Suddha
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14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Some Tips on Taking a ... · 0 replies · +1 points
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
14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Some Tips on Taking a ... · 3 replies · +1 points
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
-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
14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Afghan girl will never... · 0 replies · +2 points
(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
14 years ago @ KABOBfest - Afghan girl will never... · 2 replies · +2 points
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
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