Comments on: Ashura = Violence

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:56:05 +0000

I guess I just find it depressing. Learn the lessons of the defeat, but don’t fixate on it, because it turns you into a victim, and that doesn’t help you advance.

There are enough real problems and injustices in the world for a wide variety of reasons, that I find it a huge waste of resources to find offense wherever you turn. You are empowering your enemies and frustrating your allies when you do it.

Too often these old defeats are used to justify some evil that the defeated have committed against descendants of that long dead enemy.

I’m not a forgive and forget kind of person, but I want the offenses to have occurred in my lifetime. I’m not about to apply current social norms to ancient practices as doing so denies the part that passage of time and social education takes in civilization.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:37:01 +0000

Some cultures simply clasp their “oppressed” status to their chest and make it part of their cultural identity. This is by no means restricted to Shiite Muslims. For example, American Jews, for example, continue to insist that they’re oppressed (c.f. David Horowitz, professional martyr for the Jewish race), despite all evidence to the contrary (by all measures of social status, whether income, educational status, position in government, or whatever, Jews have done very well in America and that would not happen if they were as oppressed as Horowitz insists). Even supposedly sensible Jews (as vs. Horowitz) insist that they have been the victims of horrible, horrible discrimination in their lifetime, despite a total lack of evidence of said discrimination (i.e., driving a Mercedes, high six figure income, VP at a major corporation, yet still insists that he is “discriminated against”, sigh). And of course you have the professional martyrs of the black race such as Al Sharpton who insist that all the horrible things going on in the black community are the fault of white people (for the record, there is plenty of evidence that blacks are discriminated against in America — but it ain’t whites that make black boys wear their pants around their ankles, listen to rap music performed by black performers that glorifies ignorance and violence, and refuse to perform well in school because that would be “actin’ white”). Compared to all that, flogging yourself over a defeat that happened 1400 years ago is almost sane.

– Badtux the Sociology Penguin

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:35:56 +0000

Defeat welds a people together more closely than a victory does.