Saudi Arabia

[think positive]

^ Yep, that's how arranged marriages work (or worked until recent times), in Israel, Japan, India and Congo, as well as every country in Europe. This - second-class treatment of women - is the history of the entire human race. Thankfully, even the stragglers are starting to leave it behind now. Cause for celebration, no?

It's not the best analogy, but seeing these cracks in the Saudi patriarchy is like seeing the slowest kid in school pick up his first book. It doesn't mean you no longer have idiots in your class or that he's suddenly a genius, but it does mean that things are changing for the better.

TP, how slow is too slow? By what measurement can we assess these things?

Oh I don't know, by letting women drive, get educated, pick their own husband, if any, vote, have the same rights as men, anything less, is too slow!

[stui magpie]

The same applies to our grandparents, but we have grown up together and accommodate the differences, and can't remember just how insane many of their old views and behaviours were when we were kids. And if we can't remember something, it might as well have never existed.

Not all of us can't remember.

I'm fully aware of the stigma of being a single mum or being conceived out of wedlock not that long ago. My paternal grandparents apparently had a shotgun wedding, but none of their kids knew until my grandmother died and her eldest daughter found their marriage certificate and did the maths. She was shattered, served the biatch right.

My mum tried to get a loan to buy a milk bar in the 70's, the banks refused to give her the loan unless her husband also signed the papers

From around 1902 to 1966 women in the public service were subject to the Marriage bar which assumed that women only wanted to work until they got married and then concentrate on being a housewife and having kids so any woman employed by the public service was deemed to have resigned the day she got married. I learned of this in the 90's at Telstra dealing with applications for recognition of prior service from women who had been made to resign under the marriage bar and had now, 25 years later, were getting employed to work in the directory assistance or 000 call centres. The service was recognised FWIW.

[David]

^ Yep, that's how arranged marriages work (or worked until recent times), in Israel, Japan, India and Congo, as well as every country in Europe. This - second-class treatment of women - is the history of the entire human race. Thankfully, even the stragglers are starting to leave it behind now. Cause for celebration, no?

It's not the best analogy, but seeing these cracks in the Saudi patriarchy is like seeing the slowest kid in school pick up his first book. It doesn't mean you no longer have idiots in your class or that he's suddenly a genius, but it does mean that things are changing for the better.

TP, how slow is too slow? By what measurement can we assess these things?

Oh I don't know, by letting women drive, get educated, pick their own husband, if any, vote, have the same rights as men, anything less, is too slow!

Sure, those are things that most of us think are essential now. But it took time for us to get to that stage, so there's no reason why it shouldn't take long periods of time in other places too (some of which, as I said, have started from much further back).

Think of it like same-sex marriage. How slow is too slow? By this stage, with majority public support, the numbers in both houses of parliament and the Prime Minister and opposition leader on the same page, it seems ridiculous that it's taking so long for the reform to be achieved. Most of us think it's wrong that a gay couple can't marry now, and by extension most of us think that it was just as wrong that a gay couple couldn't marry 20 years ago. But if someone had asked you back in 1996 whether the law should be changed now, you probably would have said no. Certainly, most Australians would have. We hadn't gotten to that stage yet. Was progress on marriage equality 'too slow' back then, or was it happening at the right pace?

Gay rights has been a comparatively fast form of social change. In under 50 years, homosexuality has gone from illegal and nearly completely stigmatised to nearly completely accepted. Some social change takes much longer, and some social change in certain social and economic conditions takes much, much longer. So, how slow is too slow for Saudi Arabia? I honestly have no idea what the answer to that question is.

[Mugwump]

^ David, I think you are making a cultural assumption that is probably not valid. Gay rights evolved as they did in the West because they are encoded in the very ideal of liberalism which has underpinned Western thought since Rousseau, Smith, Mill, Voltaire and so on. This has been underpinned by a rule of law derived from parliament, and an economic system based on free enterprise and mass consumer choice.

I see none of those really operating in Saudi Arabia, and hence I find it very hard to feel confident about the future evolution of such matters there. The starting place for evaluating anything that is happening now, is now, not what it might be. Maybe it'll get better ; maybe it'll get worse, if ISIS (and its many sympathisers in the Wahhabist faith) has its way.

[David]

You speak of history as if it were just a rolling ball of progress, not a series of pitched ideological battles over power and public will. Gay rights were not encoded in Western society's 'liberal' system in 1956, any more than the right of African-American students to sit in the sandwich bar was encoded in the 'liberalism' of the American south.

Let's not get confused about this. Martin Luther King's appeal to the constitution was an act of appropriation; the founding fathers of the US weren't speaking of black slaves when they wrote about the inalienable rights of every "man". In the same way, the Muslim progressives of today and the future will take Quran verses out of context to argue for the greater rights of women, ethnic minorities, gay people and everyone else. And people will look back and talk about the Muslim cultural heritage of social progress, as they already do, I'm sure.

What is clear, or should be clear, is that societies are always evolving. If you were in Spain during the Inquisition, would you have had reason to believe that one day the church would lose its power to murder and torture people? I don't know; but regardless, what we do know is that that society did change. There's no reason to think that it can't happen to other theocracies, and no guarantee that it will even take anywhere near as long. In any case, it seems fairly evident that Saudi Arabia is changing as we speak, so I'm not even really sure why I need to argue any of this.

[Mugwump]

^ Well, that's the first time I've been credited with a belief in benign progressive history. History is certainly no rolling ball of progress. That is why I said "maybe it'll get better ; maybe it'll get worse, if ISIS (and its many sympathisers in the Wahhabist faith) has its way". It is certainly a matter of struggle, and it can go forward - or backward. Afghanistan from 1970-1990 under a resurgent Islam is a case in point.

Note that "forward" is of course a completely cultural construct - what you and I consider a move forward will be backward to a theocrat or a Saudi patriarch.

The point is that change happens because a society has developed the institutional and intellectual potential energy (to use a physics metaphor) for the particular kind of movement that happens. I see little of this potential energy for "progress" in sex equality in the ME /Saudi Arabia today. Of course it may happen, but I think the underlying forces remain very hostile.

[pietillidie]

[Mugwump]

^ Both true, and untrue. There is no one narrative. There are a plurality of them, and our narrative today will be disowned and disavowed by tomorrow's generations. Values, as Wittgenstein pointed out, are not matters which can be logically spoken of in true-or-false terms, however much we may want to.

We draw from that opposite conclusions, however. I think your conclusion is that we should regard other narratives as equally valid, and be hyper-critical of our own "silly stories". My conclusion is that there is no absolute truth which guarantees our way of life, the correctness of our beliefs today, or our continued success. All that protects those things is our defence of them, and our emotional attachment to them. As Lord Palmerston once said, "a nation has no permanent allies, only permanent interests". These "silly stories" which hold us together as Australians or Brits or English-speakers are in fact a large part of the meaning of life for many of us, fibres of our emotional being, not a desiccated project in meta-analysis. Like my attachment to my family, nothing makes it special in the universe except that I feel it is - yet that is enough. So it is with culture and nation, at least to my side of politics.

This is all true for other nations, too, of course. Their beliefs and values are alien to our own and sometimes dreadful in our eyes, but they're really not our active concern until and unless they attack or threaten us, as Islamism does today. As you put it, "reconciliation, negotiation and solution" etc are tools well worth using ; but they are just tools toward achieving our objectives. There are times, too, for defence, resistance and hard realism.

[pietillidie]

^My conclusion is quite different to that; it's to assume all power centres and received stories are nonsense and work from there. Declaring any particular religion a constraining absurdity is about as useful as complaining about the shape of planets. Damn these spheres! I hate spheres!

The fact is, we're stuck with these constraints, so the next step is to see how we can move forward.

When you go through it, extremist Islamic groups are just one among a host of pressing concerns. You've got multiple billions of people from Nigeria to Iran to Turkey to Russia to India to China to Indonesia who are going to get extremely upset very shortly if things stop moving forward. Now, that's a French Revolution I don't want to be on the wrong side of. Just a few bad seasons of weather or a couple of scourges and plagues could turn that into the mother of all problems.

Instead of making sure Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia have functioning economies, and instead of making sure China finds a way to push through this present challenging stage without erupting into an actual apocalypse, the only people with free time on the planet are fighting "my daddy is tougher than yours" wars with ragged religious peasants, themselves angry at not having functioning economies and therefore functioning, stable and evolving societies.

The present silliness really is Trumpesque, time-wasting stuff. Some concern is no doubt justified, but it's one concern among many, and a concern we have willfully spent trillions of dollars *making worse*.

This obsessive focus is actually quite reminisce of apocalyptic religion, which takes the great complexity of the world and reduces it to a single clash on the Plain of Megiddo, or wherever, as if nothing else on earth matters but one, simple holy struggle.

Well, the economies of billions of people of various persuasions say hello and request five minutes of our time in between Muslim panic outbursts.

[HAL]

What makes seasons of weather or a couple of scourges and plagues could turn that into the mother of all problems bad?

[pietillidie]

^Rust. That's the only scourge you need to worry about, HAL!

[HAL]

What if it didn't happen?

[Mugwump]

^My conclusion is quite different to that; it's to assume all power centres and received stories are nonsense and work from there. Declaring any particular religion a constraining absurdity is about as useful as complaining about the shape of planets. Damn these spheres! I hate spheres!

The fact is, we're stuck with these constraints, so the next step is to see how we can move forward.

When you go through it, extremist Islamic groups are just one among a host of pressing concerns. You've got multiple billions of people from Nigeria to Iran to Turkey to Russia to India to China to Indonesia who are going to get extremely upset very shortly if things stop moving forward. Now, that's a French Revolution I don't want to be on the wrong side of. Just a few bad seasons of weather or a couple of scourges and plagues could turn that into the mother of all problems.

Instead of making sure Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia have functioning economies, and instead of making sure China finds a way to push through this present challenging stage without erupting into an actual apocalypse, the only people with free time on the planet are fighting "my daddy is tougher than yours" wars with ragged religious peasants, themselves angry at not having functioning economies and therefore functioning, stable and evolving societies.

The present silliness really is Trumpesque, time-wasting stuff. Some concern is no doubt justified, but it's one concern among many, and a concern we have willfully spent trillions of dollars *making worse*.

This obsessive focus is actually quite reminisce of apocalyptic religion, which takes the great complexity of the world and reduces it to a single clash on the Plain of Megiddo, or wherever, as if nothing else on earth matters but one, simple holy struggle.

Well, the economies of billions of people of various persuasions say hello and request five minutes of our time in between Muslim panic outbursts.

But it is not a zero sum game. You can deal with the Muslim threat while considering other issues on their merits. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. The issue for me comes down to this : We have a Muslim community in Britain 25% of whom sympathised with the Charlie Hebdo murders. This population is proportionately growing across Europe, and there is some evidence that the second generation is more radical than the first, so it is not going away. Twenty-five years ago a leading British writer's murder was incited outside a rally of over a thousand at a Bradford mosque for writing a book, and nothing was done about it for fear of inflaming race relations. 20% of British Muslims then, too, stated that they agreed with the fatwa.

That s a policy problem, and it needs rational, careful discussion and decisiveness. They can do this in Singapore and we can do it here. It will invovle careful immigration policy, and strong penal sanctions on any kind of incitement or sedition using religion as a pretext. It can still (just about) be managed without escalating the danger. But if we do not act now, that moment may well pass. We can do that and worry about the rest of the world at the same time.

[pietillidie]

Public focus and attention is extraordinarily limited; possibly as close to zero-sum as you can get, hence textbook PR.

And 20% of <insert people group> believe <insert autocratic violation of some group's rights here>, and always have. That could result in all kinds of fun in most countries on earth, none less than the UK and US, and doesn't tell us much at all. Just for your entertainment, type "20% americans believe" into Google!

The point being the translation of absurd beliefs into reality is complex in big populations; a bit like the way some people with very racist beliefs in theory can be very friendly to minority ethnic groups in reality. There is very often a dissonance going on which plays out in different ways depending on the context, such as whether objective thought (e.g., an academic exam), group identity or individual identity is being primed at the time.

Terrorism is already being given the resources and attention needed and no one opposes sufficient funding for it. The rest of the hysteria and silly mythology only gives rise to resource misallocation such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Society just isn't getting worse on any measures which warrant this new obsession; it's entirely disproportionate. Meanwhile, the risks of terrorism and people movements continue to be driven and funded *above all* by a politics of chaos elsewhere built on completely bastardised economies and longstanding religious wars we have had a major hand in perpetuating for many long decades now.

Where is the energy for getting the world off oil and getting those economies on a balanced footing ASAP? Where is the plan for geopolitical security in that region that *doesn't* involve creating terrorists by siding with some violent brute? There is none and there is no serious public concern; instead, people are busy defeating imaginary Internet villains, even as the chaos which causes the terrorism they fear is heightened by their own disingenuous governments and hysterical sanctioning of irrational policy.

Misallocated public attention is one of the most costly misallocations of all.

[stui magpie]

^ Yep, that's how arranged marriages work (or worked until recent times), in Israel, Japan, India and Congo, as well as every country in Europe. This - second-class treatment of women - is the history of the entire human race. Thankfully, even the stragglers are starting to leave it behind now. Cause for celebration, no?

It's not the best analogy, but seeing these cracks in the Saudi patriarchy is like seeing the slowest kid in school pick up his first book. It doesn't mean you no longer have idiots in your class or that he's suddenly a genius, but it does mean that things are changing for the better.

TP, how slow is too slow? By what measurement can we assess these things?

Oh I don't know, by letting women drive, get educated, pick their own husband, if any, vote, have the same rights as men, anything less, is too slow!

Oh I don't know. There's a case to be made for not letting women drive.



(ducks and runs)