[ExI] riots again

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Mon Sep 24 14:28:16 UTC 2012


On 24 September 2012 15:55, Joshua Job <nanite1018 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The simple fact is that, whatever the historical reasons, the culture of the
> West is better in terms of supporting human flourishing than that of Muslim
> countries.

I would qualify that with an "in our opinion", as you say in court,
but this is very possible.

In a while, however, both cultures could be made irrelevant by
Chindia, in spite of our (and Muslim) superiority complexes. :-)

> Trying to convert them with guns won't help, we need to convert them with
> promises of wealth and gadgets and through the power of rational
> argumentation and the spreading of Western culture, just like every other
> culture in the world.

What about not trying to convert them *at all*?

In the Middle East, save for the Saudi kingdom which is itself a
Western creation through our support for the Wahabite
counter-reformist sect, Islam was well on its way to become something
not so different from what the Orthodox Church may be for the Russian
Federation, less than Judaism might be for Israel. One can find
Khadafi or Pahlavi or Kemal Ataturk or Arafat quite funny leaders, but
during their rule women were not supposed to wear a veil, not even as
a matter of a social norm, and feodalist/theocratic remains were
actively fought as a threat to entirely secular states.

So, Western policies regularly betting on religious extremism have
been a monumental failures. Or have they?

It could be argued that our own societies are becoming increasingly
fundamentalist and intolerant and, yes, "anti-relativistic", with the
"clash of civilisation" being an important ingredient in such change,
so perhaps this has always been intended after all.

-- 
Stefano Vaj



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list