They did not "coexist" with European monarchies. The Caliphates conquered as much of the area around them as they could, and it was the European countries that had the geography and political powers to resist conquest.
You made me spit my coffee, thanks.
Do you honestly think that the Caliphates were in any way different from European colonists? Do you honestly think that Persia left everyone alone for the 1500 years before Islam came along? Do you know about the Russo-Persian and Anglo-Persian wars, or the 1953 Iranian coup? Do you know anything about the history of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Algeria? What do you think caused the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?
The history of Islam is war with non-Islam. There have been periods of peace... but we're exiting that, right now.
The history of Islam is the history of everywhere else in the world.
Incidentally, you wrote this less than a week after the 100th anniversary of the start of the Battle of Gallipoli, where the British Empire (Australians and New Zealanders commemorate the battle most closely) fought the Ottoman Empire, which was Germany's ally.
It is tragic how many people are killed each year by European Christian suicide bombers and terrorists.
The West prefers drone strikes these days. It's far less personal.
Still, I think the Religion of Peace is winning in bodycount.
Nobody has yet beaten the record of Mao's China, although Stalin's Russia came pretty close.
Hint: mockery and blasphemy is a HUGE part of modern American culture.
It's tempered by the maxim that you never punch down. That's why you never see blackface any more.
The fact that they are asshats doesn't change the fact that they are legally in the right, and the fact that they are legally in the right doesn't change the fact that they are asshats. As such, they should neither be censored nor admired.
I don't advocate censorship, but I strongly advocate censureship.
I do! They were hereditary monarchies which claimed divine right, in a way that was essentially indistinguishable from the monarchies of Europe with which they coexisted. The last caliphate was abolished at the same time and in the same way that many European monarchies were abolished: in the aftermath of World War I. Like them, it was abolished by popular support of the people.
Did you have a point, or did you just want everyone to understand that Muslim people of Middle Eastern descent are no different from Christian people of European descent?
And I have to question your assertion that work in functional programming helps your work in iterative and OO languages.
Well, it does. I know about 60 programming languages to varying levels of fluency (if that sounds like a lot, it's because I used to research programming languages, and contrary to the Pragmatic Programmers advice, I tend to learn two a year), but I do most of my work in C++ and (sadly) node.js. I can tell which languages improve my "traditional" programming and which ones don't. The ones which do are the ones which force you to think in different ways, because they are the ones which open you up to new possibilities.
You can do Haskell in any language. But until you've done Haskell, you really can't grok what it means to do Haskell or what this buys you.
Quite frankly, I find that the functional programming enthusiast crowd is a group of people who only know how to use hammers and they're trying to convince the world that every problem is a nail.
That's probably true of Lisp. It's certainly true of Paul Graham. However, exactly the opposite is true of Haskell.
Haskell's unofficial motto is "avoid success at all costs" (which may explain the thread-originating post). This means several things, but one corollary is that if there isn't a mathematically pure way to do provide some feature, Haskell does not get that feature until such a way is found. Haskell people do not only know how to use hammers. On the contrary, Haskellers firmly believe that for many problems, we don't know what the right tool for the job is because the right tool hasn't been invented yet.
Why did they seceed from India when India has millions of muslims?
There are generally two reasons why countries secede: either the previous regime is intolerable, or someone is on a power trip (or some combination of both).
I'll let historians debate which was the more dominating motive in the case of Pakistan.
How do you know that gtall is American? If he or she lives somewhere else in the developed world, US-style fundamentalist evangelicals probably are a tiny minority there, and worldwide they certainly are.
They aren't a problem because they are numerous (on a worldwide scale). They are a problem because they've been infiltrated by secular politicians (and only quite recently; we're talking the mid-to-late 70s) and their leaders are cashed-up at the moment. Comparisons to Saudi Wahhabism are not coincidental.
And yet, their cultural identity as the foundation of Christianity and Islam make them culturually.
Jewish people do not generally define themselves culturally as the foundation for Christianity and Islam. This makes even more sense when you consider where antisemitism has historically come from: the majority culture wherever they happened to be.
The very term "Judeo-Christian" is a piece of modern revisionist history.
Yet they're amazingly well represented in finance, media, and law.
European culture made sure that they couldn't do anything else. Historically, Jews in Europe were not allowed to be members of a trade-guild, because doing so required making a Christian oath. For city dwellers (i.e. non-farmers), peddling and money-lending were two of the only jobs available until quite recently.
Neither Christians nor Jews are book-worshippers. Besides, both Christians and Jews agree that no Gentile is bound the civil/religious code of the ancient Hebrews. By the way, that is right there in the Bible too.
The statement that "neither Christians nor Jews do that" is not a universal quantification, and nobody who made it through the first week of any critical thinking course would ever mistake it for one. Finding some tiny subset of Christians in some cultish backwater of Christendom (such as, oh, the US Bible belt) does not negate the claim.
[...] spoke on multiple popular TV programs which are -undoubtedly- watched by judges.
There is a world of difference between being interviewed on a TV program which is probably seen by judges, and being invited to deliver a lecture to a conference of judges.
Slashdot Mirror
They did not "coexist" with European monarchies. The Caliphates conquered as much of the area around them as they could, and it was the European countries that had the geography and political powers to resist conquest.
You made me spit my coffee, thanks.
Do you honestly think that the Caliphates were in any way different from European colonists? Do you honestly think that Persia left everyone alone for the 1500 years before Islam came along? Do you know about the Russo-Persian and Anglo-Persian wars, or the 1953 Iranian coup? Do you know anything about the history of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Algeria? What do you think caused the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?
The history of Islam is war with non-Islam. There have been periods of peace ... but we're exiting that, right now.
The history of Islam is the history of everywhere else in the world.
Incidentally, you wrote this less than a week after the 100th anniversary of the start of the Battle of Gallipoli, where the British Empire (Australians and New Zealanders commemorate the battle most closely) fought the Ottoman Empire, which was Germany's ally.
It is tragic how many people are killed each year by European Christian suicide bombers and terrorists.
The West prefers drone strikes these days. It's far less personal.
Still, I think the Religion of Peace is winning in bodycount.
Nobody has yet beaten the record of Mao's China, although Stalin's Russia came pretty close.
Awesome! So what is the PM of Singapore like?
Guns don't kill people. Americans do.
You jest, but some people are drawing conclusions from the Baltimore riots.
Indeed. That runs foul of the "nothing about us, without us" doctrine.
One thing I'd love to see some day is a collection of historic depictions of Mohammed from the Muslim world. That would at least be respectful.
It's tempered by the maxim that you never punch down. That's why you never see blackface any more.
The fact that they are asshats doesn't change the fact that they are legally in the right, and the fact that they are legally in the right doesn't change the fact that they are asshats. As such, they should neither be censored nor admired.
I don't advocate censorship, but I strongly advocate censureship.
Jesus: Martyr.
Mohammed: Conquerer.
Where would you put Charlemagne on that spectrum, as a matter of curiosity?
Do you know what a Caliphate is?
I do! They were hereditary monarchies which claimed divine right, in a way that was essentially indistinguishable from the monarchies of Europe with which they coexisted. The last caliphate was abolished at the same time and in the same way that many European monarchies were abolished: in the aftermath of World War I. Like them, it was abolished by popular support of the people.
Did you have a point, or did you just want everyone to understand that Muslim people of Middle Eastern descent are no different from Christian people of European descent?
I guess that's just as believable as the rest of the scenario.
Why is the Prime Minister of Singapore in Alaska after the zombie apocalypse?
Imagine a line between Redding and Yuma. Anything that happens West of there is "news for nerds" according to Slashdot.
Now where's the weekly Australia story?
Thank you! I'm relieved that you got it without me having to explain it.
And it looks like some of hoi polloi(or should that be hoi barbaroi?) appreciated it too.
I thought I was making a joke in Greek, since polites is the antonym of barbaros. Did I do it wrong?
That's not polite.
I'm much closer to greybeard than hipster.
As am I. My neckbeard is going grey.
And I have to question your assertion that work in functional programming helps your work in iterative and OO languages.
Well, it does. I know about 60 programming languages to varying levels of fluency (if that sounds like a lot, it's because I used to research programming languages, and contrary to the Pragmatic Programmers advice, I tend to learn two a year), but I do most of my work in C++ and (sadly) node.js. I can tell which languages improve my "traditional" programming and which ones don't. The ones which do are the ones which force you to think in different ways, because they are the ones which open you up to new possibilities.
You can do Haskell in any language. But until you've done Haskell, you really can't grok what it means to do Haskell or what this buys you.
Quite frankly, I find that the functional programming enthusiast crowd is a group of people who only know how to use hammers and they're trying to convince the world that every problem is a nail.
That's probably true of Lisp. It's certainly true of Paul Graham. However, exactly the opposite is true of Haskell.
Haskell's unofficial motto is "avoid success at all costs" (which may explain the thread-originating post). This means several things, but one corollary is that if there isn't a mathematically pure way to do provide some feature, Haskell does not get that feature until such a way is found. Haskell people do not only know how to use hammers. On the contrary, Haskellers firmly believe that for many problems, we don't know what the right tool for the job is because the right tool hasn't been invented yet.
If you don't understand why this is important, go watch Bret Victor's talk on The Future of Programming .
I count emacs-lisp, so that's at least a thousand more people who have each written two lines in the last ten years.
But you have to, since output has been demanded.
TL;DR America is the whole world.
There are generally two reasons why countries secede: either the previous regime is intolerable, or someone is on a power trip (or some combination of both).
I'll let historians debate which was the more dominating motive in the case of Pakistan.
How do you know that gtall is American? If he or she lives somewhere else in the developed world, US-style fundamentalist evangelicals probably are a tiny minority there, and worldwide they certainly are.
They aren't a problem because they are numerous (on a worldwide scale). They are a problem because they've been infiltrated by secular politicians (and only quite recently; we're talking the mid-to-late 70s) and their leaders are cashed-up at the moment. Comparisons to Saudi Wahhabism are not coincidental.
And yet, their cultural identity as the foundation of Christianity and Islam make them culturually.
Jewish people do not generally define themselves culturally as the foundation for Christianity and Islam. This makes even more sense when you consider where antisemitism has historically come from: the majority culture wherever they happened to be.
The very term "Judeo-Christian" is a piece of modern revisionist history.
Yet they're amazingly well represented in finance, media, and law.
European culture made sure that they couldn't do anything else. Historically, Jews in Europe were not allowed to be members of a trade-guild, because doing so required making a Christian oath. For city dwellers (i.e. non-farmers), peddling and money-lending were two of the only jobs available until quite recently.
Neither Christians nor Jews are book-worshippers. Besides, both Christians and Jews agree that no Gentile is bound the civil/religious code of the ancient Hebrews. By the way, that is right there in the Bible too.
The statement that "neither Christians nor Jews do that" is not a universal quantification, and nobody who made it through the first week of any critical thinking course would ever mistake it for one. Finding some tiny subset of Christians in some cultish backwater of Christendom (such as, oh, the US Bible belt) does not negate the claim.
There is a world of difference between being interviewed on a TV program which is probably seen by judges, and being invited to deliver a lecture to a conference of judges.