Kaw's Rant-Space
When not railing against despots, stupidity, superstition and oppression, I'm busy hating on your freedoms.
When not railing against despots, stupidity, superstition and oppression, I'm busy hating on your freedoms.
“Television’s artifice no longer mediates: in order to for us to be entertained now, someone has to do something to us, hurt us or praise us, talk about us or leave us. This need to be done to, to be acted upon, is masochism. Reality television was sadism. Social media is masochism.”
No longer do we have scholars who spent their entire lives studying and contemplating the principles, concepts and teachings of the Prophet, teaching what they have discovered in highly sophisticated halaqahs in mosques and in their homes. Instead we have books like, “Islam: The Simple Religion” and “What Islam Says About Free-Mixing.” These books, written by either engineers or Wahhabi scholars, are very popular because they can be read in one sitting. They allow us to avoid any debt we may feel we have to investigate what God wants of us, or any debt we might feel toward our rich and diverse intellectual tradition.
Evolutionary psychology rests on the shaky (often enpornulated) hypothesis that modern human social behaviors are actually species-preserving adaptations. Because evolutionary psychology, like all psuedoscience, is administered by jackasses who are heavily invested in patriarchy, the behaviors in question just happen to be the very same behaviors commonly observed to be beloved of patriarchyists. And also of sexists, misogynists, horndogs, militarists, straight people, politicians, consumers of pornography, consumers of “beauty,” racists, godbags, liberal men, Hollywoodists, homophobes, matrimonialists, and other cogs in the megatheocorporatocratic machine. Everybody who loves the current world order loves the romantic myth that it is the result of the random interaction of mindless genes, or biological “design.” Sadly, the world order is actually the result of something way more sinister: the completely arbitrary social construct of the culture of domination and submission.
This article explores fictional representations of queer Muslims in the Western world. Analysing two films (My Beautiful Laundrette and Touch of Pink) and two novels (The Taqwacores and Bilal’s Bread), the article argues that despite queer Muslims facing multiple forms of alienation and othering, new hybrid identities and relationships are developing, rejecting the rhetoric of a “clash of civilizations” between Muslims and the West. The article explores the political, cultural, sexual and economic situation of Western Muslims as they seek meaning, belonging and faith in late capitalism.
It is always possible that an autocrat will be able to advance development. But the donors’ use of this possibility is inherently undemocratic—they presume to evaluate the ruler instead of the citizens (usually based on questionable information), and thus undemocratically decide who should have democracy.
This week, an evolutionary psychologist published his "discoveries" into, among other things, the dangerous sexual desires that motivate Muslim men to become suicide bombers.
Next week, a provocatively titled book, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle-East, by John R Bradley intends to take us on a "riveting journey" (his publisher's words) through the "underbelly of the region to expose its sexual mores".
*facepalm*
