That’s not how carpets work
For most Americans, the Middle East is an exotic and mysterious place. Like the Persian carpets made there, it is a complex weave of nations, tribes, languages, and religions. And like a Persian carpet, you can’t pull on one thread without pulling on many others.
However, if you study the history of the region, certain patterns emerge. I studied the history and cultures of the region for many years until I had my eureka moment. I had discovered what I call the Grand Unified Theory of the Middle East. It is a unifying principle which explains every event there since the beginning of history. Once you learn this theory, you will instantly understand everything that happens there.
Here is my Grand Unified Theory of the Middle East: Everyone hates everyone.
The Arabs and Persians hate each other. The Turks and the Kurds hate each other.The Sunni and the Shia hate each other. The Bedouins and the Berbers hate each other. The Muslims and Christians hate each other. And all of them hate the Jews. The Jews, not wanting to be outdone in the hating game, boldly up the ante by hating both themselves and other Jews, mostly because they are either too Jewish or not Jewish enough.
Democracy at work
Could this geopolitical dumpster fire possibly get any worse? Yes, it can! Democracy in the Middle East, where it exists at all, tends to get into a rut. Generally, there is a two-party system which is a fierce duel between the Islamic Party of Islam for Muslims against the Very Very Very Islamic Party. In such a situation, it is difficult to find common ground.
So what should the US do? I suggest treating the place like a nest of killer bees. The farther away you are, the less likely you are to get stung. And if you insist on getting close and throwing rocks at the hive, throw really big rocks. In 1983, Reagan withdrew US forces from Lebanon after a truck bomb killed 241 Marines. He said:
“Perhaps we didn’t appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle. Perhaps the idea of a suicide car bomber committing mass murder to gain instant entry to Paradise was so foreign to our own values and consciousness that it did not create in us the concern for the marines’ safety that it should have.”
Tribes with oil money combined with global geopolitics.
Thank jeebus that North Dakotans are foreign policy naifs!
Shorter Reagan – “We stuck our dick in crazy, probably was a bad idea. Let’s not do that again.”
I can’t imagine a president saying something like that these days. We’ve gone from introspection to ‘I can do no wrong’ in a relatively short period of time.
There are no mistakes anymore. Everything was a rousing success, everything was justified, everyone did the best they could.
And if it wasn’t, it was the other teams fault.
“We saved Yassar Arafat’s life and the PLO. This is the thanks we got.”
Say what you will about Ronnie, he admitted his mistake and got the fuck out.
With a hail of 16″ shells to announce our departure.
It was the only way to be sure.
You have to take steps to make sure you didn’t pick up a tail.
I’ve met a few hot Lebanese chicks. I can justify sacrificing some Marines for their right to wear bikinis. I’m not going to sleep soundly at night about that decision, but isn’t that kind of the point?
I’d like to see a chart using colored flames for all this hatred and a breakdown between the groups. White, blue, green, red, orange.
I’m having a hard time figuring out how I can create think tanks and put a bunch of consultants and pundits on the payroll with such a simple approach to the ME.
Straffin is right, we are going to have to pretty this pig up before we can make some real money.
We would also need (yes, I’m inviting myself into the think tank) a bunch of vague policy recommendations filled with baffle-gab speak, which we then present via PowerPoint in bullet-point form.
How about a hastily created meme?
There are not enough colors in the spectrum.
So the middle east minus tribalism = libertarianism? interesting.
You cannot subtract tribalism from a set of cultures whose bedrock foundation is tribal.
I’m not commenting on how to make the middle east libertarian. I was joking about how libertarians hate everyone
I would argue that you can, but it takes a lot of dead bodies. Most of Europe has had tribal identities for centuries, but 1500 years of warfare, including a couple world wars, and we have the EU.
Most of Europe still has tribal identities, they’re just tired of fighting since the last big fight took a lot out of them. And the Europeans separated themselves out into a lot of little, homogeneous countries, which took some of the edge off (the least stable Middle Eastern countries tend to have the greatest diversity of tribal loyalties).
Only by loose definition of ‘homogeneous.’
England had a head start and created a reasonably homogeneous nation out of Saxon-Norman (and that simplifies matters still), but UK still includes Welsh, Scots and Irish. Orkneys, Shetland and Cornwall are distinct enough to be their own thing.
But many “homogenous” countries ended up being a fiction created by one large national group consuming identities of others. “French” is distinct from Breton, Provancal or Norman, and is mostly Ille de France making their language/dialect the official one. German nation was created in 1871 by Prussians – had Saxony or Bavaria been the unifier, Germany of today would be much different. Let alone had Austria remained a hegemon.
Italy is still a crazy quilt that Piedmontese tried to put together, but fuck, there’s an honest-to-goodness separatist movement in the north of the country that thinks unification was a terrible idea.
Belgium takes the prize though, for being both tiny AND a patchwork of ethnic groups who are part of one nation mostly by inertia at this point. Had the sorting gone on organically, north should be in Netherlands, and south in France.
Swiss, of course, demonstrated centuries ago that you don’t need a homogeneous country to forge disparate tribes into a nation, despite those tribes keeping their identity. But it’s hard since it requires the dispersion of authority country-wide, contrary to natural desire of monarchs to centralize.
An 1% of Belgium that should be in Germany.
cultures whose bedrock foundation is tribal.
Describes all cultures.
And gays. They all hate the gays. Except in Iran, where there are no gays.
That’s cause in Iran it’s not gay if you’re pitching
That’s impossible. The LGTBQ advocacy group assured me they will continue to stand for the rights of Muslims everywhere, and they are very friendly towards homosexuals.
Not so much in Israel. The ultra Orthodox aren’t thrilled but don’t really do anything about it. The rest of Israeli society is pretty accepting.
Now for the scariest part: it hasn’t even gotten close to as bad as it possibly can get yet.
That happens on the eventual day when one of these hateful psychopaths detonates some kind of nuclear device in a major city somewhere.
That’s a scary part. The scarier part is that it’s probably never getting better.
Also, why is that scary? It has never been appreciably good for the better part of the 20th century. From a historical perspective there have only been times when, in my estimation, it was less shitty. By what rational basis can we presume that it would ever get or be better?
Realistically, how is that scary for the U.S? How will that change my day to day life? I presume there would be ‘extra security’ at the borders, but I’m not sure how that would look any different than the farce we currently have. Maybe the Dow would drop a bit. If my life isn’t significantly altered I find it hard to be scared.
The Middle East is probably the best argument for the development of alternative energy sources there is.
Monster! You mean politically acceptable alternative energy sources.
Eh, I’m good with Nukes and fracked natural gas actually
Sorry, I was offering the prog interpretation.
LOl I know
Unfortunately, there isn’t a principled libertarian mechanism for turning the whole area into a glass ashtray.
There is if they nuked one of our cities.
Not really. Who is this nebulous they? It’s cool to kill some goat farmer in the middle of nowhere because a couple of other assholes killed some of Americans? I have no doubt we WOULD nuke the shit out of them, but I fail to see the principled libertarian case for it.
Gotta nuke something? /Muntz
Even our warboner-enthused political class would stop short of sanitizing the whole area with the deep cleansing action of hard radiation.
Actually the whole point of the article is how all divided the Middle East is by sectarian conflict. ‘They’ is one group in thousands. Killing a couple million other Arabs, Kurds, Persians, Levantine groups, etc. in said future glass ashtray because a dozen Syrian religious fanatics got their hands on a Russian nuke does not make you the good guy.
In nuclear warfare, there is no ‘good guy’!
Sounds like an excellent place for a wall to keep them all in – certainly wouldn’t millions of these maniacs showing up in Western Europe or North America.
Typical American arrogance, refusing to accept the validity of other cultures! /prog
Shorter version – “We should have given the guards live ammo.”
The Barracks bombing was not that simple. The night prior to the near dawn bombing there was a concert at the barracks which ran past midnight. In order to move some equipment the Marines had to move some concrete barriers at the checkpoint out of the way but since it was after midnight the commander decided to move the barriers back in the morning. Between that decision and dawn ~5 hours later the enemy noticed the breach in security, and executed the mission. Now even given that the truck bomb was probably already constructed that is a pretty impressive OODA loop.
They’re all crazy. You cannot fix that.
What about the children? *Holds up pics of dead kids* Now let me tell you how this one trick will stop that.
Nuke it from orbit?
The kids will be just as dead but there won’t be any messy pictures and you could even make the argument that it was more humane to give them a quick death over the long suffering one they are in for in that region.
Forced sterilization?
I like Riley’s take. *Disclaimer or teaser (you decide). This is the dude that claimed you were homophobic if you would dump a chick if you found out she was a guy. (I have no idea how to pronoun that correctly).
Fortunately, I suspect that Riley is the end of that particular genetic thread.
Actually people have parsed the pile of adjectives and discovered that by his own admission, he’s a biologially male, straight guy with a girlfriend who is biologically female.
There are plenty of guys out there, even ‘normal’ non-narcissists who don’t manage to perpetuate their genetic sequence.
Although I can imagine a Pythonesque sketch, with ‘Riley’ coming home after a long stressful day at the office, wondering where his supper is.
Douglas: Oh, poppet. To think when we met, you were so worried that you came from Iran.
April: …What?
Douglas: When we met. As if I’d be worried about something like that! I don’t care where you’re from; Iran, France, doesn’t bother me. I’m very modern
April: I’m not from Iran!
Douglas: Well, you said something along those lines.
And then they broke the Internet.
I had a close friend in college, a room mate in fact who was from Azerbaijan. A very intelligent, cultured and cool guy. Unless the subject of Armenians came up. These people take their histories of antagonism very seriously. You mix religion into it and it gets all sorts of crazy. Tribalism, dogmatic religion and a coveted resource has done nothing but drive these feuds to the next level.
Like trying to explain to Americans in the 1990s that the English-Irish troubles didn’t just go back to the 1970s or even the 1920s.
To be fair, that wasn’t necessary when talking to the descendants of Irish emigres to the US, just to the Americans who believed they were in some way Irish because they’d got drunk on March 17 for a few years when they were at college.
True.
In a way yes. He tried to explain it to me, but it mostly came across as ‘fuck those guys’. It didn’t help that his ancestral homeland is being occupied by the Armenians now. If you want to chase the rabbit down an ancient fued-y rabbit hole then look up Nagorno-Karabakh.
One of about 400 feuds you’d have to worry about if you tried to do a forced entry into the area. For instance, there are more Azeri in Iran than there are in Azerbaijan. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 105 distinct ethnic/cultural/religious breakouts in Georgia.
No way we have a cogent understanding of all the issues in a place like that.
The Middle East sort of reminds me of a dysfunctional couple who lives a couple of doors from your apartment who always argues and beat the shit out of each other. Every time you try to intervene on one of their behalf and stop the fighting, they both turn against you and try to fight you.
I guess my point is, stay the fuck out of people’s business.
… and put an electric fence around their property
… install video cameras
… sell resulting footage to ESPN
Consolidation everywhere
Steamboat Ski Resort has embarked on a new chapter in its 54-year history, with the news Monday morning that Intrawest Resorts Holdings, Inc., has been acquired by ski resorts operator Aspen Skiing Co LLC and private equity firm KSL Capital Partners LLC for about $1.5 billion, including debt
——-
The deal goes beyond the competitive advantages of bringing Steamboat, Aspen, Squaw/Alpine Meadows and Winter Park together under the same management, including the synergies that offers in multi-resort season passes. The new group also acquired Tremblant in Quebec, Blue Mountain Ontario, near Toronto, Stratton in Vermont and West Virginia’s Snowshoe, with its proximity to the Washington, D.C. market.
As Vail Resorts has continued to gobble up large ski resorts and pursue dominance with its Epic Pass, other destination resorts have felt the pressure to compete or become marginalized. The eastern ski areas can be expected to be significant feeder markets for both the California and Colorado ski areas under the Steamboat/Aspen/KSL group.
When do economies of scale trip over the law of diminishing returns?
Don’t forget diseconomies of scale, somehow everyone seems to forget those exist
One of my good buddies in college was Egyptian. He had an expression that i always found funny: “Who is the only group that Arabs hate more than the Jew? = Other Arabs” I had no idea what the Sunni/Shia schism was at the time, but his point was that it is an essentially-tribal culture. (which i think is an important sub-group you left out of your formula – ‘every tribe hates all other tribes’)
Perhaps its not entirely limited to the Arab world either. This is what Winston Churchill had to say about the Pashtun =
anyway, I thought you echoed some of Winston’s very-charming phrases there. which is never a bad thing.
I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.
Bedouin saying.
everyone biting the OG bedu stylee
Random musing: we have some pretty hard-core tribal hatreds in the west but these days they rarely break out into violence.
That could change fairly soon. I have been sensing that the left are really going to double down down on stupid and probably resort to violence. They’re like a wounded animal that has been cornered right now.
Well, on the bright side, at least they’re not going to have guns most likely.
(hides copy of “The Protols of the Elders of Guidos”)
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
True story = while in college, i was kicked out of a Kappa Alpha fraternity-party/sorority-invite when someone learned i was from NY*. I was brought as a date of the sorority-president, which caused her to threaten to storm out with all the other girls. It was like a scene out of west side story, only it was a bunch of drunken blue-blood yokels vs. overdressed jappy/preppy girls. I volunteered to go willingly, as my buddies all lived across the street anyway. Ever the peacemaker.
(*i swear i didn’t say anything! people always assume i was shit talking. I didn’t even make any civil-war jokes)
I knew a KA once, met him on overseas trip. Those guys have a serious stick about being southern. That doesn’t surprise me.
Another reason I despise my
social marxistcommunications instructor. She carps on about the superiority of collectivist societies over individualists, because we tend to have a very atomizing social fabric whereas tribal societies tend to prize community and social concerns. It’s like, bitch, have you seen the state of tribal politics in the middle east or India? Do you recognize that tribalism is just as socially enervating as individualism, just on a different scale? No, thank you, I’ll take the meritocratic culture in which I thrive or fail on my own talents over the culture where a bunch of us go stave in the heads of some children in another shithole village because one of their boys raped one of our girls.tribal societies tend to prize community and social concerns.
And are famously known for their “crab-bucket” mentality – as soon as anyone starts to climb out of their little buckets, whether economically or socially, the rest of the village makes damn sure to pull them back down.
But we should continue to arm the good terrorists against the bad terrorists and occasionally bomb someone, right? I mean there doesn’t seem to be any reconsideration of that idea and our leaders know what they’re doing, so I just have to assume we’re doing the right thing.
Step 1: Arm terrorists, bomb other terrorists
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit?
I’ll be in curled up, sleeping naked in the bathtub by the time next links roll out, so I’ll leave this here. Maybe covered, but it’s nuts so another peek.
OT: GERMANY LABELS TWITCH A ‘RADIO SERVICE’, TELLS STREAMERS THEY NOW REQUIRE A BROADCASTING LICENSE
Do you know who else …
That website is blocked at my office. Is this real or just some bullshit headline?
Pirate stations?
They’re really selling me on this Twitch thing.
ARGH!
Maybe Erdogan is right. The Germans are looking a lot like Nazis as of late.
I am assuming this is more about money than censorship. Probably some very old judge that doesn’t quite the nuances of this new spacebook stuff the kids are always talking about but we can’t have ze people not paying for zere papers kan ve now?
I dunno, because there is an eerily similar (in attempted outcome, not method) attempt here by the left to silence some Youtube streams by labeling them ‘extremist’. And extremist means anything not on the far left. I’m suspicious that this is not about money, but about the far left attempting more censorship.
The article claims that it’s a preemptive measure to stop TV stations from classifying themselves as ‘streaming service’ and avoiding the fees and regulations that way.
Desirability of government regulating TV broadcasts that don’t consume any publicly owned resource is left as an exercise to the German reader, but I suspect he’d fail it.
One of those radio services that doesn’t use radio? Cool!
Well given that the US did kick the hornets nest a bit, it will probably get blamed for most stuff the next 20 years even if they stay out from now. So might as well drop a few more bombs, since it’s not put of the way. That is how I see the near future.
Tom Lehrer would like to have a word about your lack of citation to his stuff.
The SWPL parody guy?
I figured Old Man With Candy would explain Passover today. Is it getting saved for Jewsday Tuesday?
He mentioned in one of the threads yesterday evening that it was coming on Tuesday.
Short explanation: There’s a huge difference between Passover and an overpass.
LOL. Thanks. I missed that.
Yes, it’s a Jewsday post. I spent the First Night at a seafood restaurant near Cape Cod entertaining customers. This was not my idea of a great holiday celebration.
Anyone else been having an issue in Chrome with all or part of the comments randomly disappearing?
Nope. Maybe Monocle? I’m not running it at the office.
It ‘could’ be Monocle, or it could just be Chrome. But I’m not having any issues in Firefox, but don’t have Chrome installed. Maybe I’ll turn off Monocle in Chrome and see if it goes away.
Monocle? what magic is this?
Desktop, or smartphone?
Deskphone.
It took you that long?
But I’ve been told, despite the madness, Obama ‘calmed the Middle-East’ and that Trump is destabilizing it.
It’s almost as if these people are retarded.
Next thing you know, the “progressive” left will bring Cindy Sheehan out from the gutter into which they tossed her when Obama got elected.
Remember her??
Everyone hates everyone.
I hate everyone there too.
“Everyone hates everyone”
We in the west are pikers when it comes to the civilizational resentment thing — before the Dorians were even a speck in the eye of Zeus, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Elamites, and any number of ancient peoples had already piled the skulls of their neighbors high enough for everyone to hate everyone else with a righteous fury. The geography of the region allow for the militarily successful to dominate vast tracts of land without much trouble with a high degree of centralization — the people there don’t even have to like you that much, so long as your military is competent. Combine that with the easy living that Eastern monarchs were accustomed to, and you have a situation where just about any ethnic group handy with a spear or bow was going to rule over other people — and eastern ruling methods were not for the faint of heart.
Europe on the other hand was mostly free of coercive empire after the Romans dropped the ball. Sure, you’re gonna get the Hapsburgs, and the Carolingians are gonna pretend that they’re the same thing as old Rome, but small, decentralized states with almost no ability to project force are the norm in European history until roughly the early modern period. In the near East, a revolving door of foreign-run, centralized empires is a pretty normal thing and the current period’s the anomoly. That’s gonna cause some serious resentments, when it comes right down to it.