I had him muted for a long time. Then I unmuted him to see if he had anything worthwhile to say. As Hauta pointed out, he doesn't. NAO back into the mute folder he went

The comment about Syria and ISIS is uncalled for, Ogion. (You're going to say something about right-wing theocrats and terrorists and their line of thinking, and it's not going to justify what you said. So maybe skip that part.)

Indeed. They share a common theocratic ideology based on the notion that God is the only source for the organization of society and that somehow not being religious means one is necessarily terrible. Obviously the converse position has some merit.

If you feel that theocracy doesn't result in oppression and reap reason virtually always, I'd be curious to hear what distinctions you see. The only difference is which book they're using really.

No, the converse position has no merit. For example, there's a notable lack of the desire to violently actualize a global theocracy, which would be the substantial reason to say ISIS instead of, say, your average Indonesian. (The rhetorical reasons are of course name recognition and provocation.)

@ Hauta. what do you want to know about my kids again?

Very little. Just what you ranted about a couple weeks ago.

Let's review, shall we? Zmaj and Brad were pushing this notion that a non-religious dictatorship is uniquely bad while pushing a theocratic view that only religious based society is good. This is the same idea behind ISIS's pushing for global Sharia law.


Furthermore, Zmaj's notion that a religous dictatorship is somehow benign is rather disproven by the concrete example of ISIS's rule. Obviously, the converse proposition that religious-based societies can be pretty damned terrible has real merit. This notion that religious groups don't want to actualize a global theocracy is far from universally true. I'll probably get silenced again for pointing out, for example, that some Christians are in fact dominionists.. This is pretty much precisely the same view of the desired role of religious doctrine that ISIS has, namely that all law should be based in some reading of fundamentalist principles from some founding book. In taht sense, dominionism is basically salafism in Christian robes.

Maybe there is some distinction, but from where I stand two things are clear:
1) non-religious government is not somehow "soulless" and inferior, given that "reglious" government includes things like ISIS rule
2) Domininism and salafism share a common view of the proper role of fundamentalist religious law as supreme to secular concerns like rights or justice.

From where I sit, I can tell you for damn sure, I have zero desire to live in either kind of society.

I think your undestanding of the worldview of some of these people is frankly, pretty naive, Leth.

@Ogion, I never said anything of the above. Stop living in a fantasy world.

Apologies. It was Brad, not you Zmaj. Sorry about the confusion

Apology accepted.

But even in your golden rule world, that's a state enforced moral view, and I'd also say that your approach of just turning a blind eye on injustice doesn't exactly live up to that.

Unless, are you suggesting you'd like people to kill your family, force you out of your home, push you into the most impoverished parts of the country, strip you of resources, force you to abandon your language and religion by force and exterminate your culture? If so, I guess your lack of interest in justice for tribes might have merit. Otherwise, apply the golden rule to recognize taht if someone had brutalized your culture that way, you'd want to be treated with respect and with some recompense for the brutal wrongs perpetrated upon you, no?

Thanks, zmaj

@Ogion, yes, I would apply the Golden Rule. I would let it go if my great-great-grandfather was brutalized. In fact, I did let it go. I live in the Balkans, you know, and if we started playing the reparation game here, there would be no end to it.

"Some of these people" is not who you were talking about, Ogion. When it comes to "some of these people," talk away. But I think you underestimate just how common it is for people to take religion for granted throughout their life, including in their politics, without actually harboring visions of global theocratic domination, let alone wanting to realize such visions. Problems still arise, but they're *different* problems.

Well, the problem is that it doesn't end with your great grandfather, because you're still living in dire poverty with negligible cultural, political and economic rights that people want to strip away from you. As long as the past harm continues because of your dire situation, so does the need for some kind of redress.

Actually, yes, and I'm pretty sure Brad is among them. When people start denigrating the legitimacy of other view points and pushing ideas like the notion that atheists, for example, are morally inferior and "soulless" that's tantamount to religious supremacism. I certainly understand having religion play a central aspect of life, as it does for me, but that doesn't mean I have to take the position that others are necessarily morally inferior, only that they don't have a right to force me to live by their religious dictates. When Christians are genuinely pluralistic, that's mere disagreement. When they start saying they want to use the force of the state to dominate others and oppress them (e.g., LGBT people, Muslims, or atheists), then I find that abhorrent. It is a very common mentality and one finds these views that non-Christians are second class human beings VERY frequently expressed. So, does one not speak to those view for what they are, an absolutist and supremacist, and indeed fascistic, philosophy? I am not one for politeness in the face of things that pose existential threats to others.

Ogion, the intergenerational problems you identify do indeed exist but nothing stopped American Indians from leaving the reservation and moving to NYC where nearly everyone off the boat was discriminated against. There they could achieve a lifestyle and education that could be superior to what they got by staying.

Not so fast Hauta, the Native Americans were killed and forcibly removed in most cases with some exceptions of the 'civilized' tribes that eventually moved to modern day Oklahoma or other places. Don't you remember that terrible phrase, the only good Indian is a dead Indian. And who are you to judge what is superior your culture or someone else's

And there raises again the exterminationst approach. That's a recipe for the loss of culture and nationhood. Tribes have ancestral lands, the best of which were stolen. They'd be in better shape if they'd been treated fairly and hadn't been, essentially robbed. Between the Indian schools and systematic disenfranchisement, the genocides have been worsened by cultural extermination. This false equivalence with immigrants is historically ignorant. But as is typical, there is no understanding of the history or nature of tribes

Blame the victim, it's a tiresome game for those who haven't faced this.

And you Letho with your theocratic domination. What domination. What I see in today's culture is a domination of others with those 'rights' that were once considered aberrant behavior. It is one thing to call to account racial barriers of marriage that is a recent occurrence. But this idea of homosexual marriage goes against millennia of human custom and practice over many cultures, peoples religions and ages. That is the horrible domination.

Haifa and Letho, you both fall short in your treatise of right and wrong behavior with your opinions coming from one generation feeling themselves superior to all of those in the past. This is a horrible time of depressing of peoples and cultures by a minority of persons.

Brad, you don't know what I'm talking about because you can't see the comments I'm replying to. But if you don't want me to get all exercised on *your* behalf, I'm happy to stop.

You're also *comically* mistaken about what domination entails. Their freedom is not your oppression, except insofar as you have been denied the freedom to oppress others.

^this!

Brad, "And who are you to judge what is superior your culture or someone else's"

I wasn't judging. I was responding to Ogion's argument that Indians are caught in some intergenerational cycle of poverty. With poverty being the metric, my response was to point out that NYC was a better bet than a reservation. Apparently, many Indians decided that poverty with their own people was better than a chance at prosperity with unfamiliar people. Their choice.

Odd statement coming from you, Brad.

Funny, i thought I pointed that out. Often when an indian showed up somewhere he was killed.

It's sickening that a thread about such an important issue has been hijacked by racist, genocidal drivel.

orathaic: Constitutional law is two-faced when it comes to Indian treaties. Tribes have certain 'sovereign' privileges, but in practical terms have very limited legal recourse to violations of sovereignty. This on top of serial violation of treaties over the years.

Poverty isn't the metric, Hauta. It is really about whether you condone genocide. The US came along an engineered a massive genocide. Now, you're telling the survivors "abandon your ancestral homes and culture forever and go chase a paycheck in our corporate machine" without any sense of responsibility for past actions? That's a pretty damned harsh approach. Convenient for you I guess. As JECE points out, tribes still exist and they're still being screwed.