I'm not sure they were. They kicked off when food prices spiked, and proximate causes were corruption and unemployment.
Officially endorsed foreign protests against government we don't particularly like are always described as being about freedom in the west for reasons that aren't always good.
>The idea that citizens in Tunisia, Egypt, or Syria are "intellectually incapable of understanding" the idea of freedom of speech is insulting.
Yes, absolutely it is.
And for corruption and unemployment, they are much worse now than before. Then more than half the country are under poverty line, most of middle class became lower class in a couple of years.
There were no particular reason why the uprising happened, of course some people joined because of that. But this wasn't my reason (or majority of people I know).
It might be that the conditions are just as ripe now as they were under Arab spring.
I don’t think that’s a charitable or logical framing of his point of view. Unless you’re religious—which the American framers were—“inalienable rights” are an illogical concept. In the state of nature, you are free to say whatever you want, and the people around you are free to beat you to death for it. It’s only when you have a civilized society that the concept of rights makes sense. Roughly speaking “rights” are simply rules society agrees upon for how individuals relate to each other (e.g. private property) or how society as a whole relates to the individual (e.g. free speech). There’s nothing inherent about any arbitrarily selected set of “rights.”
Hubris abound.
This is a pretty bullshit reading of the comment you replied to, which was about the nature of "rights" as a social agreement rather than something natural.
People are allowed to have different values and opinions. Hubris is believing western morality is self evidently superior to everything else that exists.
What made Western Europe diverge from places like Russia or Saudi Arabia?
Individuality seems to have been invented and embraced by European and American intelligentsia.
But we also can’t underestimate the impact of: 1) abundant energy sources—initially wood and then coal that could power machinery. 2) a scientific tradition with engineering applications in mind. 3) the Black Plague that let people just drop their scythes and move to the city to become tradesmen and earn a better living. 4) the Common Law tradition placing property rights and the right to contract on near-sacred grounds. 5) Access to abundant fishing off the coast of what became North America.
I don't think there's any one thing we can point to explain the rise of West, it's a confluence of factors that I'm very grateful happened before I was born
This created an intense competition where the best ideas would survive.
As trade grew so did the exchange of ideas in Europe. Different regimes had different views on intellectuals. Famously, Da Vinci and Voltaire had multiple patrons through their lives.
Claiming they are best because they survive is survivorship bias.
No, it’s not. Only measuring survivors is survivorship bias.
Not really. It’s saying increases competitive pressure results in a more-competitive output. That’s almost by definition true. Products of competition tend to be fitter than not. If ten fish of a rainbow of colors are introduced to an environment and only the red ones survive, they are fitter. If one looks at the surviving fish and concludes only red fish were introduced to the environment, that is survivorship bias.
The Black Death increased labour’s bargaining power right before the Industrial Revolution. It’s a lucky set of quirks that gave Enlightenment-era ideas fertile soil to land on.
“Right before” was hyperbole. The population, and in particular, labor effects, were nevertheless persistent. Western labor was anomalously expensive.
Just admit you were completely wrong and move on. It's fine, I'm wrong a lot too.
Because the thesis holds [1][2]. It’s far from a controversial theory in medieval and developmental economics.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=EUoCBAAAQBAJ&oi=...
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C51&q=Bla...
Come on, that's hilariously wrong, and no attempt to walk it back makes it less funny.
Of course, I'm just a bit on edge because I'm writing this post right after the 30 years war has started.
University level international relations courses generally start on the 30years war, I feel it is appropriate for that to be considered "the rough start" of "honest to god modernity" yeah
Joseph Henrich says it’s the medieval church’s prohibition on cousin marriage, which dissolved the strong kinship bonds that dominate the rest of the world. He has a book on the subject called The WEIRDest People In The World which is good.
That's an odd claim to make so casually. This is something people can and have argued about for thousands of years, in both directions. One direction is: How can we have values in a world without god(s)? (See: Epicureanism, Kantian ethics, or any other system of secular morality). But the other, equally fair direction is: How can we have values in a world with god(s)? (See: The Euthyphro dilemma and broader problem of evil, the Epicurean paradox, or more recent historical and anthropological analyses of how religions and their institutions are formed and operate.)
I suppose you can play bad-faith semantic games with "inalienable", "right", or "inherent" as words here, but the long and short of it is that this isn't a settled issue. There are good arguments not only that religion is not needed as a foundation for rights, but that religion has not (historically) and cannot (philosophically) provide this foundation.
For example, what’s Kantian ethics?
> It states that an action can only be moral if (i) it is motivated by a sense of duty and (ii) its maxim may be rationally willed a universal, objective law.
If I autopsy a dead body, am I going to find any evidence of those things in there? Can you empirically prove the categorical imperative?
Moreover, “secular morality” in practice is typically just the moral philosophy of the dominant religion with the supernatural elements removed. My dad isn’t a believer, but thinks choosing not to have children is immoral. Why? Maybe it’s because his parents were devout Muslims and having children is an important obligation in Islam. Similarly, it’s amusing to observe how many professed atheists really just believe in the Christian social gospel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Gospel) without Jesus.
I’m not saying that’s bad. But you have to understand how deeply intertwined even seemingly secular western thought is with Christianity, and doesn’t easily translate to other parts of the world.
Sure, they're a few centimeters to the right of the evidence of consciousness, just below the evidence of the Pythagorean theorem.
This sounds glib but isn't. What counts as 'evidence' and how much of it is needed for 'proof' are themselves hotly debated. Empiricism is no more a given than morality.
And now you’re in woo social studies land. Once you leave the land of empiricism you might as well be arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
As a Muslim, this is so incorrect to the point of almost absurdity. Just because you have encountered one person who appeared to you that he did not understand or comprehend a certain topic you were explaining, does not mean that the rest of the Muslims are the same. I can point you to many many youtube channels (just as an example) on Muslim scholars, sociologists, and more living both in the Middle East and in the West who have been discussing very nuanced sociopolitical topics and how they relate to our religion.
Like I said I've been in the islamic world for a decade. I've studied Arabic/Turkish music in Iran, Egypt, Turkiye, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. It's not like "I met one muslim". I have spent about 20 hours per week for the past decade teaching Syrian and Yemeni refugees in Istanbul and Ankara.
Please point me to a democratic, secular islamic nation. Just one? As far as I can tell this only existed for the brief period from when the Turkish Cumhuriyet was established until Ataturk drank himself to death. Most are kingdoms run by rich tribal warlords.
Indonesia and Malaysia, for two.
Malaysia is, as you stated, an Islamic nation. It is not secular, however.
Also, the parts of Indonesia I've been to (mostly Java) feels much less "Islamic" on the ground than Malaysia. Yes I see hijabs fairly often, but to me at least, Islamic motifs seemed much more prominent in Malaysia and even Singapore than Java.
FWIW, the structure of your reply implies that "secular islamic nation" is a contradiction in terms. Maybe that was intentional, but if so it works better as a reply to GP.
Turkiye has not been a secular nation for a very long time. Go read hurriyetdailynews.com, a moderately pro-government site. Currently the government is trying to make it illegal to be gay by attaching it to a bill that supposedly protects the rights of turbanli (covered women). The full text of the bill practically Turkiye into every other shariah nation.
Also read up on "Imam hatips", which are failed religious school the government forces us to pay for. Nobody wants to go to them, because the educational quality is garbage, so they actually started forcing students to go to them.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's democracy could have been the most inspiring democracy the world has known, but the democracy itself died within 10 years of him. I think we're on our 6th constitution since then.
During the 2 year "state of emergency" after the coup, he rewrote the entire constitution.
Currently there are over 250 politicians in prison from the HDP (Kurdish party), and EVERY major name in the CHP is being prosecuted, or has been convicted of "insulting the cumhuriyet" in the past 3 months.. This is the most democratic nation in the ummah. :(
Yes. There is a difference between an Islamic nation and a nation of Muslims.
This describes none of the Arab monarchies. Neither does it describe Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan. (Indonesia and Malaysia are political science’s Rorschach tests.)
Secular dictatorships in the Muslim world are the exception, unless we’re using highly unorthodox definitions of secularity or dictatorship. (Secular government in Muslim-majority countries is common; most are not dictatorships [1].)
Shortly after the 2004 tsunami, Aceh province, the hardest hit area in Indonesia, converted to Shariah for their "legal" system. I could go much further, but right there shows that Indonesia is by definition NOT secular.
I gave you a very solid example of how in one large province of Indonesia, democracy and the rule of law were entirely removed and put in the hand of islamic "leaders".
Honest question, how does Jordan fare in democracy?
But this is just my impression as an outsider.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_monarchy
What matters is not whether there is a king, but the details of how the specific powers are allocated between the different parts of government. Sweden is also a constitutional monarchy, with a king.
Note that several of these are Islamic.
> Please point me to a democratic, secular islamic nation.
Western style democracy and secularism are contradictory with Islam. To us, it is not a measure of success or prosperity. On a side note, there aren't really any fully Islamic states today - practically all of them have remnants (or more active engagement) of Western colonization and influence. I'm sure you're aware of how things have been after the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate.
Furthermore, I think it's a bit of a strawman to say that people who think "The West" is evil (usually in reference to the USA's long history of spying on and overthrowing countries) wouldn't also think Saudi Arabia is evil.
For refugees I'd guess it takes a long time for them to feel safe and for the established patterns of thought to "thaw".
20 years later, in Canada, my job sent me to California for training. When I heard, surprisingly to myself, I hyperventilated and got an asthma attack - my adult Canadian self and the 6 year old from somewhere else colliding in their expectations and worldview reality.
Which is to say that I think you have a profound point in that somebody may be "aware" on intellectual level of different places, cultures, laws etc; and it still not feel very real or be at all relevant on practical level.
At the same time, rights and freedoms are limited in most of the world, not just in the Muslim countries. There is no first amendment anywhere outside USA, there is no second anywhere else, even in Europe the rights and freedoms are very limited. For example there is something similar to 1st amendment in the Romanian Constitution, but you can still go to jail just for opinions, while in UK even for thoughts (recent event confirms that). I would not bash the Muslim countries for brainwashing, everyone is doing it.
This is wrong on every level except technical[0]. While other countries in Europe aren't as free-speech extremist as the US, there are still protections on speech in those countries. The biggest exception to that I can see in France or Germany would be the constitutional prohibitions on being a literal Nazi[1].
I Googled "romanian arrested for opinions" and got a bunch of stuff about Andrew Tate. To be clear, he wasn't arrested for opinions, he was arrested for running a sex trafficking ring.
I'll give you that the UK has some really scary anti-protest laws. Though to be clear, when I Googled "UK arrested for thoughts" I got one article about someone being arrested for praying in front of an abortion clinic, written by someone with an axe to grind about abortions. I've seen worse - I'm reminded of the recent push to ban Extinction Rebellion protests in that same country.
Without more specifics I can't elaborate further beyond "UK bad".
>there is no second (amendment) anywhere else
sigh
Say it with me now: The 2nd Amendment is not an adequate backstop against the abuse of government power.
As a specific response to things the Brits did in the colonies, it's fine. But if there's, say, a fascist uprising in the US, I do not expect private gun ownership to save me. The amount of power that a government can wield in order to roadkill you is absolutely enormous, and makes your pile of AR-15s look like child's play. In order to fight back against tyranny, you need consensus about what the tyranny even is, and that's a whole load of collective action problems. They're also adversarial - as in, if the threat is internal, then your adversary is going to use this against you. If the tyranny only affects a small group of people, then they will not have the power to fight back, even in the case where they would need to resort to guns.
[0] Well, they don't call it the First Amendment...
[1] To be clear, this is an act of self-defense against censorship. Nazis do not give two shits about your freedom of speech, except if they can use the 1st Amendment to eat itself. Affording them freedom of speech is a fool's errand.
Romanian law: Law 107 of 2006. UK: you can even find even lawyer's explanations for that prayer thing, with full details, just look for it.
Please explain how most of European countries, for example, have free speech. Most don't, Australia and Canada don't, who is left ... China or North Korea?
Searching for Romanian Law 107 of 2006 brings up an anti-discrimination statute and an article from civic-nation.org that says[0]:
>Anti-racism Act № 107/2006 (preceded by government decree № 31/2002) prohibits the operation of organizations of fascist, racist or xenophobic nature, participation in such organizations, the use of symbols of this kind, as well as the occultism surrounding personalities who were guilty of crimes against peace and humanity. The law also foresees criminal liability for the Holocaust deniers. By the end of monitoring this Article has not been used towards anyone.
My read on this is that it's substantially similar to the German constitutional prohibition on Nazis. And as I said in the footnotes before, I do not believe Nazis are entitled to free speech, on the grounds that their explicit political ideology is to censor and kill people. If there's an example of this prohibition being unfairly used against people who are not Nazis, then I will happily rail against it and add it to my list of "shitty things governments do". But as it stands this is not "evidence that America is the only country with free speech". It's about as much of a difference as permissive licensing vs. the GPL.
I still agree that the anti-abortion protester in the UK was being censored. To square that off with my prior paragraph of assertions, anti-abortion activists don't pose a threat to free speech like how Nazis do. They are irksome and morally repugnant but not censorious.
Australia has no express right to free speech, which is a constitutional problem. However, Canada does has a right to free expression, which functions the same as it does in Europe. In either case, the amount of potential or actual harm to free speech is nowhere near "jailed for 20 years for editing Wikipedia" levels of censorship.
And America is not a free speech haven either - in fact, our censorship problem is arguably worse than Europe's. Left-wing activists were routinely investigated and attacked for decades by the CIA and FBI. The intelligence community uses classification and espionage law to silence and punish whistleblowers. This was all done under the auspices of a textually unmodified 1st Amendment.
[0] https://civic-nation.org/romania/government/legislation/anti...
On paper, a law saying you can't be a particular political ideology sounds like you just tore the beating heart straight out of free speech's chest. When you realize, "oh wait it's just the Nazis", it's less bad, and in practice speech is still mostly free in countries with these laws.
And on paper America has the strongest free speech protections in the world. In practice, we've had government censorship regimes for centuries. And our legal system is entirely blind to private censorship enabled by monopolies.
If I get caught sucking dick in a Muslim country, I die.
If I suck dick in the west, maybe I get my own dick sucked in return.
Tell me again about the freedom of the islamic world.
I might as well commit suicide if I have to go there. If they find out, I would be stoned probably immediately. Or, I've got a collection of pictures of what they do using knives - "Et tu Brute" style.
I would consider going to a Sufi controlled area. At least they have some semblance of sense.
Ask anybody in the streets about their opinions of gays, and you shall get your answer.
It may be fundamental freedom for you, but for them its an outrageous act that deserves punishment.
Don't like it, don't stay there, simple.
You have a funny concept of free.
If I am not free to be exactly who I am, then I am not free.
If I am forced to follow a religion under penalty of death, I am not free.
If I am forced to not leave that religion under penalty of death, I am not free.
If I am forced to be straight, I am not free.
A free nation allows everybody to be free, not just the mainstream.
The entire point of democracy is it allows commoners to decide regulation, and you bet that if there was ever a true democracy in the Arab world, gays won't be welcome in it either.
Parent comment did not use this word
Don't be an asshole
Could you please elaborate on this? In my understanding, inalienable, or natural rights are of ancient Greek origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...
Islam still grants inalienable rights to people that are almost lost in the West. For example: the inalienable right to privacy. Spying on people in their homes is strictly forbidden in Shari'ah, regardless of whether it's the government doing it or anyone. This concept was unheard of in Western Europe until Islam came.
Also, the idea of war crimes. Western Europeans believed that war justifies any and all cruelty to the enemy. The West still believes that, actually, even if they have signed treaties, you can see it in their actions (Libya Iraq, etc.). They learned the idea of wartime ethics through contact with the Muslims during the Crusades.
Belief in equality of opportunity is also Islamic in nature. The Greeks didn't even believe that. Aristotle and other Greek philosophers held that certain races of people were just born for slavery. This is what inspired the Dutch and English to start the triangular slave trade and establish the race-based caste system in the Americas.
When I study European history, it makes me realize that the Dark Age was not a pause in European history like we thought, but a reset. That's because the population of Europe had been almost completely replaced. And there were many other resets before and after that one. Europe was constantly being overrun and devastated over the centuries. So those new people (Goths, Huns, Norse, etc.) who came in were not literate people, but just going off of their own traditions and whatever they learned by way of contact with their nearest neighbor civilization, who in our modern times, happened to be Muslim.
One of the cornerstones of Scythian and German civilization was this idea of dual rule, where you have one rule for war and one rule for peace. I believe this transformed into the idea of emergency powers in Western civilization. So all the freedoms you think you have are just conditional on whether or not the rulers deem it necessary to override them.
An Islamic government is severely restricted from doing most of the oppressive acts we take for granted our states will do in the West (like levying high taxes, restricting commerce, etc.), in both war and peace.
Regarding the protections, it's also interesting to hear about, because usually when the topic is islam in the news, it's tied to the abuses of power in those systems, like regarding the rights of women. Makes one think just how one-sided the information is.
Regarding the emergency powers, they worry me too. Hungary, my home country, resembled a democracy somewhat before 2020, but since then, it's rule by decree - or as the running joke goes, Hungary's form of government is emergency. The EU even branded it as an "electoral autocracy" for this reason.
Those inalienable rights are for Americans and Israelis, not Palestinians.
The west still does this. The big enemy is Assad, the last detritus and remnants of the old Nasserite anti imperialism. The US is a strong ally of Saudi Arabia, most of the tensions it has had recently were due to oil prices ( https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-saudi-tensions-ease-as-conc... ).
The West helped successfully destroy much of the secular left of these countries, and backed/backs and armed/arms the reactionary Muslims against them. Then it throws its hands up like here about how Arab culture is inherently the way the West helped mold it as.
Have you tried explaining them to your liberal friends in San Francisco? Their English is probably even better, but for some reason they still constantly fail to appreciate those concepts.
We're trying to avoid generic ideological tangents in general because they're the most predictable sort of internet discussion. The same points simply repeat in endless circulation. That may be fine for certain kinds of conversation but it's not fine for a forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity, which is served by diving in into what is specific and different about a situation.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: actually, given how badly you broke the site guidelines with religious flamewar elsewhere in the thread, I've banned the account. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404910, and please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
The Iraq war is a textbook example of this. We claimed it was all about freedom and democracy, but the reality was that we had long supported Saddam while he fought an incredibly bloody war against Iran in the 80s, but he eventually fell out of favor when he started growing too ambitious and invade Kuwait. In the end, the US decided it would be better to just try and do the job ourselves and just overthrow him directly and nation build in our image in Iraq (and Afghanistan), surrounding Iran on both sides and setting things up for the next stage.
We all know how it turned out, both Iraq and Afghanistan are looked upon as disasters, as both countries saw untold death and destruction, and aren’t any better off for it.
Does that mean that I personally, as a citizen of the west think that the western values we profess are inferior, or have some sort of image of “noble” Muslims that are perfect and can do no wrong? Of course not. I am a reflection of the culture I was raised in and hold western values deeply. Which is why it enrages me that people chauvinistically look down upon people from other societies while ignoring the fact that we’ve gone into their countries and committed literal war crimes and pardoned the offenders. [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/eddie-gallag...
Whenever my more liberal friends back in San Francisco talk about Palestine and the "Evil West" .. I laugh a bit, because I know none of them have ever experienced this world.
I recently tried explaining the 1st amendment to a Syrian CS student of mine. His English is very good, but the concept of inalienable rights, freedom of speech, and freedom to yell at our politicians .. he was intellectually incapable of understanding this, his society had brainwashed him so thoroughly.
The things that keep the west alive are abstract, unfathomable concepts to the Ummah.