The Good Stuff is Happening

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

The Good Stuff is Happening

The following article shows how great ideas are being wedded into Islamic cultures. I have no doubt this will not satisfy those who want 100% about-face changes immediately, but it is extremely instructive for those who are truly engaged in the intellectual war for ideas, especially freedom.

The following is how the intellectual war is won. And it is happening, example by example. Notice that this is mainstream popular culture in Saudi Arabia, not an isolated event in some corner of the country.

Brave Saudi housewife set to win Arabic X Factor after blistering attack on hardline Muslim clerics on live TV

Mail Online

Mail Foreign Service

31st March 2010

From the article:

A brave Saudi housewife has reached the final of the Arabic version of the X Factor after lashing out at hardline Muslim clerics on live TV.Wearing a black burkha, mother-of-four Hissa Hilal delivered a blistering poem against Muslim preachers 'who sit in the position of power' but are 'frightening' people with their fatwas, or religious edicts, and 'preying like a wolf' on those seeking peace.

Her poem got loud cheers from the audience last week and won her a place in the competition's final on April 7.

It also brought her death threats, posted on several Islamic militant websites.

. . .

Her poem was seen as a response to Sheik Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, a prominent cleric in Saudi Arabia who recently issued a fatwa saying those who call for the mingling of men and women should be considered infidels, punishable by death. But, more broadly, it was seen as addressing any of many hard-line clerics in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region who hold a wide influence through TV programmes, university positions or websites.

'Killing a human being is so easy for them, it is always an option,' she told AP.

. . .

She described hard-line clerics as 'vicious in voice, barbaric, angry and blind, wearing death as a robe cinched with a belt,' in an apparent reference to suicide bombers' explosives belts.

The three judges gave her the highest marks for her performance, praising her for addressing a controversial topic. That, plus voting from the 2,000 people in the audience and text messages from viewers, put her through to the final round.

The violent haters are gradually being isolated in the Islamic world. It's a slow process, but it's going strong.

We need to support people like Hissa Hilal.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

The violent haters are gradually being isolated in the Islamic world. It's a slow process, but it's going strong.

In another hundred years it will be peachy.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[dan2100]

The violent haters are gradually being isolated in the Islamic world. It's a slow process, but it's going strong.

In another hundred years it will be peachy.

Ba'al Chatzaf

How long did it take elsewhere?

Have you ever heard of or read War Before Civilization? Its author's contention is, if I recall correctly, that there's been a long-term trend, starting in prehistoric times and continuing to today, for a general decline in violence among humans -- with a few exceptional periods. Of course, I'm not arguing this trend is inevitable, but it does seem like there's been a learning process going on for millenia -- one where people slowly learn it's better to not use violence.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Bob,

It's looking a lot more peachy on the Arabic version of the X Factor than ever before.

That program is the spontaneous will of the general Saudi people. That has to mean something.

Unless you don't want these things to happen...

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

Bob,

It's looking a lot more peachy on the Arabic version of the X Factor than ever before.

That program is the spontaneous will of the general Saudi people. That has to mean something.

Unless you don't want these things to happen...

Michael

Of course I want them to happen. I want them to happen a hundred years ago instead of a hundred years from now. How soon will all this "good stuff" take place. Before or after one or more American cities suffer dirty bombs or brutal terrorist attacks?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Bob,

A hundred years ago and a hundred years from now are not reality.

What we have is now.

And it's working.

Here and now.

It's working.

The ideas are spreading.

Instead of bemoaning that it isn't working the way you want it to, why not put that marvelous brain of yours in gear to see if you can come up with something to make it work better?

Something real.

There's a buttload of stuff left to do...

Michael

[dan2100]

Bob,

A hundred years ago and a hundred years from now are not reality.

What we have is now.

And it's working.

Here and now.

It's working.

The ideas are spreading.

Instead of bemoaning that it isn't working the way you want it to, why not put that marvelous brain of yours in gear to see if you can come up with something to make it work better?

Something real.

There's a buttload of stuff left to do...

Michael

Well put!

[algernonsidney]

This is good news.

Here's another good one:

http://www.medicalne...cles/189379.php

It was a scene Saudi women’s rights activists have dreamt of for years.

When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement park in the eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples illegally socializing, he probably wasn’t expecting much opposition.

But when he approached a young, 20-something couple meandering through the park together, he received an unprecedented whooping.

A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the Hai’a, asked the couple to confirm their identities and relationship to one another, as it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to mix.

For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed upon being questioned by the cop.

According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman then allegedly laid into the religious policeman, punching him repeatedly, and leaving him to be taken to the hospital with bruises across his body and face.

Edited May 21, 2010 by Chris Baker

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Chris,

You link goes to an article on detecting depression in infants.

Is that what you wanted to share in this thread?

I'm confused...

Michael

[sbeaulieu]

Michael,

What I enjoy about this woman, and those like her, is that she's a catalyst to a slow death (figuratively) for thugs like the clerics. You put it best that violent people are becoming isolated. It's going to be a mad scramble for them. Once they lose the leverage of fear, it will turn on them instead.

~ Shane

[Philip Coates]

Dan Ust, #3: Have you ever heard of or read War Before Civilization? Its author's contention is, if I recall correctly, that there's been a long-term trend, starting in prehistoric times and continuing to today, for a general decline in violence among humans -- with a few exceptional periods. Of course, I'm not arguing this trend is inevitable, but it does seem like there's been a learning process going on for millenia -- one where people slowly learn it's better to not use violence.

Dan, despite the qualification 'a few exceptional periods' I'm finding this hard to believe if only because the ability to kill has so greatly accelerated and the ideologies justifying or even glorifying murder are as uncompromisingly virulent as they have ever been. If not more so. And they are still accepted (or acquiesced to) by millions as in the case of Islamofascism and the general idea of beheading those who draw a cartoon of the fatwa justifier in chief or belong to the wrong sect or let their veil slip or have the bad judgment to get raped. Never before the instruments of totalitarian control existed was it possible to kill internally close to if not upwards of ten million people each time. This happened three times in the last hundred years -- Germany, Russia, China. Plus the world wars themselves and the unprecedented violence and death in them. And the unprecedented scale of the targeting of civilian populations. Fire-bombing cities was done even by the -democratic- countries.

And then there's Pol Pot... The Irish Catholics vs. Protestants has died down, but it's not clear the underlying hatred has. Or the whole ideas of tribal (or gang)colors and "turf" and killing others for crossing into another neighborhood or "dissing" you. And let's not even go to the third world with the Hutus vs. the Tutsi...and on and on.

Not exactly what I'd call a global learning process.

Edited May 21, 2010 by Philip Coates

[dan2100]

Dan Ust, #3: Have you ever heard of or read War Before Civilization? Its author's contention is, if I recall correctly, that there's been a long-term trend, starting in prehistoric times and continuing to today, for a general decline in violence among humans -- with a few exceptional periods. Of course, I'm not arguing this trend is inevitable, but it does seem like there's been a learning process going on for millenia -- one where people slowly learn it's better to not use violence.

Dan, despite the qualification 'a few exceptional periods' I'm finding this hard to believe if only because the ability to kill has so greatly accelerated and the ideologies justifying or even glorifying murder are as uncompromisingly virulent as they have ever been. If not more so. And they are still accepted (or acquiesced to) by millions as in the case of Islamofascism and the general idea of beheading those who draw a cartoon of the fatwa justifier in chief or belong to the wrong sect or let their veil slip or have the bad judgment to get raped. Never before the instruments of totalitarian control existed was it possible to kill internally close to if not upwards of ten million people each time. This happened three times in the last hundred years -- Germany, Russia, China. Plus the world wars themselves and the unprecedented violence and death in them. And the unprecedented scale of the targeting of civilian populations. Fire-bombing cities was done even by the -democratic- countries.

And then there's Pol Pot... The Irish Catholics vs. Protestants has died down, but it's not clear the underlying hatred has. Or the whole ideas of tribal (or gang)colors and "turf" and killing others for crossing into another neighborhood or "dissing" you. And let's not even go to the third world with the Hutus vs. the Tutsi...and on and on.

Not exactly what I'd call a global learning process.

If War Before Civilization is correct, one has to consider percentages here. (Steven Pinker covered some of this in his The Blank Slate too.) Yes, the technology for mass murder is certainly much "better" now -- or at least during the last century -- than ever before. But the overall level of violence and of murder is much lower. This applies to modern hunter-gatherer societies and to the evidence from prehistoric societies. In many of these societies, the murder rate is extremely high and the fatality rate in wars and raids is also very high -- though the societies are small. So, a band of fifty hunter-gatherers fighting a similar band might lose, say, 4 people during the typical conflict. That's a staggering 8% of their population! Were the same to be true of modern America, that would mean having 24 million people die during a war (or similar casualties on the other side).

Also, according to War Before Civilization, murder rates among prehistoric and present-day hunter-gatherer societies are very high -- usually in double digits for adult males. I'm not sure what the figure would be if America had a similarly high murder rate, though I imagine we'd be talking about murders per hundreds of people rather than per hundreds of thousands of people. Just think if over any time frame, if 10% or more of all adult males in your society were murdered. Are any modern, civilized societies like that? I bet that even the extant dictatorships don't come the close.

[Philip Coates]

I imagine you're right if the claim is between hunter-gatherer and settled societies. But I thought the claim was stronger - a rather steady downward trend from the first villages, then Mesopotamia and the river valley civilizations up through the present day, still declining. And I was talking about the last hundred and years and right now.

[dan2100]

I imagine you're right if the claim is between hunter-gatherer and settled societies. But I thought the claim was stronger - a rather steady downward trend from the first villages, then Mesopotamia and the river valley civilizations up through the present day, still declining. And I was talking about the last hundred and years and right now.

I believe the claim is stronger. I'll have to find and reread the relevant passages in War Before Civilization. If my memory's correct, he did point out a general long-term trend in the decline in violence since prehistoric times. And he did include the last hundred years or so -- at least, I believe he did because he mentioned the 1930s and 1940s as a reversal of that trend. (I forgot what or if he wrote about the Rwandan Genocide.)

The Wikipedia entry for the book is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization

Note the chart.