Syrian has a border with Israel.
Libya does not.
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Bahrain does not have a border with Israel
nor does Yemen or Saud.
what is your point?
the US cant go charging into Syria to help the protestors because Syrian has a border with Israel and the fighting will spill across the border. wallah, Assad might even attack Israel to draw them in.
whats Bahrain got to do with it?
US, NATO, Turkey, Arab League, GCC (and Israel, warily) are all now supporting the overthrow of Assad. Politically as well as covert operations.
Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Russia, China all oppose it. The latter two blocking the resolution in the UNSC by vetoing it.
My impression is there is a huge amount of disinformation on all sides. Interestingly the secretly leaked Arab League’s independent report came out significantly favorable to Assad.
(There is a link to download the pdf report at that site)
Former Indian diplomat, M K Bhadrakumar , has some interesting observations on the maneuvering behind the scenes at the UNSC.
The real difference is that Gadhafi had no real friends other than African Union.
Assad has Iran, China and Russia.
China and Russia might not support Assad to the hilt, but they are totally tired of US-NATO unilateralism, and are significantly willing to do what they can to spike it. JMHO.
Reports that Iran has sent 15 000 of its elite troops to assist Syria. Also info on the growing covert proxy war. You should read this whole article.
doesnt matter.
we cannot go into Syria like we went into Libya because of the border with Israel.
the same reason we couldn’t go into Egypt.
We didn’t “go into” Libya, but NATO had special forces there. Just like probably now in Syria.
The Free Syrian Army looks more and more like a NATO-GCC front. There are constant reports of financial aid and special ops training etc. from UK, US, France operating out of Turkey and Jordan. Try Googling it.
The Chinese-Russian UNSC veto has made a “no fly zone” NATO air-war impossible is all.
The Sunni Kingdoms of the GCC and NATO are cooperating to break the Iranian-centred “Shia crescent” at Syria, its weakest point.
JMHO. You may see it differently.
the US had special forces in Libya training the Egyptian special forces.
the US cannot officially support the opposition, because of the border with Israel.
sure theres covert shit going down.
Israel is the 800 pound gorilla in the room.
if the Sauds begin to look like they are too pro-AmerIsrael than they will get their own Arab Spring.
Shams.
Chris Mooney is about to release a new book The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality
I need to put several links here so I will spread this over a couple of posts to avoid moderation.
Chris has listed a number of data sources at his blog.
The first one is a list of cognitive-science research papers.
Chris has also listed 11 genetic studies on Left-Right differences.
Anyway, I know how much this whole question of the biological foundations of our beliefs intrigues you, so I hope you find these links interesting.
shukran, Spock.
that is gunna royally frost razib, murtaad fitri’s chaps, dontcha think?
lol.
Really? I don’t know what Razib’s views on this are.
I have something else for you too.
An interesting graphic article about the patterns of conservatism in USA states.
There are a few minor details here that I found a little surprising.
its fractal, Spock.
poor razib.
and your article?
i’d retitle.
Q: why america keeps getting LESS conservative
A: the demographic timer.
OK. Something else for when you have the time to listen to it.
There is an audio podcast, you can listen online or download it as an MP3. (01h:05m)
It’s a review of what opinion polls and sociological studies reveal about the factors that influenced the “Arab Spring” and the results and outcomes.
It fills in a lot of detail on stuff that I already knew a little bit about.
I think you might find it interesting too.
Ah. I had forgotten about your earlier link to Chris Mooney’s Discover blog.
I’ve known of Chris for a longish time because I have been a long-term listener to the Point of Inquiry podcast from the Center For Inquiry.
PoI is one of my favorite secular-humanist sources.
it will frost Aziz’s chaps too…..you see Spock….Aziz believes humans are Persuable.
But if red/blue genetics and neuropolitics are True, most humans simply aren’t.
Humans have strong tendencies.
But a large part of scientific training is to persuade you to adopt a empirical framework for belief.
As a rationalist, I believe I must approach all problems of belief with, as far as possible, an unbiased prior, and let the evidence push me wherever it will.
So in the end I will follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if I don’t necessarily like where it’s taking me. Arguments, may or may not persuade me but evidence always does. In the end.
I willingly, willfully, subjugate my beliefs to the tyranny of evidence. In the end without any possibility of exception.
and why do you think I believe that?
do you think it’s just my pet theory? or perhaps I am drawing upon something else?
because you refuse to acknowledge the biological basis of behavior on political affiliation.
and im going to be correct on this too, Aziz.
emergent IQ gap between liberals and conservatives
just wait.
I am responding to this here, because you might not see my comment on BJ.
It is inevitable that PO will hit the West much harder than China. The West is an oil-era civilization. All its infrastructure is predicated on the existence of cheap oil. Cars, freeways, suburban sprawl, shopping malls, etc.
China is still largely an early-industrializing coal age power. Rising oil prices just don’t hit China so hard.
Also China offsets some of the impact of rising oil prices by allowing its currency to appreciate in real terms against the US dollar. This is partly higher exchange rate, partly higher domestic inflation. China has a lot of leeway here because of its huge current account surplus. China holds down its currency but offsets the damage by subsidizing domestic fuel prices.
China is also the goods manufacturer of choice for all the OPEC oil producers. So they recycle petrodollars through China setting up a three-way trade: West buys oil from OPEC. OPEC uses petrodollars to buy manufactures from China. China lends money to West. The higher the oil price goes, the more China sells stuff to OPEC. This offsets China’s own oil-import costs. Through OPEC’s imports of Chinese manufactures, some of China’s prosperity is leveraged off OPEC’s higher oil income.
This is one reason why focused anti-China trade barriers won’t help US. If you import oil it ends up in China anyway through the 3-way trade.
Again I am going to have to spread this over two posts, because I have two links and this site only permits one link per comment without moderation.
These links are from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2011
If you look at China in terms of coal consumption, it looks like one of the more highly-industrailized powers.
The map is actually consumption per capita. You can download the original slide from the “download” section of the page as part of a ppt file.
But if you look at oil consumption per capita, China is one of the preindustrial nations. China’s oil consumption per capita is still tiny compared to the West.
This is why Peak Oil is not a major burden to the Chinese economy.
But the West is gasping for air.
biology is always your deus ex machina
you are forgetting something that transcends biology. ask your shaikhs
No aziz.
He Who Pastures the Stars IS biology.
also quantum physics, math, and science in general.
and you know what Aziz?
you and razib, murtaad fitri are WRONG.
there is a biological basis for political affiliation.
and it matters.
If you think God and Nature are the same thing, you might like to read Spinoza.
This lecture by Beth Lord may interest you.
Here is another podcast, an interview with Beth Lord, who is a leading Spinoza scholar.
You may find this article in the Winter issue of Washington Quarterly, about Iran’s declining influence in Iraq, interesting.
The page linked is a brief excerpt. The full article can be downloaded as a pdf file.
After talking about Spinoza, I went and downloaded the audio book of Ethics myself from LibriVox dot org.
I have only ever read Spinoza before, through modern interpreters, never his actual writings. Anyway. I have to say that I think it was a truly amazing system he created. But after “reading” it, I found it helped a lot to consolidate my understanding of his philosophy, by reading the Spinoza section in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
I’m not sure now, that I entirely agree with Beth Lord’s take on Spinoza. I am not sure that Spinoza is really an atheist so much as a deeply traditional theist who believes that Nature is God’s manifestation in the world “God considered from the attribute of extension, rather than from the attribute of thought”. I think his substance-monism is a very cool idea. To Spinoza, God is a thinking being, and his sense that the chains of reasoning in God’s thought becomes the chains of causality in nature is a thought-provoking idea. It is a bit like St John’s concept of the Divine Word as God’s creative principle. Only in this case it is the Divine Thoughts that become real.
I keep wondering what Spinoza would make of our meta-theories about the universe as a quantum computer that computes its own future state? Would he conflate computation with thought, and simply say that God is the Universe-computer? It is significant that to Spinoza, God has no purpose in creation. It is purely a manifestation of his nature. Very much like a natural computer, I thought.
Also. Spinoza’s God definitely lacks any of the personalistic, interventionistic or legalistic aspects of the Abrahamic God. So you would have to say that his God is the abstract God of the philosophers, not the God of the Bible.
And the fact that he conflates that vision with nature, or rather, he regards nature as an attribute of that God, I think it would be true to say that Spinoza is a pantheist, but as an elaboration of a pagan, nature-centric monism that locates its ultimate source in a very abstract philosophical Deism.
Stuart Kauffman, Gabor Vattay and Samuli Niiranen have a paper describing a possible mechanism for quantum biology, the persistence of quantum coherent states for orders of magnitude longer than expected, near the critical quantum chaos boundary. They argue coherence could be re-established with externally-driven coherent photonic fields.
The following interaction took place on BJ:
“OT Samara.
Have you seen this article?
It’s dealing with the same kind of demographic issues we were discussing the other day.
Excellent and detailed.
samara morgan – March 11, 2012 | 10:03 am · Link
@THE: its mildly interesting in that development doesnt actually correlate with depressed fertility. but the flip side is still that muslims dont convert, because al-Islam is a Maynard Smith uninvadable strategy.
but that sure frags the Eurabia-shouters like Mark Steyn’s arguments.
one out of ever four humans will be muslim in 2020.
how many anglo christians will there be again?”
A 3% increase on what there is now, and mostly in the poorest countries. So?
Far fewer Christians and Buddhists, generally, because as Paul and Zuckermann point out they are all secularizing at record speed.
“No Religion” is the fastest growing religious category if you measure by conversion rate.
I have an important analytical chart to send you relating to the food price crisis and the deep implications for the poorer food-importing countries.
Check your email in the next day or so.
It’s why I think no-one should be sanguine about population projections.
For everyone else, the latest chart, updated by the FAO a few days ago.