[evilgenius]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Squilliam', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('evilgenius', '
')Yes, and getting purpose wrong could be why I've seen such envy on the part of Muslims toward the West. Numerous times I've heard Muslims complain that they don't have the riches and blessing of the West, and they can't understand why. They see themselves as God's own who should have received the rewards. But they've been focused upon the rewards. They haven't been focused upon authenticity. It's not a much different place for them than for the end-times Christians who revel in some coming punishment, and lose track of the message of love their religion is supposed to be about.

[evilgenius]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Squilliam', 'T')o be fair I would say every culture is a negotiation between the sexes. This is just a reflection of the different reproductive strategies of men and women. Like for instance in the west the old middle class ideal of 'freeing' the wife from work if you could afford it was not to enslave them, but a way to make their lives easier as historically work was extremely hard on people physically and mentally. However with any choice there are unintended consequences. To be a poor male in the Muslim world means you're essentially good for the 3 Fs: Forced labour, fornication and fighting. It's a deliberate ploy essentially to make a large pool of fighters available and expendable given the ability of men to take multiple wives. The only social mobility afforded to many men in that world was to go out and 'fight' the infidel.

[evilgenius]

It's like this, the English don't have a parliament because the aristocracy decided that it was about time that principles of equality were the law of the land. They have a parliament because the merchants gained enough importance through what they did to demand power. If these oil exporting countries where to use their own oil to build their own economies, they might see that they had fostered a group of people who had become important enough that they could demand power too. It's the idea that anybody within society can become a member of this group that matters. That alone will eventually act to expand the suffrage. The Saudis don't want to see this happen. If the Iranians do, then they ought to go about doing it in a more transparent manner because they don't seem to be building anything other than a sycophantic system reliant upon a form of patronage as well. Theirs can simply accommodate a larger section of the population. It doesn't mean that any member of society could theoretically be in it.

[evilgenius]

Yes, but you are overlooking the point in attempting to be so exactly correct. We tend to see history in terms of kings, while it was lived to the nines by common people. Because of that when we imagine what the past was like we are much more likely to conjure up an image wearing robes. You know what's strange is that the predilection toward end of the world thinking and resource scarcity is always trying to take us back to the idea of the king, not recognizing how, for instance, a common person today can eat much better than royalty of several hundred years ago, and that even collapse might not take that away because it is derived as much from an idea as from the mechanics. The imagination wants to take the easy way out if it can. This pertains to what I said earlier, concerning the weird place of silver as the means of payment to Judas. It was almost working in a pejorative sense against the idea of the multiplicity of today's markets.