Suddha

Suddha

39p

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14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Some Tips on Taking a ... · 0 replies · +1 points

Haha, *delete post*

Still relevant: Actually the real significance of the Safavids lies in their establishment of an assertively Shia Iranian ideology, which was asinine of me to leave out. Missing the forest for the trees, if you will. A matter of deep geopolitical importance resonating down the ages, methinks.

14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Some Tips on Taking a ... · 1 reply · +1 points

Oh - and if you know of a computer game where the Safavids play anything like a leading role, I'd be much obliged if you'd point me to it. :) I don't know if it'd be more fun to play as Ismail I or to pwn him...

14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Some Tips on Taking a ... · 3 replies · +1 points

On capitalism: since this is on "taking" ME classes, I figured I'd touch on student foibles only. Of course the good Professor W------ would never claim such a thing to have existed in thirteenth century Anatolia. However, undergraduate students with no real exposure to pre-modern history often graft capitalist analysis onto pre-capitalist ages. Saw this sort of thing not only in "Islamic Empires" but also in "Ancient Greece," where of course notions of capital and capitalism are even more problematic. Of course it's relatively easy to correct, so all's well that ends well and with a good prof.

As to contemporary relevance of pre-modern history, I'm not sure why you bring it up in this context - after all, I'd say (as a historian) that the most interesting errors in historical perception occur when one grafts a modern worldview onto pre-modern subjects. And we were talking merely about foibles - or I was.

If we were to discuss this, I'd have to cede ground on the Fatimids. I know little about them and have only looked at them cursorily. But the Safavids built much of Iran, including the port of Bandar-Abbas and Isfahan. Their cultural accomplishments remain a touchstone for people who care about Persian culture. They effectively broke Uzbek power in Central Asia and moved a good many Armenians around, both of which certainly shaped the landscape of Central and Near Asia. And they checked Ottoman expansion to the East. All important, modern-world-shaping phenomena. But, obviously, things that happened since the early 1700s are arguably more important than those earlier occurrences. Or at least they're easier to trace, track, and quantify. How's that for ambivalent historiography?

14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Some Tips on Taking a ... · 7 replies · +1 points

Haha, beautiful. From personal chagrined experience (but a history class) I would add:

-Thirteenth-century "capitalism": not a useful or relevant construct.

-Fatimids and Safavids: not as similar as you think.

14 years ago @ KABOBfest - At the Ballot Box, Tro... · 2 replies · +1 points

Here's the thing about Hamas being a criminal gang, akin to the Italian mafia (did you know that the US used them to help cement power in Sicily immediately following the invasion of Europe's soft underbelly in WWII? I didn't 'til very recently - but 'tis true). Even if one accept this argument, that doesn't explain the international community's rejection of them. Let's scale up for a minute and look at other states which get considerable input from criminal gangs/networks, and which are accorded legitimacy by the international community: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia, and Equatorial Guinea, just for four truly glaring examples. Now, these states, which are currently being run as for-profit entities by criminal cliques, which kill and torture people, etc. - similar to what you're accusing the looters and shooters, if you will, of Hamas of doing - have no problem with the international community doing business with them. Shit, they don't even have much trouble with irredentism, a la Russia in Georgia. What's the difference? Power. And money. The interests of the wider international community (or the G-8, or the G-20, or however you want to parse it). Putin, Karzai, Obiang, and Zardari are useful to those interests. Hamas is not. You can argue moral high ground, if you want, and I might even concede some of your points though by no means all. But I don't think it's useful to you to try to take the moral high ground vis-a-vis international recognition of Hamas. A winter metaphoric simile, since it's almost that time of year: the snow on that mountain is a heart as pure as the driven slush.

14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Afghan girl will never... · 0 replies · +2 points

Well I'm flattered to receive such a complement! *preen* As long as we all seek after truth and are intellectually honest, with ourselves and each other, I think we'll all be okay.

(And I'm glad to hear that you don't seek to downplay the impact of domestic violence in the US. It's unfortunately a phenomenon that is still very much "underground" in terms of public perception.)

What I think BCell is going for is the fact that problematic gender relations underlie this encounter and the encounters between victims and abusers in the US. That said, obviously these gender relations manifest themselves very very differently from place to place. This is based on not institutional factors - the rule of law is quite weak in Kashmir, whereas it's much less incentivized here for me to go kidnap a cute girl with some of my buddies. But it's also a function of cultural factors. Regard for women and their status as human beings is lower in some places than in others - or regard for women is manifested in different ways, to put a different spin on it. Of course when these two factors come together, the resulting dynamic is pretty problematic.

14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Afghan girl will never... · 0 replies · +2 points

Just to clarify: I do not agree that the Afghan Taliban and their foreign and criminal associates are responsible for the majority of violence against women in "Afghanistan." They are certainly responsible for a majority of civilian casualties. But I suspect that the vast majority of violence against women is carried out by everyday "Afghan" men who have no political or religious motivation for their contemptible actions.

14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Afghan girl will never... · 2 replies · +2 points

OH AND ONE MORE FUCKING QUIBBLE:

I spent a little time volunteering at a battered women's shelter in a place I used to live. Please do not use the phrase "average domestic violence." I assume that you think domestic violence is an awful phenomenon. But you implicitly say that it is not - that it is a predetermined fact of life - when you use the term "average domestic violence." I don't think that's what you want to do. Let's try to keep in mind the power of language, since we're all spewing many many words out into the colossal content-ridden void of the internets. And insofar as those words determine your actions, they're to be taken seriously when you choose which to use.

14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Afghan girl will never... · 2 replies · +1 points

Man, so much for my resolution to stop commenting on blogs because it's a huge waste of time. This is going to probably drop into a void, but let's play the LSAT practice test game here real fast.

So, "Islamofascists" (can you please find a different term? There are plenty of anti-Islamic words that would actually correspond to a real category) are responsible for roughly 70% of wartime civilian casualties in "Afghanistan." Fine, that's valid. And it's a lot of people, too, and some percentage of them are women. I'd suspect over half.

But you cannot use that figure to claim that "Islamofascists" are responsible for the majority of violence against women. Since a lot of evidence (most spectacularly the travesty of the "no sex no food" law) suggests that structural and physical violence against women is endemic in Afghanistan. The impact of the Taliban eventually shrinks to irrelevance in this cesspool of female suffering, which continues regardless of whether their oppressors are unusual black-flag-of-Khorasan bearing drug-addled millennialist madmen, criminal networks, or the run-of-the-mill ol' Patriarchy. It's been going on a long time, and, I'm sad to say, will probably continue to go on.

But back to the LSAT: you're taking one figure (wartime civilian casualties) and conflating it with another (violence against women). But analytically these categories are totally different. So, uh, skip ahead to the next question and work on that for a while.

You can still wriggle out of this by claiming that all "Afghans" are Islamofascists. But then your whole larger argument is meaningless. Have fun advocated the propping-up of a Shariah state, oh Eagle-my-eagle! :-D

14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Finding Islam's Modernity · 0 replies · +1 points

Eagle, are you WN? If you don't know what I'm talking about then you're not, but goodness, using BNP sources is a little risqué ain't it?