It’s more like a dangerous/annoying stack overflow, but useful enough that you still use it (when you get past the ethics of how it was made). But it’s not something I would pay for (I’d pay to be part of a programmer community or access to curated raw material like documentation (like MDN or the old Apple documentation))
I think if you were sensitive you could still have that conversation. People might very well complain, as is their right, but they’d still allow it if you were sensitive.
The problem is that the Jewish community in the UK is relatively small and vulnerable and there is the tendency for such discussion to turn ugly and affect the lives of all British Jews regardless of their thoughts on Zionism.
We don’t want you burning Korans outside of mosques and we don’t want you throwing paint at people on their way to temple.
I’m not religious but I don’t want either of those situations. There are more effective ways to help those in trouble than starting pub fights.
I kind of agree with you that as a public statement it shouldn't be banned but it's not the burning of the koran, or any book, that should be protected but the where and when of it.
I feel similar to how I feel about fans who taunt opposition fans at football matches.
Some off colour jokes are funny, even when they're in bad taste. They aren't and shouldn't be banned.
You hear a commedian saying them on stage and you'd laugh.
Making those same jokes at a football match though has the potential to cause a riot because people's passions are already raised.
I'm not talking about normal banter[1] related to the game or the teams but the dark stuff that crosses the line. I'm sure you can google it if you want examples.
Where the lines are I'm glad I'm not the one to decide.
Zionism is the notion that the state of Israel has the right to exist. Opposing Zionism is the call to destruction of the entire nation-state, and, therefore, a call to genocide.
(Opposing the actions of said state is, of course, a natural right and can be freely expressed by anyone).
> Zionism is the notion that the state of Israel has the right to exist.
No state has a right to exist; people have a right to self-determination, and a state of a particular form, and territorial extent may or may not be an realization of such a right, so even in that minimal framing (which I would say is more the motte Zionists retreat to when challenged than the bailey of the actual substantive meaning of the term in practical use by them), Zionism is a flawed and problematic proposal at best.
Well, if your logic is pretending to be universal, then it should apply to Palestinian Arabs as well. Why they should have the right to their state and Israeli Jews don't? (Or vice versa)
I think there is a big disconnect in this debate, and a lot of it comes from framing and conflicting definitions.
I'll try to describe this from my PoV:
Zionism, to me, is just jewish-flavored nationalism. To me, the question "has Israel (the state) the right to exist" is almost nonsensical; I don't think that Italy, Germany, France or the US have any inherent "right" to exist, and the same would be true for Israel in my view.
The people that a state governs, however, do have an inherent right to fair representation of their interests (in my view), and this is where Israel often falls short.
There are a lot of non-jews living within Israels borders, and Israel (as a state) fails those people regularly (and, arguably, by design: it does not really want to protect interests of citizens that deviate from that jwewish national identity).
So I think questioning "western logic" with "why should Palestine (the state) have more of a right to exist than Israel?" is unhelpful framing that misses the main point ("citizens have a right to have their interests represented").
>There are a lot of non-jews living within Israel's borders, and Israel (as a state) fails those people regularly (and, arguably, by design: it does not really want to protect interests of citizens that deviate from that jwewish national identity).
I dont think this is well supported, or the source of conflict. The state seems to do a fairly good job of providing for citizens within boarders. Arab Israeli citizens have the right to vote in Israeli elections, run for office, and serve in the Knesset. They make up roughly 1.9 million people (about 20% of Israel's population).
You can argue that these people have civic representational differences as minority group, but this is a very different situation than people living Gaza or the west bank, and their representational rights.
I think that is the central question: Can you exert control while avoiding representational responsibility, and how much?
Nation states influence each other all the time. They threaten, sanction, and impose restrictions, especially when in conflict without invoking responsibility.
Now I agree that isnt a very accurate characterization of this situation. It is much more of an occupation. I still dont think that invokes a responsibility of enfranchisement, but it certain invokes some responsibility for the occupier. The US occupied Japan following WWII, but that doesnt mean Japanese became US citizens, but there are moral obligations.
I model the Palestinian situation as a failed occupation where there is no progress towards end of occupation criteria. Neither party want integration, nor are they ready for peaceful coexistence.
I dont think Israel has a responsibility to enfranchise or integrate, but it does have a obligation to provide and maintain an option for coexistence, and perpetually put real effort towards achieving it. That means giving 2nd, 3rd, or 100th chances.
> Do you consider Westbank and/or Gaza a full state independent from Israel?
Whether or not a legally independent state exists with some or all of that territory within its borders, that area is effectively controlled by, and in large part (including all of the West Bank, though the exact administrative details differ in different locations in the WB) under military occupation by, Israel.
> Well, if your logic is pretending to be universal, then it should apply to Palestinian Arabs as well.
It applies to the State of Palestine as much as to the State of Israel, correct.
Of course, while I have heard many arguments for recognition of a State of Palestine with twrritory including some parts of the area bounded by the Mediterranean Sea and the internationally recognized borders of Egypr, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, none of them have been that that State has a “right to exist".
And I haven't, in this discussion, stated a position on whether either Israel-within-some-borders or Palestine-within some-borders are proper realization of the right of self determination of some people living in the area described above. You’ve just assumed a position out of nowhere because I argued that a “right to exist” if the State of Israel is a fundamentally flawed and problematic position, with a reasoning that on its own terms applies equally to the same argument if it were made for the State of Palestine.
FWIW, I think the best realization of the self-determination rights of the people in the region would probably, in the near term at least, involve both a Jewish and a Palestinian Arab State within some borders, a situation to which there are many obstacles, not least of which is Israel’s long (consisting of most of the time since 1968 at least) campaign of genocide against the Palestinian Arab people, callibrated largely to avoid excessive blowback from the West (and particularly the US), with strategies enggaged in to preserve pretexts for continuing and escalating that campaign with reduced resistance, both direct and dippomatic (which includes, among other things, fostering the formation of Islamist network that gree into Hamas to split Palestinian resistance and have a less sympathetic organized opposition during the occupation of Gaza.)
Unfortunately for that meaning of the word — and a few million people stuck in the middle — two completely different groups of racists are both simultaneously coopting it to stir up hatred for their enemies, who are the other group.
> (Opposing the actions of said state is, of course, a natural right and can be freely expressed by anyone)
Unfortunately, the "soldier mindset" (as opposed to scout mindset) is dominant in this case, and I fear suggesting why would be rejected because of that very mindset. So no, the freedom is not there in practice.
"You're with us or against us" kind of thing, but only with the most expansive definition of what counts.
Well, the soldier mindset and "us vs them" mindset is deadly, and the history is littered with mountains of corpses of people who subscribed to this world view, as well as millions of their innocent collateral victims.
Hate is deadly and useless. Israel is a nation that is tightly bound and has the right to exist, as there are millions of people who consider themselves Israeli. Palestine is a nation and has the right to exist, as there are millions of people who consider themselves Palestinians. Zionism is the affirmation of the Israelis to be a nation proper. Palestinian identity is the affirmation of Palestinians to be the nation proper. Both things are OK, even if I will be promptly hated by both groups, I won't give the words meaning beyond what was originally given to them.
> Both things are OK, even if I will be promptly hated by both groups,
Brave, and I respect that position.
Myself, I would prefer to carefully phrase things to not get hated. I likely can't be of any help anyway, but I think the chances go down even further if both broader groups hate me equally and think I'm on the opposite team or can't see what the other lot are doing wrong.
> I won't give the words meaning beyond what was originally given to them.
"Orangeman" is a member of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland, named for the Dutch William of Orange who took over the UK at the beshest of parliament to support protestantism. William got the name from the principality of Orange, which is named after the city of Orange, which is in France and named after the Celtic word for foread or temple.
They wear the colour orange, even though the colour is named after the fruit (old English grouped this colour under "red"), the fruit being a corruption somewhere in probably-France of "Norange" (hence modern Spanish "naranja"), and before that Arabic.
Back to Dutch Prince William of Orange: The Dutch for the colour is "oranje"; for the fruit is "sinaasappel", literally "Chinese apple", hence the similar (but I'm told distinct species of) fruit with the English name of "mandarin".
Oranges are technically a kind of berry, unlike strawberries which are not.
The zest of an orange is an important ingredient of the mincemeat used in mince pies, which (despite the name) are generally vegetarian.
That's not the part we have a problem with. It's that there was already people living there before and now they're using this supposed right to exist to wipe out the local population. Ironically they don't believe that Palestine has the right to exist.
Colonialism has always been bad, Israel is clearly no different.
"They" are me, I am a religious Zionist Jew. I believe that Palestine has the right to exist, just like Israel. Israel is the land of our ancestors, which was ruined by Romans and then settled through Arab conquests (Arabian colonialism was a thing). This is fine, this was a long time ago. We were there even longer, but it is not the time to compare.
If Palestinians consider themselves a nation, they are a nation, just as we are. Neither of us should try to destroy each other.
No state has the right to exist, that thought terminating cliche makes no sense legally or philosophically. States are recognised by other states, with no legal rights involved. Also claiming that a call for the end of a state is a call for genocide is ludicrous, if that was the case then every revolution in world history would be a genocide.
That was their voluntary decision supported by the population of both states.
A closer analogy would have been some proposals to dissolve the German state forever after WW2, and get its parts annexed by other states. But that didn't happen.
Not to mention that Nazi Germany was actually doing an actual genocide. But that wasn't sufficient to warrant the same fate for them as a nation.
The latter part definitely did. See Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave) and all the parts of Germany that were ceded to Poland.
And the expulsion of ethnic Germans living in non-German lands across Europe postwar was certainly a form of ethnic cleansing, even if you believe it was justified to remove the justification Germany had for prewar annexations like the Sudetenland.
It's not US vs China. It increasingly looks like China VS a conglomerate of multi national companies with foreign born billionaire CEOs whose HQs happen to be located in the USA.
> He stood on the shoulders of Persian, Greek, Indian, and Chinese precursors, while Renaissance inventors, in turn, stood on his.
This is the first time in my life where a western outlet doesn't try and obfuscate the fact that many of the "discoveries" made by europeans in the the renaissance period have taken inspiration from the close to 800 years of Islamic scientific research (who themselves never failed to credit their predecessors).
Typically, when you study the history of science in the west, it starts at ancient greece (who have no contemporaries) then there's a massive blackout of 800 years and poof ! The "light" is magically turned on.
I thought you were going to go the other direction. All I ever read is that the west relied on Islamic science and math, but "no one" will acknowledge this. Except of course it's the only perspective I ever hear about, so I'm not sure who this mythical "no one" is. On the other hard, vanishingly few sources do seem to acknowledge that the Islamic sources "stood on the shoulders" of Greeks and others. Ibn Khaldun states this directly in the Muqaddimah: "The sciences of only one nation, the Greek, have come down to us, because they were translated through al-Ma'mun's efforts."
The full quote:
"The subject here is different from that of these two disciplines which, however, are often similar to it. In a way, it is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines by anyone. I do not know if this is because people have been unaware of it, but there is no reason to suspect them (of having been unaware of it). Perhaps they have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us. There are many sciences. There have been numerous sages among the nations of mankind. The knowledge that has not come down to us is larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians that 'Umar ordered wiped out at the time of the conquest! Where are the sciences of the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, and the Babylonians, and the scholarly products and results that were theirs! Where are the sciences of the Copts, their predecessors! The sciences of only one nation, the Greek, have come down to us, because they were translated through al-Ma'mun's efforts. (His efforts in this direction) were successful, because he had many translators at his disposal and spent much money in this connection. Of the sciences of others, nothing has come to our attention."
>Except of course it's the only perspective I ever hear about, so I'm not sure who this mythical "no one" is.
Most American primary/secondary textbooks (in a country where the majority of people still don't go to college). Ask the average person to name an Islamic analogue to Newton, Copernicus, or da Vinci, you're going to get blank stares. I couldn't do it, and I watched Family Guy Cosmos and everything.
ps: just want to point out that i'm not being snarky, just asking a question in good faith.
I heard more than once on TV (incidentally by critics of the catholic church), that Copernicus or Galileo had been burnt at the stake for proving that "the earth wasn't flat".
Knowing that TV and social media do play as large a role as history books or formal education in knowledge acquisition these days, is it really wrong to question whether "the average person" is a valid point of reference when discussing inter-civilisational exchanges of discoveries.
It's odd how far people have run with simplified versions of Galileo's story. The version I've seen everywhere is "The dastardly anti-science Church hated heliocentrism so much that it persecuted Galileo for it." The Church's support of geocentrism did play a role, but if you look at the details, it seems far closer to "The Roman Church of Galileo's day was filled with scheming politicians, and he (perhaps unwittingly) offended people who he couldn't afford to, so his enemies latched onto his support for heliocentrism as an excuse to get rid of him."
These days, I've come to treat every clean-cut historical anecdote as suspect; there's too much of a game of telephone between people who want history to prove their point.
I can't speak to any very recent changes (I'm doubtful anything's changed massively, I could be wrong), but I was educated in the US and went to highly selective schools--and it was only in an obscure, elective history of science class fairly late in my college career that I learned about al-Haytham (who was called Alhazen in the class). Meanwhile, I (and many of my HS classmates) could have told you that Copernicus pioneered a heliocentric model of the solar system, or about Newton's laws of motion, etc., when we were 15.
The Renaissance really was taught as "Europeans rediscovered the great classical thinkers", and it was only through my own curiosity that I learned that Islamic science played a key role.
Here in France, we were taught from fairly early on about Averroes and Avicenne (Ibn Sinna) for instance. There may geographical and societal reasons for these differences, but all in all that's besides the point i was trying to make, which is :
The average person may have heard of Newton, Darwin and others, but how many could really explain the theory of gravity or that of evolution without getting at least some of it wrong?
("Gravity... ha yes, the guy with the apple","evolution... sure, we all are descended from apes, right?")
...Therefore, relying on what the average person may know to discuss whether something is publicly acknowledged and understood is perhaps the wrong way to go about this.
You're missing the point. There's value in even simply knowing the names. I may not know the details of a given historical scientist's accomplishments, but if their name floats around the cultural ether, I can pluck it from the air and type it into Wikipedia. Most Americans - likely most Westerners - cannot do that with even a dozen or so non-European historical scientists, because we don't even know their names.
This massive gap in the common understanding of the way the modern world came to be is concerning; undermines most people's model of the development of civilization is, for example, one of the things that makes it easy to drop bombs on historical sites (and the descendants of those who built them), or to ignore when other parties do the same. "Ignore what the peasants think, only elite thought matters," has never preceded an era of sustainable peace and prosperity.
Indeed. In fact, it is one of the most amusing aspect of the anglophone west (at least for the last few decades). Despite public perception (by public I mean those who have been to university since the 90s), Western historians of science and mathematics in general have never not acknowledged the previous works of the Persianate civilizations commensurate to their knowledge of them in their time. But somehow in the last few decades professional historians have had to waste time figuratively looking over their shoulders lest they be percieved as being Eurocentric. And, if they were to somehow find a way to show -- requiring whatever hermeneutical gymnastics -- that a prominent scientist was influenced (or even better, had stolen) from some other "cultures" than nothing better! (ex: Copernicus from the Maragha school as an example of interpretive gymnastics)
But, of course, this is one of the symptoms of the degeneration that now afflicts your particular civilization and is bringing about it's inevitable transformation to something else -- but better this than the fate of the Abassids or the Sung.
I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion for this. But it's still the truth: just wait until you try to get muslims to confirm what exactly about islam "safeguarded" science in the middle ages.
The answer is slavery, and patronage by very, very rich people (who outright owned the scientists, and these in turn kept libraries of the great scientific works of the past, as trophies for the sultan, with zero public access). Oh and the fact that they recreated the Roman habit of kidnapping slaves and then selling them, sometimes an enormous distance from where they were captured. That is how Hindu numerals spread.
One very famous example is the "Blue Mosque", the greatest piece of islamic architecture for over 500 years, the tallest building in the world for a very long time (only overshadowed by the Church it was copied from: the Aya Sofia) which is a copy of a Church building by a Jewish architect (who was a slave to the sultan). Yes, minarets are a Christian idea.
Perhaps this is the reason the Blue Mosque doesn't have one of the defining features of islamic architecture of mosques: it doesn't have a catwalk, a podium for selling slaves, which most ottoman mosques have.
Then, usually during periods of economic stress, muslims destroyed their science, usually for religious reasons. Of course, this happened in the Christian west too. In the west science (specifically the copying of books by the Catholic church, then giving public access to them. No public access existed in any caliphate) recovered faster than these religious attacks could destroy it. In islamic nations it didn't. Islam was more scientifically advanced in 800 than in 1800 (or 1900). Or, to put it another way: the more actual muslims a society had (in 800 that was almost none), the less science existed.
Why? The only disagreement with these claims comes from islamic supremacists. Even in islamic sources directly you can verify most of the claims (slavery, Blue Mosque - Aya Sofia + architect, slavery in mosques, barely any muslims in early muslim society ...)
Look up on Wikipedia, look up in history books. These are not small details.
> This is the first time in my life where a western outlet doesn't try and obfuscate the fact
I do not know what you have been reading, but most western outlets go out of their way to acknowledge this. If anything people tend to idealise the "Islamic golden age" in the same way they do ancient Greece and Rome.
> Typically, when you study the history of science in the west, it starts at ancient greece (who have no contemporaries) then there's a massive blackout of 800 years and poof
They ignore the significant advances made in medieval Europe, and the Byzantine Empire.
I'd agree with the gp. An amazing example for such an attitude was some french edition like "History of the World in Ten Chapters and a Half" which said in the introduction that it will talk about greek and roman history and then the modern times because the Byzantine empire just kept the torch burning. I stopped reading right there. Maybe it is different in the more academic literature, but the pop culture narrative is that the eastern roman empire, the islam world, the chinese, and the mongols were some autocratic religious barberians who worshiped things that they do not understand. If western Europe wasn't leading the way, some people reason, then everyone else shouldn't be allowed to stand above. Politics has the habit of using history to justify its own ends and it is true everywhere and in every century.
I don't remember the exact book name, but it is not the argument, it is an example. The argument is multiple instances of pop culture statements and opinions where people believe that the world was on a pause between 476 and 1452 and even if someone else has created something, it was given meaning only when the europeans discovered and improved it. Don't feel obliged to believe me, I know what I've witnessed and shared a data point.
You must have read different sources from the ones I read. There is no shortage of mentioning the "Islamic golden age" and the role it played in bringing knowledge from "the east" to "the west" as well as preserving knowledge from and of classical Greece by means of translations to Arabic. There seems to be doubt about the veracity of the latter though as this claim may have been a strategical device to promote 'anti-Byzantinism':
The claim that philosophy and the sciences died out in Christian Byzantium and were transferred to the Islamic world can be found in a number of ninth- and tenth-century Arabic sources, edited and translated from the 19th century onwards and mostly taken at face value since then. However, Dimitri Gutas has explained that, during this time of bitter military struggle with Byzantium in which the Arabs were losing ground, emphasizing the Muslim appropriation of the pagan Greek heritage and claiming that Byzantium destroyed it because of the ideological and political break represented by Christianity was a form of anti-Byzantinism expressed as philhellenism. Gutas has also clarified that Abbasid society appropriated Greek philosophy and science in order to address its own needs: negotiating a canonical version of Islam [1].
Wherever the truth lies I do not see any dearth of mentionings of the role played by Islamic scholars.
I wonder if GP is trying to be witty or simply has an axe to grind.
The transmission of knowledge between civilizational blocks is fairly well documented (I recently read Jacques Le Goff on this particular topic), and what is owed to the Islamic civilization is no secret.
For those interested in comparable technical developments in Europe around the same time, for the middle ages were not as dark as usually portrayed, I recommend reading Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine (whom Ken Follett relied on extensively for "The Pillars of the Earth") and David Landes' A Revolution in Time.
I think there was a bbc documentary where they showed a manuscript of Newton or Kepler with a geometric proof and compared it to one by Al Jazari. They were identical.
In fact even the vertices were labelled the same, and followed the order of Arabic letters.
It’s good the author mentions Persian specifically, given most of the influential mathematicians and scientists who comprised the Islamic Golden Age were Persian.
Disagree. If you spend any time studying the history of science, you know that many stars have Arabic names, we use Arabic numbers, and the word Algorithm is Arabic in origin.
