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They have handed over their sovereignty to US forces to help kill their Muslim brethren. You want them to prove some more loyalty tests?
by asadm 7mo ago
They have handed over their sovereignty to US forces to help kill their Muslim brethren. You want them to prove some more loyalty tests?
- JasonADrury 7mo agoThe state religion in Kuwait is Sunni Islam. It's much more nuanced than "Muslim brethren", except perhaps less so when Israel is directly involved, as it is today. It's also important to note that these are not democracies. The state frequently does things that people aren't entirely happy with, it's only when the people (or religious leaders!) become sufficiently unhappy that it becomes a problem.
- dfadsadsf 7mo agoDo not mistake leadership and regular people. Afghanistan president Ghani handed over sovereignty to US too but Afghans disagreed. I am confident that there is significant minority in Kuwait wishing for Iran victory. As a datapoint, there were videos from Bahrain with people cheering for Iranian rockets hitting American bases.
- breppp 7mo agoBahrain has a significant Shia population that feels oppressed and identifies with Iran. That's not similar to Kuwait, a country that has a recent history of being taken over by its largest neighbor and saved by the US
- vonneumannstan 7mo agoLol most Kuwaitis including the royal family are Sunni and believe Iranian Shia's to be heretics. So no love lost there at all.
- lenerdenator 7mo agoImagine thinking that you're brothers with someone based solely on what religion you both supposedly believe.
- JasonADrury 7mo agoIn a sense it's a rather positive way of thinking, no? Surely having a shared set of beliefs is a pretty good starting point. I'm certainly not religious, but it feels rather cynical to make fun of this.
- asadm 7mo agocorrect.
- lenerdenator 7mo agoIt's not cynical if centuries of history show that it doesn't work to effectively moderate bad human and societal behavior.
- JasonADrury 7mo agoYou can be cynical about Islam without being cynical about this particular principle.
- lenerdenator 7mo agoI'm not being cynical about Islam. The principle is the thing that I'm being cynical about. We look for these shortcuts all the time because we're meant to interact with much smaller groups of people than we do on a societal scale now. For most of human history the average person was born, lived, and died within the same community of maybe a couple hundred people at most. This thing where the average person lives in metro areas of millions and can do business with people on a completely different continent is really new and we're trying to find methods for figuring out who is and isn't trustworthy. Most fail, and you can throw "in group vs out group" in the failure pile. Any sort of shortcut to "this person is an ally and/or worthy of my trust" based primarily on race, religion, nationality, etc. is a very good way to set yourself up for exploitation. You see it all the time. Televangelists scam money out of people's pockets by the same mechanism. A "good Christian" man is asking for your donation after giving you the Almighty's blessings. You also see it in criminal organizations that tend to group themselves by ethnicity like the American La Cosa Nostra, where you have to be full-blooded Italian to be a made man. The people considering your induction into the further depths of the criminal organization won't let you join if you're not full-blooded Italian, because that's the "in group", but the "out group" of everyone else is less likely to kill you in that lifestyle than the members of the "in group".