Wanderthread

Wanderfound · January 16, 2019, 3:50am

Wanderfound · January 16, 2019, 3:53am

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Wanderfound · January 16, 2019, 4:08am

Wanderfound · January 16, 2019, 4:11am

Wanderfound · January 16, 2019, 4:35am

Wanderfound · January 16, 2019, 7:02am

Wanderfound · January 16, 2019, 9:26am

Wanderfound · January 16, 2019, 9:47am

Totally healthy culture. Not at all deranged.

Wanderfound · January 16, 2019, 10:43am

Gillibrand critique thread:

Wanderfound · January 16, 2019, 12:21pm

Crashproof · January 16, 2019, 2:34pm

For a long time now I’ve wondered how Claire McCaskill wound up with a (D) next to her name… typo, probably

knoxblox · January 16, 2019, 4:59pm

Tuttle/Buttle?

Wanderfound · January 16, 2019, 10:25pm

Rahaf aftermath:

ChickieD · January 16, 2019, 10:34pm

It was real easy to fix the New Orleans public school system once all the poor people went to Texas.

Wanderfound · January 16, 2019, 11:55pm

Wanderfound · January 17, 2019, 12:11am

Because McCaskill/Manchin/etc accurately represent the true nature of the institutional Democratic party?

nimelennar · January 17, 2019, 12:43am

Never been prouder of Canada or of Trudeau than since he’s started to really piss Saudi Arabia off.

Wanderfound · January 17, 2019, 1:12am

Wanderfound · January 17, 2019, 1:22am

It’s tempting to explain the seemingly endless Middle East strife in sectarian terms. In Iraq, for example, it’s Sunni extremists vs. Shiite moderates. In Syria, it’s Shiite President Bashar al-Assad vs. Sunni rebels. And in Yemen, it’s a proxy war between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran. Some observers have even suggested that the whole region is on the verge of an epic religious conflagration on par with the Thirty Years’ War, which tore Protestant and Catholic Europe apart in the 1600s.

By this telling, Sunnis and Shiites have been locked in a vicious, intractable conflict since the seventh century, when a disagreement broke out over who should succeed Muhammad. Shiites backed the prophet’s cousin Ali; Sunnis backed his trusted adviser Abu Bakr. This scuffle culminated in the historic defeat of Ali’s family at the battle of Karbala, circa 680. As the story goes, the sects have been killing each other ever since — and will continue to do so until they stop obsessing over ancient history.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this historical narrative is that it ignores everything that happened between 680 and, say, 1980. Op-eds about the “ancient” and “age-old” Sunni-Shiite warfare rarely reference this crucial 13-century period — a.k.a. the entire time during which Sunnis and Shiites were supposedly in conflict. Like everywhere in the world, people in the region were definitely fighting during this time. Historians could even provide a couple good examples of battles along Sunni-Shiite lines. But sectarian identity was seldom the chief issue that brought people in the Middle East to war.

Wanderfound · January 17, 2019, 1:30am