Total number of comments: 1542 (since 2013-04-13 18:28:29)
Juan Cole
is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page
Website: http://juancole.com
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I don't understand your premises. If you run the car off your solar panels, the only question is how many you need to charge the battery. As for the car, Renault's Tangiers plant advertises itself as net carbon zero.
No, in percentage terms, Christianity itself is also shrinking, though you are right that it isn't at the same rate as whiteness. Religious "nones" have gone from 8% 25 years ago to 15% today, and non-Christian religions have gone from 3% to about 5%. So the Christian proportion has gone down from 89% to 80%. Among Millennials, religious "nones" are at 33% and non-Christian religions also bulk larger, so the Christian proportion of the population in 30 years likely will go on down to 65%. Of course, Christian-heritage people will still be the vast majority, but if they don't go to church, don't believe a doctrine, and say they either don't believe in God or don't know if there is one, then calling them "Christian" is a stretch.
No, ISIL is toast. It has blown up Paris and won't be allowed to control territory for much longer.
Syrian Kurds, SAA with Iraqi Shiite militias, or FSA/Turkey -- somebody will take it out. And before too very long.
I called ISIL a flash in the pan some while ago. I stand by that.
Detroit had already declined to a little over a million when I got here in 1984. Sugrue argues that mechanization in the 1950s and 1960s was primarily responsible for the decline of the workforce, and that then race came into play. Neither Japan nor Mexico bulks large in his well-researched work, and there isn't any essential reason Detroit could not have flourished with such competition.
what I think is that if working class people think Trump is on their side they are making a big mistake.
only 47% of 18- to 29-year-olds agree that Hiroshima was justified
There is no evidence that ordinary Americans understood that Dresden was fire-bombed or that if asked beforehand they would have approved of this tactic. They certainly would not today.
That was yesterday's posting:
link to juancole.com
sorry, that should have been off *new* coal plants, i.e. have stabilized emissions, by 2030. But I think it will come sooner.
Computerization of publishing allows textbook manufacturers now to do Texas editions, and normal ones for the rest of the country.
Bill, you're being silly. It is like expecting the Spanish to see the Habsburg Empire as foreign imperialists. You are mixing up two separate concepts, "empire" (the normal form of government in the early modern world) with imperialism, the European capitalist incorporation of much of the world into an economically exploitative and often racist, illegitimate order.
Hi, Jay. Yes, I know. But I wasn't talking about that period of his life. I was talking about 1960-66 and the context of his 60s hits, which were progressive. People change.
Hi, Frank. this Iranian article is completely crazy and you'd want some corroboration from some non-whacky news agency before crediting it.
Iranian support for Zaidis in Yemen, who are 1/3 of the country and a majority in the North, has been minor. Most of their weapons are American and come from regular army units who defected to them. Since Yemen has launched only minor attacks on any of its neighbors, in response to heavy and steady bombardment and military invasion from several other countries, the source of the threat seems to lie elsewhere.
If you mean the aerial bombardment of Aleppo that has been going on since Friday or so, it is not as bad as any of the others yet, but it hasn't been going on as long. If you mean al-Assad's mad bombers in general, by now I figure they've killed tens of thousands, so worse than Gaza by a long shot and on the Iraq War/ Occupation scale.
The Syrian regime has vehemently and violently rejected a federal solution for the Kurds; what coolaid are you drinking?
OFAC claims jurisdiction if at least 10% of the product is American-made. You have not appreciated the supremacy of OFAC.
Cigarette smoking is not a choice. The tobacco companies spray extra nicotine on the leaves to make sure they addict people. Essentially they doom them to an early grave. My relatives in the hills of northwest Virginia all smoked and most of them died young. We know how to shoot, by the way. Squirrel hunting is not the same as putting millions of Glocks into urban areas. It is silly to suggest it is.
It is what Obama said; how about seeing the title as a commentary on the article?
check back in 2019. These stats will change with incredible rapidity. 2006 was only ten years ago and wind would have been nearly zero then.
Never explain by cleverness in the US government what can satisfactorily be explained by incompetence or stupidity.
geez, you could wait and read beyond the prologue before deciding something about the character.
You can't end CO2 emissions by fracking for gas and petroleum; the extra methane released may well make it more lethal than coal. Not to mention the extensive water pollution as in upstate New York.
I don't agree that Trump can't be sued. The Southern Poverty Law Center sues groups all the time in connection to violent acts that they helped inspire.
thanks! fixed it
Mark Tessler at the U of Michigan was involved in a joint US-Iraqi team of pollsters. In 2012 they asked Iraqis if there should be a separation of religion and state. 75% of Sunni Arabs said yes. Mosulis are mostly Sunni Arabs.
No one who is critical of Israel's Apartheid and appropriation project in the Palestinian West Bank would ever be confirmed by the US Congress.
Electric cars fueled by solar. My Volt is Saudi-free.
Yes, Helen. The Baathis in Syria are *much* more brutal domestically than the Saudis and just as authoritarian. They have tortured over 10,000 prisoners to death and are responsible for a significant number of the 400,000 Syrians killed in the Civil War.
Abroad, Saudi now bears responsibility for some civilian deaths in Yemen.
you have to say which one
US has high legal immigration, benefiting its own corporate and global South elites. It has low rates of acceptance of needy refugees in international terms, especially from countries like Iraq where the US played a big role in causing displacements.
I, Ed. No, I disagree. Some 80% of the Yemeni electorate voted for Mansour Hadi in the Feb. 2012 referendum and severe critics of Saleh like Tawakkul Karman were on board with it and the process of multi-party consultation it initiated. Mansour Hadi appointed what was essentially a national unity cabinet. The Houthis supported these processes as well.
The Houthi coup of September 2014 was instigated by Ali Abdullah Saleh as a way of coming back to power and it is clear he ordered the elements in the army still loyal to him to collaborate with it. Had the Houthis not made their coup, there would by now be a new constitution and a multi-party parliament and the country wouldn't be in shambles.
Hi, Dr. Antar. As you know, there have been many positions in Western academia (what I was talking about) on the hadith corpus, from Schacht to Juynboll.
I am not from Near Eastern Studies but from History, and I don't know of any historian who would be comfortable with a set of oral sources collected 200-300 years after the fact for which there are no early manuscripts. It would be like flying to Corsica today and asking people their family reminiscences of Napoleon.
Historians weight sources by a set of criteria: Was the source by an an eyewitness? Was it written down soon after the event? Do we have the original document?
A source by an eyewitness written down 30 years later is not as good as one written down immediately, e.g.
Historians of the medieval world routinely do use later sources, which are thought to preserve earlier ones in some form, but they weight them less heavily than the earlier ones.
As a result, an academic historian working on the Qur'an would typically admit of hadith, sira, etc. only if it accorded closely with the text of the Qur'an and was plausible in the context of the late antique world.
We historians will just have to say to others, to you your methodology and to us, ours.
There was also Dar al-Sulh or realm of conciliation for friendly non-Muslim countries like Ethiopia.
The Qur'an prescribes lashes for adultery. Hadith prescribes stoning, which is an importation of Jewish law from the Talmud.
There isn't anything in the Qur'an about dhimmis.
Bill, there is nothing in the Qur'an about Dar al-Harb and all the verses on warfare in it I can think of pertain to defensive war. Really, you want to argue with me about this?
Hadith are very problematic; they were collected from oral tradition 200 years after the fact and reflect the feudal militaristic atmosphere of Abbasid Baghdad, which ruled much of the civilized world. We historians don't view most of them as very likely to reflect the ideas of the Prophet Muhammad in early 7th century Mecca.
writing as fast as I can!
cheers Juan
Yeah, 200 support troops for the YPG is not exactly the Vietnam War. I am not aware that they have killed anyone at all, much less innocent people. They are there to help roll back the genocidal ISIL. In any case, my article was attempting to draw attention to how dangerous it is even for that number to be there.
Turkey can't possibly be aboard with Russo-Iranian policy in Syria. Erdogan is famous for trying to find other bases for trade even in the face of a big policy difference.
It is sardonic- judging Trump by his own criteria
There is no evidence in the Qur'an for veiling
the veil has nothing to do with Islam; it was adopted from upper class Iranian and Byzantine custom. It was highly classed. Few 19th century women wore a full face veil; the majority of them worked as peasants or shopkeepers, etc. and couldn't have afforded it.
It is down to about 80,000 from an original 300,000. It is disproportionately Alawite but still has members from among Sunni Arabs and other communities.
That's silly. I figure at least half of Sunnis are with the regime or at least prefer it to the fundies
First of all, VOA is a good deal more independent and objective than RT, which this site uses for video all the time. Second, you don't judge a story by who distributes it. Third, the only way to remain informed is to triangulate by sampling a wide range of journalism. Fourth, this site publishes analysis by people of many perspectives. Fifth, you expressed yourself here in terms that don't reassure us about your own objectivity.
the link to Scientific American is in the piece.
I don't believe it is alleged that the US ever funded the Jabhah. Some of their battlefield allies of convenience, yes.
thanks so much for your informed intervention, Glenn. Trying to have it both ways is definitely the tactic here.
birth rates in the Arab World are variable. Tunisia underwent a demographic transition in the 1970s.
Lower birth rates come with higher rates of urbanization, a clear trend in the region.
You need to read some social science on the region-- your view is way too simplistic.
Because you always want to honor someone who acted so unethically she had to resign by making her the honorary chair of your campaign.
The numerals are Sanskrit & borrowed by the Arabs
The Zero has been invented several times but our zero is the Baghdad one
link to dailymail.co.uk
Your discussion is on rational grounds. Pence's isn't.
unclear
because the vast majority of generals opposed, which is what counts.
I think the Dutch East India Company may have been worse, and the Portuguese Empire certainly was far more brutal.
Tunisia has no oil.
Tunisia is fairly highly industrialized, moreso than most countries on that continent. Sfax is an industrial city.
Oh, Daesh in Syria and Iraq has to be rolled up; otherwise it has the prestige and resources to keep provoking these attacks.
Gandhi helped recruit Indians to fight against the Kaiser, too.
Gandhi was also responding to serial killers of various sorts, from Jallianwalla Bagh to the ethno-sectarian rioters that killed over a million people in Bengal and Punjab.
I didn't say the killers have no motivation. I said the motivation is to commit suicide by white people in such a way as to cause a backlash against all Muslims, thus driving the Muslims into their arms. Gandhism is suggested as a way to avoid falling into their trap. Try reading it again without blinkers.
splitting countries up doesn't stop wars, it just makes them extra-state rather than intra.
Everybody had their own reason for wanting to invade Iraq. Bush wanted revenge on behalf of his father. I think his evangelical constituency also wanted to admit Christian missionaries to a major Muslim country. Cheney wanted new oil fields for Halliburton. The Project for a New American Century wanted a colony to rehabilitate the idea of empire. Feith wanted to destroy the only Middle East power that could stand in the way of US/Israeli hegemony. Some of them probably knew that there would be opportunities for loot. Billions disappeared into their bank accounts.
The differences between Daesh and Wahhabism are wider than that, including the tactical theory of tawahhush or acting like wild beasts, etc. King Abdullah put 2 Shiites on the national Shura Counsel. Do you think Daesh would do that? The differences are quite vast.
He did, and to Muslims, as long as they were loyal to the British crown
there was a passage in the original Declaration about freeing the slaves; Jefferson had to take it out to get the text passed.
Let's say al-Assad's forces have killed 130,000, the majority of them citizens. That is certainly too low, but for the sake of argument. In what way do you attribute anywhere near that number to Saudi Arabia, which until Yemen hadn't even been at war?
The Saudis haven't killed a fraction of the number of people al-Assad's regime has.
Yes because Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries didn't destroy or occupy African coastal cities and steal millions of people from Africa compared to a tiny number of Europeans taken in the Mediterranean.
Maybe start with French invasion and occupation of Algeria in 1830 and then go forward comprehensively, with the US getting into the game of crushing Muslims from 1948 forward.
That was a syndicated piece, not by me, and posted for the sake of argument.
DC hasn't been much involved; the revolution and civil war was largely indigenous and the US hasn't intervened in any serious way. Obama said he felt liberated when he told the Saudis to jump in the Gulf in 2013. It is local and regional actors who have mainly kept it going.
The problem is private sales at gun shows. Private sales are completely unregulated and are permitted to be transacted at gun shows. So in that case, no procedures.
The point wasn't about British motivations but Trump's rhetoric.
Alas yes it is you-- maybe a workplace filter that disallows political blogs?
What I would say to Monica is that there is a difference between bad Muslims joining an organization, getting training, and carrying out operations with a political goal, and bad Muslims just hanging out at clubs and then going postal in the name of some organization they've never had any contact with.
They were in an organization, received extensive training over years, and did those things to throw off surveillance (it is called false flag tradecraft). This guy was just a troubled loner who didn't know anything at all about political Islam.
This guy was never withing 4000 miles of Daesh.
Both attacks did indeed have a political agenda. The PKK attack in Istanbul was aimed at getting the Turkish public to let the Kurds secede. The attack in Tel Aviv was aimed at encouraging European Jews to go back to Europe and leave the Palestinians alone.
The attack in Orlando was carried out to produce what political outcome, exactly?
Not a fan of boycotts. USG uses them to stop us talking to Iran and Cuba and I believe in talking to people.
You can say it is wrong. You can't say it is disingenuous.
thanks so much, Ambassador Mack!
Similar things were said about Ramadi as the offensive began there. And before that Tikrit. The Shiites have the biopower here, plus US/allied close air support. Fallujah will fall.
the trillion dollar figure is over 30 years, which is a little deceptive. And, if he can't get Putin and Congress to reduce the numbers it is desirable that they not be kept in a deteriorated state.
They stockpiled more than the medical reactor could use any time soon. Likely this was a form of implicit deterrence. LEU is still easier to upgrade to highly enriched uranium than starting from scratch. So don't mess with them. The problem is that this stance is 50/50 deterrence and invitation to attack. The current Iranian position of no nukes and transparency removes the invitation to attack.
I don't think Fallujah Salafism in the '90s had anything much to do with Iran, or at least they don't mention it in their memoirs. They were angry about Gaza, though, and wanted to form a Fallujah branch of Hamas.
ummah probably means nation here-- she looks secular
It is pretty surely just Daesh.
oops, thanks for alerting me to this slip of the keyboard.
Just quoting the perp: You have to actually watch the thing you're commenting on.
It is silly to blame Bill Clinton for what happened in Mogadishu. And saving the people of Kosovo was both praiseworthy and a low-impact intervention. There is such a thing as a sense of proportion. This comment entirely lacks it.
The new Tunisian constitution, approved by an elected parliament, says women and men have equal rights.
Cordoba was replaced as largest by a Chinese city in the early 1000s when it went into abrupt decline, according to the world historians.
There is a difference between vassalage & independence
My point is that Byzantium as defined by most historians is a contemporary of Muslim Spain. They even ended around the same time.
Yes and the Protestants and Catholics also mistreated each other and fought wars of religion. Minding that European Muslims weren't always tolerant (but often they were) more than minding Protestant intolerance is a blind spot.)
It was major by virtue of being Athens.
The convention among many authors is that it was the Roman Empire to Heraclius, Byzantium after that
I think the Normans and Bourbons also arrived by conquest
The mayors of Istanbul Tirana, Pristina and Rotterdam are elected