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That's not your inner devil, that's your logic talking to you.
Really people? Really? You're going to protest in several different countries because a movie was made that is obviously meant to antagonize? It's a horrible, MST3K-worthy movie, that was likely overdubbed with antagonistic comments. What the are you protesting? The fact that someone made a ty video? No government anywhere is backing this up, you ing re s.
It's times like these where my inner devil says, "Why the are we trying to help these morons? It's useless."
That's not your inner devil, that's your logic talking to you.
Answer: Oil
Nothing more, nothing less. Its God's divine will that the most sought after resource on the planet be underneath its least useful and most hateful denizens.
OIL? did somebody say OIL?
How Coal Brought Us Democracy, and Oil Ended It: Lessons from the New Book “Carbon Democracy”
Long before politicians mewled helplessly about the power of “Big Oil”, carbon-based fuels were shaping our very political, legal, intellectual, and physical structures. It was, for instance, coal miners who brought us the right to vote. Israel’s founding had a lot to do with British fears of Palestinian labor unrest in coastal energy complexes. And the European Community was a post-WWII experiment to switch that continent to oil, a task begun before World War I by British conservatives to defeat their domestic political opponents. Glass-Steagall crimped financial flows, partially at the behest of the oil industry. In fact, you can’t understand modern democratic or third world political structures without understanding energy, and particularly, coal and oil. That’s the contention of Tim Mitc ’s new book, Carbon Democracy Political Power in the Age of Oil, a history of the relationship between carbon-based fueling sources and modern political systems. It’s a book that tackles a really big subject, in a sweeping but readable fashion, and after reading it, it’s hard to imagine thinking about political power the same way again.
Everything in our politics flows through dense carbon-based energy sources, and has for three to four hundred years. For instance, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a pivotal moment in America’s strategic outlook. America, a global hegemon whose empire was weakening, seized the second largest oil deposits in the world as a way of preventing its economic and political decline. Was there any precedent for this kind of action? As it turns out, yes. The last declining global hegemon, Great Britain, also engaged in a brutal and highly controversial British occupation of Iraq, in the 1920s, pressed aggressively by the well-known British conservative, Winston Churchill. Churchill supported this occupation not just because he wanted Iraq’s oil, but because he wanted to defeat democratic forces – particularly militant coal miner unions – at home. Churchill and conservative elites running through British history (most recently Margaret Thatcher) understood that as long as the British power grid, and more importantly the military, was dependent on radical coal miners, his left-leaning labor opponents would be able to demand higher wages, social insurance, voting rights, and a share of the economic gains of the British economy. He preferred to have the British economy running on oil, so he sought imperial strategies to ensure access to resources without being reliant on his political opponents. Globally, in fact, the switch from coal to oil was a fight about labor.
The use of coal and oil in the context of industrialization has always been about who has the power to profit from the surplus these energy forms produce, but until now, no one has pulled the various historical details together into a historical narrative laying bare the fascinating power dynamics behind the rise of Western political systems and their relationship with energy. Carbon Democracy is an examination of our civilization’s 400 hundred year use of carbon-based energy fueling sources, and the political systems that grew up intertwined with them. Rather than presenting energy and democracy as separate things, like a battery and a device, Mitc discusses the political architecture of the Western world and the developing world as inherently tied to fueling sources. The thesis is that elites have always sought to maximize not the amount of energy they could extract and use, but the profit stream from those energy sources. They struggled to ensure they would be able to burn carbon and profit, without having to rely on the people who extract and burned it for them. Carbon-based fuels thus cannot be understood except in the context of labor, imperialism and democracy.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/...=Google+Reader
yep, the oilcos have been setting US foreign policy for decades. Millions dead for the profits of BigOil.
They all live in closed societies where a person that even speaks out against Islam is put to death. All the media is state controlled and that is the way of life for the region. They have no concept of free speech, are widely uneducated and the imam's and clerics dominate the social structures.
If there was one thing that Paul did that was good was kiss some autocrat ass in his letter to the Romans. Christian dogma allows for a separation of church and state. Contrast that with sharia law and their theocracies.
I have though for a long time that the region merits a heavy hand and cultural condescension. It's pretty obvious that trade and their self determination is not a good thing.
The Chinese realized that you cannot just change the political and economic structure to effect lasting change.
The foundations of Western civilization are 2500 years deep.
The Arabs started to progress and at one point were ahead of the West, but then got stuck in the 9th century. Maybe given the rate of change in the world they'll be in the equivalent of the 21st century in half the time it took the West. So that would be around 2600. The successor states to the successor states of the U.S. will be gone by then.
Every once in a while, a Western country snaps and gets the blood of its enemies all over its teeth. Eventually, that will happen, 200 million Muslims will be killed, and the remainder will get the message and pipe down for another century.
Total and utter annihilation is the only solution, outside of creating a common enemy, but even that is temporary (see Mother Russia circa 1940-ish).
Well, I guess if aliens came down from the heavens and decided to enlighten the barbarians known as Humans, that would do it too.
Short of that, death and a lot of it everywhere.
or we could ignore them
The coming geopolitical problem is that now that the combined inep ude of Bush and Obama has come to fruition, you're going to have various groups competing to be the dominant regional power with the dream of being the center of the new caliphate. They're not going to unite against the West until that happens. It's going to be three-sided: Egypt/Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, and Turkey. Because of what that will do to oil markets, the rest of the world will be pulled in, but that will be about the same time the U.S. financial implosion happens.
Perfect storm. Kiss everything you've ever known goodbye, probably including your own life.
how many Muslims countries have invaded and occupied USA?
how many Muslim countries have been invaded and occupied BY the USA?
"who do they hate us?"
The chinese cultural revolution worked (see China circa 1970ish).
Sure, protest against that. But don't protest against a ing movie, that no one in America is actually watching. That's ing stupid, and makes you look re ed. No wait, that doesn't make you LOOK re ed, it makes you re ed.how many Muslims countries have invaded and occupied USA?
how many Muslim countries have been invaded and occupied BY the USA?
"who do they hate us?"
"But don't protest against a ing movie"
agreed, but the America-invading-Muslim-countries for decades is the history and cannot be ignored.
STFU white supremacist
If it really went down that way, you are forgetting a couple of other billion people that have ...a bit of a concern to put it nicely, with muslims as well. Devout Christians tend to forget about those billions.
200 million would be at the low end in that case, IMO.
I don't know tbh. I'm coming around to the idea of leveling the place and starting the middle east from scratch. Most of those mother ers are beyond repair. I'm not talking just about extremists. I'm talking about honor killings, abuse of women, etc. The muslim society just isn't going to suddenly catch up with the rest of civilized society because we want them to.
/Vent
Honor killings et al, have less to do with religion and far more to do with culture and region, from what I understand.
Nothing in the Koran demands death from some slighted honor, again to my fairly limited understanding.
The solution, I think, is to let go of the middle east, but remain vigilant and involved in world affairs. The bad will the US has accrued among Muslims due to the Iraq invasion and perceived meddling is pretty much irreversible.
These people need to be left to their own devices to sort themselves out. For a while, that will not stop the animosity toward the US, and terrorist groups will look to take revenge for the incursions of the last decade, which is why the US will need to remain vigilant on its own shores, and if needed in allied countries. But the continuing military presence in the Middle East is not solving problems, it is creating them. The only place there ought to be military presence now is at US embassies, which is technically US territory anyway.
I have confidence in the possibility that, like most of the rest of the world, the Middle East will self-correct if left to fester on its own for a significant period of time. People of the region will see the squalor and backwardness of their way of life as the rest of the world moves forward, and will strive for something better, which may be found as an example in China or in the west.
rofl op fighting for the petrodollar
Friday prayer was today. As you probably know, one of the pillars of faith of islam is the kowtowing 5 times a day routine. What you may not know is that Friday is a special day in that the midday prayer is congregational and followed by a sermon.
It should be of little surprise that following the little powwow at mosques across ME and north african countries that the protests were once again more confrontational, violent, zealous and directed at us.
You do the math and figure out who fomented today's unrest.
I keep on hearing rhetoric about this being a minority and this is not the real islam but when following sermons in countries as far west as Tunisia and as east as Bangladesh then those populaces across the muslim world start attacking us once again after they killed our people just a few days ago then those words ring hollow to me.
There are no other real civic authorities other than the clerics and imams and its pretty obvious left to their own devices that they are going to encourage their followers to attack our people at any provocation.
This is very much about Islam and no amount of words is going to cover up the actions of that religion's leaders.
Hmmmm...our leaders need to make up their ing minds. On one hand, they fear monger us with these guys like they are the most savage people on earth who want ALL americans dead and are a huge threat to our existence. If this is really true, then we need to engage in mass genocide against them immediately. Of course yes, this would mean blowing up their precious oil fields.
If they're not such bad guys and all this is a direct result of us constantly meddling, then we need to just get the out of their countries and leave them alone. Pick one...but don't play both sides by telling us we have to go to war for safety while simultaneously giving aid to these countries.
You sound very civilized talking about leveling the place.
Let's say a fringe group in the US... Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, whoever... started protesting violently against a foreign enemy. Some killings occur as a result of these protests, other violence and acts of vandalism are rampant, and images of angry mobs are broadcast around the world.
Some asshole in Sweden suggests that the United States should just be nuked to . As a non-participant in these protests/riots, how do you feel about that?
Also, you.
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