Why is Islam growing nastiest?

[FBM]

I'll admit my ignorance of the matter, but why is Islam, of all the 'kill the unbeliever' religions (of which there is no shortage) the nastiest of the nasty? Why does it have to result in suicide bombings, glorified killing of the innocent, violent oppression of the fairer gender and institutionalized child-rape? What is their real motivation for so much anger, hatred and sub-human behavior? I just don't think that the words of one illiterate-yet-charismatic sociopathic paedophile explains it. There must be more to it than the gullibility of a cuture that is stuck in a Bronze-Age stage of development. Doesn't it all boil down to economics? I'd like to see Levitt take this question on.

[Rum]

Because it is the one true faith and anything is justified in making it the king of the world!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Nothing has changed there since the Hittites. Nothing will change in the future while there is anyone there.

[FBM]

Alright, but I'm still half-way convinced that economics plays a bigger part in it than is generally recognized. People don't do shit unless they see some sort of gain, whether monetary, political or emotional. What do Muslims have to gain by becoming the nastiest of the nasty? (And you've got to go a long way to get nastier than xtianity, eh?) What's the economic incentive?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Alright, but I'm still half-way convinced that economics plays a bigger part in it than is generally recognized. People don't do shit unless they see some sort of gain, whether monetary, political or emotional. What do Muslims have to gain by becoming the nastiest of the nasty? (And you've got to go a long way to get nastier than xtianity, eh?)

"Honor" is programmed into them young there. It's like a Kabuki play with camels.

[FBM]

Alright, but I'm still half-way convinced that economics plays a bigger part in it than is generally recognized. People don't do shit unless they see some sort of gain, whether monetary, political or emotional. What do Muslims have to gain by becoming the nastiest of the nasty? (And you've got to go a long way to get nastier than xtianity, eh?)

"Honor" is programmed into them young there. It's like a Kabuki play with camels.

'Honor' is built into every culture I've ever lived in. That's not enough. Most cultures recognize 'Pride goeth before a fall.' I'm reminded of the Japanese emperial mindset, based on assumptions of racial/cultural superiority, but Muslims haven't produced shit in multiples of centuries that can be seen as an advancement of mankind. However, they're as poor as dirt, except for the few who control the oil wells and use that power to keep the masses ignorant and superstitions and desperate. I'm thinking that the oil-rich few are simply greedy and envious and rather than actually use their wealth to enrich their people, instead choose to enhance, encourage and manipulate the widespread ignorance and superstition rife among their citizenry for a quick political buck. "Damn the future and damn the truth! I want to be recognized!"

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Alright, but I'm still half-way convinced that economics plays a bigger part in it than is generally recognized. People don't do shit unless they see some sort of gain, whether monetary, political or emotional. What do Muslims have to gain by becoming the nastiest of the nasty? (And you've got to go a long way to get nastier than xtianity, eh?)

"Honor" is programmed into them young there. It's like a Kabuki play with camels.

'Honor' is built into every culture I've ever lived in. That's not enough. Most cultures recognize 'Pride goeth before a fall.' I'm reminded of the Japanese emperial mindset, based on assumptions of racial/cultural superiority, but Muslims haven't produced shit in multiples of centuries that can be seen as an advancement of mankind. However, they're as poor as dirt, except for the few who control the oil wells and use that power to keep the masses ignorant and superstitions and desperate. I'm thinking that the oil-rich few are simply greedy and envious and rather than actually use their wealth to enrich their people, instead choose to enhance, encourage and manipulate the widespread ignorance and superstition rife among their citizenry for a quick political buck. "Damn the future and damn the truth! I want to be recognized!"

"Honor" to the Arab is a life-or-death matter. It's not "Great, he just made me look like a fool", it's "I must kill him for making me look like a fool". Murder is the solution for most serious problems in their culture. Kid doesn't stay with Islam? Kill 'em. Your neighbor might have seen your wife without her veil? Kill 'em both.

[JacksSmirkingRevenge]

I suspect that on a personal level it boils down to insecurity of the individual. A system that allows one to dominate the other half of the population would have great appeal to many people in that case, I think.
The prospect of having to relinquish this power would be quite frightening and would therefore provoke over-reaction if such a position were challenged. - Just a thought.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Christianity had the same stranglehold on its followers for many centuries. And when that stranglehold loosened, their attitude worsened before it got better. Islam is merely going through the same period of adjustment to modernity. They are cunts but no worse than the cunts that the xtians were in the past - after all, they are of the same human stock in the end.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Christianity had the same stranglehold on its followers for many centuries. And when that stranglehold loosened, their attitude worsened before it got better. Islam is merely going through the same period of adjustment to modernity. They are cunts but no worse than the cunts that the xtians were in the past - after all, they are of the same human stock in the end.

They won't start getting better until they stop getting worse.

[Twiglet]

Christianity had the same stranglehold on its followers for many centuries. And when that stranglehold loosened, their attitude worsened before it got better. Islam is merely going through the same period of adjustment to modernity.

This I agree with.

Why does it have to result in suicide bombings, glorified killing of the innocent, violent oppression of the fairer gender and institutionalized child-rape? What is their real motivation for so much anger, hatred and sub-human behavior?

Suicide bombings are the poor mans helicopter gunship, cluster bomb (insert weapon of choice here). If we're talking Israel or Iraq, you only have to look at the fatality counts to see that things are very asymmetrical. People who consider themselves oppressed (wording chosen to avoid a very long argument) - have pretty much always found ways to strike back at their perceived oppressors.

Oppression of women varies greatly across the Islamic world. It's worth noting that the more progressive factions of Islam which evolved round Europe were ruthlessly suppressed, first by the Inquisition (especially in Andalucia), and then by western-backed Wahhabism (in Saudi) and other equally fundamentalist strains (in Pakistan and Afghanistan). The more backward a religion, it seems, the more easily bent it is to political ends.

By child-rape, I assume you mean underage marriage? Tradition plays a big part, and it was and still is considered irregular to have sex before the woman is of healthy childbearing age, though it happens. In the west, the age of consent rising to 16/18/21 is a recent thing, as lower life expectancy made it sensible for women to produce children as soon as it was reasonably safe for them to do so. Many Islamic nations still have a much lower life expectancy. If you want to tease out the issue of arranged marriage from the age at which people marry, then "child rape" isn't that common. It happens in the west too.

NB I am not seeking in any way to justify the things you asked about, only to provide something of a working explanation.

[charlou]

Christianity had the same stranglehold on its followers for many centuries. And when that stranglehold loosened, their attitude worsened before it got better. Islam is merely going through the same period of adjustment to modernity. They are cunts but no worse than the cunts that the xtians were in the past - after all, they are of the same human stock in the end.

Very true. As I said elsewhere, Islam is on the lower rungs of the memetic ladder of humanity.

[orpheus]

Christianity had the same stranglehold on its followers for many centuries. And when that stranglehold loosened, their attitude worsened before it got better. Islam is merely going through the same period of adjustment to modernity. They are cunts but no worse than the cunts that the xtians were in the past - after all, they are of the same human stock in the end.

Very true. As I said elsewhere, Islam is on the lower rungs of the memetic ladder of humanity.

Well put.

[FBM]

http://ideas.repec.org/p/uca/ucapdv/31.html

Radicalization as a reaction to failure: an economic model of islamic extremism

Author Info
Ferrero, Mario (mario.ferrero@sp.unipmn.it)

Mario Ferrero
Abstract

This paper views Islamist radicals as self-interested political revolutionaries and builds on a general model of political extremism developed in a previous paper (Ferrero, 2002), where extremism is modelled as a production factor whose effect on expected revenue is initially positive and then turns negative, and whose level is optimally chosen by a revolutionary or-ganization. The organization is bound by a free-access constraint and hence uses the degree of extremism as a means of indirectly controlling its level of membership with the aim of maximizing expected per capita income of its members, like a producer co-operative. The gist of the argument is that radicalization may be an optimal reaction to perceived failure (a widespread perception in the Muslim world) when political activists are, at the margin, relatively strongly averse to effort but not so averse to extremism, a configuration that is at odds with secular, Western-style revolutionary politics but seems to capture well the essence of Islamic revolutionary politics, embedded as it is in a doctrinal framework.

And in full PDF format: http://polis.unipmn.it/pubbl/RePEc/uca/ ... rrero2.pdf