DrZoidberg
Contributor
I don't think this is what I said/or a misrepresentation of what I said. You're conflating two different discussions.
1) How to get Muslim immigrants to the West and from tribal areas to break with their tribal culture.
2) How to break tribalism in the Middle-East
The first one we really don't have to care about. They're a minority. The majority culture is a well functioning liberal democracy with all the bells and whistles. There is zero benefit for high status immigrants to grant corrupt favours to low status immigrants from the same group. No kick-backs will ever materialise and the legal risks are massive. So they will stop. This behaviour can only be found within maffia organisations. Which incidentally is where home-grown western tribal traditions is kept alive. So tribalism exists in Europe as well and always has. This is something that will pop out and instantly reassert itself if ever our civic institutions collapse. Which they're nowhere near doing. European political institutions are extraordinarily robust today. It's going to need a hell of a lot more than a couple of million refugees. Also, you don't need to take my word for it. Immigrant groups wield zero political pull outside their group. All their tribal (or pseudo-tribal) bullshit is all about controlling their own in-group. But it isn't working. Muslim girls are screwing around left and right with Swedish men. Swedish society protects the integrity of immigrant girls. These Islamic families have zero control over "their" women.
The second one is a fucking nightmare to fix. The naivete of Western meddling isn't helping. George Bush waving his democratic magic wand in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't help. Lo and behold it all went to shit. The details matter. Saddam used and abused tribalism in order to maintain control. Interestingly enough the Taliban didn't. One size doesn't fit all. In hind-sight only the Kurdish part of Iraq stood a fighting chance to survive, because the Kurds were less tribal. For whatever reason Kurds are just Kurds. Sunni Iraqis are part of an intricate social client system network. Perhaps because under Saddam Kurds were all peers in that they all shared the bottom most rung of the social ladder? Each successful transition to democracy, in high-sight, always has it's own story to why it worked that time. It's always some socio-economic factor. It's never religion. And most importantly they're all different.
What the Middle-East needs less of is idiots with simplistic grand visions. All those countries are cobbled together arbitrarily and have disparate groups of people who have very little common ground. What we need is pragmatic types who focuses on what can be done, rather than wishful thinking. Security must be the first order of things. Saddam can be blamed for many things. But he did that well. Until security is established it's a waste of time fiddling with any of the other shit. Tribalism will be the last thing to go. Just one thing at a time.
There's a double negative there, so I'm not sure what you're arguing for. What I think we deserve is having our shit stolen by gypsies, because we've created a society where they're out of other options. They're just following the incentives we've set up. That's what I meant with that we deserve it. But that won't happen for the Muslim immigrants. We already have loads of them and they've for the most part integrated just fine.
There's always the problem of that immigrants always occupy the lowest rung of the social ladder in any society. And there's a bunch of social problems that accompany having low social status. But that's not "tribalism". That's just "it sucks being poor". And Humans are a pattern seeking species so we tend to draw conclusions even when there are none, so right-wing "thinkers" assume that their rowdy behaviour is because of Islam. When in reality this is a social class problem. And whatever group occupy the lowest rung of that ladder will be a problem. Good news, it lifts the group that used to be there out of it. So the sum of social problems is the same. No harm done.
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There is such a thing as conservation of energy. There is such a thing as conservation of angular momentum. There is no such thing as conservation of social problems.