Cartoon Power: Danish newspaper and cartoons of Muhammad

[stilltrucking]

Mnaz there is a post about Nancy Levant down below. We were talking about Matriarchy and Patriarchy. I was blaming a lot of this stuff on that mighty smighty Hebrew God of my Mothers. Pretty sure from the anthropological evidence that the early stone age societies at the dawn of civilization we lived in matriarchies. I suppose in the cosmic schema we are on time on track, but dam these are dark times, they got to pass.

I see this as testosterone poisoning.

On an unrelated note and I can't document it but I had a boss who was working on his PhD at Johns Hopkins which has a world class Near eastern studies department. He told me that the Hebrew Children had a town surrounded and the towns people sued for peace. The Jews said ok but you will have to convert to Judaism and all the men must get circumcised. So they did. And when all the men were pretty much out of commission after the ritual, the Jews attacked and wiped out the whole town. Probably not true. But an interesting story.. My boss was Jewish so I don’t think he meant any harm by it.

Where the hell would be with out the number Zero which we got from the Arabs. We would still be using Roman Numerals, good for Counting SuperBowls but not for computer code.

[mnaz]

Civility and uncivility are found at all corners of the earth. We could debate which societies are more civilized by degree, using various yardsticks, and we might make note of various perceived patterns and tendencies, and how they came to be, and we could arrive at X is more civilized than Y, by rational method. Sure we could, and we do. I think 99% of the world agrees that the Taliban was a relatively horrific regime, but there are many factors and cultural influences to consider when talking about an entire region.
We can judge an entire region as a whole. Sure we can. But what then? Where do we go from there?

Extremist religious violence happens in both the Middle East and West. A few Muslims would destroy over a cartoon. A few Christians would torch Planned Parenthood clinics. These things are what make the news. Of course.

[firsty]

mnaz, i agree with your first paragraph, i'd say, in response to "where does that get us," that it might get us towards a path on helping make them a little more fucking civil.

now, to the second paragraph...

are you comparing cartoons to abortions?

[mnaz]

I'm talking about violence and destruction perpetrated in the name of religious/moral belief.

[stilltrucking]

I forgot we are relatied, I should have said Our Mothers

The prisions are full of XYY, very violent men. I am not blaming Y, I just think there is a terrible imbalance right now between X and Y.
A lot of swinging meat. I do not know who is to bless and who to blame, but I look at the status of women in the Near East and Middle East and I think that is part of the problem. Of course we are nearing equality here in the USA when it comes to wacko women reliigious leaders. Phylis Schafly for example. First I think it is good analogy. How many doctores have been shot down in cold blood here by christian gun men. Talk about an oxymoron.

This is about more than just cartoons. How many people will be killed before this is over. Again I ask everyone here microbe's question. Why now?

[e_dog]

Mnaz--

i said, if you look at my post carefully, that (1) all that is good in Western civ. comes from the Jewish and Greek ancient cultures, a bit of an overgeneralization but basically correct. I DID NOT say (2) that all that existed in Jewish and Greek cultures was good; slavery was defended by aristotle, that's not good; the Haggadah glorifies retributive genocide; that's not good. very important logical difference between 1 and 2. take the Greek case: because we have learned how to read paganism as a quaint precursor to secularism in a way that you obviously aren't yet able to do with regard to the Bible as evidenced by your citing whalebones against my position. the concepts of reason, justice, virtue in our world derive from the Greeks, although they often added restrictive aspects -- like male supremacy, restriction of citizenship and slavery, etc. that we have thankfully jettisoned leaving the powerful core concept.

I stand by my statement: Moses and Socrates knew how to speak the truth! i understand the Ten Commanments as essentially stuff Moses made up or fabricated rather than being divine writ. Thou Shalt not Kill. etc etc. pretty good, huh? that doesn't mean ALL of 'em are equally good or true: thou shalt not steal, for example, is an ideology of the powerful and propertied.

the greatest psychosocial thinkers of modernity are Freud and Marx, both of whom have direct intellectual lineage to the ancient world.
No Moses, no Jesus. No Jesus, NO Kant; no kant, No Hegel; no hegel, No Marx.
No Kant, No schopenhauer, no schopehauer, no nietzsche, no nietzsche, no Freud.

[firsty]

mnaz.

i understand that, but...

if we're going to compare, and i think your point was that there is uncivilized behavior on the part of just about everyone, so whats the big deal here? i realize i'm paraphrasing and simpllfying, but i'm sure you get my point.

if we're going to compare, dont we need to compare apples and apples? i mean, it's a sin in the judeo-christian religion to worship false idols. this seems pretty similar to the islamic law about representing mohammed in a drawing? i mean, actually, if you want to be literal about it, that blaspheme goes back to judeo-christian religions as well. we're not really even supposed to speak the lord's name, much less create any representation of Him, literally or figuratively.

in fact, i would say that the best comparison might be when scorsese released "the last temptation of christ". i remember lots of protests when that came out, because it presented christ on screen, and it also showed him in a fantasy involving, well, you know, chicks and stuff.

so i guess if we were really to compare apples to apples, we would have to find a bunch of christians SETTING FIRE to the ITALIAN embassy as a response to scorsese shooting that film.

abortion is completely different. the reason that religious groups oppose abortion isnt because it's considered some harmful sort of speech or worship, it's because they consider it to be murder, which is outlawed by societies independent of any religious tenets.

[stilltrucking]

You have souch a shallow appreciation for freud. You read him as a quack, I mean a psychologist. He was a cultural anthropologist and he he is

oh shit I read you wrong.
For some reason Swift is on my mind a lot these days too

nevermind excuse me e-dogy.

Speaking of Marx and the XVIII Braumier of whatever
If I hear "every thing happens twice..." attributed one more time to him I am going to puke. It was Hegel. But you probably all ready knew that.

just go around me here.

[firsty]

edog, you seem to be explicitly excluding chinese and arabian culture. is that what you want to do there? just asking. because that might be wrong, and i'd refer you to history of laws and society going back to mesopotamia and the code of the hammurabi.

i only say this because you were very adamant about defining the "us" "them" thing with western vs middle eastern cultures and it had sort of smacked of the implication that i was being ethnocentric. so i bring this up just to make sure i'm clear about how you're justifying your statements there about the greeks and hebrews in light of the fact that you thought i was somehow being dismissive of arabian culture.

thanks.

[stilltrucking]

why now
why now
why now
why now
why now
why is this so important all of sudden
why has Europe suddenly stopped sucking up to middle eastern oil wells
Why

[stilltrucking]

Why

[stilltrucking]

Why

[stilltrucking]

Why

[e_dog]

firsty -- i don't see the difference you are tryioin to draw between the two 'offenses' of abortion and let's call it, blasphemy.

while its true abortion opponents try to coopt the prohibition against murder for their cause that concept of murder i.e. feticide is precisely denied by abortion supporters. its exactly the same with the violation of taboos of sacredness -- the crime of blaspheming the prophet could conceivably be regarded by some as worse than murdering even a born child. the santity of human life is not the only view of the sacred that has been prevalent -- of course traditions of human sacrifice in pre-columbian america attests to this. liberals will deny any significance to blasphemy as a crime just as pro-abortion people deny the idea of a right to life of the fetus. the assumption that speech is necessarily difference from action is a component of an oversimplified liberal worldview.

[mnaz]

firsty, i could give many other examples of western/christian extremist violence, or even atrocity, if you don't like the torching of abortion clinics one. the point is still out there.

edog, yeah, i admit it. i don't know how to read the bible, exactly. it scares me. to me, genocide is genocide. i guess sometimes i don't get the symbolism or allegory or whatever. and the 10 commandments have some good stuff, and some drivel, like most things. even 'thou shalt not kill'. what about self-defense? and it was 'jawbone of an ass', not whale.