No idea

Nah you gotta do what’s best for you two, I’m just trying to get a read of where people are. I don’t plan on ever owning a house, so my concern’s more with getting my paycheck garnished.

When European, at first Christian and then secular colonial powers run rampant over your culture and people for 100+ years, and demonize your local majority religion as barbaric for almost as long, practicing that religion becomes an act of anti-colonial resistance in and of itself. A way of rejecting outsiders’ attempts to define “correct” beliefs and morality on their own terms.

Then there’s also the element of practicality. At least in Palestine and Lebanon, a lot of the secular leftist anti-colonial movements have been hollowed out, smothered and/or discredited over the past several decades, leaving more religious groups like Hamas and Hezb Allah as really the only resistance-capable game in town.

Suddenly flashing back to that one dialogue where a human woman is desperately trying to get her mixed human/asari daughter out of a warzone and the galactic beuracrat she’s speaking to initially won’t do anything until the woman gives an emotional Sorkin speech that changes the beuracrat’s mind.

If this is a case of “person realizes something everyone already knew” please let me know.

Very interesting. Are there any works you’d recommend that talk more about this? Besides the one @Wertheimer recommended, that is.

Didn’t Hellenistic era Greeks have their own internal ethnic chauvanism going on though? Like Ionians didn’t like Dorians who didn’t like Magnetes or whatever?

The Civ series is basically Whig History: The Game.

The anarchist-to-ML pipeline is real, and as someone who went through it, I’ll say that anti-structure Reaction is also real. A lot of anarchists (at least in my experience) are young and full of piss and vinegar and distrustful of any kind of hierarchy that could constrain their individual actions. It’s a form of liberalism that many outgrow and many don’t.

Then there’s the fact that in the U.S. at least, anarchism is far more tolerated by the state than is any kind of organized ML movement. Other comments have already addressed this, but it bears repeating: when you spend your whole life immersed in anti-communist propaganada, it’s easy to take at face value that ML governments / orgs are “just as bad” as the capitalists.

Who are the settlers in Palestine? The poor and dispossessed from Israel and from around the world.

Is this really the case though? I know there are some Israeli Haredi groups (with members living below the poverty line) that sponsor settlers, but I’ve also known some perfectly comfortable Americans that move out near Bethlehem.

Some of the settlements have pretty comfortable conditions even by U.S. standards, and even as nearby Palestinian neighborhoods still have to ration daily water.