1. I am now reading three very interesting books.
Fabian Biancardi’s “Democracy and the Global System a Contribution to the Critique of Liberal Internationalism” – an interesting look at post-modern democracy, globalism, and governance in our present era. I’ve not yet formed an opinion of this book so far.
You can get it at Amazon here:
Justine Davis Randers-Peherson’s “Barbarians and Romans: The Birth Struggle of Europe, A.D. 400-700” a very interesting look at the evolution of what would become the Germanic world of Western Europe we knew today, out of the sparsely populated, mostly arboreal, primitive tribal milieu of barbarian late antiquity.
There are numerous myths on Western civilization and culture which I find to be ahistorical, and without real basis. This book makes a serious examination of the processes by which the Celts and Germans became civilized in their interactions with the Roman State, the military and cultural dynamics, and how the formerly semi-nomadic Teutonic tribes became real nations and settled civilizations with the passing of Roman power. More importantly, it deals with the Asian steppes and suggests something I have long believed, that there was no clear demarcation between “Europe” and “Asia” when it came to the folk-wanderings of Indo-Aryan tribes even up to late antiquity. A fascinating and well researched book.
And you can get Randers-Peherson’s book at Amazon here:
Lastly James H. Billington’s “Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith”.
Billington is a highly placed authority, historian of the Library of Congress, and one of the most respected historians of the nation (bio at http://www.loc.gov/bicentennial/bios/preserve/billington.html) This book is a landmine of historical research, but its themes hold implications that a highly literate reader, with some background knowledge of revolutionary politics and history, can put together.
Billington delivers a highly readable, and authoritative, history of the revolutionary strands of thought that birthed America, Soviet Russia, post revolutionary France, and indeed the whole face of modern democratic Europe, and looks at the way in which social revolution, social justice, leveling, and other similar themes formed part of an enlightenment era creedal faith, a secular religion in other words, with its own rites, myths, and sacraments.
Billington shows that, for many people, it was truly a religious faith that drove them on, and he shows how this led to the libertarian, leftist, democratic, and republican traditions and threads that characterize modern political thought on both the right and the left. It is also the only sane and authoritative history on the real origins of the Bavarian Illuminati.
Billington also examines interesting overlaps between certain occult groups and the early socialist Left, though regrettably doesn’t spend much time on this fascinating, bizarre, and mostly forgotten side of Western political history. (It’s something only raving conspiracy theorists really deal with, although Rene Guenon touches on and alludes to certain matters in his history of Theosophy and Spiritualism. Also. Deveney’s history of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor can be read closely for names to follow-up on. Julius Evola, himself well steeped in European occultism, drops an interesting tangent or two throughout his oeuvre)
Billington’s fascinating and informative book can be found at Amazon here:
2. Thoughts on the show “To Catch a Predator” – I could ask, isn’t this legally entrapment? But on a more subtle level, does it not, in constantly displaying such matters, actually popularize pedophilia, making it seem normative and wide spread?
There are three main problems with To Catch a Predator, each I will deal with. It’s legally entrapping, biologically disingenuous – in confusing sexualized adolescents with non-sexualized children; and it actually makes the problem of pedophilia worse. Skeptics can now rip my head off. Bear with me, as I explore these ideas further, and you will find yourself seeing, at least, that I have a valid point and frankly could very well be correct.
The problem with this show starts with the simple fact that our Modern Western culture utterly lacks any concept of sexual honor or shame, and worse certain seemingly well meaning, but actually deeply idiot and possibly subversive, individuals in academia have subjected us to a 40 year propaganda campaign convincing us that sexual honor and shame, as well as that instinct that the Arabs call Gheera, (it’s not quite jealousy, though it is frequently mis-translated as such into English) are somehow pathological and wrong.
The subversive idiocy of certain voices in the psychiatric establishment is a theme for another day, needless to say there are sincere and genuine people who thought they were engaged in a liberational and progressive project of enlightenment, but because of their reacting to the, if you will, Victorian ancien regime of morals and psychological health, simply went to another extreme in reaction.
The sincerely mistaken, however deep the harms they have caused us, can be understood, but there is another smaller section of the intelligentsia who were outright, knowingly and with fell malefic intent and bad faith, out to subvert the dominant social order not in order to reform it, but in order to dissolve it.
This is my claim, and I won’t bother defending it because it would take too long, it is somewhat obvious to anyone who has done a good deal of reading, and would lead me on a tangent.
So, as to the show itself; what I find problematic, beyond the fact that it constitutes almost as legal entrapment, is that the “girls”, used to lure the would-be sex offenders in question, may happen to be under age, but they are neither biologically or even legally children.
This is a subtle point to consider, think the following over.
One – these girls are minors, but they are not, and cannot be defined as, children. Many could legally get married in a number of states with their parents permission, and some are even over the lowest ages of consent in some US states and Western countries.
Children cannot legally engage in sexual congress. Ergo if by law a person who is pubescent or post-pubescent can marry, even if only with their parents permission, in some localities then by definition they are not children.
QED dude.
This is not difficult to understand. Secondly biologically, at the point of puberty being reached a child becomes a sexual being, and hence capable of siring or bearing children which is, after all, the teleological point of sex. Of course there are some people who haven’t figured this out, but we can leave them to the side for now.
Now, whether or not it’s a good idea for 14 or 15 or 16 year olds to marry in our culture today is an entirely different question. Only the weak minded and confused conflate such issues without thinking them clearly. the fact remains that some of the minor characters used on the show to lure the guys in are old enough to marry, and biologically capable of, and ready for, coition, go into heat during ovulation like adult females, and in our culture today already run around like alley cats anyway.
So who is kidding whom?
What concerns me is the constant theme in the media of referring to pubescent youths as children – this is a memetic landmine. It will end up destroying the childhoods of many children, for a very crucial reason.
Normal Adult heterosexual males, have a baseline normative level of sexual response to pubescent females. It’s neurobiology, and in itself is an instinct and human appetite and hence is not naturally perverted. Females displaying pubescent traits evoke a normal sexual response for biological reasons in adult healthy males, the strength or weakness of that response depends on how physically developed the female is, and how sexualized she displays herself.
On the other hand, normal and healthy adult heterosexual males do not have a sexual response to pre-pubescent female children. Period. There is some slipping, of course, with a small, very small, base level of arousal occurring in a very small percentage of sexually normal adult males, to female children who are near puberty and adolescence. Thus some small percentage of biologically and psychologically healthy men may display a small degree of arousal near 10,11, or 12 year old girls when the female features which typically evoke sexual arousal in men are accentuated or displayed. More often than not normal men will simply exhibit a disgust and aversion, however experiments have shown some small degree of arousal.
This is why it’s a bloody stupid idea to dress 12 year olds in sexualized clothing, and it’s a stupid and obscene idea to let them sit on Santa’s lap in the mall. It’s a threshold that you do not want to cross.
Such small levels of arousal, when they occur, do so on a very, very, small, barely measurable level. And it’s a small, unconscious, biological threshold of arousal that typically [in a healthy society] will never be acted on by, or even noticed in, the subject.
Summing it up – normal adult males do not, do not, and I repeat do not, get noticeably aroused – that is to say horny – around children. Though a small minority of non-pedophile, otherwise normal, adult males may experience a very small level of arousal around older children, of the opposite sex, who are close to puberty.
Again this is why it’s not a bright idea – and in fact it is a criminally stupid idea – to put 10 year old girls in bikinis at co-ed summer camp or the beech, or to buy for them tight pants and booty shorts with “cute” sayings written on the bottom. And this why it is obscenely stupid to sell Pole Dancing kits, marketed to pre-pubescent girls, unless we want a generation of 11 year old strippers growing up.
They say you can’t take the trash out of a trashy person, but I prefer to think that no one is this depraved and trashy.
Parents with any degree of intelligence and good breeding realize such things, parents who do not might want to consider weeding themselves out of the gene pool. These matters are implicit and our culture at one time displayed very sensible social restrictions and regulations around the close contact of adults with older children of the opposite sex, so as to prevent the possibility of even the hint of certain improprieties being suggested.
And so as to preserve the honor of the families, and children. This was America even three generations ago.
Our culture now lacks even the very concept of honor and, of course, propriety. Such was forgotten a couple of generations ago. This said my grandmothers still freak out whenever they see girls walking around in halter tops or in bikinis at the beach, or sitting on adult non-parental males laps. Even my mother finds this completely distasteful and vile, a sign of trashy parents of the lowest breeding and rearing.
I agree. This might piss off readers in the habit of parading their 11 year old girls dressed like street walkers. I think they should reconsider their priorities however.
Now, measurable arousal and attraction to children – pre-pubescent youths of the same or opposite sex – is biologically deviant. Attempting sexual contact with such children is deviant, pathological – let’s just say sick – and depraved. It is a social taboo, though there are people who do have an agenda to make this less so. These people are dangerous and subversive.
Conflating pedophilia, which is the disgusting and sickening sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children, with sexual responses to pubescent females – however sexually inappropriate and forbidden sexual activity is between adults and pubescent individuals under the legal age of consent – is a dangerous confusing of categories which will actually backfire and lead to a normalization of deviant sexual responses to outright children.
An example:
For female adult school teachers to have a sexual response to, and engage in sexual intimacy with, teenage males is socially and morally inappropriate, however biologically it is not deviant, since teenage males are pubescent and have adult sexual development, such as the capacity for erection and engaging in coition, ejaculation after orgasm, and the capacity to impregnate said cougar teachers.
Indeed our pop culture is hypocritically full of innuendo and veiled acceptance of this anyway, every teenage boy has wanted to have his way with his 10th grade English teacher, and Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” suggests some things. Socially and morally, however, it’s unacceptable, and makes an argument for the appropriateness of even allowing mating age older adult females in close, potentially intimate, contact with mating age younger adolescent boys.
I could make jokes about purdah and eastern style seclusion solving such problems, since I do not want to make the comments section a tedious battleground I will refrain from such jokes, out of concern for awakening certain krakens of the deep… but society should think very carefully about the appropriateness of opposite sex teachers in near intimate mingling with adolescent students.
In any case, on the other hand for female adult school teachers to have sexual responses to, and engage in sexual intimacy with, pre-adolescent boys, is socially depraved, morally depraved, and biologically deviant. There is no possible excuse other than pathology – a sickness.
Adolescents biologically are sexual beings, ergo they naturally have sexual desires and responses – adult sexuality is a continuum and range, and it includes innate responses to sexed adolescents.
However our culture’s hyper sexed media accentuates this to an unhealthy balance, and sexualizes even the most innocent of things on a subtle, subversive, level – not in a loving, life enhancing, and community/family building way, but in a sterile and compulsive way.
I’m not moralizing, I’m pointing at existential matters. It’s a bad thing in general to over-sexualize adolescents for the purposes of increasing their commercial consumption of goods, to the profit of those entities pumping sexualized media out.
My problem is not with sex, rather with the crass commercialization of sexuality, and corrupting normal instincts in normal people for ulterior purposes.
Our modern Western culture lacks healthy ways in which adolescent and young adult sexuality can be expressed in a family friendly, community friendly, life enhancing manner. People used to get married at 15 and adopt adult life roles, what we have today isn’t much better than what we used to have then, and I’m not romanticizing a damn thing. The present order is only better from a materialistic, crass, consumer oriented standpoint.
Instead today, teenagers are fed Lady Gaga and Internet gonzo porn, and led to believe donkey punching is normative sexual behavior. It is not of course. And I suspect all of this is a wee bit psychologically damaging to growing young minds.
In other words, shows like Catch a Predator – by confusing a biologically normative, though socially taboo, sexual response to adolescent females with a biologically deviant and pathological, and still taboo, sexual response to children – will result in erasing a certain mental and emotional wall, portraying pedophilia as widespread and normative, heighten public fears, while at the same time ultimately leading to the lowering of these taboos on a wider scale.
There are already activist groups trying to push for the acceptance of “trans-generational sex” in the Western world.
People I see as perverts trying to normalize in the public mind, and eventually legally, the idea that adults can fuck little children – not adolescents, not pubertal individuals, but outright children. These groups are deviant, perverted, and have an agenda that seems enlightened and progressive in their eyes, but is in reality harmful and will lead to unspeakable horrors.
I used to know a girl who was a rather precocious girl, who started running around when she was like 13 or so. Of course she looked 18 or 19, and was known to frequently pass for 21 at bars, though no one in her social group knew she was so young until much later (one can only remain 21 years old for 6 years before people start to get suspicious). In any case, I heard from a friend that the poor girl wound up a bad case of HPV warts while still at a tender age. This emotionally wounded the poor girl deeply. And this is, I believe, a deep tragedy.
A similar example of a tragedy is a young girl who catches Chlamydia at the age of 12, realizes it not, and discovers that she is infertile at the age of 22 and unable to ever conceive due to the massive scars on her fallopian tubes.
The only people who do not see this as a tragedy are the eugenically minded.
Since I am not a eugenicist (though there are some ideas in eugenics worth considering and contemplating, I admit. No body of thought is completely full of bad ideas) I see this as a tragedy.
Even if I were a eugenicist, I would want people to have the conscious choice of making informed decisions that could result in their genetic lineages cut off for the rest of time. Of course that video of the 2 year old girl smoking a reefer, filmed by her mom, does cause me to re-consider, at least, the question of eugenics.. but this is a tangent.
I think it’s obvious that a young mind is not emotionally equipped to handle certain things related to sexuality in the present cultural environment, though this may have been much different 200 years ago.
Now if a pubescent mind is fragile and delicate and unable to handle certain matters, such as pregnancy, abortion, and permanent venereal diseases, imagine the horrors when inter-generational sex becomes normalized to the point that 11 year olds are winding up with genital warts in their throats, sterilized due to Chlamydia infections at 12 and 13, emotionally unable to pair bond as an adult because of a string of heart breaks, breakups, sexual trauma, before the age of 17 even? Does anyone want to consider the emotional damages of 12 year old boys being normalized into pedophile sex with older men, and suffering from anal incontinence by their early adulthood?
Come on people, let us consider this deeply.
Look up anal incontinence folks, there is a reason that anal sex has been considered deviant throughout most of human history. Even Greeks “androphiles” frowned upon outright buggery in the early classical era.
I do not want to contemplate our culture becoming so damned depraved to the point that not only 11 year olds turning tricks for corner store money (which is already starting to happen in some communities, a friend of mine is a youth program counselor attached to a local university, a few times this year they’ve caught 11-13 year old girls gleefully servicing freshmen and sophomore guys) but worse I do not want to contemplate a culture in which 11 – 13 year old girls, and boys, wind up with Venereal infections in their throats and anuses, wind up anally incontinent, and are completely emotionally unable to form any sort of pair bond in an adult relationship lasting longer than 6 months.
Am I exaggerating matters? Not really if you look at the logical terminus of things.
Shows like Catch a Predator are inadvertently – possibly – contributing to the phenomenon they claim to oppose. And in my non-informed opinion and speculation, such shows may actually form part of a Fifth Column of memetc engineering serving to normalize am acceptance of child/adult sexuality, by conflating it with adolescent / adult sexuality, which anyway was once the human norm in the bounds of matrimony and family making.
Historically adolescents, individuals after puberty, would not be having sex unless in a committed partnership equivalent to a marriage in the respective culture. Historically children, pre puberty, would not be having sex unless the culture itself was depraved and near a moral terminus and collapse.
Normalized pedophilia, through repeated exposure in the media, will – mark my words – 15-20 years from now become a norm.
Scoff and deny it now, if you will, but mark my words, this shall occur, along with – eventually – a near normalization of bestiality. This is done through jokes, innuendos, comic relief in the media, talk shows, expose shows like “Catch a Predator” and other such matters. Essentially cultural engineering covertly done on a population of mind softened schmucks.
Idiotcracy folks, but no long winded hereditarian HBD explanations are needed, the TV you watch, the linguistic decay you abet, and the shite food you eat suffices.
To Catch a Predator protects no one, serves as legal enticing and entrapment of guys who very well may have only kept their fantasies of boffing the prom queen to themselves had it not been for the entrapment, and serves as a socially and culturally corrosive force.
Everyone knows that teenagers put-out, for reasons relating to biological imperatives, and accentuated by cultural programming through the media. Teenagers have natural sexual urges, and when bombarded with Chris Brown and Lady Gaga, and a dose of Internet porn thrown in, well you have horny teenagers. It’s biologically normal, though socially unacceptable, for teenage females to have sexual responses to older men, and vice versa.
However it is completely deviant, and pathological, for an adult to have a significant sexual response to an actual child, and vice versa, and even more damning and ethically, morally, wrong to perform a sexual act on a child.
To Catch a Predator conflates and mixes up adolescents with children, and lowers the audience threshold of acceptability by giving them cathartic melodrama to act out and get their moral finger waving out. Once catharsis is reached, you have the fact that this is made to appear, through the TV show, as an extremely prevalent phenomenon.
To Catch a Predator is creating the problem it is exposing, on a very subtle and subversive level.
Few are capable of understanding this, but the nimble and subtle of mind, and most of my readers are.
However you have been warned, and my debate on this matter is closed.
_EOF
About Desi dudes caught on TO CATCH A PREDATOR:
http://twentyonwards.blogs.com/twenty_onwards/2006/09/to_catch_a_pred.html
Watch some of the videos. Silicon Valley MARRIED computer programmers from India and Pakistan CAUGHT being the repressed pervs they are on international TV!
I can’t agree with you about 10 year olds in bikinis. For goodness sake, 10 year olds don’t have anything to notice in a bikini so what’s the big deal?
And as far as older girls – what are they supposed to wear if not a bathing suit when they go for swimming? And yes, they have or are growing boobs – so what? Women have boobs. Your Mom has them also. I’m sure men are capable of noticing that their Moms and sisters have boobs without getting sexually attracted to them. When you see other women out in bathing suits just think of them as your Moms, sisters or daughters. What’s the big deal?
There is nothing that can hide the appearance of boobs, not even niqab, so men are just going to have to learn to live with the fact that women and pubescent girls have boobs and get the hell over it!
PS I have to say: you made inappropriate comments about my “ass” in a response elsewhere addressing serious issues that I had brought to your attenting regarding Islam. Is that “Islamic behaviour”? According to Quran, no it’s not.
Moreover it was sexist and shows where your mind is at.
(what the hell is “donkey punching” dare I ask?)
[…] Kamal S. – “Misc. – Books Now Reading, and Thoughts on Catching Predators – 18, September 2010” […]
Treta Yuga: “I can’t agree with you about 10 year olds in bikinis. For goodness sake, 10 year olds don’t have anything to notice in a bikini so what’s the big deal?”
Some of them do, and even if not in the chest department, in the behind department.
“And as far as older girls – what are they supposed to wear if not a bathing suit when they go for swimming?”
He didn’t say anything about not wearing a bathing suit; he was discussing bikinis. How about a modest one-piece bathing suit?
“When you see other women out in bathing suits just think of them as your Moms, sisters or daughters. What’s the big deal?”
Sorry, we men are not wired that way, and you can’t make us that way just to suit your purposes.
“There is nothing that can hide the appearance of boobs, not even niqab, so men are just going to have to learn to live with the fact that women and pubescent girls have boobs and get the hell over it!”
Ah, shaming language. The bathing costumes women in the West wore a century ago, do at least minimize the shape to what one sees; and back then, there wasn’t mixed bathing, anyway; that’s a more recent development. I know Islamic countries still practice this kind of sexual segregation in swimming, and I can’t say that I think that’s a bad idea; it strikes me as wholly sensible, in fact.
Idiot.
Will, thanks.
Ditto.
I was going to post something in deeper response but have been rather busy the last week.
I was specifically talking about the bikini which is a specific form of bathing suit originally designed as a sexualized and eroticized piece of swimwear. Everyone over 40 knows this, bikinis were designed from their inception to be sexy, to not so much as cover as much as to emphasize and eroticize specific parts of the anatomy.
I’m not being a prude, it’s something anyone with a few brain cells knows, or used to know until what, 15 years ago? Unless they really don’t understand the cultural ambiance bikinis appeared in.
Little girls running around buck naked on a street would be far MORE innocent and far LESS sexualized than running around in a bikini. It’s not difficult to figure out, putting bikinis on little girls has only been considered “innocent” during the last 15 years chiefly among people who really don’t have much home training or good rearing.
And I stand behind that.
One piece swimming suits also have become more eroticized in their cut and design; it’s not difficult to notice for anyone not walking around with their eyes closed. Hell, I stumbled on an article at Salon a few years ago dealing with the phenomenon of little girl bikini model pic websites that guys, who evidently get off from bikini pics of 12 year olds, can subscribe to. The author if I recall correctly (I read the article like 5 years ago) pointed out to both the girl model and her mother that there were creepy older guys wanking off over her pics, and how did that make her feel? If I recall correctly they just sidestepped the question and made some crack about college money..
I’m pointing out something subtle that won’t be understood if someone is reading my words trying to find a way to trip me up, rather than actually, golly gee, consider what I’m writing and considering the possibility that I might have a point.
What I write I put out for people to think about, I could word things in a way that actually more people would agree with but that would be like feeding pabulum to people.
DFPUA/Treta – regarding my commenting on your ass…
Perhaps just maybe it amused me to write what I wrote.
1) Has you remotely considered that I may have been being, say, sarcastic?
2) Given that you have a bone to shake against Muslims anyway why would you be upset if my discourse strayed from Islamic norms?
3) The notion that referring to a girl’s ass in a discourse may be sexist is a highly problematic one. Frankly, it reeks of a sort of schoolmarmish hysterical obsession with correctness in speech. I could have called your ass ugly, instead I called it cute. In truth I could not have referred to your ass at all, but I chose to do so in amused expectation of some sort of reply from you that would further amuse me, and lo you delivered. I am grateful for this.
I speak whatever I happen to speak of, if it amuses me, or interests me, and in so doing so the world concerning which I speak is my oyster.
I laugh at, poke at, roll around in, and scratch at it as I will.
In the process of doing so, I speak and write as I will, when I will, out of my amusement and joy at it all.
Of course, yours was a nice attempt at shaming speech, actually better than most.
I’m rather immune to shaming speech, in any case, but I do have to give you this at least..
On your points regarding your concerns with Islam and Muslims, I’m willing to accept your consideration that they are, in your engagement with Muslims in your life, well intentioned concerned with what you see as non humane aspects of the Quran. Of course I could dredge out volumes of non humane statements from any religious or mythic or legal or historical text constituting a formative base of any community or nation or civilization. Rome was based on the Rape of the sibylline women, a far more ignoble beginning than the Quran’s “Read, in the name of your lord who created man”.
If I were of malicious intent I could pull out all sorts of stuff from the Puranas, or Vedas, or the Persian Avesta, or Homer, etc., and throw it around out of context, or in some cases in context, and paint all sorts of horrible pictures of the respective civilizations.
There is something to be said for looking at things in context, and looking at things out of context. Our conceptions of humanism are heavily influenced by Islamic sources anyway, for anyone who cares to look into the genealogy of ideas that led to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Quite a bit of what people assume is Greek thought comes from various Muslim writers anyway, scratch quite a bit of humanism and one finds a secularized Saracen or two lying around.
My point is that your words concerning what you perceive to be historical evils in Muslim communities are limited; there are vast parts of the world in which Islam spread organically among people due to sincere conviction and interaction with Muslim sailors and traders, because the populace saw it as a superior way of life. Judging Islam from the actions of various half Islamicized Turkic overlords who lived and acted in defiance of Islamic norms anyway, and were often opposed as unjust tyrants, by the real articulators of Islam, pious scholars, simply because they had Muslim names (anyone who thinks Timur, for example, was a normative Muslim needs their head examined) is possibly acting out of either ignorance or bad faith. There are other possibilities of course but I’m not concerned with them
As for cultural supremacy in Islam, there are many aspects of Arabic culture Islam harshly criticized. Islam as I see it is culturally independent, there are mainly two groups of people in the world I’ve noticed who babble endlessly about Islam being Arab cultural imperialism,
one are a few Desis,
and second are a few Persians (and when I say Iranians I’m not referring to Persians specifically, sometimes people forget that Iran is full of ethnic groups other than the Persians and that Persians are one specific minority among many Iranian peoples. To call Iran Persia and Iranians Persian is sort of like calling India Pakistan and Bangladesh all together “Greater Sind” and all Desis “Sindhis”)
If a few Arabs, who are minorities anyway, outnumbered by vast quantities of Muslims (there are more Indonesians and Chinese Muslims than Arabs period), and who haven’t been politically or socially relevant in the greater Islamic world for over 1000 years (except in North Africa) somehow think their culture is superior, then its fine by me. I could care less if pandits think their own culture is superior, or if Ashkenazim think their culture is superior. Why should I care? There are British atheists who think British culture (somehow -oddly enough) is superior to all. I could care less, if anything such sentiments, form wherever they come, do nothing more than amuse me.
Islam as I see it, was taught, and raised, and studied formally is independent of any particular culture and the Quran in a couple of places actually insults Arabs specifically. There are places in the Hadith where the Prophet Muhammad praises Persians, Romans, and Abyssinian blacks over Arabs.
These are matters that may be more complex than one would think, and if one has an agenda to prove rather than being open to discourse and exchange of ideas one will arrive to conclusions that are not fully in accord with reality.
Africa, there are millions of Muslims who embraced Islam as a spiritual path and way of life impressed with Islam’s teachings on justice and fairness and who found in Islam’s spiritual paths, the Sufi tariqas, paths to gnosis and knowledge. One who does not see this doesn’t see this; can one who has not tasted sugar have sweetness explained? Would a child who knows not the reality of lovemaking not see coition as something frightening messy and bizarre? Words
At the end of it all I am a Muslim for reasons that are not easily compressed into writing, I am not running around interested in forcing you into Islam though I find in Islamic thought and thinkers things relevant to the world, and things that may provide a candle for some to see the world in a different more interesting way. I’m not interested in debating Islam or its historical role, for I could do so in volumes, about parts of the world that you possibly haven’t even heard of.
But I’m not interested in debate, so to quote Rodney King
“Can’t we all jus… get along?”
“Some of them do, and even if not in the chest department, in the behind department.”
Who the f*ck NOTICES?
Sicko.
Do you also notices the round booties of babies in diapers as well?
Baby got back?
Perv.
“He didn’t say anything about not wearing a bathing suit; he was discussing bikinis. How about a modest one-piece bathing suit?”
One-pieces have the same backs as bikinis.
F*cking idiot.
Great post, Kamal. Your dissection of the willfully delusional nature of contemporary American views on adolescent sexuality are very frank and courageous. People like you and I are aware of our own and (brother’s) impulses for we are reflective, and willing to chart unknown territories of the self, and I concur with what you say regarding your opinions and have faith in the realizations gleaned from research. All I have to say to those who are morally outraged by your statements is that, as quoth I, “those who are unaware of their own impulses are most capable of acting on them.” People need to come clean about adolescent sexuality, mostly the adults that are totally out of touch with their own feelings. I’m not sure I agree with the ideas regarding the future mainstream acceptance of bestiality and pedophilia (though in some circles, they already are accepted). I do prophesy they will be termed disabilities by the medico/psychiatric establishment, and Big Pharma may come up with a pill to curb those carnal cravings. Also, another hypothesis regarding how the memetic misdirection may channel the minds of viewers is that it will push further underground the admission of attraction to pubescents and therefore, according to my above maxim, lead to more closeted trysts. When one can admit an idea in one’s head, one can be free not to act on its realization. But when one refuses that the idea exists, dissociative acts of impulse may materialize. Sort of like some of the most ravenous drug abusers just happen to say no to “illegal drugs” yet have made drug overdoses the leading cause of accidental death in this country, topping gun deaths (http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2010-06-21-editoril21_ST_N.htm?csp=obinsite). So, I wouldn’t believe the lip service of shamers. I am really impressed by your long and absorbing posts. Thanks again.
Omar, hot digity dog,
always a gem from you !
You make really interesting points on medicalization and the role of Pharma, this might be an even more pernicious development. I’m just noticing too often a sort of subtle, and subversive, sniping at the borders of themes in public discourse that should be buried.
Also what worries me is the fact that if one looks hard enough for aberrant tendencies one can find or invent some sort of test to test for anything, then convincing someone that what may have simply been “khawatir” or “waswasa” actually represents some normative tendency in them, thus needing correction. I post a couple of links below on this.
I’ve come to the conclusion that, maybe, some people are simply born more reflective of and observant of themselves and others, and some are simply more conventionally minded in that they only focus on, pay attention to, or perceive what they have been told to, or a bit of a range of what’s around them.
Being too reflective and able to consider and examine and think about all things does have certain dangers, not the least of which is depression, are worse the danger of identifying with what in themselves are simply thoughts and observations. Being able to stand outside somewhat, and gaze into something, even if it is disturbing, ugly, or very dark, perhaps is both a curse and blessing at the same time.
But as we both know “is the unexamined life worth living?”
This scares me here:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20100921/tsc-finnish-researcher-wants-dna-test-on-e123fef.html
These also seem to reflect some subtle biases that can become quite dangerous
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1312968/How-tiny-dose-Prozac-help-relieve-misery-PMS.html
http://www.wiseupjournal.com/?p=1715
What do you 2 gentleman with Arabic names (despite not being Arab yourselves) have to say about women being forced, either legally or from family/cultural pressure, to wear niqab in 100+ degree weather?
The question is utterly irrelevant to the post that you commented on, of course.
So too are the origins of my name, or Omar’s name. You simply seem not to be able to get past the Arab name bit,
But, for that matter, since you raised the question this will consist of my only comment on the matter. I try to avoid matters of hijab or niqab on my blog because they are utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of my readers, my interests even vis. Islam is concerned lie elsewhere, and I see such questions as distractions and proxies isolating from other far more interesting questions. They bore me, have been hashed to death a hundred thousand times, and likely bore many other people.
My opinion, since you asked it, stems from the fact that in many ways I’m a bit of a libertarian – if someone wants to wear niqab as a sign of her cultural or religious commitment she should legally be able to.
If someone does not want to wear niqab then she should legally be able not to wear it.
In either case the law should not pressure her into doing so or not doing so as her choice stands – it’s a matter of personal choice. It is as ludicrous for Turkey or France to pretend to be democratic republics and ban the niqab as it is for the Taliban or Saudi governments to enforce it. Both cases are breeches of rights and in both cases the issue of female dress is an interesting media canard to distract soft minded people from examining more interesting matters going on under the surface of each country in question.
My mother is Muslima; she neither wears niqab nor hijab, nor do any of my sisters. There are areas of the world in which people were Muslim for a thousand years and their women never wore niqab. In some parts and tribes of west and North Africa, for a thousand or more years, some Men veil their faces and their Women do not. It’s a matter of immense cultural and religious variation and this is how it should be, I value diversity and loathe fitting everyone into one shoebox.
It is a non-issue in my mind, from a religious standpoint, if a woman sincerely believes that it is part of her religious commitment, then she should be free to do so, if she does not or simply does not want to she should be free not to.
I’m not one of those fascists who would want to ban people from wearing fezzes, turbans, hijabs, or niqabs – nor am I one of those fascists who would want to force them into doing the same. You can choose whichever side of such you like.
As to cultural and family pressure, every culture has a right to enforce its cultural norms in the public sphere; I do not need to agree with those cultural norms. And in principle I immensely defer to family pressures because the only viable alternative to the family is the State, and being of a libertarian cast I oppose the intrusion of the state into private and family affairs in all but the most egregious cases (such as physical assault and bodily harm and sexual assault) – I even oppose the State’s intervention in cases like Christian Science in which parents do not believe in modern medicine, or in the case of the Amish or similar groups who reject amenities that modern governments see as vital to child welfare.
So I utterly refrain on any level from interfering in normative cultural practices or familial practices, apart from things like human sacrifice, buggering little girls or boys in public, child slave labor, or other gross egregious breeches of sane norms. In such cases I’d just as soon intervene with a gun and heaven help the one who objects.
I have pretty broad lines of tolerance.
As a matter of principle I must respect a culture’s right to normalize what the vast majority of its populace approves or, and sanction whatever the vast majority of its populace disapproves of, up to actual physical coercion and physical harm.
Legally if one woman wants to wear a niqab in 100 degree heat and another woman wants to wear a mini skirt in 15 degree cold, then legally, frankly, I think both should be free to.
Whether non-legal social sanctions apply is a matter of the society and cultural ambiance.
You see the question isn’t a yes or no trap, it’s far more complex.
Legal force is one thing, cultural force is another, and family force is yet another. I avoid legal force in any equation, legally the government should not ban nor enforce any sort of religious or cultural dress in my opinion beyond the absolute minimal standards of decency that are normative in that culture. Now informal non legal pressure, in family or community, is frankly none of my business. I’m a libertarian in such matters, I can approve or disapprove of a certain mode of dress but it is none of my business to try to enforce it on others, so too if others are intent on applying social pressure on a Jewish boy to wear a yarmulke, a catholic girl to wear knee length skirts, or a Muslim girl to wear hijab or niqab, then it is none of my bloody business in either 3 cases to force or not force the issue.
From a historical standpoint, the niqab is a bit sketchy anyway. What is clear in early Islamic history and normative practice is that women did cover their heads, indeed it was a norm throughout the near east and if one goes far enough back even in ancient Rome, Greece, and other Mediterranean cultures, at various times in their history. At other times that norm vanished.
However the act of covering the face was a byzantine Roman practice of high status Patrician women, though it was also practiced here and there by very high status pagan Arab women. Lower status women in both cultures did not cover their face. When the Umayyad Caliphate took over Roman areas their elites adopted Byzantine elite norms.
My understanding of niqab, and I could be wrong, is that this is its origins. I could be wrong, this is how I understand the history and I defer to anyone who knows it better than I.
I’ve long been of the opinion that contemporary Muslims have a puritanical double standard when it comes to male and female modesty in dress. Frankly there were women who went half-nude on the streets of Medina and Mecca itself for the first couple of centuries of Islam, the Prophet didn’t run around forcing people to dress in the way he taught was pious. The pious simply averted their gaze from partially undressed women and did not gawk at them.
It’s clear from historical accounts that there were men and women who went around partially nude in the first century or two of post-Islamic Arabia.
much less than not wearing niqab or hijab. They were simply viewed as low character by those who objected to this behavior. It is also clear that women didn’t wear burqas in Central Asia until the 17th or 18th century and in Afghanistan many Pashtun women still didn’t among more rural tribes, such as Afreedis. Urban women did wear Burqas and the trend started basically among the upper classes
The dual obsession with either covering women up, or un-covering women, has a similar etiology. My concerns wherever I express them is not obsession, I notice, I observe, and I comment on what I observe – the one concern I have, and hence commented on, is with the memetic effects of acculturating children into certain modes of dress or undress which may have larger socio-cultural and sexual ramifications.
As to the ultimate legal freedom of adults, non Minor adults, to dress, or undress, pierce, or un-pierce, tattoo, un-tattoo, or whatever they want, as they see fit, this is a question I stop at. Whether I think it be wise to wear a pink thong bikini with a purple niqab on roller-blades with the magna carta tattooed across one’s back is a separate question than my approval of one’s legal right to do so. Law is what is relevant to me, because it controls the freedom or duress under which adults are able to conduct their lives. I CAN NOT AND WILL NOT CONTROL CULTURAL FORCES OR SOFT PRESSURES FOR ANY RACE CULTURE OR RELIGION because unlike some people out there I am not a tyrant, I have no business forcing your family to make you wear a niqab, or a bikini, or a tutu for that matter. IF I think the matter is relevant to a larger social phenomenon I’m commenting on, like for example pedophiles, and if I think your family’s propensity to pressure [or not] certain modes of dress [or undress] I then may comment on it.
And it’s my bloody right to do so.
I’m not, however, about to seriously walk to your family and try to force you into not dressing your child like a stripper, or a nun for that matter.
There is nothing hypocritical or hard to understand in this, anyone who thinks otherwise may simply lack a certain subtly of thought and ability to consider multiple concepts and their ramifications at one time. I won’t think badly of such a person of course, but will suggest that such a person should shove their opinion on my response where the sun shines not. They are, of course, free to do so, or not, as they will.
Frankly the more I study the actual history, the more it becomes clear that a lot of what people mistake as religious writ was actually simply custom inherited from various near eastern communities and civilizations. But it’s not my business to force Muslims, or non-Muslims, into my understandings.
It is my business to practice my religion and life as I understand it, and am capable of, what I am incapable of to seek mercy and forgiveness for, and to act like an adult in my affairs. If I act in a way consistent with my moral code I get no cookie or pat on the back for what should be normative, if I do not act in a way consistent with my moral code then I simply chalk it up as a straying and error and return to my program.
If anyone thinks poorly of me for the way in which I choose to live my life, and for the ideals I strive after, whether I fall short of them or reach them, such a one can simply walk off a bridge for all I care. My life, my faith, my ethics, my mores, or lack thereof in all such cases are between me and my creator.
Actions and beliefs have larger ramifications, most people are remarkably weak minded and incapable of seeing nuances in the world.
I witness the world, it is my fishbowl.
I see things in it some see (such as Omar – who I know from experience to be a VERY astute and sensitive witness of life and the world)
Others see in it things that I see not. And at other times I may happen to see things that others, in turn, do not see.
I avoid the habit of issuing 20 questions to suss out one’s positions, in the world and life, though if they share such with me I may find it interesting or stimulating.
Others have different habits, I would never dream of lifting a finger to stop them, however, because it’s their freedom to do so, but if there is something I feel like not answering, of course, I won’t.
You caught me in a talkative mood. On this point, niqab and hijab, and indeed on anything concerning Islam and gender, frankly I’m bored to death having engaged in countless conversations on such matters since, like, 1993 or so. Therefore for the time being I’m likely not to respond to any future questions on related matters. Because they bore me, have been discussed between me, and others, countless times in the past, and most people take emotive irrational positions regarding them anyway, making real communication impossible.
If you happen to ask a question I do find interesting, however, I’d be more than happy to oblige you with a reply.
For the record, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind, and indeed even enjoy, most of your replies. If it’s something I don’t feel like responding to of course I won’t , no hard feelings.
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