>The second thing to do is to invest as much money as possible into developing domestic energy sources, as well as alternatives to crude oil
Folks in the West with stakes in maintaining the monopoly on oil as an energy source have a lot of power. They won't give up without a fight. The same Neocons that make a big show of decrying Islam to their base also chum around with Saudi Arabia, sucking up the royals.
>Arabs will just go back to what they were before - a bunch of desert nomads with no real power
Here's a nice summary of arab contributions to mathematics.
> Folks in the West with stakes in maintaining the monopoly on oil as an energy source have a lot of power.
There are certainly people at home who have just as much of a vested interest in preserving the status quo, which is precisely why things haven't changed much at all despite the rise of militant Islam. It's upstarts like Elon Musk that are going to force the hand of Big Oil on this matter. But it will be a long & hard battle, one that may not be won for quite a while.
> Here's a nice summary of arab contributions to mathematics.
I don't see how mathematical contributions hundreds of years ago have any relevance to the modern world. We're talking about a time when the US as a country didn't even exist.
>There are certainly people at home who have just as much of a vested interest in preserving the status quo, which is precisely why things haven't changed much at all despite the rise of militant Islam. It's upstarts like Elon Musk that are going to force the hand of Big Oil on this matter. But it will be a long & hard battle, one that may not be won for quite a while.
I'm guessing/hoping that Big Oil will be killed by grassroots innovation, open hardware designs that don't have companies behind them that can be bought out and their patented tech buried. If it's simply a matter of spending money or killing a few people to keep the gravy train going, they'll do it.
>I don't see how mathematical contributions hundreds of years ago have any relevance to the modern world. We're talking about a time when the US as a country didn't even exist.
I'm amazed at the hubris shown towards a civilisation that has existed far longer than your own.
Please reflect more on this. Your "solution" to this problem is just to oversimplify everything and solve these simple problems. A clear flag, that you lack the education to actually contribute something meaningful to the discussion.
> I'm amazed at the hubris shown towards a civilisation that has existed far longer than your own.
I don't understand why the age of a civilization should be a matter of pride. This is an entirely arbitrary point of distinction and has no real relevance to the conversation at hand.
> Your "solution" to this problem is just to oversimplify everything and solve these simple problems. A clear flag, that you lack the education to actually contribute something meaningful to the discussion.
And your inability to literal make any meaningful statements other than ad hominem attacks against me suggests that you need to go back to high school and study logic and debate.
> I don't understand why the age of a civilization should be a matter of pride. This is an entirely arbitrary point of distinction and has no real relevance to the conversation at hand.
> And your inability to literal make any meaningful statements other than ad hominem attacks against me suggests that you need to go back to high school and study logic and debate.
It is arrogant to assume a single countries path is correct vs a much older civilisation, given that single country has not stood the same test of time.
It was not intended as an ad hominem. Only that a meaningful debate could only be made with you, were you open to learning the full history and reasons behind the current problems. After reading your comments so far it is apparent you aren't open to learning these things. I'm sorry if you took offense.
> It is arrogant to assume a single countries path is correct vs a much older civilisation, given that single country has not stood the same test of time.
Once again, the point flew over your head. This has nothing to do with correctness, it has to do with maintaining America's global hegemony.
And Arab "civilization" is a tenuous concept. Many modern Arab countries didn't exist until less than a century ago. Given the horrific exploitation the Arab peoples suffered at the hands of Europeans, I'd say that their countries haven't withstood the test of time very well.
> Only that a meaningful debate could only be made with you, were you open to learning the full history and reasons behind the current problems. After reading your comments so far it is apparent you aren't open to learning these things.
The only thing that's apparent is that you're completely misunderstanding the purpose of my initial comment. It wasn't intended as a normative dismissal of Arab or Muslim culture, it was intended to be a suggested improvement of America's geopolitical current strategy.
The point is that America's global hegemony shouldn't be maintained.
Quite apart from the jackass immorality of it, maintaining hegemony implies indebting America to the point of economic collapse while generating more and more enemies.
The objective instead should be to maintain the quality of life of American citizens.
And there are all kinds of countries, from Japan to Switzerland to Norway to Slovenia, none of which attempt world domination, where citizens can live fine.
(Oh yeah, and as a result of not attempting world domination they also tend not to get attacked by terrorists.)
Many across the spectrum, from Dennis Kucinich to Stephen Walt to Ron Paul, have explained this better than I can here; if you are interested in the geopolitics I suggest you look them up.
Your points about history are equally preposterous. Just because modern middle eastern states are young it does not mean that middle eastern civilisation is young. By that logic, China and Greece are both younger than the USA.
> The point is that America's global hegemony shouldn't be maintained.
That's purely a matter of opinion, so there's no point in arguing about it. As a non-American, it's pretty obvious why/that you don't want America to be dominant. As an American, it's pretty obvious why I do.
> Quite apart from the jackass immorality of it, maintaining hegemony implies indebting America to the point of economic collapse while generating more and more enemies.
I don't think that's true at all. You don't need to spend billions of dollars on costly wars in order to keep yourself in control. You just have to render other people irrelevant, which is exactly what would happen to the Arabs if the world's dependence on crude oil were to vanish.
> The objective instead should be to maintain the quality of life of American citizens.
Which America's global power contributes to.
> And there are all kinds of countries, from Japan to Switzerland to Norway to Slovenia, none of which attempt world domination, where citizens can live fine.
And they pay the price for it - literally. Energy costs are much higher in Japan, for example. If I were living in Japan, I wouldn't be able to cool my entire house during the summer (or heat it during the winter). I've experienced it in Tokyo myself, and it's a significant degradation of quality of life.
> Many across the spectrum, from Dennis Kucinich to Stephen Walt to Ron Paul, have explained this better than I can here; if you are interested in the geopolitics I suggest you look them up.
I know exactly what they've expressed, and I agree with a lot of it. You're still missing my point, which is that you can achieve global hegemony and domination much more effectively through technological innovation that you can through military might.
> Your points about history are equally preposterous. Just because modern middle eastern states are young it does not mean that middle eastern civilisation is young. By that logic, China and Greece are both younger than the USA.
Once again, the age of the "civilization" is entirely irrelevant to modern geopolitical concerns. The age of the state, on the other hand, can at times demonstrate political stability/power.
You would not render the middle east irrelevant by erasing the dependence on crude oil.
I personally think you could in fact be doing the middle east the biggest favour if you could make the global oil price drop to zero. At least to the people, if not the current rulers.
That's not what maintaining Hegemony means. Hegemony means Kicking other people around.
Did you mean something else, like Energy Independence?
Or perhaps Being a world leader in science and technology?
And that's not the thrust of what you were referring to in your original post. You were talking about the INS screening people who look like me and not letting us into America.
Why that's a bad idea is a whole different can of worms, but basically Nazism is not an efficient security policy.
You have to put in place a whole lot of Nazism to get small gains in security.
> I don't see how mathematical contributions hundreds of years ago have any relevance to the modern world. We're talking about a time when the US as a country didn't even exist.
> It's not irrelevant. Without math we wouldn't have a modern society.
Correct, but who made those discoveries has no relevance to modern geopolitical strategy.
> But if you insist that it's irrelevant than Arabs being desert nomads is irrelevant to modern geopolitics too.
I already stated how that fact is relevant, but you chose to ignore it. If the Arabs weren't desert nomads, they might be a credible threat to the US even without oil.
It seems that everyone here is taking offense at the fact that I called Arabs "desert nomads". The point I was trying to make is that without oil, the Arabs don't pose a threat to America.
> I don't see how mathematical contributions hundreds of years ago have any relevance to the modern world.
Math is timeless unless it's mistaken.
...there’s an alternative math metaphor we might use: calculus. The calculus metaphor asks whether and how we can figure out exactly what’s going to happen. Take NASA and the Apollo missions, for instance. You have to figure out where the moon is going to be, exactly. You have to plan whether a rocket has enough fuel to reach it. And so on. The point is that no one would want to ride in a statistically, probabilistically-informed spaceship.
The origins of calculus can be traced to ancient times. Moon rockets. Let that sink in.
Elon Musk and anyone else who pushes that envelope must stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before him, including Arabic mathematicians (indirectly).
What about mathematics that are thousands of years old, i.e. geometry from the ancient Greeks? Buildings with architecture based on the golden ratio[1] are aesthetically very pleasing, e.g. Georgian architecture[2]. Far nicer and better proportioned than most of the shit that's hastily thrown up all over the world today.
Every time you fire up your computer, you're taking advantage of boolean algebra[3], first laid down in the 1850s by George Boole, which is critical to modern computer science.
Mathematical contributions from hundreds of years ago has an incredible amount of relevance to the modern world, in countless different ways.
I wish I knew more about the history of mathematics to counter you more forcefully.
It shows how that in the 15th century, Europe was a shithole backwater, plagued by diseases and wars, and other civilisations like the Chinese and Arabic ones were far more advanced. By various accidents of history, the western world dominated the rest over the next 500 years. Some would argue that the wests' power is currently on the wane, and China is rising again.
btw, many of the arab mathematics "innovation" is simply copied from India. Since, Europe found those through arabs, they were named as "arab" innovation. If they were so advanced 1000s of years ago, how come there is no one coming out of it now?
Adopting your line of thinking: if India, as you claim, is the originator of all this knowledge why is it not the current global leader of science and tech?
That is good question. While indians are excelling in science and tech, India itself is not a leader in science and tech. India was never industrialized, So, even if innovation occurs, it never becomes part of the industrial-government machinery. That is the reason, I believe, indians who are interested in innovation, leave india.
India as a nation is very young. Even, the concept of india is very young. The only connecting fabric underlying india is its spiritually, beliefs and traditions ( Hindu/Vedic traditions ). Their lifestyle is very different from industrialized west or terror based middle east. India itself has two major kinds of people, city folks who are westernized and rural folks who are relatively non-westernized. depending on who you talk, you may get a different answer.
Anyway, this is great question. You should visit india to find it by yourself. It will be a journey worth taken. :)
when 100s of barbarians surround a village populated with unarmed, un-prepared people and kill them all, do you call them war? No, It is not war. And it is not "terrorism" as well. Its worse than that, may be "genocide" is a better word. Today, the rest of the world is caught up with these barbarians, so their only option is "terrorism".
Folks in the West with stakes in maintaining the monopoly on oil as an energy source have a lot of power. They won't give up without a fight. The same Neocons that make a big show of decrying Islam to their base also chum around with Saudi Arabia, sucking up the royals.
>Arabs will just go back to what they were before - a bunch of desert nomads with no real power
Here's a nice summary of arab contributions to mathematics.
http://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/history/arab/arab.html