Well, it’s that day again. Nine years on, what’s changed? After Iraq, and the new quagmire in Afghanistan, it seems that our laser-like focus on what & who caused 9/11 is no longer with us. I can’t believe we haven’t caught Osama bin Laden yet. Look at what Eric Raymond is blogging about now vs. what he was blogging about in 2002. For the best I think.
The whole affair with the Turkish commenters gives you a window into some of the stuff that I see, which I do not allow through the mod queue (and usually results in the banning of users). The quantity was greater than the usual, though the Jewish genetics posts invariably draw in a lot of crazies. Even the random post on Uyghur genetics will attract nationalists enraged that I suggested that Uyghurs have a connection to the Han Chinese.
Speaking of what I let through, etc., any commenters you think I should ban or clamp down on? The comments close after two weeks, and I frankly get lax after the first ten on a given thread unless I’m a participant. I try to keep the comments useful to me (and therefore to you), so I work to keep mischief-makers from peeing in the pool for kicks.
Since 9/11/2001 I have changed my opinion as to why Islamic societies tend to have “bloody borders.” I used to think it was because the Koran and the Hadiths are blueprints for a Dominionist ideology. To some extent that model was one which Muslims who I had grown up around espoused, insofar as they asserted that Islam was a total way of life, where all was prescribed or proscribed. I no longer believe this to be definitively correct, and am moderately skeptical of the model. This was primarily the long term impact of reading in cognitive anthropology of religion, in particular Scott Atran’s In God’s We Trust, as well as more reading of history. I still think Islam has a Dominionist tendency:
But I no longer have great faith in one predictor of large effect, such as a textual blueprint. Rather, I suspect the roots are complex and historically contingent. Additionally, the geopolitics of Islamic civilization, the high border to area ratio, means that there’ll be a lot of borders, period.
Also, I think David Sloan Wilson had a point that the individual level selection paradigm had overextended itself too far. I’m not sure that individual level selection can explain everything, especially in the cultural and social domain (the rational actor model is generally methodologically individualist). But the non-individual selection models need some empirical firming up before we can move from agnosticism to a positive acceptance of alternatives.
Enjoy the last days of summer.