Don't be so silly onthebeach, editing is woman's work. You're not expected to do it.

Thanks Banjo, we all understand not every protest group is worth support.
Well I think most of us do.
For some time I have taken part in an on line group *change* but selectively.
To just tick sign is both unwise and blind.
I have been over whelmed with silly stuff, we have here to.
I think the form of protest is a great tool, but not the only one.
The thing is, we in our comfortable western homes would be just plain horrified if we truly knew the fate of women in that and other country,s.
And that we should be, that it is our duty to care.
Yet we protest about things that are marginal at best.
IF some one started a world wide campaign , one calling for human rights for women in these country,s, if only.
I would expect millions of votes, and maybe trade embargo s.
Am I however asking too much? some say yes.

Belly and others
What we think of the culture of other countries is our business, but what they do with it is theirs. It's just cultural elitism to compare our high energy, low entropy social structure to theirs and find their low energy, high entropy one wanting in our terms.

The simple fact is that the social structures of Islamic society are very, very strong and regular, like crystals. Ours is also strong, but it is like a clay, with lots of flat plates that are able to move over each other with little friction and are themselves readily broken up and reformed, but hold together quite strongly if not disturbed. Not even adding enormous amounts of social energy in the form of war or oil has done much more than make their structures grow within the same framework, with some local disruption to structure that quickly reassembles itself into the same form or breaks the whole thing into a social dust that blows around and forms temporary loose structures but with each little crystalline social structure within it still as tightly bound to itself as the original.

The only way to turn a crystal into a clay is to grind it very finely and cycle it through periodic cycles of oxidation followed by wetting. In social terms that would mean breaking the Islamic faith's hold on the social structure by a long period of alternating cycles of strong outside influence followed by lengthy periods of social prosperity, while supplying them with the philosophical tools to rearrange themselves into groups that have strong links and stable, flat social arrangements internally (classes, professional colleges, religions, etc) with loose bonds between them that are formed by the interaction of individuals between the social groups.
Clays take thousands of years to form from crystals and I'm not sure that a Western-style state could be formed from an Islamic one much faster. We had to have the dark ages to make ours.

OK, Antiseptic is going to make a great academic, as I found his last post incomprehensible, but I take it he is saying leave the muslim countries to their own devises. Looks like Hasbeen would agree with that.

So Joe, do we leave them all and not interfere? If so why are we encouraging them to bring their culture here and other western countries?

For the last 40 years or so we have been saying 'come here and enrich our society and we will accommodate your culture'. If you want to force marriage on young girls, oppress your women and cut pieces off little girls genitals, that is OK, we will just turn a blind eye.

Looks to me that Islam is a violent culture, with killing and maiming the only way they know, but as long as they keep that to their own countries it is OK by me. What the hell, 20000 terrorist attacks since 9/11, mostly in muslim countries, just leave us out of it.

Lol, sorry Banjo.

Crystals are very strongly ordered structures, with little room for individual particles to do other than stay in their place and no way for them to move to another part of the structure except very slowly by diffusion. The bonds between individuals are based on their place in the structure.

I think that's a pretty good description of Islamic societies.

When they grow larger, like the Arab states, they grow like crystal does, with the basic structure forming the frame and the large structure looking the same as the small one. When they are broken up, each small social group retains the structure, but it's no longer bound to others, so it's like a dust.

We have a structure in which peer relationships are the strongest social bonds for most of us and the social structure allows us to have weaker interactions between groups, like a clay. We're malleable, they're rigid.

I think South East Asia Islamic states are in a sort of transition state, because of their constant exposure to outside influence and the natural barriers to imposing total Islamic dominance. They're like a decomposed granite that has clay between crystals.

I forgot to mention that some crystals respond to being put under strain by emitting energy. The jihadis are the energy emitted by an Islamic crystalline structure when it is under strain by interaction with other societies.

I think the analogy is pretty strong.

It seems to me that trying to understand societies in terms of individual motivations is like trying to understand a material's bulk properties in terms of how an individual atom within it behaves. The individuals develop motivations based on the social structure they inhabit, just as an atom's behaviour is based on the stucture that contains it.

The properties of the material come from the way the atoms are arranged within it, just as the properties of a society depend on the way it is arranged. Any group of people could form any kind of society, of which there are only a few forms, but the specific form of that society will be a response to the conditions in which it forms.