protect" Islam in way that their not willing to do for Christianity.
Well, my family came from Asia and I'm not exactly secular (one branch of the family is Jewish, even, the rest are Southern Baptist, or lapsed of either)...but mostly it's I think the long shadow of the GWOT? Used to be a lot more liberal. I remember making a little "Bush Is A Sleazebag" protest sign in elementary school, which was considered too inflammatory, even though most in the school agreed with such sentiments. Then years of growing up bashing rightists and Christian-supremacy nationalism (with occasional actual terrorism too), while denouncing Islamophobia as Not Okay, Diversity Is Our Strength...you know, pretty typical NPR stuff for the time. So it's hard to let some of those old habits of thought go, despite now being warmer to Christians and righter on several axes. Like I don't know how hard to generalize from, say, Hamas...the reactions at home are plenty of evidence for stuff at home, but don't tell me a lot about the greater Islamic world as a whole. And I don't wanna turn into the same sort of nativist-jingoism caricature I once derided, not unless there's really good evidence for that actually being the correct stance...(It'd probably be very different if I lived in Europe, where the issue is more salient.)
Some is also personal experience: certain kinds of demographics are just...statistically likely to be more or less of a headache as customers. It gets harder to reflexively defend people when the representatives I have to service on the regular tend to make my life much more miserable than, say, the kindly old Sunday School grandma with the big cross necklace who wishes me a God bless on her way out. That's just frenquentism, I guess, but...it's not like one *shouldn't* update at all based on lived experiences. So in the end all I can do is kind of equivocate and maybe mouth generic platitudes while being conflicted internally.
First time, I am seeing someone online so openly acknowledging their biases. Very impressed. I will admit I am quite biased in favor of my side (Right) too and honestly can't even pretend to be neutral on many issues.
But interested to know about your Asian Jewish Southern Baptist family? How did that come about?
I think it's a lot like how people feel about cannabis vs tobacco. One is widespread around you right now and annoying you constantly, while the other may be equally annoying, but in your experience just ends with its practitioners on the wrong side of the law. So even if you don't like either of them, you try to dissuade the tobacco/Christianity while trying to remove the legal obstacles to cannabis/Islam. It's not actually in practice more favorable to cannabis/Islam, but in attitude it often feels that way.
Fair enough, I think its a decent analogy. I keep forgetting that Islam is quite new to the Anglosphere West and most locals don't have any historical memory of Islam that could negatively tilt public opinion as in parts of Southeastern Europe, Africa, and South Asia.
I'm pretty sure that the first line "Cats have nine lives but they don’t get involved in jungle wars in the Philippines" is supposed to be a section title. In the review collection doc, it's written in the same font size as as all the other section titles, but it has some weird color unlike the normal bold. I think probably Google Docs or the copying mechanism had some malfunction, and it should be a section title like all others.
I remember that back in the 2000s it was pretty common for New Atheist affiliated people to say that the extreme violent fundamentalists of all religions were the ones who were interpreting their sacred texts correctly, and that this was a major argument against religion. At the time I remember reading an argument, I don't remember who by, that fundamentalist Islam was "Westernized" because it allegedly took its precepts seriously and tried to execute them the same way western engineers took mathematics seriously. In retrospect this view is both wrong and possibly harmful.
I think it seems more likely that violent authoritarian people just use interpretations that justify what they want to do, even if it isn't really scriptural supported. Seeing Dean poking holes in jihadist arguments aligns with things I've read in the past (the Taliban's justification for banning music is similarly specious). I've noticed the same thing with other religions, Jesus and his disciples seemed to act a lot more like laid-back hippies than the modern churches that are obsessed with purity and patriarchal authority. The one that annoys me most personally are the branches of Judaism that insist you can't put cheese on chicken, even though chickens don't make milk.
I think "fundamentalist" is probably a misnomer. It seems like the people we call that aren't people with a more fundamental, basic interpretation of the scripture. They're people with a more violent, purity-obsessed, and authoritarian interpretation of the scripture. That interpretation is likely pretty shaky.
> But really, the writer is constantly complaining how Western analysts are always trying to understand the jihadists’ motivations and plans through their own lens: economy, strategy, nationalism, fighting against oppression. Dean claims that these all overlook a major goal that motivated him and many of his comrades: fulfilling the prophecies.
Looking through western lens was (an to large extent still is) a major blind spot in regards to Russia's motivation in Ukraine as well. People scoff and claims that large chunk of Russian population honestly believes that Ukrainian are misguided Russians and should be brought back in by force to protect slavic culture. Articles like this one[0] are treated like propaganda that, obviously, no-one believes.
I used to suspect that debating Islamic radicals wasn't a great option because they, not the moderates, really have the scriptures on their side: but apparently that's not the case? Potentially big if true!
This review is my favourite in the ACX book-review contest so far. And I take its "surprising announcement: jihadists actually believe in their religion ... I know, shocking" as an opportunity to note something inspired by Dan Williams of Conspicuous Cognition, who last month published an essay on fashionable ideas as a category. My own contender for most unfashionable correct idea: religious beliefs across times and cultures should be taken at face value by default.
Thus, in the case of radical Islam, the lenses of economics, or fighting against oppression, both noted in the review, certainly look more fashionable. In the case of traditional cultures, modern leftists face the problem that taking the religious beliefs at face value could look like putting down non-Westerners. Especially if, lacking "intellectual empathy", one regards these beliefs as inexplicably stupid (when taken at face value).
Most importantly, taking something naively at face value is bound to be less fashionable than "seeing through it". This is true not least in the milieu of Astral Codex Ten or Conspicuous Cognition, where people like their signalling explanations (as I do, usually) and thus tend to interpret religious belief in a signalling framework. But many sophisticated people of remarkably different stripes would agree that "belief-centred" explanations of religious developments are too naive.
Yeah, I just want to say my default is to believe everyone. It's all first level, ground truth of what they think. This is where I want to live. We just tell each other what we think the truth is.
I suspect that the Western researchers who emphasized factors such as economics, etc., weren't actually trying to determine what the Jihadis believed, they were almost certainly trying to predict the liklihood of different types of future attacks. Since Islamic doctrine has remained pretty consistent for almost a thousand years, it probably isn't too useful for that purpose. That said, if researchers misunderstand the actual motivations of Jihadi terrorists, that is a problem.
The review says that sometimes „there is a prophecy with a clear interpretation, so they follow it even if it goes against any strategic reason“, and gives Dabiq as an example. Consistency for a thousand years would not stop the rare researcher who takes their religious motivation at face value and therefore pays attention to the details of their doctrine from forecasting their behaviour unusually well. (I loosely remember Sam Harris talking about something like this, probably indeed Dabiq.)
That might indeed explain that one incident in Dubiq, perhaps, but unless I missed something, the Koran says nothing about ramping activity up in the 2010's generally.
Jihadis should be expected to believe in their own religion, but a problem arises when someone's religion is so extreme that it's very difficult to understand it, esp. when one has almost no similar experiences in one's own background that could provide a referent. This is the problem I'm having with Islamic terrorists (although not just them).
I do wonder about something though. Forty years ago, there were few Jihadis, their organizations were weak, and they were able to cause relatively little harm. Something changed in that time. I would find a comprehensive explanation of what that change was to be extremely helpful.
This probably doesn't explain everything, but the United States was sponsoring the global jihadi movement when it was focused on driving the Soviets from Afghanistan. Pumping who knows how much money into the that ecosystem, which helped it prosper and put down roots.
Then there's just the cumulative effects of Saudi funding for super conservative Wahhabist schools worldwide.
Jihadis also adopted online technology early and have made effective use of if.
I suppose the fall of the Soviet Union, and the consequent loss of funding and other support for the type of left wing terrorism that was typical up to that point was a factor as well.
But also more than just a fall of Soviet Union, the collapse/failure of a large number of more "secular" Arab/Muslim governments (especially against Israel) meant that those visions had failed, and the success of Islamist movements (eg Iran) meant those visions gained credence.
Soviet-sponsored Left Wing terrorism was indeed a part of the Cold War. Though one nice thing about having the American press on your side as a rightist Cold Warrior, was that you could terrorize and murder civilians with far less scrutiny. Out of sight, out of mind.
> E/acc has its vices, but despite its name it doesn’t fit the general pattern: as far as I know, they don’t want to make things worse, so things get better later — they just want to accelerate AI, which they consider a simple good thing. So the above criticism doesn’t really apply to them.
This is a difference in tactics, not philosophy.
Beff Jezos and bayeslord's original "Notes on e/acc principles and tenets" [1] describes Nick Land's Meltdown [2] as the "original founding text for accelerationism", which in turn says that "Nothing human makes it out of the near-future." Meanwhile the "Notes on e/acc principles and tenets" doesn't say that humanity being out-competed by AI ("non-biological substrates") *wouldn't* result in current humans being replaced (i.e. becoming extinct, murdered); but says that this would be *OK* because it is the "will of the universe" that our replacements would automatically be better.
The Jihadist justification for killing innocent civilians is that it's a cost to get to paradise. e/acc's justification for risking the murder of humanity is A) that's absurd and would never happen; B) even if there *is* a risk then it should be addressed by unfettered acceleration of capabilities because any form of regulation or restraint always makes things worse; or C) if it *does* happen it would be the inevitable will of the universe and would lead to the development of a greater and more intelligent civilization, so we might as well get it over with.
e/acc isn't deliberately trying to make things worse to provoke a response because it doesn't *need* to. e/acc believes if they are left alone and free of regulation and oversight, they'll be able to spawn the creation of paradise themselves.
"Meanwhile, it doesn’t seem like the situation around Islamic terrorism has gotten much better since the book was written."
That really surprises me! I thought it was universally acknowledge that Islamic terrorism has been in retreat for a while now. A few decades ago they were doing attacks across North America and western Europe. By a decade ago it was western Europe, the Philippines, Africa, and the Middle East. Now it's mainly just Russia, Israel, and Iran.
I thought that phrase sounded odd, and agree with you. Maybe he means that the level of interest in terrorism hasn't waned, even if it's less successful? Maybe he's including Afghanistan going back to the Taliban as significant even if Madrid hasn't had a bombing in a while.
Africa is in bad shape right now; IS/AQ derivatives have been on the march especially in Mali (my understanding of the ground truth is that basically they have control of the whole country except for the capital and a few other towns/cities, but it's not usually framed that way), along with Somalia and Mozambique. The Nigerian Army has really struggled dealing with their IS variant.
Then of course there's Syria and Libya which still have active civil wars going on with varying degrees of Islamic groups having success, Afghanistan is run by an Islamic group again-relatedly, Pakistan has been having a bunch issues out in the FATA.
Western Europe/North America does seem to genuinely be a success, although how much of that is credible to a massive surveillance system and how much to just letting a bunch of jihadis go seek Paradise in Syria is a fair question. Some of it (especially in the US) is that a lot of the attention that was directed at jihadis got transferred to the CVE/Domestic Terrorism world; some of it is that even successful attacks don't really get remembered anymore (2015 San Bernardino attacks, 2017 NYC truck attacks) or don't get remembered *as Islamic extremism* (Pulse Nightclub attack would be the exemplar of this). There's still a fair amount of "minor" attacks that happen (eg only a few killed), especially in Europe, but it's reached a level that people don't notice.
As always, a major argument can be had about just how "jihadi" some of these groups are.
TLDR, Islamic terrorism is probably as bad as it was 10 years ago, but it's bad in places that we've functionally stopped carrying about (Ukraine having sucked up a lot of the attention that might have otherwise been focused on this).
OK, this is the best review so far, not in the least because it actually discusses book's content instead of being a rant loosely based on book's theme, an author's biography or a "clever" gimmick.
On content: I wonder if debating jihadists would work at all. It seems to me the book's author already had a seed of doubt planted in his mind, and so finding flaws in Al-Quaeda's sheik's arguments worked for him. But he was convincing himself. In a two-sided debate about the same document, most people would probably just say "well, MY interpretation is clearly a proper one, and you suck donkey balls". I mean, even for me, it's easy to argue that the West is using Muslim civilians in the same manner as Mongols: any one that is buying anything from the West funnels money into American war machine that fights jihadists, which is clearly no different from pushing a siege tower toward Muslim city's walls.
I want to add that I think there's at least one other major reason young men become jihadis: lack of perceived better options. They have no job, no wife, and no prospects, and maybe an older brother or a cousin who's already involved with jihad and can give them an in, and jihad seems like their best career option, plus they also get some level of respect, and a surrogate family if their relationship with their own family is bad, and the prospect of glorious martyrdom. I get the impression that *a* lot of jihadis are the kind of young men who would be gangbangers if they were growing up in the US in an analogous situation, and that, like gangbangers, a lot of them grow out of it if they live long enough.
Saudi Arabia has a successful de-radicalization program by meeting with Islamic scholars and debating the principles the terrorists had learned. Sam Harris had a great podcast about this (couldn't find it) where his guest talks about how they de-radicalized an Italian convert working for an Islamist terrorist org (possibly ISIS) by showing him about how much of the Quran pulled from older Aramaic texts (it makes sense in context because the convert was some sort of liberal arts major) that made him very knowledgeable about Islam and religions generally. When he saw the evidence and the good points made in debate, he moved to disavow his former connections.
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
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)
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!
-------------
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.)
.
-------------------------
III. (Footnotes, for some reason)
-------------------------
·············
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–)
·············
²: (???)
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³: (felt disrespectful not to capitalize the pronoun, though I think this is, Islamically-speaking, Not Cool.)
·············
-------------------------
.
(...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/!
.
*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.
Huh that's an interesting idea. Spiritual trade! I wonder if I could give someone 10 bucks now and get back 1 million dollars post-singularity, for people who think singularity is impossible (or definitely doomed).
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.
We're talking about both. Constantinople being fallen is considered as half of the prophecy being fulfilled.
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?
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. The notion of "checking off" very specific items before some religious event happens sounds just like these guys: https://templeinstitute.org/red-heifer-the-ceremony/
Personally, I'm skeptical of all religions. What personally strikes me as even stranger about all of these checklists is - ok, you think you have a deity that controls all of time and space. And it is very specifically concerned about what happens in a few hundred square meters? Really???
Given a supernatural being who cares about humanity and this particular planet at all, extremely specific geopolitical agendas don't seem particularly weird. There might be some larger reason for it, beyond our current comprehension, or it might be a personal whim.
Imagine a police dog who checks for drugs or explosives, and a circus dog who works some acrobatic routine. They're both off-duty, talking to each other, trying to guess which of them has the more important job, based on the complexity and specificity of what humans are asking them to do, how many people watch them do it, and whatever other information is available to them. They'd never figure it out, right? Too many missing pieces.
Somebody who's seriously hardcore into "God works in mysterious ways" considers themselves to be in roughly that same situation. No point trying to figure out *why* the Lord cares about some particular stick being repeatedly retrieved. Just do it, and maybe get a treat. https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1037.html
>Given a supernatural being who cares about humanity and this particular planet at all,
Yes, that does indeed already encompass much of the weirdness, Many Thanks! Perhaps the less counterintuitive way to think of it is to think of the control of all of space and time as being overreach, and that what's being posited is better thought of as just a terrestrial deity. It isn't as if iron age scripture authors had any idea of the scale of the cosmos, so it would be unreasonable to expect them to make a sharp distinction between "master of the Earth" and "master of everything".
>https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1037.html
Cute! The wisdom of "Nod. Get treat." - if there had been something real to converse with...
If the person who wrote that book were commenting on this board, would you be telling him how wrong he was about his own experiences?
Or would you be saying he was wrong to tell the truth about them?
I understand that the author and the people he knew acted on the beliefs they had. I don't find that very hard to understand.
All people act on beliefs they have, the hard part is how beliefs are shaped by society and how they shape it in turn. If you are satisfied with understanding which explains none of it, I don't think there is any point in continuing this discussion.
The book is about one dude and his experience; it's not about the entire Middle East. You're complaining that this guy didn't review a book that the author never wrote.
You are right, I should've worded my complaint better. If reviewer stuck to narrow interpretation of authors personal experience, it would be alright. But he decided to make review not just about half of Middle East, but also invent new "Accelerationist" category to draw conclusions about the rest of the world too.
The idea of accelerationists wasn't invented for this review, it's a widely recognized phenomenon merely being applied to a new context.
Yes, e/acc wasn't invented by review, but category of accelerationists ideologies was. As broad generalization that wasn't in the book, it's definitely not "about one dude and his experience"
Accelerationism as a strain of (idiot) leftist thought is my primary familiarity with the word and the comparison used in the review made total sense to me. It's apparently a much younger term, but the thought process goes back a long ways, e.g. "After Hitler, our turn".
> Yes, e/acc wasn't invented by review, but category of accelerationists ideologies was.
I think you're just wrong on a factual level here. Political accelerationism is definitely an existing thing that's more established and better known than e/acc (which is very niche).
I disagree with both your assessment of the review and the Dictator Book Club.
The book and the review were very much not trying to give a broad overview of Muslim culture over the world, but focused on the beliefs of the tiny minority of Muslims who try to use terror for religious reasons.
Personally, I found the claim that prophecies are an important input in the decision process of terrorist groups very insightful -- it is not talked very much about in the west.
If you were saying 'I have lived in Yemen all my life, and only two percent believe that the end times are near and nobody talks about prophecies', then I would update towards the review being wrong.
Instead, your complaint seems to be 'this vaguely pattern-matches against stereotypes, and is in any case less comprehensive than a five year course on Islamic culture, hence we should not update on it'.
You might as well claim that the reporting on the presidential election is not painting a representative picture of US culture at all, but only a caricature. If someone who knows little about the US reads ten minutes about that election, they will learn some important facts about the US, e.g.
(1) There are two opposing parties
(2) They disagree on some key issues and have different demographics
(3) The US is a federal state with different levels of government
That is all knowledge which is helpful to understand the US. Of course, it would be bad to assume 'what I know is all there is to know'. One might mistake a high school football match to be about party politics because one side is dressed in blue and one is dressed in red. Or one might ask in a murder case if the victim was Republican and the murderer a Democrat, or if it was the other way round. Or express surprise that a Texan married a Californian even though one is from a red state and the other from a blue state.
But if one avoids these pitfalls (and has read a decent article which neither distorts the facts nor assumes a ton of prior knowledge), one will come away after ten minutes with a better understanding of one of the facets which shape life in the US.
My argument is that we should be very careful updating on material that has three properties:
1. Closely matches several of your priors
2. Contain novel insight that allow simple explanation for something you thought complex
3. Provide answers to a lot of open questions that are obvious approximations of real answers but deficient in a way you can't immediately grasp
It will get your priors stuck by convincing you the subject is not very deep and you have already mostly got it. Notice that novel insight can be genuine, and your really understand more than before, but the presentation and your mindset made it seem like profound revelation and not just another step on the road of learning.
Let me show you the difference between the review and your analogy with US presidential election using criteria described above:
1. few people would have their priors confirmed by this simplified US model
2. it doesn't provide neat explanation for something complex (if you know enough about US behavior to consider it complex, you already know about elections)
3. It may provide a lot of answers to open (for audience) questions - depends on presentation, if e.g. we got ten minutes of recent debates, it would raise far more questions that answers
So review has 3/3 danger signs, while 10 minutes of content about US election at most 1/3.
To conclude, its actually super hard not to "assume 'what I know is all there is to know'", and we regularly fail at this by thinking that we know enough to make judgements. Dunning-Kruger is everywhere, so we should try to avoid intentionally courting danger. This review certainly doesn't
Let's examine your three properties:
"1. Closely matches several of your priors"
Many people here have said that the information in the review was surprising, that they learned a lot about the jihadi mindset they didn't know before. I agree with them. I also didn't know, for example, about the importance of prophecy fulfilment in motivating jihadists. Another part of the review that definitely didn't match my priors (and probably the priors of most Westerners) is where it said most jihadists are not evil or psychopathic:
"But the majority don’t seem to fall into this category, or at least they don’t start out like this. I remember that it hit me as a surprise when the book first used the word “psychopath”. It was 100 pages in. Dean had already been hanging out for years with al-Qaeda fighters, he had seen Serbian prisoners of war being beheaded with blunt knives, and this is the first time he said of someone “Wow, this guy is a psycho”. Apparently, most of them weren’t like that."
"2. Contain novel insight that allow simple explanation for something you thought complex"
While there is plenty of novel insight in the book, no simple explanation is to be found. The review says "from the book, you can glimpse three primary motivations for taking up jihad", and then summarizes the three motivations: some are evil, some want to be heroes, some just take their religion very seriously and literally. Note the word "glimpse", which implies that even this non-simple mix of motivations is the reviewer's simplification of what the author said.
"3. Provide answers to a lot of open questions that are obvious approximations of real answers but deficient in a way you can't immediately grasp"
You've just described all of the humanities--and in fact, all of the sciences as well. All models are wrong; some are useful. The world has fractal complexity, and if a book can provide approximations of real answers to open questions, it's doing pretty well.
"1. Closely matches several of your priors"
> "But the majority don’t seem to fall into this category, or at least they don’t start out like this. I remember that it hit me as a surprise when the book first used the word “psychopath”. It was 100 pages in"
It should be obvious if you think about it. Infants aren't born evil, even "psychopath" ones, so of course "they don't start out like this".
> "this is the first time he said of someone “Wow, this guy is a psycho”. Apparently, most of them weren’t like that"
In any group of people there would be always the one who is most unhinged. Pointing out that not all people in the group would behead prisoners with a blunt knife is very low bar. Even literal Nazi party managed to beat it. So no surprise here either.
"2. Contain novel insight that allow simple explanation for something you thought complex"
> Note the word "glimpse", which implies that even this non-simple mix of motivations is the reviewer's simplification of what the author said.
Some thing cannot be simplified, especially if don't explicitly highlight the complex parts which simplified explanation doesn't cover. Either review should have included a lot more details and made review longer, or at least explicitly said what they didnt have space to cover. Jaunty and cynical tone only exacerbates the issue.
"3. Provide answers to a lot of open questions that are obvious approximations of real answers but deficient in a way you can't immediately grasp"
> You've just described all of the humanities--and in fact, all of the sciences as well.
In physics we explicitly assume parts of the world away - like zero friction and air resistance. The answers model provides are wrong, but you have likely culprits and a lot of new open questions - what would happen in model if we do include friction in it?
Humanities usually try to beat it by providing a lot of examples, some of which show the limits of the theory or teaching several different theories covering similar ground.
You know even less about jihadists after reading a book review of a book written by a former jihadist. In what sense is this coherent?
Is it more likely that what you thought you knew was incorrect and you now actually know more? Perhaps this is what learning feels like from the inside?
Or is it your stance that the review of a book by a jihadist has caused you to lose prior information you had on the subject of jihadists through some sort of metaphysical concussive effect?
In my view this review strongly encourages Dunning-Kruger while indeed providing a bit of novel insight. I recognize feeling of learning and it was certainly not it. It was more like browsing popsci reddit in grade school - you learn some cool facts but think that learned the Science (tm), when you've just wasted time. Popsci at least inspires you to try to do real science, but I bet after the review most readers are discouraged from learning more about Middle East.
I absolutely agree that the review was shallow and facile.
I hope I don't get in trouble with admin for saying this, but this review shows the limitations of ACX culture. ACX culture encourages out-of-the-box thinking when it comes to a lot of things.
But when it comes to foreign affairs and US foreign policy, ACX culture rewards hewing closely to tired, mainstream narratives.
How anyone could read the whole review and not learn anything from it is hard to fathom! It sounds like the author's jaunty and in places slightly cynical style somehow disguised to you the plethora of facts in it, and these were specific facts not just vague generalizations.
You've just described popsci reddit - lots of facts but no real framework behind them and no obvious way to dive deeper. I'd argue that for a lot of people popsci is actually bad - they become convinced that it's real Science (tm), and they can learn it by scrolling, while they are just wasting time. I feel the same way about this review - it has some insight but on balance it's bad for people without at least some background in ME affairs (which, to be clear, includes me)
One thing that strikes me ia how literalist they are as opposed to being spiritual, it is not about the glory of fighting the west but trying to make an engagement with western ground forces in one specific village; WMD aren't about scaring or killing people or getting attention, it is about fulfilling the definition as laid out in the WHO handbook presumably written by Western secular doctors. It seems an odd thing to say but for passionate fanatics they seem oddly non-poetic and vaguely autistic.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-memetic-immune-disorder
> I have a theory that "radical Islam" is not native Islam, but Westernized Islam. Over half of 75 Muslim terrorists studied by Bergen & Pandey 2005 in the New York Times had gone to a Western college. (Only 9% had attended madrassas.) A very small percentage of all Muslims have received a Western college education. When someone lives all their life in a Muslim country, they're not likely to be hit with the urge to travel abroad and blow something up. But when someone from an Islamic nation goes to Europe for college, and comes back with Enlightenment ideas about reason and seeking logical closure over beliefs, and applies them to the Koran, then you have troubles. They have lost their cultural immunity.
That might certainly be true. It may also be true that they had culture shock from the decadent and sinful western societies they witnessed, and came to the conclusion that such societies were evil and needed to be eliminated.
Engineers have always been vastly overrepresented in Al Qaeda. Considering the level of vitriol in political discourse, I totally get why a deeply literal person might be drawn to political violence.
It is notable that far left and far right Millernarians are also absolutely obsessed with Israel. Maybe they all reflect a common abrahamic source.
Or possibly all three were influenced by people who read lots of late 19th century antisemitic literature. Do Islamist extremists talk about the Freemasons?
This is long and I haven't read the whole thing yet but the that idea that making things worse until there's a collapse and you come out on top is not that ahistorical. Usually it's outside factors that cause the disasters, but it's a pattern in history. In the French revolution, the incompetence and insolvency of the crown is what led the revolutionaries to be able to seize power, and later Napoleon seizing power from the directorate. In Russia WW1 and the Tzar's incompetence is what let the Bolsheviks take power. In China the collapse of the ancient governments and the growth of warlords as well as foreign invasions is what created an opportunity for Mao.
" It’s also suspicious that I can’t find any reference to the prophesied Five Armies of Jihad anywhere on the internet."
Maybe it was a bad Arabic translation of The Hobbit.
> Maybe it was a bad Arabic translation of The Hobbit.
"The Hadith"
Hehe. Somehow I imagine the Tolkien version to be a lot more lighthearted and fanciful.
It shouldn't be too surprising that so many movements converge on accelerationism, and it has nothing to do with morality. It's because they know they can't win by conventional means. They sow chaos, hoping it can weaken the enemy enough to give them a chance at victory. Like a cornered animal lashing out. That's why it's important to put them down quickly.
And I wouldn't say it never works out. The civil rights movement can be described as accelerationist in some aspects, mostly the Malcolm X side of things, and the far-right seems to have a good chance of fulfilling their ambitions.
In any conflict which is not perfectly symmetric, and which involves some persistent "state of play" rather than clean-slate iterations, whoever's currently in the lead will choose tactics which produce less variability, in order to preserve the status quo, while underdogs take risks.
> That's why it's important to put them down quickly.
They're already down - that's why they're lashing out. Killing them all would be both unconscionable and logistically infeasible. The best way to get them to chill and stop killing people probably involves pointing out logical inconsistencies in the pro-violence ideology, and giving them some positive stake in the status quo so they can flex that virtus https://acoup.blog/2024/03/29/fireside-friday-march-29-2024-on-roman-values/ through the medium of, say, solar panel installation instead of bombs.
Acceleration also has the tendency to point out the internal contradictions of a philosophy or way of life. It was very hard for the US to tell the USSR that we were a freedom loving people when 10%+ of our population were literal second-class citizens. Malcolm X provided a foil for comparison, but MLK and other peaceful protesters were even more accelerationist, they just did it in ways that were less directly violent. "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal..." rings hollow if a black man can't eat at a local diner or use a water fountain.
Similarly, Ghandi was able to point out the contradictions in a lot of British thinking through peaceful accelerationism. When a non-violent crowd is beaten up or shot, it makes it hard to say the British were the righteous ones. Or when Ghandi got arrested for making salt at the ocean with a wooden bowl. It was illegal and needed to be illegal in order to prop up the salt market, but it was obviously illegitimate to forbid individuals from walking to the ocean to get a private amount of salt. They weren't doing it for sanitary reasons, and everyone knew it.
Remind me of a chess champion Mikhail Tal "the strategy is to drag your opponent to a dark chaotic jungle, and only Tal will come out"
typo:
"This is a good moment to note that that jihadists in the book are all obsessed with Israel"
should be "that the jihadists".
There is another typo:
"The eventual victory of our ideology is inevitable, either because of divine prophecy, or some “arc of history”. But in the current world order, we are severely overpowered, and there is no clear way how we could win. So we make things worse for everyone until everything breaks down, and our ideology will inevitably emerge victoriously from the chaos. What could go wrong?"
It should say severely underpowered, not overpowered, as overpowered doesn't make sense in context.
This is the type of review I like to see. An informative window into a world I didn't know about before. And "More than you wanted to know: Jihad Prophecies" is way better than the usual EA/Rat plugs.
>It’s easy to notice how eerily similar the jihadists’ thinking is to communist and far-right accelerationism.
Indeed. My interpretation is that it's easier to cast yourself in the role of hero if you are doing something that feels heroic. "Integration from within" is no fun, even if it stands a good chance of success.
I appreciated this review, I feel there was some tension between "jihadists really believe in their religion" and "some people are just evil and will grasp for any ideology which allows them to be evil". I tend towards the former - zeal is an effect of love, excessive zeal is certainly evil but starting with the evil confuses cause and effect.
The misuse of the concept of accelerationism is the only thing I disliked about this otherwise excellent review.
I'm assuming they're using the more contemporary, right-wing meaning of the term. From Wikipedia:
> While originally used by the far-left, the term has, in a manner strongly distinguished from original accelerationist theorists, been used by right-wing extremists such as neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and white supremacists to increasingly refer to an "acceleration" of racial conflict through assassinations, murders and terrorist attacks as a means to violently achieve a white ethnostate.
Why do you consider it a misuse of the concept? I thought the review's was fair interpretation; I wouldn't consider it _Evil,_ but that's reasonable editorializing.
Accelerationism is support for technological capitalism by its opponents who see it as a evil but necessary stage. By supporting it they want to accelerate its demise. The important part is that accelerationists support the existing order at least in short term not try to blow it up. AQ is more like the original anarchists which were big on wanton bombings and assassinations.
Good review of a book that sounds very interesting. The discussion seems quite plausible.
>After some time, there might be no one left alive who even knows if the prophecies were massaged for strategic purposes.
My favorite definition of the difference between a cult and a religion is that with a cult there's somebody on top who knows it's a scam, while with a religion that person is dead.
Wonderful review. Loved going through the text. Would actually like to pick up a book after reading the review it seems but we will see. 👏🏽
>He has a photographic memory
Given that photographic memories (likely) don’t exist (or, if they do exist, are so rare as to be essentially unheard of), and given the high percentage of fabulists who claim to possess this particular gift, I would regard the rest of his claims with some skepticism.
I don't know how literally to take such claims anymore...several people have claimed I have a "photographic memory", even though I'd hardly claim the same myself, and mostly it just seems to be hyperbolic parlance for "better than average memory". Which gets easier and easier these days as phones turn more peoples' recollection into goldfish. Or like, autists get a +status bonus to certain Knowledge checks, which can look impressive to the right audience, but only cause they aren't testing on all the other domains we didn't inexplicably latch onto - like face blindness, which I'd definitely expect a so-called photographic memory to not have.
I'd regard it as an exaggeration. He has a very good memory.
At the very least lots of children is indeed encouraged and succeeded in memorizing the entire Koran
That jihadists are more often dissuaded from jihadism when they discover theological inconsistencies in their own belief system, rings true based on my personal experiences.
In younger days, I knew a few dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-Leninists who could potentially have joined groups set on killing leading politicians and capitalists, and generally do “crisis-maximizing”. They lost their faith in Communism not due to becoming aware of communist mass killings in China, Cambodia and elsewhere (they were aware, but that stuff could be defended as “unfortunate but necessary”).
They instead lost their faith due to becoming convinced that Marx’ theory of the inevitability of the falling rate of profit was not internally consistent, i.e. the theory was wrong. Removing the bottom plank in Marx’ theory that the collapse of capitalism is a “scientific inevitability”.
…which goes to show the fruitfulness of taking the theology of believers seriously, if you want to turn them.
What specific evidence did they find convincing? Moreover, mainstream media seems to still push some form of efficient market hypothesis, which has a big overlap with the falling rate of profit contention, so it's not obvious to me what the mechanism is for conveying that evidence.
Also wondering, but maybe it was Rawls: https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=marx
"Rawls Killed Marx" by Alex Tabarrok
In my experience, the same nonsensical anti-capitalist statements I heard in 1985 are still regurgitated by the same fringe of (not the same) young people in my (West-German) hometown.
"Rawls versus Marx" is a different ball game. Then you are referring to Marx as a moral philosopher (as Rawls is a moral philosopher). And sure, there are Marxists who believe economics & politics has something to do with "morals". But not the type of Marxists who believe in the inevitability of the falling rate of profit, and the corresponding inevitability that capitalism is doomed. This type of Marxists think of themselves as "scientists", not as moral philosophers. And they usually only smirk when someone comes along talking of "bad moral" related to capitalism, or abstract notions of "moral" at all.
...more generally, science-oriented Marxists - who tend to be STEM-type people - have a rather aloof attitude to moral-oriented Marxists, who tend to be Humanities-type people (while Social Science-type people, Psychologists and Health Science-people tend to fall in-between). This is due to "morals" - according to classical Marxism - being part of the less-important Superstructure of society (= superficial surface phenomena). The Deep, Real Action instead takes place in the underlying Basis (= ongoing technological changes in the productive forces, and corresponding changing relationships between the factors of production - including changing factors influencing human reproduction). In a classic Marxist worldview, being concerned with "moral theory" signifies that you are a well-meaning but not very intelligent person, since you fail to understand where The Real Mover of Things is located.
When I was immersed in this internal culture war in my younger days, moral-oriented Marxists were called "honest progressives" by the science-oriented Marxists. They did not mean it as a compliment.
Rawls would get a similar label: A well-meaning academic professor whose ideas are decoupled from the lived experiences of people, and therefore not connected to any struggle that is actually going on.
I do not share this smirky attitude to Rawls myself, just to make that clear. (Although I do notice that his ideas have had limited impact in the design of social policies around the world, my specialized area of interest.) My point in this context is only that no, Rawls is unlikely to have killed Marx in the eyes of many Marxists.
Marx’ theory is based on a philosophical assumption that only labor produces value. This assumption (which can be traced back to Aristoteles) makes it difficult to empirically test the theory, given the type of data we have available. (This is known as the transformation problem, i.e. finding a rule by which to transform the values of commodities based on their “socially necessary labor content”, into the competitive prices of the marketplace.)
But empirical studies are not crucially important for believers in any case, so such studies hold no potential for getting believers to lose faith. Philosophical-type arguments that the theory qua theory is not internally consistent is much more likely to make believers question their belief. (Notice that - if the author of this book review is roughly right - this is parallel to how pointing out theological contradictions, rather than empirical studies trying to demonstrate that Allah/God does not exists, is what leads jihadists and others to lose their faith.)
So what are the internal contradictions in Marx’ theory that the rate of profit is determined to fall under capitalism? You find quite a lot on the subject on the internet these days. If I should do a Reader’s Digest version, I would point to three types of criticism:
1) The assumption that only labor creates value has shaky philosophical foundations.
2) If you put a parenthesis around (1), the assumption that only human labor produces surplus value (Mehrwert) is on thin ice. For example, if two slaves or workers pull a plow and are fed scraps, they produce Mehrwert for their owner (and are exploited). But if a horse pulls the same plow and is fed the same scraps, this is bookkept as “constant capital” rather than as human “variable capital”, and the horse’s work therefore does not produce Mehrwert for its owner. That this difference is a result of something more than bookkeeping is not philosophically clear.
3) Even if you put a parenthesis around (2), i.e. accept Marx’ “only human labor produces Mehrwert” – thesis, it can be shown that Marx underestimated the countervailing tendencies that can restore a falling rate of profit. Why this is so is quite complex & requires mathematical analysis, but this is the most detrimental critique. Since few strategies are more effective than showing that your intellectual opponents are wrong, even when you accept all the philosophical premises of your opponents.
Thank you for outlining your experience. If historical inevitability is removed from Marxist thought then it is just another (old and not very well empirically validated) economic theory. Sounds like an excellent way to change the terms of the discussion.
Yes, removing "historical inevitability" is the gist of it. What draws many intellecually-oriented people to Marxism is the same reason many intellectually-oriented Jihadists are drawn to theologies stating when and how the End Times comes. (Many jihadists, as well as many intellectual Marxists, come from well-off middle-class families. I believe this is not a coincidence.)
Remove the "ability to predict world-shattering events in the not-too-distant future"- allure from the theory or theology, and it loses its appeal to a certain type of intelligent people. Since then they are not among The Chosen Elite Who Understands Deep Important Things any more, but just ordinary people bumbling about as best they can. Not a type of life-narrative intellectuals want to use to describe themselves, if it can be avoided.
Funny how this also applies to climate and AI doomers
I did not think of that...you have a good point.
Is there a book you can recommend that goes through and points out the inconsistencies with Marxism?
There are many years since I engaged in a systematic way with Marx’ Labor Theory of Value, plus the theory of the inevitability of a Falling Rate of Profit (and hence the inevitability that capitalism will self-destruct). I became convinced by the critics myself, and moved on to other topics. So unfortunately, I do not have any recent book or summary article to recommend.
If one concentrates on what I have called critique no. (3), i.e. if one accepts (for the sake of argument) Marx’ Labor Theory of Value, Heinrich (2013) gives a (fairly non-technical) account of why the long-run rate of profit under capitalism is indeterminate, rather than (necessarily) falling across time. It’s open access. See the section “The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall”- and its Failure (1865)” in Heinrich, Michael. 2013. “Crisis Theory, the Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall, and Marx’s Studies in the 1870s.” Monthly Review 64 (11). http://monthlyreview.org
…much of the debate originates with a short paper by Okishio, Nobuo. 1961. “Technical Change and the Rate of Profit.” Kobe University Economic Review 7, 85–99. The wiki page related to Okishio’s criticism of Marx’ theory is worth reading, as it gives you a flavor of the history of the debate related to the theory of the Falling Rate of Profit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okishio%27s_theorem
…Concerning the more philosophical criticism of the Labor Theory of Value itself, Wikipedia has a quite good page on that too, starting with the criticism voiced by good old Eugen Ritter von Böhm-Bawerk, the grandfather of all serious Marx’ critics. Including a nice presentation of the difference between the classical economists, including Marx, who focused on the labor theory of value (an “objectivist” philosophical view of what constitutes value); and the neo-classical economists who dominate today, who instead focus on the (marginal) utility of goods & services for those who buy them (a “subjectivist” philosophical view of what constitutes value). Link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_the_labour_theory_of_value
…I hope these references are of use to you.
> accelerationism is just a general purpose ideology of Evil.
I'd say it's more an ideology of not-the-status-quo. If you want something like a Manichean framing, Order vs. Chaos would be better.
Agreed. Order is better than chaos per se but sometimes chaos is useful as a means to a better order. In this case the means are killing civilians and the end is mumble mumble prophecy, those are the weak links.
In a wat it's a way to get a society out of local maxima. Whether it'll actually succeed to bring you to a better maxima is subject to discussion
"According to a Pew Research poll, more than half of Muslims believe that the Mahdi will arrive within their lifetime."
Before we mock or feel superior, remember that the a majority of Americans think we are living in the End Times, whether they are Evangelical Christians or climate doomers.
Now it's time for some climate doomer to chime in and explain in detail why No, Actually, OUR Doomsday Prophecy is Real, Thank You Very Much.
Not sure how accurate "majority" is (climate change reliably ranks not that high in most-important-issue polling, evangelism continues its slow decline apace), but It's been a minor disappointment to me that climate catastrophizing didn't fold more after St. Thunberg stopped getting so much credulous earned media. Crushing the head of the snake doesn't work so well if the beast is actually a hydra, or something.
You know, I know you're being rhetorical, but I thought I'd look and and see how many Americans do think we're living in the end times. According to Pew, the answer is 39%. What's interesting is the breakdown of who believes it. Sure, 63% of Evangelicals believe it, and only 9% of Atheists, but one of the big outliers is "Historically Black" Christian churches, with a whopping 76% belief that we are living in the end times. If you break it down solely on race, 34% of whites believe it compared to 68% of blacks. Interesting! As someone who is not historically black, I was not aware that black churches had such a strong emphasis on eschatology.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/08/about-four-in-ten-u-s-adults-believe-humanity-is-living-in-the-end-times/
I'm including climate doomers as end times eschatologists. Not exactly the same thing but close enough.
Well, I figured that was probably the 9% of atheists and the 30% of the "nones" from the poll that seem to believe in some kind of secular end times scenario we're in the midst of. Though I suppose you would really need a separate poll to separate the climate doomers from all the other kind of doomer out there (nuclear war doom, AI doom, population doom, etc).
Yep, I think you need a separate poll. You're gonna get a lot of variance depending on how you word things.
I still hink it's fair to say that Our Eschatology tends to look reasonable and cautious and Their Eschatology tends to look batshit. It's ALL batshit to me.
but, but, but... Isn't a Russell Conjugation supposed to have _three_ forms, I/you/they? :-)
Also worth including singularitarians and whatever Eliezer Yudkowsky is.
“Bad things are good, because they bring forward the glorious ___. So do your thing.”
Again, it's easy to mock this as alien to Mainstream Western Thought. Until you remember Wilson's War To End All Wars and the Allies deliberately targeting masses of civilians in WW2.
Nobody actually thought it was the "War to End All Wars" and him saying that was universally mocked by the public
They took it seriously to not resist the draft and to (largely) applaud when Eugene Debs was imprisoned for speaking out against the draft. But WW2 is a better example. FDR also more or less claimed Allied victory was the key to unlocking world peace, and I know for a fact the public ate it up. FDR may have believed hia own rhetoric, or he may have been telling a “white lie” for the greater good. But either way, the rhetoric was ludicrous.
This was...interesting. Didn't particularly like or dislike it, writing was average, engaging enough to keep me reading (though that's mostly transitive from the book contents), acceptable length. No mention of anthrax seemed a bit weird - was that a complete nothingburger like the nukes?
One reason I want to believe in the Western "economy, strategy, nationalism, fighting against oppression" angles more than It's The Religion, Stupid is that...it helps avoid having a general negative prior on Islam, which doesn't feel correct. But if Dean is to be believed (and the Pew poll isn't encouraging either, nor the events of last year), that's a Tarski penalty to my Bayes points, and I should just go ahead and make the update. This leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I find myself still wanting to walk it back to Just A Few Bad Apples instead.
"Take solace in religion"
Still thats why the religion in question matters. Jains would not be flying planes into two towers in Country A because it placed troops in Country B to protect it from Country C because apparently Country B contains the holy sites of their religion. But for Muslim terrorist that was an important motivating factor.
This, I think, is why Republicans haven't welcomed Muslims into the fold, despite the fact that they share so much in common with Christians when it comes to social issues. The Christians know what it is like to have a religion and believe in it, so in that way they can understand Muslims a bit better than secular Democrats. Understand them well enough to know that "live and let live" isn't likely to be a popular opinion among Muslims when it comes to Christians.
Or maybe "don't let weird foreigners" into the country has been enduringly popular throughout the ages, and since conservatives conserve things, they're conserving that, too. The GOP seems equally committed to keeping out "weird" Christian foreigners.
Sure, but once they're here they generally accept them under the big tent if they want in: unless they're Catholics, of course. But then again, that may be evidence in favor of my theory; religious people take other people's religion more seriously than seculars do.
I think it's too early to say Muslims are immune to being accepted under the big tent. That hand is still being played. I think the rapidly unfolding secularization of the Republican party is an underreported story in Democrat circles.
Sidebar: Opposition to abortion is tied way too firmly to religion by Democrats. I think a lot of it just has to do with the fact that Fetuses Seem Like Babies to a lot of us, and no amount of argument is going to change that.
Germany bans most abortions after 10 weeks, and I highly doubt it is motivated by religion. (Edit: 12 weeks)
I also think Democrats underrate how much anti-trans has to do with: how passionate we are about fashion and grooming disputes. God knows how many Americans have been beaten or killed for having long hair. There have been riots targeting men who wore straw hats off-season.
"Abortion in Germany is legal on demand during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy upon condition of mandatory counseling. The same goes later in pregnancy in cases that the pregnancy poses an important danger to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman. In the case that the abortion is because of a rape, counseling is not mandatory."
I do not "highly doubt" this due to religion. The big conservative CDU has many believers - heck, the C stand for Christian.
Just a majority agreed: a pregnant woman who wants an abortion really should be able to get her act together in 3 months, before curettage is needed.
Germany's Christian Democrats are famously not especially Christian.
>"live and let live" isn't likely to be a popular opinion among Muslims when it comes to Christians.
They won't just bill all the non-Muslims their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizya fees? :-)
>No mention of anthrax seemed a bit weird - was that a complete nothingburger like the nukes?
Do you mean the 2001 mail envelope anthrax? https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/amerithrax-or-anthrax-investigation
My personal reaction at the time, was that inflicting a 5/300,000,000 death threat starts to look less like terrorism and more like obnoxiousness...
Ah, interesting, I was only like 10 at the time so don't remember/didn't have much ability to follow that news thread...definitely remember anthrax being used as a dead horse joke for years afterwards though, which led to the mental association "wasn't A Thing". But I guess it was! That's an incredible amount of resources dedicated to solving a very small amount of direct harm, pretty good Terror ROI.. Guess it buttresses the review's point that we've indeed often Step 2'd to the Jihad Success In Five Simple Steps plan. There really is something more terrifying about CBRN threats, no matter the actual green eyeshade calculus. (Would have been interesting to explore why - wonder if the book discusses.) To mirror your catchphrase, "Many Thanks!"
Many Thanks! I was 42 at the time, so I followed it then. I guess for some reason I personally don't find CBRN threats more terrifying than other threats with the same probability of harm. Re the resources: Yup, the number of investigator-hours spent was as the same order as the total lifetime working hours of the victims, if they had lived.
Now, if it were a plausible chance that Al Qaeda had gotten hold of a nuclear _bomb_, that would have been different, since potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of us could have been killed. But anthrax in envelopes? To use a venture-capitalistism: It doesn't scale. The odds of any one of us being killed are less than the odds of our daily commute turning us into a meat pancake. Shrug.
Interesting, I am not saying it applies to you, but it always feels like Western seculars want to "protect" Islam in way that their not willing to do for Christianity.
Well, my family came from Asia and I'm not exactly secular (one branch of the family is Jewish, even, the rest are Southern Baptist, or lapsed of either)...but mostly it's I think the long shadow of the GWOT? Used to be a lot more liberal. I remember making a little "Bush Is A Sleazebag" protest sign in elementary school, which was considered too inflammatory, even though most in the school agreed with such sentiments. Then years of growing up bashing rightists and Christian-supremacy nationalism (with occasional actual terrorism too), while denouncing Islamophobia as Not Okay, Diversity Is Our Strength...you know, pretty typical NPR stuff for the time. So it's hard to let some of those old habits of thought go, despite now being warmer to Christians and righter on several axes. Like I don't know how hard to generalize from, say, Hamas...the reactions at home are plenty of evidence for stuff at home, but don't tell me a lot about the greater Islamic world as a whole. And I don't wanna turn into the same sort of nativist-jingoism caricature I once derided, not unless there's really good evidence for that actually being the correct stance...(It'd probably be very different if I lived in Europe, where the issue is more salient.)
Some is also personal experience: certain kinds of demographics are just...statistically likely to be more or less of a headache as customers. It gets harder to reflexively defend people when the representatives I have to service on the regular tend to make my life much more miserable than, say, the kindly old Sunday School grandma with the big cross necklace who wishes me a God bless on her way out. That's just frenquentism, I guess, but...it's not like one *shouldn't* update at all based on lived experiences. So in the end all I can do is kind of equivocate and maybe mouth generic platitudes while being conflicted internally.
First time, I am seeing someone online so openly acknowledging their biases. Very impressed. I will admit I am quite biased in favor of my side (Right) too and honestly can't even pretend to be neutral on many issues.
But interested to know about your Asian Jewish Southern Baptist family? How did that come about?
I think it's a lot like how people feel about cannabis vs tobacco. One is widespread around you right now and annoying you constantly, while the other may be equally annoying, but in your experience just ends with its practitioners on the wrong side of the law. So even if you don't like either of them, you try to dissuade the tobacco/Christianity while trying to remove the legal obstacles to cannabis/Islam. It's not actually in practice more favorable to cannabis/Islam, but in attitude it often feels that way.
Fair enough, I think its a decent analogy. I keep forgetting that Islam is quite new to the Anglosphere West and most locals don't have any historical memory of Islam that could negatively tilt public opinion as in parts of Southeastern Europe, Africa, and South Asia.
A lovely and amusing book review. Written by a modern-day Mencken.
I'm pretty sure that the first line "Cats have nine lives but they don’t get involved in jungle wars in the Philippines" is supposed to be a section title. In the review collection doc, it's written in the same font size as as all the other section titles, but it has some weird color unlike the normal bold. I think probably Google Docs or the copying mechanism had some malfunction, and it should be a section title like all others.
I think you‘re right, and it actually says „the jungle war in the Philippines sounded cool in the section title“ a few paragraphs later.
I remember that back in the 2000s it was pretty common for New Atheist affiliated people to say that the extreme violent fundamentalists of all religions were the ones who were interpreting their sacred texts correctly, and that this was a major argument against religion. At the time I remember reading an argument, I don't remember who by, that fundamentalist Islam was "Westernized" because it allegedly took its precepts seriously and tried to execute them the same way western engineers took mathematics seriously. In retrospect this view is both wrong and possibly harmful.
I think it seems more likely that violent authoritarian people just use interpretations that justify what they want to do, even if it isn't really scriptural supported. Seeing Dean poking holes in jihadist arguments aligns with things I've read in the past (the Taliban's justification for banning music is similarly specious). I've noticed the same thing with other religions, Jesus and his disciples seemed to act a lot more like laid-back hippies than the modern churches that are obsessed with purity and patriarchal authority. The one that annoys me most personally are the branches of Judaism that insist you can't put cheese on chicken, even though chickens don't make milk.
I think "fundamentalist" is probably a misnomer. It seems like the people we call that aren't people with a more fundamental, basic interpretation of the scripture. They're people with a more violent, purity-obsessed, and authoritarian interpretation of the scripture. That interpretation is likely pretty shaky.
Have you tried reading the Qu'ran?
> But really, the writer is constantly complaining how Western analysts are always trying to understand the jihadists’ motivations and plans through their own lens: economy, strategy, nationalism, fighting against oppression. Dean claims that these all overlook a major goal that motivated him and many of his comrades: fulfilling the prophecies.
Looking through western lens was (an to large extent still is) a major blind spot in regards to Russia's motivation in Ukraine as well. People scoff and claims that large chunk of Russian population honestly believes that Ukrainian are misguided Russians and should be brought back in by force to protect slavic culture. Articles like this one[0] are treated like propaganda that, obviously, no-one believes.
[0] https://www.aalep.eu/advent-russia-and-new-world - accidentally published in Feb 2022, couple days after full-scale invasion
This is the first book review that prompted me to buy the book.
I used to suspect that debating Islamic radicals wasn't a great option because they, not the moderates, really have the scriptures on their side: but apparently that's not the case? Potentially big if true!
This review is my favourite in the ACX book-review contest so far. And I take its "surprising announcement: jihadists actually believe in their religion ... I know, shocking" as an opportunity to note something inspired by Dan Williams of Conspicuous Cognition, who last month published an essay on fashionable ideas as a category. My own contender for most unfashionable correct idea: religious beliefs across times and cultures should be taken at face value by default.
Thus, in the case of radical Islam, the lenses of economics, or fighting against oppression, both noted in the review, certainly look more fashionable. In the case of traditional cultures, modern leftists face the problem that taking the religious beliefs at face value could look like putting down non-Westerners. Especially if, lacking "intellectual empathy", one regards these beliefs as inexplicably stupid (when taken at face value).
Most importantly, taking something naively at face value is bound to be less fashionable than "seeing through it". This is true not least in the milieu of Astral Codex Ten or Conspicuous Cognition, where people like their signalling explanations (as I do, usually) and thus tend to interpret religious belief in a signalling framework. But many sophisticated people of remarkably different stripes would agree that "belief-centred" explanations of religious developments are too naive.
Yeah, I just want to say my default is to believe everyone. It's all first level, ground truth of what they think. This is where I want to live. We just tell each other what we think the truth is.
I suspect that the Western researchers who emphasized factors such as economics, etc., weren't actually trying to determine what the Jihadis believed, they were almost certainly trying to predict the liklihood of different types of future attacks. Since Islamic doctrine has remained pretty consistent for almost a thousand years, it probably isn't too useful for that purpose. That said, if researchers misunderstand the actual motivations of Jihadi terrorists, that is a problem.
The review says that sometimes „there is a prophecy with a clear interpretation, so they follow it even if it goes against any strategic reason“, and gives Dabiq as an example. Consistency for a thousand years would not stop the rare researcher who takes their religious motivation at face value and therefore pays attention to the details of their doctrine from forecasting their behaviour unusually well. (I loosely remember Sam Harris talking about something like this, probably indeed Dabiq.)
That might indeed explain that one incident in Dubiq, perhaps, but unless I missed something, the Koran says nothing about ramping activity up in the 2010's generally.
Jihadis should be expected to believe in their own religion, but a problem arises when someone's religion is so extreme that it's very difficult to understand it, esp. when one has almost no similar experiences in one's own background that could provide a referent. This is the problem I'm having with Islamic terrorists (although not just them).
I do wonder about something though. Forty years ago, there were few Jihadis, their organizations were weak, and they were able to cause relatively little harm. Something changed in that time. I would find a comprehensive explanation of what that change was to be extremely helpful.
This probably doesn't explain everything, but the United States was sponsoring the global jihadi movement when it was focused on driving the Soviets from Afghanistan. Pumping who knows how much money into the that ecosystem, which helped it prosper and put down roots.
Then there's just the cumulative effects of Saudi funding for super conservative Wahhabist schools worldwide.
Jihadis also adopted online technology early and have made effective use of if.
I suppose the fall of the Soviet Union, and the consequent loss of funding and other support for the type of left wing terrorism that was typical up to that point was a factor as well.
But also more than just a fall of Soviet Union, the collapse/failure of a large number of more "secular" Arab/Muslim governments (especially against Israel) meant that those visions had failed, and the success of Islamist movements (eg Iran) meant those visions gained credence.
That was partly a result of Western support for brutal secular dictatorships, which weren't needed after the SU fell. Chickens, roosting.
Soviet-sponsored Left Wing terrorism was indeed a part of the Cold War. Though one nice thing about having the American press on your side as a rightist Cold Warrior, was that you could terrorize and murder civilians with far less scrutiny. Out of sight, out of mind.
How did this impact the rise of Islamic terrorism at this time? Did American policies, or press coverage, change?
> E/acc has its vices, but despite its name it doesn’t fit the general pattern: as far as I know, they don’t want to make things worse, so things get better later — they just want to accelerate AI, which they consider a simple good thing. So the above criticism doesn’t really apply to them.
This is a difference in tactics, not philosophy.
Beff Jezos and bayeslord's original "Notes on e/acc principles and tenets" [1] describes Nick Land's Meltdown [2] as the "original founding text for accelerationism", which in turn says that "Nothing human makes it out of the near-future." Meanwhile the "Notes on e/acc principles and tenets" doesn't say that humanity being out-competed by AI ("non-biological substrates") *wouldn't* result in current humans being replaced (i.e. becoming extinct, murdered); but says that this would be *OK* because it is the "will of the universe" that our replacements would automatically be better.
The Jihadist justification for killing innocent civilians is that it's a cost to get to paradise. e/acc's justification for risking the murder of humanity is A) that's absurd and would never happen; B) even if there *is* a risk then it should be addressed by unfettered acceleration of capabilities because any form of regulation or restraint always makes things worse; or C) if it *does* happen it would be the inevitable will of the universe and would lead to the development of a greater and more intelligent civilization, so we might as well get it over with.
e/acc isn't deliberately trying to make things worse to provoke a response because it doesn't *need* to. e/acc believes if they are left alone and free of regulation and oversight, they'll be able to spawn the creation of paradise themselves.
[1] https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets
[2] http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm
"Meanwhile, it doesn’t seem like the situation around Islamic terrorism has gotten much better since the book was written."
That really surprises me! I thought it was universally acknowledge that Islamic terrorism has been in retreat for a while now. A few decades ago they were doing attacks across North America and western Europe. By a decade ago it was western Europe, the Philippines, Africa, and the Middle East. Now it's mainly just Russia, Israel, and Iran.
I thought that phrase sounded odd, and agree with you. Maybe he means that the level of interest in terrorism hasn't waned, even if it's less successful? Maybe he's including Afghanistan going back to the Taliban as significant even if Madrid hasn't had a bombing in a while.
Africa is in bad shape right now; IS/AQ derivatives have been on the march especially in Mali (my understanding of the ground truth is that basically they have control of the whole country except for the capital and a few other towns/cities, but it's not usually framed that way), along with Somalia and Mozambique. The Nigerian Army has really struggled dealing with their IS variant.
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/islamic-state-march-africa
Then of course there's Syria and Libya which still have active civil wars going on with varying degrees of Islamic groups having success, Afghanistan is run by an Islamic group again-relatedly, Pakistan has been having a bunch issues out in the FATA.
Western Europe/North America does seem to genuinely be a success, although how much of that is credible to a massive surveillance system and how much to just letting a bunch of jihadis go seek Paradise in Syria is a fair question. Some of it (especially in the US) is that a lot of the attention that was directed at jihadis got transferred to the CVE/Domestic Terrorism world; some of it is that even successful attacks don't really get remembered anymore (2015 San Bernardino attacks, 2017 NYC truck attacks) or don't get remembered *as Islamic extremism* (Pulse Nightclub attack would be the exemplar of this). There's still a fair amount of "minor" attacks that happen (eg only a few killed), especially in Europe, but it's reached a level that people don't notice.
As always, a major argument can be had about just how "jihadi" some of these groups are.
TLDR, Islamic terrorism is probably as bad as it was 10 years ago, but it's bad in places that we've functionally stopped carrying about (Ukraine having sucked up a lot of the attention that might have otherwise been focused on this).
OK, this is the best review so far, not in the least because it actually discusses book's content instead of being a rant loosely based on book's theme, an author's biography or a "clever" gimmick.
On content: I wonder if debating jihadists would work at all. It seems to me the book's author already had a seed of doubt planted in his mind, and so finding flaws in Al-Quaeda's sheik's arguments worked for him. But he was convincing himself. In a two-sided debate about the same document, most people would probably just say "well, MY interpretation is clearly a proper one, and you suck donkey balls". I mean, even for me, it's easy to argue that the West is using Muslim civilians in the same manner as Mongols: any one that is buying anything from the West funnels money into American war machine that fights jihadists, which is clearly no different from pushing a siege tower toward Muslim city's walls.
This is a great review!
I want to add that I think there's at least one other major reason young men become jihadis: lack of perceived better options. They have no job, no wife, and no prospects, and maybe an older brother or a cousin who's already involved with jihad and can give them an in, and jihad seems like their best career option, plus they also get some level of respect, and a surrogate family if their relationship with their own family is bad, and the prospect of glorious martyrdom. I get the impression that *a* lot of jihadis are the kind of young men who would be gangbangers if they were growing up in the US in an analogous situation, and that, like gangbangers, a lot of them grow out of it if they live long enough.
Wow, this was amazing. It's going to be hard to choose between this and Two Arms and a Head.
Saudi Arabia has a successful de-radicalization program by meeting with Islamic scholars and debating the principles the terrorists had learned. Sam Harris had a great podcast about this (couldn't find it) where his guest talks about how they de-radicalized an Italian convert working for an Islamist terrorist org (possibly ISIS) by showing him about how much of the Quran pulled from older Aramaic texts (it makes sense in context because the convert was some sort of liberal arts major) that made him very knowledgeable about Islam and religions generally. When he saw the evidence and the good points made in debate, he moved to disavow his former connections.
https://www.rcc.int/swp/news/198/why-saudi-arabias-deradicalization-program-is-successful