We had a discussion around the office in the very early days of "Atlantic voices" about when it would and wouldn't be appropriate to use a profane word on the blog. I think I'm going to say that Ali Eteraz points out that Edward Luttwak is full of shit (see below) in a good HuffPoPost.
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More on Luttwak
12 May 2008 07:26 pm
Comments (32)
ali says a lot that is correct. but, i think it is important to overgeneralize here. there are 1.3 billion muslims with lots of different views....
(e.g., the stuff ali says about muslim men allowing their children being raised as hindus is totally known from india, but it wouldn't happen in pakistan)
meant: but, i think it is important not to overgeneralize here.
a good HuffPoPost.
It makes a good argument against Luttwak, but it's a well-written post overall. When he says that we need to consider Luttwak's allegiances, it's at best a bad joke. In general, the piece doesn't flow very well, and the important argument about Luttwak is wrong is made in points three and four, while the earlier material is less relevant (and the international law argument doesn't make much sense, anyway).
Doug H. wins the prize for being the only commenter not to drop a negative so far. Yglesiitis is catching.
Speaking of profanity, can in interject here that Joe Lieberman is a fucking back stabbing piece of skunk sprayed dog shit?
sirs,
i would respectfully submit that such vulgarity does not add any credit upon your characters!
yours truly,
c.v. snicker
Razib: Yeah, but the US is a lot more like India than like Pakistan. I don't think most extremists are even so extreme as to assume a particular wacked interpretation of Sharia law applies in the US.
Washer: He structured the points oddly, in that the two easy for anyone to understand points are at the end; I assume this is due to a peeve regarding the misrepresentation of Islamic law, and of Muslims understanding of where Islamic law does and does not apply, which is stronger for anyone well versed in such but weaker for the general public. Still, good he got this out there quickly--I can observe that non-Muslim NYTimes columnists issuing fatwas is rather inappropriate, but I can't cite chapter and verse and Atawaz can.
Yglesiitis is catching.
Across blogs too: the linked post spells Luttwak's name wrong each and every time it appears.
So we're supposed to bow to religious fanatics now??
Why not just say "in a good HuffPost" instead of "in a good HuffPo post?"
You can start a trend!
"Shit" is still considered profane in some quarters? How quaint.
Yeah, but the US is a lot more like India than like Pakistan. I don't think most extremists are even so extreme as to assume a particular wacked interpretation of Sharia law applies in the US.
i thought luttwak's op-ed presupposed obama visiting muslim countries?
Yeah, but the US is a lot more like India than like Pakistan. I don't think most extremists are even so extreme as to assume a particular wacked interpretation of Sharia law applies in the US.
i thought luttwak's op-ed presupposed obama visiting muslim countries?
Eteraz, as usual, comes through beautifully, I only wished more people like Fred and Al read him.
Eteraz also might have pointed out that the Grand Mufti of Egypt, 'Ali Jum'ah, has held (along with Jamal Qutb) that Muslims have the right to change their religion -- though, of course, to do so would lead in their opinion to hell. (This has not yet led to a change in Egyptian law, and Islamists still threaten those who try to convert.) Of course, Luttwak is not a scholar of Islam or the Middle East.
On the bright side, at least we now have an idea of how the GOP's fall campaign will go: at the high end (where useful idiots like the NYT reside), Luttwak and others will constantly remind us that Obama's father and stepfather were at least nominally Muslim (sotto voce: Obama will draw us into Muslims' incomprehensible blood-hate); McCain and his cohort will remind us that a Hamas spokesman compared Obama to JFK (sotto voce: Obama will enable Muslims' incomprehensible blood-hate); and the slime e-mails will assert that Obama is secretly a Muslim who swore his oath of office on a Qur'an (not-so-sotto-voce: Obama is filled with incomprehensible Muslim blood-hate).
Welcome to the next five months. Hope the NYT got a decent price for selling off the last of its pretended objectivity.
The last sentence of the first paragraph should be:
Of course, Luttwak is not a scholar of Islam or the Middle East, and he couldn't care less about any of Eteraz's carefully-marshaled arguments.
"Shit" is still considered profane in some quarters?
Actually, "shit" is vulgar; "goddamn" is profane.
What tWb said: this is just dog-whistle bullshit from the usual wingnut welfare brigade.
razib:
here in bangladesh, my (muslim) cousin is married to a hindu woman. the kids are being raised as, for want of a better word, pantheists, learning about and being instructed in both religions. yes, there are one or two kids at school who think that they are not real muslims (which, i guess, they are not, whatever that means) and that they will burn in hell, but no one is chopping their heads off. the point of luttwak's piece was to suggest that muslims around the world would be "horrified" by obama's "conversion" and that they would even think it their religious duty to assassinate him. this is surely a ludicrous concern (talk about concern trolling!) as most muslims would not be "horrified" at obama's "conversion" -- in fact would either not consider it conversion, or, even if they did, not give a shit one way or the other, and as etaraz points out, the only ones who would want to kill obama would probably want to kill any US president on principle, anyway.
Zafar made my point better than I did. If China can follow the US presidential election nonstop, the idea that the world of Islam just didn't notice Barack Obama is pretty laughable. The NYTimes giving space for a nonMuslim to correct their sad failure to issue death warrants does seem to represent their last little shred of dignity wafting away, following their failure to keep Krauthammer straight on his statistics.
I am not aware that Carlos Menem, the former president of Argentina who converted from Islam to Catholicism, was ever the subject of an assassination attempt.
Razib -- you don't see many interfaith marriages in Pakistan (as compared to India) because pakistan is 97% Muslim, while India is about 15% Muslim. Ali's larger point is correct, that entering and leaving Islam is a lot more fluid that the I-read-a-book-so-I'm-an-Muslimism-expert analysts believe. You know this.
Actually -- everyone I've talked to overseas is quite excited about Obama. regardless of his religion, he'll have a third world perspective that no recent American President has had.
Yes, Hector, that's because Menem converted solely to assume the presidency so that his closet Islamofascism agenda could be implemented. As we all know he was quite successful.
I agree with Ikram about excitement overseas; certainly this is true in Indonesia.
"Yeah, but the US is a lot more like India than like Pakistan"
Is that really true? I haven't been to Pakistan, but I've spent a lot of time in India. We aren't really anything like India. We have a lot more in common with Turkey and Thailand than we do with India. Could Pakistan really be that much different? I guess we're closer to Pakistan in terms of language, because Pakistan has no Dravidian languages, but a large number of Pakistanis are bilingual, while we, like Indians, are mostly monolingual (or "American", as the joke goes). Religiously, Islam is a lot closer to Christianity than Hinduism is, which would favor a similarity with Pakistan. Politically, India is a democracy, so we're closer there. In terms of economies, both countries are very poor and not really like us at all. I'm not really seeing how we're more like India than Pakistan. I guess if you compare Bangalore to Lahore, we're closer to Bangalore. But if you compare Siliguri to Islamabad, we're closer to Islamabad. It's a pretty mixed bag. Can someone help me out here?
Fostert,
I'm not sure whether India is comparable to America in terms of monolingualism. Educated Indians typically speak at least three languages- English, Hindi, and whatever their mother tongue might be (Tamil, Punjabi, Malayalam or whatever). I don't _personally_ know any Indians who speak less than three languages. If they've lived in other states of India they might speak other languages as well. Among the poor rural majority yes probably most people are monolingual. Still, I think it's fairer to say that more educated Indians speak multiple languages than educated Americans.
Hector: Not true. Both India and America are 20% bilingual. The Indian people you meet in America are obviously bilingual (or they wouldn't have the money to come here), but most Indians can barely speak one language. And only half of them can read. Of the well educated, you are certainly correct. My closest friend in India speaks seven languages and can read two of them. But, unlike most Indians, he was educated (thanks to me). And he's not even Indian, he's a refugee. But for the most part, unless you're from the Brahmin caste, you speak only one language and probably speak it poorly. An interesting thing here is that our bilingual people are often the least educated (Mexicans), while India's are only the highly educated (Brahmins).
"My closest friend in India speaks seven languages and can read two of them."
Correction: he can read three languages. I forgot that he can read Tibetan, his native language. He can read English and Kannada as well. But he can't read Hindi, the most common language in India. And he can't read Tamil, Punjabi, or Nepali either. But he can speak them with ease.
So we're supposed to bow to religious fanatics now??
Yes. Haven't you been listening to Republicans recently? Well, white religious fanatics, at least.
Fostert,
You're probably correct with your statistics. I'm a little dubious though that the numbers are so low for both the United States and India. How are you defining 'bilingual'? I mean, I'm monolingual if you mean _fluent_ in a given language, but I have a _working knowledge_ of two others.
I'm not referring to Indians here so much- I still have family back in the old country. My relatives back home aren't necessarily wealthy but they are educated, which you're right is not typical of Indians. Also it's not just Brahmins anymore who are educated, thanks to an affirmative action program that puts America's to shame. My home state, for example, has a relatively highly educated population but is only about 3% Brahmin (I think this is pretty typical of the south).
I think if you compared the 50% or so of educated Indians with the 80-90% or so of educated Americans you would find more monolingual people among Americans.
"Also it's not just Brahmins anymore who are educated, thanks to an affirmative action program that puts America's to shame."
India has certainly made some real progress on the education front. We can only hope that continues. But they still lag behind Thailand, and that's not good.
"My home state, for example, has a relatively highly educated population but is only about 3% Brahmin (I think this is pretty typical of the south)"
I'm guessing you're from Karnataka, which seems to be well educated, and not just in Bangalore.
"I think if you compared the 50% or so of educated Indians with the 80-90% or so of educated Americans you would find more monolingual people among Americans."
True. Our bilingual people tend to be recent immigrants. Still, I find the existence of bilingualism in India to be remarkably low for a country with 23 official languages. Thailand has two official languages and bilingualism is over 50%. The good news about India is that, even with about 5% of the country able to speak English, you can always find someone to talk to. Wherever you are, there are at least twenty people, and probably more than a hundred. That is especially true in the South, where there is considerable resistance to Hindi(for understandable reasons).
For the record, I really like India and it's people. But I'd really like to see them improve. And they are improving, but it's a slow process.
Comments closed May 26, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
*monocle* My word!
Posted by Doug H. (Fausto no more) | May 12, 2008 8:08 PM