This idea of one-sidedness can help us debunk a few more misconceptions. How do books get banned? Certainly not because they offend the average person –most persons are passive and don’t really care, or don’t care enough to request the banning. It looks like, from past episodes, that all it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the black-listing of some people. The great philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell lost his job at the City University of New York owing to a letter by an angry –and stubborn –mother who did not wish to have her daughter in the same room as the fellow with dissolute lifestyle and unruly ideas
he same seems to apply to prohibitions –at least the prohibition of alcohol in the United States which led to interesting Mafia stories.
Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.
An insight as to how the mechanisms of religion and transmission of morals obey the same renormalization dynamics as dietary laws –and how we can show that morality is more likely to be something enforced by a minority. We saw earlier in the chapter the asymmetry between obeying and breaking rules: a law-abiding (or rule abiding) fellow always follows the rules, but a felon or someone with looser sets of principles will not always break the rules. Likewise we discussed the strong asymmetric effects of the halal dietary laws. Let us merge the two. It turns out that, in classical Arabic, the term halal has one opposite: haram . Violating legal and moral rules –any rule — is called haram . It is the exact same interdict that governs food intake and all other human behaviors, like sleeping with the wife of the neighbor, lending with interest (without partaking of downside of the borrower) or killing one’s landlord for pleasure. Haram is haram and is asymmetric.
From that we can see that once a moral rule is established, it would suffice to have a small intransigent minority of geographically distributed followers to dictate the norm in society. The sad news, as we will see in the next chapter, is that one person looking at mankind as an aggregate may mistakenly believe that humans are spontaneously becoming more moral, better, more gentle, have better breath, when it applies to only a small proportion of mankind.
I don’t know about those areas but would gays want to live there in the first place? In the USA the places which are most intolerant are places where you wouldn’t want to live anyway.
And she is losing. If fundamentalists take over she won’t be able to leave the house to go and yell at people. She supports the very thing that keeps her down. She is an oppressed person directing her anger at everyone but her oppressors.
It’s London, so yes. As to those specific neighborhoods, no. But they aren’t massively geographically separated from any other area of London.
This is, very much, a misread. She is acting out her wahhabi/deobandi sect’s ideals perfectly. She won’t be housebound in any such system, just covered and working for her husband.
The west survived fundamentalist christians, Nazis, fascism, McCarthy, etc. Aristotle, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Spinoza, Joyce, Picasso, etc., have all survived. A bunch of uneducated people too stupid to notice their own misery won’t win.
Admittedly, we must admit, to use another Talebism, the Khomeni regime is less ‘Lindy’ successful than the underlying Persian culture, and a smart bet would be the underlying culture shrugging it off eventually.
Edit: Mind you, the same is true of French and English cultures, which would undercut my own pessimism.
I wouldn’t compare the Ottoman empire to those dolts. Besides, where is that empire today? Greek learning survived even if the city fell. Eventually, the hussars will arrive.
I’m not trying to completely downplay these fanatics but fanaticism can only do so much. The decline of the Ottoman empire coincided with a rise in fundamentalism. Even in the West, when nations like France, England and Spain kicked out the Jews, it did more harm than good. Look at the Catholic Church. It had the inquisition and burned heretics but today is reduced to dealing with a sex scandal.
What are the chances a bunch of fundamentalists would succeed in getting Italy to destroy its art and stop teaching Dante? The same could be said of Spain. It won’t happen. Maybe in England people are ashamed of their history and culture.
Well, they did completely obliterate 2000 year old Christian communities in the Levant with very limited resources, for starters.
And how long did it take the Catholic Church to calm down into only molesting children?
We’re talking about the equivalent of the 11th century Church, “kill an infidel and go to Heaven”. 400 additional years have passed until the Inquisition came and then another 400 until Enlightenment.
Step by step. Give it time. First comes the pork in school lunches and cafeterias, then public displays religious holidays, then supposedly blasphemous art.
Ah, but the rise of Christianity was arguably an insurgency, it isn’t absurd to suppose the same in reverse.
Probably low to zero. But I can’t speak to Italian issues, i know nothing about them.
Well, the intellectuals are. To quote Orwell:
“They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box
So all Islam did was out-stubborn Christianity, which itself won thanks to its own stubbornness. For, before Islam, the original spread of Christianity in the Roman empire can be largely seen due to… the blinding intolerance of Christians, their unconditional, aggressive and proselyting recalcitrance. Roman pagans were initially tolerant of Christians, as the tradition was to share gods with other members of the empire. But they wondered why these Nazarenes didn’t want to give and take gods and offer that Jesus fellow to the Roman pantheon in exchange for some other gods. What, our gods aren’t good enough for them? But Christians were intolerant of Roman paganism. The “persecutions” of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon and local gods, than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one.
You’d have to ask the bishop. Before this I had no idea pregnant anal sex did the trick. Well now I know my wife and I don’t have a gay kid. We’ll see if she lets me have a crack (yep) at making our next one gay.
Ever stop to consider the constant unrelenting character attacks, condescension, faux moral and intellectual feelings of superiority, partisan hackery, your intersectional victim totem hog wash, etc… might just create more pro trump types or, at the very least, turn people off to your views ? You unhinged soyified loons just can’t help yourselves.
