6 ms·

Well, this is, first of all, racist. He doesn't want to use the Spanish term because he thinks it's "really not fair to saddle Spanish culture with the term."

Well, this is, first of all, racist. He doesn't want to use the Spanish term because he thinks it's "really not fair to saddle Spanish culture with the term." But it IS apparently fair to saddle Arabic culture with the term. Considering that Arabia was the birthplace of Algebra and underwent a renaissance that in large part made the European Renaissance possible, no, I don't think that's very fair at all. But even if I let this racist term go through, what is Thar, exactly? A good deal of time is spent talking about how it isn't various things-- honor, bushido-- but it isn't ever defined. Instead I get this list of things that are associated with the "mentality," a list that, among other things, describes Tokugawa Japan perfectly. As a side note, anyone who thinks Japan's is a culture of Bushido does not know Japanese history. The Bushido code was written by a samurai who never saw combat, whose father never saw combat, and whose grandfather, in likelihood, never saw combat. The Bushido myth is a propaganda piece for convincing daimyos to keep their samurai on the payroll. So we have a clearly racist document using a nonsense term to describe nothing. What, exactly, is this?

DanielBMarkham 19y ago
"What, exactly, is this?" It is a commentary on a way of life usually practiced by Arabs, but also commonly found in other places in the world. It is not a blanket statement about any race, therefore your charges of racism are total BS. You can be a member of a race and participate or not in a particular culture. Race is not culture. It's not a one-to-one relationship. To say that it is, ironically enough, racist. People are free agents and can choose to be anything they want. Cultures are fair game for all sorts of criticism -- we are really good at criticizing our own culture. Thank goodness we live in a world where criticism of culture is encouraged.
- qaexl 19y ago
  I don't like how the original author failed to distinguish between Arabian culture and Muslim religion. Though they are intertwined, there are non-Arabian Muslim cultures as well. To add to DanielBMarkham's comment, though, Arabic culture centers around the language, not the ethnicity. Some of the original author's arguments are evidence of Muslim rather than Arabian origin. Lastly, just to throw more confusion into the issue, some of the Sufi sages were tortured to death by their Muslim bretherens as heretics, and they died with the same kind of aplomb the way the Buddhist monks were tortured to death. (Not all Arabs sacrifice themselves in hopes of attaining 72 virgins). The telling point would be to find a non-Arabian culture that encourages 'thar'. Unfortunately, I have not yet thought of an example off the top of my head involving an non-Arabian culture. The original author also vaguely discusses the rise of 'thar' culture sprouting on the internet without giving any specifics. I've been to forums where where people flame each other for sport. I remember the occasional tiffs here, and people trashing Reddit. I know Digg and YouTube comments are full of inanities. Not to mention the flames on blog posts and regular news articles when someone gets upset but clearly did not thoroughly read the article in question. It often seem to closely track the maturity level of the people involved: immature human beings don't know how to set good personal boundaries, whatever culture that might be.
  - DanielBMarkham 19y ago
    As you point out, the term Arabian is more about language than ethnicity. I'm probably wrong, but don't tribal, violence-based political-religious movements possess these same cultural traits wherever they are found, such as Polynesian countries? One could argue that in the case of extreme Islamism this is Arabic culture seeping into other areas, but Polynesians are certainly not Arabic -- or any ethnicity that could be considered Arabic. So race or geography has little to do with it. But I agree -- the article meandered a bit and one could draw various conclusions. I couldn't see anything racist, though. Seems like any more, people stick the racism label onto anything that might be critical of any sort of generic category of people. I guess if we say fat people are happy we would be accused of racism. It's just a poor choice of words, that's all my comment meant to point out.
    - qaexl 19y ago
      Hmm, "tribal, violence-based political-religious movements." Going that way though, we could start pulling in examples from the Crusades, witchhunts ... I don't remember if they matched all of the factors: - Restrictions on the free flow of information. - The subjugation of women. - Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure. - The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization. - Domination by a restrictive religion. - A low valuation of education. - Low prestige assigned to work. Given that, Dark-Ages European cultures matches most if not all of those traits. As a tangential note, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Tipping Point and Blink wrote about these guys who were able to figure things out from people because they have studied the way people make faces. They categorized facial expressions. They were able to distinguish between two South American tribe based photographs of the individuals within each of the tribes. One tribe is very friendly. The other is not -- includes a lot of the attributes listed in 'Spotting the Losers'. The caveat is that face reading like this is a specialty that requires a lot of training. Would be interesting to write software that can suggest cultural influences though, then run it through say, all the American news footage and see what kind of subcultures we have here.
      - DanielBMarkham 19y ago
- run4yourlives 19y ago
  Its a veiled attack at cultures not based on modern western values as being not only inferior, but despicable and immoral. It is racism in its purest form.
  - DanielBMarkham 19y ago
    Maybe I'm a complete idiot, but you are not making any sense to me at all. Nazi Germany was a culture, a society. It was a brutal, horrible thing that should be despised for the many faults it had. Mongol society was a barbaric, violent, awful society and culture that should be shunned. Paleolithic tribal societies were also brutish, superstitious, harsh, and murderous towards themselves and outsiders. Many were also cannibals. How is this in any way disparaging Germans, Mongolians, or people who may have come from a tribal background? E-gad, man. We have to be able to make comparisons of how various things work. Some cultures work better than others. Sure, stupid people will extrapolate that to say that the _people_ in those cultures are good or bad. But stupid people do stupid things. That's no reason at all to give up on our duty as sentient beings to make comparisons and judgments. We don't give up living in houses simply because some stupid people burn them down. Why would we give up the Enlightenment because some cultures never grasped it?
    - run4yourlives 19y ago
      I can't comment at all on the Nazis, as there is too much negative connotation to argue that effectively. However: >Mongol society was a barbaric, violent, awful society and culture that should be shunned. Bullshit. Mongol society was different than western society. They had a tremendously effective military, but they were also known for tremendous religious tolerance, placing an importance on education and arts (teachers, lawyers and artists paid no taxes). It had basically no crime within the empire. They built the largest empire the world has ever seen. If you honestly think they did that by walking around like jackbooted thugs, you sir are a fool. Of course, they weren't perfect, but neither are we. To say something like the Mogols were "a barbaric, violent, awful society and culture that should be shunned" while blissfully ignoring the faults of our own culture is woefully ignorant and arrogant at the same time. >Why would we give up the Enlightenment because some cultures never grasped it? I'm not asking you to. I suggesting that the Enlightenment is but one path to the destination.
tx 19y ago
Rasizm is recursive. By noticing rasizm in that text you became a rasist yourself. I just got rasist by commenting on it and downmodding you. The only way to get rid of it is for everybody to forget about its existence.
Retric 19y ago
Clearly you did not understand what you where reading but felt the need to attack it anyway. Anyway, Thar is a word in common usage in a different language. He attempts to translate it at "blood vengeance" but it is already a world which you could look up if you felt like it. He then uses the term "thar mentality" to talk about the systems where "blood vengeance" are part of their system. "The thar mentality can be said to include these features. They vary in degree from person to person and place to place but if we find all or most of them in a society we can justly apply the label thar. Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing Obsessive male dominance Paranoia over female sexual infidelity Primacy of family rights over individual rights" 2nd: "While we can find this attitude in Spanish cultures, it's much more virulent, destructive and unmoderated by humor and common sense in other parts of the world." AKA Spanish cultures do a weak version of X but if you want a real example look at Y and Z cultures.
theoneill 19y ago
Prediction: a Bayesian filter trained to detect uninsightful comments would be discovered to have given a surprisingly high rating to the token "racist". The word is meaningful, or at least once was. But as with the names of fashion brands, it's a bad sign if it occurs a lot in your conversation.
jsnx 19y ago
...anyone who thinks Japan's is a culture of Bushido does not know Japanese history. The Bushido code was written by samurai who never saw combat... It was formalized in Tokugawa times, but goes back to the 9th century in Japan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido) and bears a strong resemblance to the warrior ethic described in many Chinese folk tales. (These tales were collected, very late, into the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms).)

DanielBMarkham 19y ago

"What, exactly, is this?" It is a commentary on a way of life usually practiced by Arabs, but also commonly found in other places in the world. It is not a blanket statement about any race, therefore your charges of racism are total BS. You can be a member of a race and participate or not in a particular culture. Race is not culture. It's not a one-to-one relationship. To say that it is, ironically enough, racist. People are free agents and can choose to be anything they want. Cultures are fair game for all sorts of criticism -- we are really good at criticizing our own culture. Thank goodness we live in a world where criticism of culture is encouraged.

qaexl 19y ago
I don't like how the original author failed to distinguish between Arabian culture and Muslim religion. Though they are intertwined, there are non-Arabian Muslim cultures as well. To add to DanielBMarkham's comment, though, Arabic culture centers around the language, not the ethnicity. Some of the original author's arguments are evidence of Muslim rather than Arabian origin. Lastly, just to throw more confusion into the issue, some of the Sufi sages were tortured to death by their Muslim bretherens as heretics, and they died with the same kind of aplomb the way the Buddhist monks were tortured to death. (Not all Arabs sacrifice themselves in hopes of attaining 72 virgins). The telling point would be to find a non-Arabian culture that encourages 'thar'. Unfortunately, I have not yet thought of an example off the top of my head involving an non-Arabian culture. The original author also vaguely discusses the rise of 'thar' culture sprouting on the internet without giving any specifics. I've been to forums where where people flame each other for sport. I remember the occasional tiffs here, and people trashing Reddit. I know Digg and YouTube comments are full of inanities. Not to mention the flames on blog posts and regular news articles when someone gets upset but clearly did not thoroughly read the article in question. It often seem to closely track the maturity level of the people involved: immature human beings don't know how to set good personal boundaries, whatever culture that might be.
- DanielBMarkham 19y ago
  As you point out, the term Arabian is more about language than ethnicity. I'm probably wrong, but don't tribal, violence-based political-religious movements possess these same cultural traits wherever they are found, such as Polynesian countries? One could argue that in the case of extreme Islamism this is Arabic culture seeping into other areas, but Polynesians are certainly not Arabic -- or any ethnicity that could be considered Arabic. So race or geography has little to do with it. But I agree -- the article meandered a bit and one could draw various conclusions. I couldn't see anything racist, though. Seems like any more, people stick the racism label onto anything that might be critical of any sort of generic category of people. I guess if we say fat people are happy we would be accused of racism. It's just a poor choice of words, that's all my comment meant to point out.
  - qaexl 19y ago
    Hmm, "tribal, violence-based political-religious movements." Going that way though, we could start pulling in examples from the Crusades, witchhunts ... I don't remember if they matched all of the factors: - Restrictions on the free flow of information. - The subjugation of women. - Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure. - The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization. - Domination by a restrictive religion. - A low valuation of education. - Low prestige assigned to work. Given that, Dark-Ages European cultures matches most if not all of those traits. As a tangential note, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Tipping Point and Blink wrote about these guys who were able to figure things out from people because they have studied the way people make faces. They categorized facial expressions. They were able to distinguish between two South American tribe based photographs of the individuals within each of the tribes. One tribe is very friendly. The other is not -- includes a lot of the attributes listed in 'Spotting the Losers'. The caveat is that face reading like this is a specialty that requires a lot of training. Would be interesting to write software that can suggest cultural influences though, then run it through say, all the American news footage and see what kind of subcultures we have here.
    - DanielBMarkham 19y ago
run4yourlives 19y ago
Its a veiled attack at cultures not based on modern western values as being not only inferior, but despicable and immoral. It is racism in its purest form.
- DanielBMarkham 19y ago
  Maybe I'm a complete idiot, but you are not making any sense to me at all. Nazi Germany was a culture, a society. It was a brutal, horrible thing that should be despised for the many faults it had. Mongol society was a barbaric, violent, awful society and culture that should be shunned. Paleolithic tribal societies were also brutish, superstitious, harsh, and murderous towards themselves and outsiders. Many were also cannibals. How is this in any way disparaging Germans, Mongolians, or people who may have come from a tribal background? E-gad, man. We have to be able to make comparisons of how various things work. Some cultures work better than others. Sure, stupid people will extrapolate that to say that the _people_ in those cultures are good or bad. But stupid people do stupid things. That's no reason at all to give up on our duty as sentient beings to make comparisons and judgments. We don't give up living in houses simply because some stupid people burn them down. Why would we give up the Enlightenment because some cultures never grasped it?
  - run4yourlives 19y ago
    I can't comment at all on the Nazis, as there is too much negative connotation to argue that effectively. However: >Mongol society was a barbaric, violent, awful society and culture that should be shunned. Bullshit. Mongol society was different than western society. They had a tremendously effective military, but they were also known for tremendous religious tolerance, placing an importance on education and arts (teachers, lawyers and artists paid no taxes). It had basically no crime within the empire. They built the largest empire the world has ever seen. If you honestly think they did that by walking around like jackbooted thugs, you sir are a fool. Of course, they weren't perfect, but neither are we. To say something like the Mogols were "a barbaric, violent, awful society and culture that should be shunned" while blissfully ignoring the faults of our own culture is woefully ignorant and arrogant at the same time. >Why would we give up the Enlightenment because some cultures never grasped it? I'm not asking you to. I suggesting that the Enlightenment is but one path to the destination.

tx 19y ago

Rasizm is recursive. By noticing rasizm in that text you became a rasist yourself. I just got rasist by commenting on it and downmodding you. The only way to get rid of it is for everybody to forget about its existence.

Retric 19y ago

Clearly you did not understand what you where reading but felt the need to attack it anyway. Anyway, Thar is a word in common usage in a different language. He attempts to translate it at "blood vengeance" but it is already a world which you could look up if you felt like it. He then uses the term "thar mentality" to talk about the systems where "blood vengeance" are part of their system. "The thar mentality can be said to include these features. They vary in degree from person to person and place to place but if we find all or most of them in a society we can justly apply the label thar. Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing Obsessive male dominance Paranoia over female sexual infidelity Primacy of family rights over individual rights" 2nd: "While we can find this attitude in Spanish cultures, it's much more virulent, destructive and unmoderated by humor and common sense in other parts of the world." AKA Spanish cultures do a weak version of X but if you want a real example look at Y and Z cultures.

theoneill 19y ago

Prediction: a Bayesian filter trained to detect uninsightful comments would be discovered to have given a surprisingly high rating to the token "racist". The word is meaningful, or at least once was. But as with the names of fashion brands, it's a bad sign if it occurs a lot in your conversation.

jsnx 19y ago

...anyone who thinks Japan's is a culture of Bushido does not know Japanese history. The Bushido code was written by samurai who never saw combat... It was formalized in Tokugawa times, but goes back to the 9th century in Japan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido) and bears a strong resemblance to the warrior ethic described in many Chinese folk tales. (These tales were collected, very late, into the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms).)