Karnal
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freediver wrote on Jan 14 th, 2015 at 1:31pm: Karnal wrote on Jan 14 th, 2015 at 11:46am: freediver wrote on Jan 12 th, 2015 at 7:34pm: Karnal wrote on Jan 12 th, 2015 at 8:13am: Baronvonrort wrote on Jan 11 th, 2015 at 7:28pm: Karnal wrote on Jan 11 th, 2015 at 5:04pm: In.our society, freedom of speech is a rule. It has some limits, and we negotiate them. We don’t kill those who do things that are against the laws of our religion.
If we did, it would be a clash of civilisations. A few of these clashes going on around the world The Cold War was a clash of civilisations. I don’t think we’re there yet. The Muslims combine far greater motivation with mind boggling incompetence. It is already happening. It's just impolite to talk about it. We're hoping this one will fizzle out a bit quicker than communism. We certainly are, but the clash is not along clear ideological boundaries. The Soviet Union and its satellites, remember, was an economic model run out of Moscow. The "free world" was a trading bloc run out of Washington and New York. The Cold War spawned the rise of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan and the Middle East. In this sense, history can be seen to be quite dialectic, but we're not yet seeing the rise of two competing superpowers or even ideologies. Islamic militancy is not monolithic, it's based on competing cells with different agendas. With the exception of Saudi oil wealth and Wahabism, there is no real centre to it. There is no empire to speak of. Mind you, the call for an Islamic Caliphate does raise this spectre. This would never, however, be supported by the gulf states and Iran, the geopolitical powers required to back such a plan. Not every war, or clash, is between two similarly matched powers. No, but the clash we're discussing, posed by the neoconservatives at the end of the Cold War, was about two similarly opposing ideologies. The Clash of Civilizations is about a war between two competing world views: Freeeedom versus feudalism. It is not about empires as such. My take, however, is that such ideologies must be based within the economic superstructure. In our case, this involves competing nation states and economies. It is impossible to have ideologies or geopolitical world views without a sustained, well-funded production of knowledge. Likewise, it is impossible to even have economies without sustained, well-funded ideologies. People regulate their desires and behaviour within economies - school, the production line, leisure time. People will even kill themselves for ideological/economic reasons: the main target of September 11 was the World Trade Centre.
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