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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (314681)	12/9/2006 3:54:31 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1583508

Honestly, tejek, this is going to sound absolutely horrible, but I'm not at all interested in spanning the gap between Muslims and the Western world. They need to do that for themselves. I think a faster way to squash their radical element is to deprive them of the money they use to murder people by weaning this country off of oil. The Muslims have a very long way to go before they catch up with Western society in culture, science, economy, and rule of law. Their culture is just emerging from the medieval period, now that they can no longer ignore the influences of globalization. Globalization and the change that comes with it will take time to work its way through their culture, society, and religion. The moderates will eventually win and Muslims countries will become more secular over time. But that may take a couple centuries. I don't want to wait that long. I'd rather us marginalize their dangerous elements and then stay out of the rest of Islam's way until they work out the kinks in a new, modern, more moderate religion that can live side by side with other religions, societies, and cultures, without the overwhelming need for Muslims to resort to violence against those other cultures. Almost every flashpoint around the world today has Muslims on one side of the conflict. That's no accident. Muslim culture in its current form is not very tolerant of other cutlures, and yet, it is very demanding that their own be accommodated. Those contradictions oftentimes lead to conflict. Muslims need to figure out a better way without always blaming Western cultures for their own shortcomings. Luckily, American Muslims for the most part have figured out how to integrate themselves far better than in Europe, with exceptions like Detroit. So there are good examples of what Muslims can do, if they only try. But they have a lot more trying to do and we shouldn't be leading the charge on that. They themselves should be leading the charge. They have far more to gain from integration with the rest of the world than we do. Instead of worrying about Muslims, let's start worrying about Americans. We've spent way to much time during the Bush Administration spending money on a bunch of other countries while we continue to spiral our own debt out of control and a host of problems start to sink this country. Let's spend the next decade taking care of our own problems and stop meddling all over the darn world.

To: tejek who wrote (314681)	12/10/2006 2:38:16 AM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583508

On a number of occasions, you have complained about the 'backwardness' of the Muslim world.....that in many ways there is a huge gap between them and us. But what about the gap that exists between Americans; which for reasons of simplicity is referred to as the gap between the blues and the reds? While not as large, there is a significant disagreement on how to deal on number of issues. And certainly a number of standards are decidedly different. And certainly the level of sophistication and education varies between the two groups. Even more frustrating that smaller gap has resulted in a near derailment of our international policies. How can we possibly span the gap between westerners and Muslims if we can't even span the gap within our own country? Curious as to what you think. That's easy. America's gap between your so called blues and reds is decided by periodic elections, free press and majority rule. Elections result in politicians that set national/state/local policies. The press evaluates and criticizes the policies up the wazoo. The next election results in a repeat with the effective policies usually remaining, the ineffective policies getting change. It's called PROGRESS. In the ME there are no elections, authoritarian rulers set whatever policies they choose with nearly zero oversight from the public, the press is not free to criticise said policies, and there is minimal PROGRESS until the dear leader dies, and the population finds out what the dear leader's son wants to do. If a country has a wise, benevolent, progress minded leader (a la Dubai), things go well. If a country has a less wise, less progress oriented leader (most of the places), things stagnate.