Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: MP-Ryan on January 04, 2011, 05:32:45 pm
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Another "Oh ****" moment in Pakistan, brought to you by fundamentalist religion:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/governors-killing-sets-off-political-powder-keg-in-pakistan/article1857737/
The governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, ate lunch at an upscale market in the leafy heart of Islamabad and was returning to his vehicle when one of his elite bodyguards gunned him down, witnesses say. The big-bearded security officer surrendered to his colleagues and reportedly boasted about his crime while sitting tied with ropes awaiting interrogation.
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You beat me to it.
Pakistan seems to be a nice collection of all-around crazy people; we have insane terrorists, the general population that's indoctrinated and blinded by Islamic fanaticism, and then we have the rulers who just want to stay in power long enough to be able to steal sufficient amounts of money and possibly go into exile, having achieved that. Pakistan is a failed state, and I can't help but wonder how much potential they could have had if they had been untouched by Islam. Anyway, I wonder what is actually gonna happen to that country -- Are they gonna keep at this cycle of corruption, coup d'etats indefinitely, or are they gonna go the way of Somalia? -- You know, weak government supported by the rest of the world, holding on for as long as it can, and then toppled by Islamists. I really doubt Pakistan has a bright future ahead of it! :-/
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Yeah this is clearly the fault of Islam because Islam makes societies horrible as evidenced by all the horrible Muslims we have on HLP like
oh
wait
Stop the unqualified religion bashing. Don't turn into a 1950s conservative with Muslim hotswapped in for Communism.
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It's a much bigger political picture involved anyway, the British occupation of India certainly played a large role in changing the social/political shape of the area.
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Seriously, people seem unable to grasp that any form of fundamentalism would step up to wreck these societies given the socioeconomic realities.
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What surprises me is that this has been going on for decades and people are only just noticing.
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What surprises me is that this has been going on for decades and people are only just noticing.
It's just now America cares because it's our asses paying for it now.
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I wonder what we'd have making the rural hicks stupid if we didn't have religion.
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"Like many others with strong religious feelings in Pakistan, the bodyguard apparently disagreed with Mr. Taseer’s criticisms of the country’s blasphemy laws".
Yeah, sure.... it's that simple... :lol:
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I wonder what we'd have making the rural hicks stupid if we didn't have religion.
Atheism? :P
Rural hicks being stupid isn't a symptom of religion, it's a symptom of social inequality.
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Yeah this is clearly the fault of Islam because Islam makes societies horrible as evidenced by all the horrible Muslims we have on HLP like
oh
wait
Stop the unqualified religion bashing. Don't turn into a 1950s conservative with Muslim hotswapped in for Communism.
Pakistan has spent the last several decades deliberately encouraging religious terrorism and has been a major recipient of Saudi jihad petro dollars (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/analyses/madrassas.html). The main religion in Pakistan is Islam. Yeah, religious extremism isn't really the mainstream over there, it's just what most people seem to buy into. :rolleyes:
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Pakistan has spent the last several decades deliberately encouraging religious terrorism and has been a major recipient of Saudi jihad petro dollars (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/analyses/madrassas.html). The main religion in Pakistan is Islam. Yeah, religious extremism isn't really the mainstream over there, it's just what most people seem to buy into. :rolleyes:
Beware of propaganda
http://www.rense.com/general14/rise.htm
"The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul" on September 26, 1996, he said from his base in Lahore, Pakistan. "That seems very ironic now."
One key reason for US interest in the Taliban was a 4.5-billion-dollar oil and gas pipeline that a US-led oil consortium planned to build across war-ravaged Afghanistan.
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Well the Russo Afghan war was basically handled by Pakistani Intelligence, we simply bank rolled them. The ISI went from some two bit army unit to the most powerful institutions in Pakistan over the course of the war. The fact that we were hands off with little to nothing in the way of boots on the ground in Afghanistan was one of the major problems. ISI invested in the groups in their interest to support rather than ours, which turned out to be the crazy fundamentalists rather than moderates like Massoud. Course it seems like much of our foreign policy/intelligence services had an extreme case of tunnel vision on Big Red with little in the way of foresight on what happens after.
Anyway guess it would have been better to have foreign contractors as your security specialists in a place like that.
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The problem is the message it sends if a diplomat who is known for making comments against the fundamentalistic views that seem somewhat proliferate in Pakistan is surrounded by foreigners with guns, logically it makes sense, politically, it doesn't look good.
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while sitting tied with ropes awaiting interrogation.
Ropes? *Ropes*? This is what caught my eye, I can even imagine: "By Allah, lets sink our precious money and time into learning and building weapons of mass destruction and to hell with EVERYTHING else!"
Fanatics are a sad, sad thing.
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Wee, and Pakistan goes south even more.
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Yeah this is clearly the fault of Islam because Islam makes societies horrible as evidenced by all the horrible Muslims we have on HLP like
oh
wait
Stop the unqualified religion bashing. Don't turn into a 1950s conservative with Muslim hotswapped in for Communism.
Pakistan has spent the last several decades deliberately encouraging religious terrorism and has been a major recipient of Saudi jihad petro dollars (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/analyses/madrassas.html). The main religion in Pakistan is Islam. Yeah, religious extremism isn't really the mainstream over there, it's just what most people seem to buy into. :rolleyes:
your cause and your effect are backwards
socioeconomic and political turmoil create this kind of fundamentalist ****; the convenient religion is just the opportunist parasite
i wonder why people insist on arguing about this without any apparent expertise on the topic; i had the pleasure to sit down with some ambassadors and senators at the US Institute of Peace and discuss why Pakistan is so ****ed up. radical islam is as much a symptom of deeper problems as Bible Belt Christianity is a symptom of poverty and undereducation in America
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Islam is a much easier concept to blame than socio-economic and political turmoil GB. Rolls off the tongue easier.
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Islam is a much easier concept to blame than socio-economic and political turmoil GB. Rolls off the tongue easier.
this is unfortunately true :(
i also got to take a class from an Israeli tank-driver-turned-political scientist, someone with considerable reason to bash Islam; but her research made it quite clear that nationalist, fundamentalist islam as we know it today only arose (indirectly) out of reaction to European colonialism
much like US funding of the Taliban, we've only got ourselves to blame
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A lot of Muslims do not support the acts of extremists. Don't blame the religion; blame the people who use it as a weapon.
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Honestly, religion is the ultimate leash in general; but I think that the conditions in the Middle East could not have happened through religion alone. Exploitation, war, and poverty are probably the main drivers. Religion is just a tool. That's my guess anyway.
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Honestly, religion is the ultimate leash in general; but I think that the conditions in the Middle East could not have happened through religion alone. Exploitation, war, and poverty are probably the main drivers. Religion is just a tool. That's my guess anyway.
There's a lot of really solid evidence for that position.
Historically, religion has been used by the powerful as a means to exert control over the masses - a tool made more powerful still by social and economic repression (as Battuta has been saying). Fundamentalist religion is the vehicle through which power brokers move, and socioeconomic deprivation is the fuel that powers the vehicle.
This fairly basic truth is repeated through history; from Babylon, to Greece, to Rome, to the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to the conflicts that ravaged Ireland for centuries, and through many, many other examples, it should be fairly evident that it is not the belief system of the religion that matters, but the socioeconomic circumstances of the people who practice it and the geopolitical objectives of their leaders.
Islam is only the latest religion to be used in this way. Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, and yes, even Buddhists have all had their own troubles with mis-use of religious doctrine (and in many cases, still do).
It is no coincidence that fundamentalism and extremism within the broader religion of Islam have only really exploded since the Second World War.
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Actually during the Crusades, both the Muslims and the Christians took up staunch fundamentalist positions. To be fair though, they were historically less extreme.
I believe it was the Battle of Lepanto in which the commander of the Ottoman fleet told the Christian oar slaves that they would be freed should they come out victorious
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And also all about the money. That's what the Crusades were really for, opening the silk road and pilfering the Holy Land.
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Didn't the Conquistadores use Christianity to exterminate the Incas and loot their gold?
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I'd say the guns and steel cuirasses helped a bit too.
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I'd say the guns and steel cuirasses helped a bit too.
Dammit, beat me to it.
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And the germs, most.
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Well, strictly speaking it was a mixture, the Conquistadors bought smallpox to the Incas (and then, ironically, told them it was a punishment from God for Idolatory) and then the Spanish king gave the go-ahead for the War against the Incas, and by that stage they were in no condition to fight.
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Oh yeah, I forgot the germs bit...
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Didn't the Conquistadores use Christianity to exterminate the Incas and loot their gold?
For the same reason that the Crusades went off. All Mostly about the gold. Yeah, the people doing the dirty work probably thought it was God's work, but for the people who commanded them, and thereby got the mulah, I doubt it mattered.
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so what happens when the middle east runs out of oil? then they wont have any source of income (not that much of the money makes it down to the little people anyway)
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Aside from China, the Middle East is still one of the most mineral rich areas in the world, copper, nickel, zinc etc, as well as some of the rarer metals used in Electronics, often come either from Africa or the Middle East.
That's why I always find it slightly amusing when people talk about Muslim/Christian confrontations, because it has never, and will never, be about who they are, what they believe, or how they go about believing it. It's always been about what they have, and we've been getting involved in the politics of the area, keeping it unstable for decades.
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have those resources been developed yet?
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Some of them have, but many of them are deposits that have only been found recently, or, at the very least, reported recently, so a lot of development would be required if it is to be mined in large quantities.
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so could these be exploited to reduce the socioeconomic imbalance and overall general poverty and bring stability to the region ? or would it not happen with the cuurent regimes in place? essiantially what would happen if those resources were developed?
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Well, as an example, take the large copper reserves recently found in Afghanistan, if it were developed by Afghanistan, and if that money was re-invested in infrastructure and social development without being pocketed by various officials along the way, then it could contribute several billion dollars to the country. and probably go a fair way to allowing them to develop their education further, which is the dynamo that powers a country.
The main stumbling blocks are foreign and internal interference, and corruption in the Government, the problem being that it is a vicious circle, many of these problems exist because of the same weak infrastructure.
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I'd say the guns and steel cuirasses helped a bit too.
And the germs, most.
I remember reading that book back in high school... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel)
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Everyone who credits the germs is severely overestimating the ability of a relatively undisciplined army to advance in the face of firearms. These aren't the Zulus, who had practical experience and a level of discipline and unit cohesion nearly the same as the people they faced. They're the Incas and Aztecs, they're operating in a mode of personal combat and "charge in a screaming mass" that the Roman Legions obsoleted in Europe a very long time ago using far less impressive equipment.
(Granted it took about until the conquistadors for military units to develop the same kind of discipline and cohesion as a Legion of the late Republic, but the point stands.)
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nah man, it was the pox
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If I'm not mistaken, large portions of North America had already been depopulated via the pox travelling up American Indian trade routes before the Europeans even landed in Virginia and Plymouth. I believe there are records of European Colonists coming upon entire villages that had been complete killed off in along the coast. That's not to take away from the fact that the American Indian culture was totally unprepared for European style warfare. But the American Indian population in North America at least as a mere shadow of itself by the time we reached it.
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Up until TwennyCennury a lot of warfare was basically about immunology anyway, all the shooting and stabbing business was not always the primary decider of mission accomplished
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But the American Indian population in North America at least as a mere shadow of itself by the time we reached it.
But fundamentally they could never have traded on their numerical superiority; they lacked the organization to employ it on the battlefield and the political stability to pull a Grant. I mean, it's great they had so few people, sure, but they wouldn't have been able to accomplish anything with the extras.
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But the American Indian population in North America at least as a mere shadow of itself by the time we reached it.
But fundamentally they could never have traded on their numerical superiority; they lacked the organization to employ it on the battlefield and the political stability to pull a Grant. I mean, it's great they had so few people, sure, but they wouldn't have been able to accomplish anything with the extras.
I'm not sure, we're travelling into "what if" conjecture, so really who knows? The East Coast tribes were in general pretty advanced, perhaps not technologically but socially/politically they were fairly advanced (If I'm not mistaken the Constitution was heavily influenced by the Iroquois' system of government), and the Plains Indians certainly turned out to be excellent light cavalry. While it's certainly true the American Indians were clearly unprepared for European style warfare, I am a firm believer in the idea that a warrior can defeat a soldier but soldiers defeat warriors, firearms back then were crap and certainly not a be all end all weapon. Guns only took off because they were cheaper to build, maintain and train with then arrow weapons, they couldn't reload as fast as a archer and didn't have near the penetration of a crossbow. If they had pre-plague numbers they certainly could have wiped out the early colonists, Jamestown and Plymouth only survived their initial winters due to the patronage of the local tribes. Plus the way the local tribes would have handled the European incursion probably would have been different if they weren't coming off a giant cataclysm.
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I'm not sure, we're travelling into "what if" conjecture, so really who knows? The East Coast tribes were in general pretty advanced, perhaps not technologically but socially/politically they were fairly advanced (If I'm not mistaken the Constitution was heavily influenced by the Iroquois' system of government), and the Plains Indians certainly turned out to be excellent light cavalry. While it's certainly true the American Indians were clearly unprepared for European style warfare, I am a firm believer in the idea that a warrior can defeat a soldier but soldiers defeat warriors, firearms back then were crap and certainly not a be all end all weapon. Guns only took off because they were cheaper to build, maintain and train with then arrow weapons, they couldn't reload as fast as a archer and didn't have near the penetration of a crossbow. If they had pre-plague numbers they certainly could have wiped out the early colonists, Jamestown and Plymouth only survived their initial winters due to the patronage of the local tribes. Plus the way the local tribes would have handled the European incursion probably would have been different if they weren't coming off a giant cataclysm.
The problem is that their actual performance, even after a century of familiarity with firearms, does not bear out their being able to accomplish anything with the extra numbers. The engagements of the French and Indian War proved that a detachment of British regulars, or even colonial militia, could stand, fire by rank, and not a single person would ever reach them. The natives would break under a single volley of musketry. Engagements where they in theory had the numbers to push through they could never coordinate sufficiently to leverage their numbers on the field; instead they committed, and were broken, in small waves. The only successes they ever had were against units caught in marching formation, and even that didn't always go well.
While they might have successfully destroyed the early British colonies if they were in the mood to (a more difficult proposition than it sounds, really, since they're going to have great trouble with even the most primitive of European fortifications), that buys them very little as the Dutch will lodge anyways and New Amsterdam will be taken in the Anglo-Dutch Wars and become New York regardless. In the end, it earns them the enmity of the British Empire and merely ensures their complete destruction at the hands of the British Army sometime during or before the 1730s.
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Yeah, I suppose I can see that, I read the memoirs of one of the last Crow warriors in college, and their idea of warfare was extremely honor driven. Counting coup doesn't exactly mesh with an enemy that's interested in taking and holding territory no matter what your individual skill and bravery. Warriors and Soldiers.