I knew a family from Kosovo - there was a fellow in the area who had married a Kosovan woman and it seemed like largely through her - one woman's - efforts, this family among a larger group fleeing with what they could carry, the war in Yugoslavia, settled in our town. For some reason, perhaps because it required no English, and no certification like butchers - they quickly gained a place, then seemingly all the places, in our market in the produce "prep" (salads, cut-up fruit, etc.) section, and also I believe the prepared, cooked food department, though there they were not visible. Thus, for some years, in addition to the customary "employees must wash hands", "lava las manos" - the produce section had printed the same in a most unfamiliar tongue.
(Certainly they were not given hotel rooms in perpetuity, and credit cards. Assistance that was surely needed, was what could be raised privately. I believe they went to work immediately. The woman I became most acquainted with, who did speak English well or did by the time I knew her, took both a part-time produce job and one of those special ed positions in the school district, for which there was limitless "demand" due to lawyers. Not everyone was stuck in jobs unsuited to their presumed educations; the head of that family eventually got a good tech job on par (I guess) with what he had left. It goes to show that one determined person - that doctor's wife - is worth a hundred bureaucrats.)
This lady, a fellow mom, had an easygoing, languid European air, and was ready to socialize/chat in an unhurried manner that I found congenial, because it is no longer the American custom - over coffee and cigarettes. I did not pry, though I am a natural pry-er (which is usually successful because most people like to answer questions about their lives and histories). I did not pry because I had not paid attention to the Yugoslav war, had little grasp of the geography and demography of the area, nor what precisely "Kosovo" was, or whether they were simply Albanians; and so didn't feel on firm ground inquiring - but I made reference once to her religion: Muslim, I believe?
She laughed about that. She was decided: none, zero. We were all secular, she said. We were as secular as any Europeans.
It seemed strange to me, a Europe divorced from Christianity by a tenuous association with Islam, but ending in the same secular place.
I think of this, and a different-but-not-entirely-dissimilar experience I had with a Uyghur person - when the notion of the "diversity" of Islam is adduced. I now take with a grain of salt the idea that it "took" everywhere the same, no matter the distance from Mecca.
In a pattern followed in the spread of other major religions, what happened with Islam is that it started with the Arabs and its particular original flavor was inextricably and intimately associated with the Arab peoples themselves.
As such, the answer to the question of what tended to happen to local versions of Islamic belief and practice over time and space depended on whether the Muslim Arab conquerors eventually displaced the local ethnic groups and established recognizable Arab or Arab-mixed descendants as majorities, or whether the local ethnic character (such as the non-Arab groups who would later take power over certain areas) remained mostly non-Arab, but still mostly irreversibly converted to Islam.
And what that tended to mean is that as Islam landed in non-Arab areas and Arab-rule was displaced by "local native" or some other ethnic-group's rule, the beliefs and practices tended to drift and the fanatical, zealous enthusiasm about them tended to get diluted. It depended on who was doing the 'evangelization', or perhaps more accurately more often, doing the conversion-by-the-sword.
When the Arabs were converting former subjects of the Byzantine empire and some Anatolian Turks by the sword, but without ever remotely establishing an Arab majority in Anatolia or having Arabic become the vernacular tongue, the locals were getting Islam "second hand", with the dilution one would expect. When later on the Ottomans were doing the conquering and spreading into the Balkans and Southeast Europe, it seems they were certainly leaving plenty of Turkish genetic traces in their wake, but the local converted peoples like most Albanians and Bosnians remained genetically and linguistically and culturally distinct, and diluted things even more, as they were getting Islam "third hand".
Similar stories about similar steps away from "the real McCoy" original-recipe Islam could be told about the way Islam spread into the Caucuses, and into West, Central, South, and Southeast Asia, and Africa (the story in Southwest Europe is more complicated).
What happened next is that at the third and fourth-hand fringes of the Ummah the local way of Islam had drifted very far away from the traditional source, and very infrequent contact with anything more than third-hander Muslims tended to prevent any kind of "course correcting" convergence. And then some merchant or diplomat or religious figure would travel to these places and get absolutely shocked by what the locals were doing while thinking it was "cool with Islam".
Instead of isolation of females in family compounds and head-to-toe figure-obscuring clothing rules, West African """muslim""" women were going around topless in public in view of unrelated men all the time. Southeast Asian Muslims were found not just eating pork but earning their living raising pigs. There was much more tolerance of wine and spirits in Persia, the Balkans, and the Caucasus.
And what that inspired was a new wave of evangelism not from the fringes outward to the infidels, but from the Arabic Fundamentalism Center to the diluted periphery, to error-correct and patch the buggy fourth-hand Islamic code that had taken root out there, often involving recruiting locals to get trained up at one of the major Islam Academy institutions near the center, then return home not so much to "share the gospel" but to report that it turns out the local community had made several errors with regard to proper interpretation, and then get busy squaring things away. Similar things happened in the history of Christendom. The principally Saudi-funded post-war-era effort to achieve this rectification with the greatest scope and scale and pay for all those Sunni Fundamentalist madrassas everywhere is merely the most recent prominent instance of this historically recurrent pattern.
Every situation was different, and sometimes there was indeed rapid convergence, but in general the efforts didn't always work out as intended with 100% success and - get this - would occasionally provoke a lot of local anger and either active or passive resistance. It's not always easy to convince even decent, Allah-fearing people to give up their heretical pork sausages, glasses of wine, and girl-watching, which is after all what they say their fathers enjoy, "... and weren't they good people and good Muslims, all things considered?"
Local intransigence also had something to do with the preservation of a kind of racial memory that tends to create some spiritual distance between a people and their faith, "We were and remain a distinct people with its own history, language, and culture, and the only reason any of us is Muslim today is not because any of our ancestors were persuaded, convinced, impressed, or whatever, but because they were coerced by threats up to and including mass murder." That tends to keep third-hand Islam third-hand. In times and places when religiosity faded in general and across the board, a third-hander can easily drop into the "nones".
Your point about how immigrants back then were not subsidized so much (hotel rooms, credit cards, etc.) seems like the key problem with our huge surge of immigration in recent years. If the immigrants were all productive and able to support themselves, there would be a lot less opposition. It's hard to see how we can keep having millions of people per year come here and be given so many freebies.
There are differences between Shia and Sunni, educated and not, but my guess is the biggest difference is those who stay put are more likely to be conservative and the farther they travel to relocate, the more likely to be minimally religious or secular.
“My guess is that she is going to argue that Islam itself is not incompatible with modernization.” I Compare Pakistan and India, both parts of the British Raj, both large territories with large rural populations, ethnically the same, both got independence same day, both inherited the infrastructure built and left behind intact by the British.
Both had the same start point. One has just soft-landed a space vehicle on the Moon. The key difference is… ?
"My guess is that she is going to argue that Islam itself is not incompatible with modernization. Instead, she will say that it is Arab culture that resists modernization."
I don't know what Alice Evans intends to argue, but I think the obvious explanation is that the Saudi monarchy has been underwriting madrassas, mosques, and imams in much of the Muslim world (as well as places that are not primarily Muslim, like the US and Europe), and that the Saudi monarchy resists modernization.
While I look forward to reading some of the linked pieces, I couldn't follow most of your post. this is but one example: "My guess is that she is going to argue that Islam itself is not incompatible with modernization. Instead, she will say that it is Arab culture that resists modernization."
Anyway, I did kind of understand Fleischer.
"if you’re reading a news article about Gen Z that only encompasses college student voices, you’re not hearing from about 40% of the generation — a 40% that thinks substantially differently from the rest of the cohort."
Is this saying that all college students think alike? Even though he later says women are getting more liberal and men more conservative?
"the large number of Gen Z voters who refuse to identify with any political party. Other generations are disillusioned right now too, but no one as much as Gen Z and no generation was this disillusioned this young."
I don't know why any thinking person would want to identify with either party unless they absolutely had to. I suspect it is easier for younger people not to simply because they never did and don't have any loyalty based on the past.
“I don't know why any thinking person would want to identify with either party unless they absolutely had to.”
Great sentence and I absolutely agree. However, I am being forced to hold my nose and vote for Trump. There is no way that I will ever tolerate another SCOTUS nominee from Biden.
I get that. I'm somewhere between Thomas and Roberts. Not sure which I'm closer to. Either way, Trump's picks seem they might be right of Thomas. Regardless, I expect I'd like Biden's picks even less. So maybe Trump is my pick on scotus nominees but as much as I dislike Biden, I still can't say I'm more comfortable with Trump as President.
The rich owners of the irresponsible banks will be mostly bailed out.
As usual, and despite Libber blubbering about excessive govt involvement in banking: subsidizing, taxing, regulating against stuff, requiring other stuff.
Far more capital should be required, especially of the big banks, with fewer regulations. But that’s not on either potential winning Party’s bingo card, er, platform. I don’t think Trump talked about this in his speech to the Libertarians, but he did talk about winning, rather than getting 3 or 4 %.
There’s no banking, nor fiscal, crisis until Democrats say there is, especially those in the media. So then, and only then, maybe Libertarian ideas can be copied by Republicans to reduce the problems. Is Japan in Econ crisis yet? If not, certainly no big US problem.
If Gen Z avoids stupidly voting for semi-senile Biden, Trump wins unless lots of fraud. 21 million more 2020 Biden voters than Hillary or Obama. Really??? Do you know any? Biden’s been President for 3 long and disastrous years, after 4 pretty good Trump years. Bank problems are Biden Econ problems, so Dem media will minimize coverage. Oh well, America survives to face other future problems, no matter who gets elected, so far.
ALM in banking was easy at the time of 3-6-3 (borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, and be on the golf course at 3pm). The last few years have been proving bank’s management incapable to deal with an inverted yield curve. Follow the FED…..though the FED doesn’t face insolvency.
Islam has always been an ummah, just like there are brothers in christ or a Jewish people. Since the Crusades, Israel has given them something to coalesce around.
"But maybe the problem is that the current implementations of these innovations cause more pain than they relieve."
A big problem is the process of "Status-Mimetic Social Transition to Widespread Adoption". It's like class-based trickle-down fashion or tastes in art.
Something that is brand new might seem great functionally, usefully, aesthetically, practically, experientially, etc. but it is still presumptively uncool -socially- and will seem a little weird or low-status. This is especially true if using it makes one look out of the ordinary in public. This is because you haven't yet observed or imagined any cool people being cool while using it or doing it, and on the other hand you could imagine some low-status types with minority-interests and enthusiasms doing it first, and no one wants to imitate them!
The temporal evolution of widespread social adoption is the 'curve'* people talk about when they say "being ahead of the curve".
On the one hand, everybody wants to get ahead the curve enough to be able to show off as the first to be "in the know" among one's social reference group, introduce it them, to be like the hipster and in to something "before it was cool" (i.e. mainstream), and to always be different from the uncool mainstream *because* either superior to it or ahead of it. On the other hand, no one wants to seem weird or bizarre or clueless or creepy and this people are naturally hesitant and anxious to take the risk of trying something different from what is common and socially safe because a failed effort might make them the subject of mockery and they might never live it down.
Marketers of all kinds have understood forever that the answer to this is to kickstart widespread adoption by paying influencers and opinion-makers - cool, sexy, popular, well-known, high-status people - to endorse it while acting like it they were convinced to choose it for its inherent qualities out of authentic preferences and superior taste, to use it in public in the most conspicuous manner in situations where it looks like it is helping them to be even more cool and popular while having a great time, and also speaking and writing about it enthusiastically and by appealing to the kinds of "reasons" that early-adopting people grasp they can repeat to others as micro-influencers in their own milieu with social acceptance and also winning a few extra status points.
The history of cigarettes provides a textbook example. Before the iPhone, other proto-smartphones were seen as kind of little-computer-like nerdy electronics only a geek would make any special effort to get vs a regular cell phone. Jobs and the top folks at Apple were keenly aware of the need to put everything they had into making it perceived quickly by everyone to be elite, cool, sleek, sexy, easy and NOT-FOR-NERDS, because the nerds would obviously choose nerdier alternatives. A sexy young women can *still look sexy* while using her smartphone and say, smiling big because laughing at a joke.
Now, the problem with the augmented reality and whole-life-assistant AI use cases is that *the whole point is to use them constantly while in public* in the way you live your whole public life, and in a way that is unavoidably extremely conspicuous to everyone around you.
And when people are doing this, it still looks weird, ridiculous, and/or creepy to most people, and, let's face it, it is being done mostly by either (1) nerds, or (2) people with very low SCM capacity who have a hard time anticipating that other people will perceive what they are doing as weird.
And NO ONE wants to imitate those people, and one has powerful instincts to do everything in one's power to avoid even having someone mistake you for being one of those people or affiliating in any way with them.
So, the problem is, you can't do this well without wearing the giant weird ugly goggles in public and moving your hands around in bizarre-seeming mid-air gesticulations, or holding you smartphone up and making everyone hear the conversation as you are openly talking to it in public like some nerdy weirdo, and thus all people who start wearing the giant weird ugly goggles in public are indeed nerdy or socially unsavvy types are *ANTI-influencers* for the most compelling use cases.
*Pure trivia that I share because I once went down this rabbit hole and have personally experiences a similar instance of it, please feel free to skip: The original expression from the 1960s was "ahead of the power curve", which is the j-shaped curve of the relationship between power and airspeed, a phenomenon which is easy to prove but very counterintuitive and fraught with danger of fatal error if not understood, so among the first things one must learn and master in pilot training for small, simple aircraft. It is actually short for "above the speed of the minimum on the power curve, the point of maximum efficiency."
You really do not want to fall behind the efficient minimum velocity, especially near stall speed! Any pilot aware that he is operating near that point will feel immense motivation to "stay ahead of the power curve". Pilots are cool, thus any jargon they use is cool, so use of the expression quickly spread, and, as is common just past a link or two in the chain, to people who copy the words it without any understanding of the background or original meaning, just assuming that their reflexive inference based on first exposure to its usage is probably close.
The trouble here is that "power" has many meanings, and most people don't use it to refer to mechanical energy for thrust, but to social power: rank, status, influence, popularity, centrality, and so forth. The spread seems to have emerged out of the Air Force, and American military culture is notorious for a linguistic instinct for "cool-guy jargon conceptual abstraction and repurposing." For example, in the meeting when the big boss directs brutal criticism to one individual, that is "taking a HEAT round." Air Force pilots spend most of their careers as managers and staff in the military bureaucracy where the corporate soap opera and social factors are paramount, and this includes access to and control of socially-communicated information and how early in the process of dissemination one tends to learn about critical or juicy insider secrets, especially the exchange of secret opinions about other people without which one cannot effectively achieve anything that requires informal management, maintenance, and influence over office coalitions.
It thus makes a lot of sense they would repurpose the flight-based power curve to use it describe the social-based power. You don't want to surprised and last to learn something important! And information originally known by just a few top people tends to get spread to everyone not in a j-curve but like fashion or technology adoption, in a differently-shaped way resembling the error function, an s-curve.
So because we have two kinds of 'power' and two kinds of 'curve', and both situations being important to the same set of cool people, the meaning of the expression as it spread to the rest of the public changed quickly and without any conscious intention on the part of the people spreading it or picking it up. Another part of USG culture is that the first non-military "influencers" to pick up on and start using military-cool-guy jargon expressions in a way that will make it go "viral" are ... the top civilian and political leaders who work hand-in-hand with military cool-guys on a regular basis, usually those in White House, Executive Office of the President, and National Security Council.
So it's little surprise that only a few years later political tacticians in the Nixon administration were using this expression to convey (1) Making sure any new information was closely-help by a small inner circle that wouldn't leak it except in the planned fashion, (2) the pre-emption of the lag inherent in process of public dissemination of information by the dominant institutions in the media sector ecosystem, and (3) maintaining message and interpretation control by avoiding either an Omerta-like refusal to report on it, or the manipulation and spin and slant the media would use in their coverage of such stories, by using an ally at some paper to put the story out there first, surprises everyone, take credit for making it known, and force the media to play catch-up. That was "getting ahead of the power curve" to Nixon, and the big papers which hated him were often caught off guard because they were "behind the power curve".
This all makes sense, but I’m not sure it’s as complicated as all this. Nerds/geeks love new technology just because it’s neat (and it is!), but normies only care if the new technology is *useful* for them, and I just don’t think these new technologies (AI, VR, AR, crypto, etc.) are that useful for normies.
I mean, sure, you can use ChatGPT to compose generic text for emails or whatever, but that’s much less generally useful than, say, having the ability to keep connected with your friends all the time using a smartphone/social media.
My impression is when there's a trade-off and all else being equal, normies choose cool over useful to the extent they can afford to do so. The income effect on conspicuous consumption tends to be relatively biased in the direction of increasing cool vs increasing utility past what one requires for sufficiency and for the purpose of showing off costly signals, as if coolness was higher on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It would be really hard to explain observable consumption patterns if this fact weren't true.
I think that the acceptability of the AI goggles thing and related devices will probably vary based on geography and class. I could see them maybe becoming somewhat acceptable in the Silicon Valley culture, but much less so elsewhere. I don’t see these devices moving down market because they just don’t have that Veblen luxury appeal to them unless somehow geek culture can spread more widely.
However, the larger issue to me is why someone might want one. What does it do that cannot already be accomplished on a smartphone? As an example, I don’t see that large of an adoption of smartwatches in my social circle despite them becoming available over a decade ago and their being much less fringe or obtrusive in everyday conversation.
Full disclosure: to be a hip female in my neck of the woods, you need On running shoes, a lululemon skirt (preferably with pleats), fake eyelashes, Botox treatment and drive the kiddos around in a full size SUV.
"I could see them maybe becoming somewhat acceptable in the Silicon Valley culture, but much less so elsewhere."
I am skeptical. If something doesn't take off with the coolest people in the coolest places, it gets abandoned by most people anywhere exposed to this state of affairs. Even most nerds, except maybe for the least socially savvy among them.
These days cultural convergence happens at the top of all the various hierarchies, because elites of all kinds are *constantly* interacting with tons of other elites of all the other kinds, indeed, seem to be driven by a manic urge to seek out opportunities to do this as much as possible, probably because they accurately perceive it as opportunity-expanding and status-amplifying even for top elites who already have lots of opportunities and status.
What that means is that Silicon Valley elites can deviate in some minor and inconsequential "local cultural flavor" ways from what is mainstream for the elites in the other major status hierarchies, but they are going to have to interact with and impress and not appear to be weird to those other kinds of elites, and anyone operating at that level will immediately pick up on what they must do or drop to avoid negative social judgments from others in that class. Bringing Silicon Valley back into the fold politically was a major contributing factor to the recent "Great Silicon Valley Exception Revocation."
The thing about the goggles is that while human aesthetic tastes are culturally malleable that is only true to a point and can only go so far, and sometimes not very far at all for things which are deeply hard-wired by evolutionary programming. And what people find most attractive about other peoples faces, bodies, figures, and the rest of their physical appearance is NOT just some arbitrary social construct or norm that can be nudged with ease to any point in the whole space of possibilities, but obeys some narrow ranges of formulas which have been well-known for a long time to people who are in the business of having to make images of people look attractive.
And I strongly suspect that those hard-wired aesthetic taste formulas *do not include* gushing releases of emotionally rewarding neurotransmitters in reaction to seeing someone's face covered up with giant bug-eye computer-screen goggles.
In general if very attractive young women do not perceive that they will appear just as attractive when wearing some device, they just won't do it, will laugh mean-girls-style at anyone who does, and by operation of the chain of influence, no one else will want to wear them either. I suspect Zuckerberg, Cook, and the rest of them already know this, but have enough money to keep trying longshots, just in case one of them unexpectedly takes off.
All fine, but you still haven’t provided any analysis of my core question: why would anyone want one of the goggle things, even if it did look attractive or at least not butt ugly? What is someone supposed to do with it that changes things in some positive breakthrough way?
As you know, we’ve been here before only 10 years ago (link below). Google glass never made it past a beta product and was shelved. Why was that? Was it just too ugly (kinda, but not really) or was it just a product in search of practical uses? I’m going with the latter, which is why I’ve always thought of this AI stuff as a “technology tuck-in” to preexisting platforms like search or Alexa or Google Home and not broadly transformative in the consumer space. It’s just not that interesting or useful.
As an aside, Apple gets to go next at the WWDC on 6/10. Will it be another “me too” event where everyone cheers over completely useless AI applications (“where did I leave my glasses” and the bot remembers where it last saw them…cheers and clapping from the enthralled audience) or do they maybe have something more useful up their sleeves? My guess is that Cook will say the word AI like millions of times, but that Siri will still suck once the masses get their hands on the next version of iOS in the fall.
I don't see much space between you and Mims on tech adoption. His phrasing is just a bit more positive.
I don't know that I agree that Microsoft 'did it right'. I've used their products for years and found plenty of quirky and erroneous functions. What they were was sufficiently powerful to get everybody else to conform to their implementation of the specs.
My favorite, or rather least-favorite current thing, is that starting a week or so ago, every time I open my laptop, I get a box for weather (fine), a box that I think is news but I haven't really studied it, and a third box, Trending in the NBA.* I went to the internet to find out if I could get rid of Trending in the NBA, partly because I have no interest in it, and partly because I didn't like the idea that we were now putting NBA categorically on par with weather.
No. You cannot get rid of Trending in the NBA. Or perhaps you can get rid of all - NBA and weather now being linked in terms of importance. Or weather is secondary perhaps. No one buys the weather. Or no one buys the laptop user's interest in weather.
*Not sure what would happen if the national news suddenly involved an NBA player; that might break the scheme, I suppose.
I run both a MS branded Windows 11 laptop and a MacBook Air. Both OSs are top notch after Windows played catch-up for decades. Track pad still superior on Mac.
But…I find Windows super frustrating because every time a significant update is applied, 1) MS screws around with my default settings that I then have to figure out how to undo (e.g. a recent update disabled the minimize all virtual button at the lower right of the screen) and 2) MS serves up a bunch of MS bloat popups (e.g. continual prompts to move to their browser as a default even though I said “no thanks” a million times previously).
Long story short, there is no way to eliminate the NBA trending stuff on the Lock Screen *without* also eliminating weather and other useful widgets. It’s all or nothing. I think this is *by design* since the NBA and MS have a long running partnership.
My husband is in a state of simmering rage against Microsoft all the time, because he has to do work on the computer. I suppose most people are more like me, and do not have to do work on the computer. So my issues are always trivial, like the NBA thing.
I knew a family from Kosovo - there was a fellow in the area who had married a Kosovan woman and it seemed like largely through her - one woman's - efforts, this family among a larger group fleeing with what they could carry, the war in Yugoslavia, settled in our town. For some reason, perhaps because it required no English, and no certification like butchers - they quickly gained a place, then seemingly all the places, in our market in the produce "prep" (salads, cut-up fruit, etc.) section, and also I believe the prepared, cooked food department, though there they were not visible. Thus, for some years, in addition to the customary "employees must wash hands", "lava las manos" - the produce section had printed the same in a most unfamiliar tongue.
(Certainly they were not given hotel rooms in perpetuity, and credit cards. Assistance that was surely needed, was what could be raised privately. I believe they went to work immediately. The woman I became most acquainted with, who did speak English well or did by the time I knew her, took both a part-time produce job and one of those special ed positions in the school district, for which there was limitless "demand" due to lawyers. Not everyone was stuck in jobs unsuited to their presumed educations; the head of that family eventually got a good tech job on par (I guess) with what he had left. It goes to show that one determined person - that doctor's wife - is worth a hundred bureaucrats.)
This lady, a fellow mom, had an easygoing, languid European air, and was ready to socialize/chat in an unhurried manner that I found congenial, because it is no longer the American custom - over coffee and cigarettes. I did not pry, though I am a natural pry-er (which is usually successful because most people like to answer questions about their lives and histories). I did not pry because I had not paid attention to the Yugoslav war, had little grasp of the geography and demography of the area, nor what precisely "Kosovo" was, or whether they were simply Albanians; and so didn't feel on firm ground inquiring - but I made reference once to her religion: Muslim, I believe?
She laughed about that. She was decided: none, zero. We were all secular, she said. We were as secular as any Europeans.
It seemed strange to me, a Europe divorced from Christianity by a tenuous association with Islam, but ending in the same secular place.
I think of this, and a different-but-not-entirely-dissimilar experience I had with a Uyghur person - when the notion of the "diversity" of Islam is adduced. I now take with a grain of salt the idea that it "took" everywhere the same, no matter the distance from Mecca.
In a pattern followed in the spread of other major religions, what happened with Islam is that it started with the Arabs and its particular original flavor was inextricably and intimately associated with the Arab peoples themselves.
As such, the answer to the question of what tended to happen to local versions of Islamic belief and practice over time and space depended on whether the Muslim Arab conquerors eventually displaced the local ethnic groups and established recognizable Arab or Arab-mixed descendants as majorities, or whether the local ethnic character (such as the non-Arab groups who would later take power over certain areas) remained mostly non-Arab, but still mostly irreversibly converted to Islam.
And what that tended to mean is that as Islam landed in non-Arab areas and Arab-rule was displaced by "local native" or some other ethnic-group's rule, the beliefs and practices tended to drift and the fanatical, zealous enthusiasm about them tended to get diluted. It depended on who was doing the 'evangelization', or perhaps more accurately more often, doing the conversion-by-the-sword.
When the Arabs were converting former subjects of the Byzantine empire and some Anatolian Turks by the sword, but without ever remotely establishing an Arab majority in Anatolia or having Arabic become the vernacular tongue, the locals were getting Islam "second hand", with the dilution one would expect. When later on the Ottomans were doing the conquering and spreading into the Balkans and Southeast Europe, it seems they were certainly leaving plenty of Turkish genetic traces in their wake, but the local converted peoples like most Albanians and Bosnians remained genetically and linguistically and culturally distinct, and diluted things even more, as they were getting Islam "third hand".
Similar stories about similar steps away from "the real McCoy" original-recipe Islam could be told about the way Islam spread into the Caucuses, and into West, Central, South, and Southeast Asia, and Africa (the story in Southwest Europe is more complicated).
What happened next is that at the third and fourth-hand fringes of the Ummah the local way of Islam had drifted very far away from the traditional source, and very infrequent contact with anything more than third-hander Muslims tended to prevent any kind of "course correcting" convergence. And then some merchant or diplomat or religious figure would travel to these places and get absolutely shocked by what the locals were doing while thinking it was "cool with Islam".
Instead of isolation of females in family compounds and head-to-toe figure-obscuring clothing rules, West African """muslim""" women were going around topless in public in view of unrelated men all the time. Southeast Asian Muslims were found not just eating pork but earning their living raising pigs. There was much more tolerance of wine and spirits in Persia, the Balkans, and the Caucasus.
And what that inspired was a new wave of evangelism not from the fringes outward to the infidels, but from the Arabic Fundamentalism Center to the diluted periphery, to error-correct and patch the buggy fourth-hand Islamic code that had taken root out there, often involving recruiting locals to get trained up at one of the major Islam Academy institutions near the center, then return home not so much to "share the gospel" but to report that it turns out the local community had made several errors with regard to proper interpretation, and then get busy squaring things away. Similar things happened in the history of Christendom. The principally Saudi-funded post-war-era effort to achieve this rectification with the greatest scope and scale and pay for all those Sunni Fundamentalist madrassas everywhere is merely the most recent prominent instance of this historically recurrent pattern.
Every situation was different, and sometimes there was indeed rapid convergence, but in general the efforts didn't always work out as intended with 100% success and - get this - would occasionally provoke a lot of local anger and either active or passive resistance. It's not always easy to convince even decent, Allah-fearing people to give up their heretical pork sausages, glasses of wine, and girl-watching, which is after all what they say their fathers enjoy, "... and weren't they good people and good Muslims, all things considered?"
Local intransigence also had something to do with the preservation of a kind of racial memory that tends to create some spiritual distance between a people and their faith, "We were and remain a distinct people with its own history, language, and culture, and the only reason any of us is Muslim today is not because any of our ancestors were persuaded, convinced, impressed, or whatever, but because they were coerced by threats up to and including mass murder." That tends to keep third-hand Islam third-hand. In times and places when religiosity faded in general and across the board, a third-hander can easily drop into the "nones".
Your point about how immigrants back then were not subsidized so much (hotel rooms, credit cards, etc.) seems like the key problem with our huge surge of immigration in recent years. If the immigrants were all productive and able to support themselves, there would be a lot less opposition. It's hard to see how we can keep having millions of people per year come here and be given so many freebies.
There are differences between Shia and Sunni, educated and not, but my guess is the biggest difference is those who stay put are more likely to be conservative and the farther they travel to relocate, the more likely to be minimally religious or secular.
“My guess is that she is going to argue that Islam itself is not incompatible with modernization.” I Compare Pakistan and India, both parts of the British Raj, both large territories with large rural populations, ethnically the same, both got independence same day, both inherited the infrastructure built and left behind intact by the British.
Both had the same start point. One has just soft-landed a space vehicle on the Moon. The key difference is… ?
Mangos?
One is 10x the population of the other?
"My guess is that she is going to argue that Islam itself is not incompatible with modernization. Instead, she will say that it is Arab culture that resists modernization."
I don't know what Alice Evans intends to argue, but I think the obvious explanation is that the Saudi monarchy has been underwriting madrassas, mosques, and imams in much of the Muslim world (as well as places that are not primarily Muslim, like the US and Europe), and that the Saudi monarchy resists modernization.
While I look forward to reading some of the linked pieces, I couldn't follow most of your post. this is but one example: "My guess is that she is going to argue that Islam itself is not incompatible with modernization. Instead, she will say that it is Arab culture that resists modernization."
Anyway, I did kind of understand Fleischer.
"if you’re reading a news article about Gen Z that only encompasses college student voices, you’re not hearing from about 40% of the generation — a 40% that thinks substantially differently from the rest of the cohort."
Is this saying that all college students think alike? Even though he later says women are getting more liberal and men more conservative?
"the large number of Gen Z voters who refuse to identify with any political party. Other generations are disillusioned right now too, but no one as much as Gen Z and no generation was this disillusioned this young."
I don't know why any thinking person would want to identify with either party unless they absolutely had to. I suspect it is easier for younger people not to simply because they never did and don't have any loyalty based on the past.
“I don't know why any thinking person would want to identify with either party unless they absolutely had to.”
Great sentence and I absolutely agree. However, I am being forced to hold my nose and vote for Trump. There is no way that I will ever tolerate another SCOTUS nominee from Biden.
I get that. I'm somewhere between Thomas and Roberts. Not sure which I'm closer to. Either way, Trump's picks seem they might be right of Thomas. Regardless, I expect I'd like Biden's picks even less. So maybe Trump is my pick on scotus nominees but as much as I dislike Biden, I still can't say I'm more comfortable with Trump as President.
about the possibly collapsing banks:
the core idea of ESG is to improperly price loans
the gen z description is just gen X with social media
The rich owners of the irresponsible banks will be mostly bailed out.
As usual, and despite Libber blubbering about excessive govt involvement in banking: subsidizing, taxing, regulating against stuff, requiring other stuff.
Far more capital should be required, especially of the big banks, with fewer regulations. But that’s not on either potential winning Party’s bingo card, er, platform. I don’t think Trump talked about this in his speech to the Libertarians, but he did talk about winning, rather than getting 3 or 4 %.
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2024/05/26/trump-was-booed-relentlessly-at-the-lnc-heres-why-thats-a-good-thing-for-him-n2174683
There’s no banking, nor fiscal, crisis until Democrats say there is, especially those in the media. So then, and only then, maybe Libertarian ideas can be copied by Republicans to reduce the problems. Is Japan in Econ crisis yet? If not, certainly no big US problem.
If Gen Z avoids stupidly voting for semi-senile Biden, Trump wins unless lots of fraud. 21 million more 2020 Biden voters than Hillary or Obama. Really??? Do you know any? Biden’s been President for 3 long and disastrous years, after 4 pretty good Trump years. Bank problems are Biden Econ problems, so Dem media will minimize coverage. Oh well, America survives to face other future problems, no matter who gets elected, so far.
ALM in banking was easy at the time of 3-6-3 (borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, and be on the golf course at 3pm). The last few years have been proving bank’s management incapable to deal with an inverted yield curve. Follow the FED…..though the FED doesn’t face insolvency.
Islam has always been an ummah, just like there are brothers in christ or a Jewish people. Since the Crusades, Israel has given them something to coalesce around.
"But maybe the problem is that the current implementations of these innovations cause more pain than they relieve."
A big problem is the process of "Status-Mimetic Social Transition to Widespread Adoption". It's like class-based trickle-down fashion or tastes in art.
Something that is brand new might seem great functionally, usefully, aesthetically, practically, experientially, etc. but it is still presumptively uncool -socially- and will seem a little weird or low-status. This is especially true if using it makes one look out of the ordinary in public. This is because you haven't yet observed or imagined any cool people being cool while using it or doing it, and on the other hand you could imagine some low-status types with minority-interests and enthusiasms doing it first, and no one wants to imitate them!
The temporal evolution of widespread social adoption is the 'curve'* people talk about when they say "being ahead of the curve".
On the one hand, everybody wants to get ahead the curve enough to be able to show off as the first to be "in the know" among one's social reference group, introduce it them, to be like the hipster and in to something "before it was cool" (i.e. mainstream), and to always be different from the uncool mainstream *because* either superior to it or ahead of it. On the other hand, no one wants to seem weird or bizarre or clueless or creepy and this people are naturally hesitant and anxious to take the risk of trying something different from what is common and socially safe because a failed effort might make them the subject of mockery and they might never live it down.
Marketers of all kinds have understood forever that the answer to this is to kickstart widespread adoption by paying influencers and opinion-makers - cool, sexy, popular, well-known, high-status people - to endorse it while acting like it they were convinced to choose it for its inherent qualities out of authentic preferences and superior taste, to use it in public in the most conspicuous manner in situations where it looks like it is helping them to be even more cool and popular while having a great time, and also speaking and writing about it enthusiastically and by appealing to the kinds of "reasons" that early-adopting people grasp they can repeat to others as micro-influencers in their own milieu with social acceptance and also winning a few extra status points.
The history of cigarettes provides a textbook example. Before the iPhone, other proto-smartphones were seen as kind of little-computer-like nerdy electronics only a geek would make any special effort to get vs a regular cell phone. Jobs and the top folks at Apple were keenly aware of the need to put everything they had into making it perceived quickly by everyone to be elite, cool, sleek, sexy, easy and NOT-FOR-NERDS, because the nerds would obviously choose nerdier alternatives. A sexy young women can *still look sexy* while using her smartphone and say, smiling big because laughing at a joke.
Now, the problem with the augmented reality and whole-life-assistant AI use cases is that *the whole point is to use them constantly while in public* in the way you live your whole public life, and in a way that is unavoidably extremely conspicuous to everyone around you.
And when people are doing this, it still looks weird, ridiculous, and/or creepy to most people, and, let's face it, it is being done mostly by either (1) nerds, or (2) people with very low SCM capacity who have a hard time anticipating that other people will perceive what they are doing as weird.
And NO ONE wants to imitate those people, and one has powerful instincts to do everything in one's power to avoid even having someone mistake you for being one of those people or affiliating in any way with them.
So, the problem is, you can't do this well without wearing the giant weird ugly goggles in public and moving your hands around in bizarre-seeming mid-air gesticulations, or holding you smartphone up and making everyone hear the conversation as you are openly talking to it in public like some nerdy weirdo, and thus all people who start wearing the giant weird ugly goggles in public are indeed nerdy or socially unsavvy types are *ANTI-influencers* for the most compelling use cases.
*Pure trivia that I share because I once went down this rabbit hole and have personally experiences a similar instance of it, please feel free to skip: The original expression from the 1960s was "ahead of the power curve", which is the j-shaped curve of the relationship between power and airspeed, a phenomenon which is easy to prove but very counterintuitive and fraught with danger of fatal error if not understood, so among the first things one must learn and master in pilot training for small, simple aircraft. It is actually short for "above the speed of the minimum on the power curve, the point of maximum efficiency."
You really do not want to fall behind the efficient minimum velocity, especially near stall speed! Any pilot aware that he is operating near that point will feel immense motivation to "stay ahead of the power curve". Pilots are cool, thus any jargon they use is cool, so use of the expression quickly spread, and, as is common just past a link or two in the chain, to people who copy the words it without any understanding of the background or original meaning, just assuming that their reflexive inference based on first exposure to its usage is probably close.
The trouble here is that "power" has many meanings, and most people don't use it to refer to mechanical energy for thrust, but to social power: rank, status, influence, popularity, centrality, and so forth. The spread seems to have emerged out of the Air Force, and American military culture is notorious for a linguistic instinct for "cool-guy jargon conceptual abstraction and repurposing." For example, in the meeting when the big boss directs brutal criticism to one individual, that is "taking a HEAT round." Air Force pilots spend most of their careers as managers and staff in the military bureaucracy where the corporate soap opera and social factors are paramount, and this includes access to and control of socially-communicated information and how early in the process of dissemination one tends to learn about critical or juicy insider secrets, especially the exchange of secret opinions about other people without which one cannot effectively achieve anything that requires informal management, maintenance, and influence over office coalitions.
It thus makes a lot of sense they would repurpose the flight-based power curve to use it describe the social-based power. You don't want to surprised and last to learn something important! And information originally known by just a few top people tends to get spread to everyone not in a j-curve but like fashion or technology adoption, in a differently-shaped way resembling the error function, an s-curve.
So because we have two kinds of 'power' and two kinds of 'curve', and both situations being important to the same set of cool people, the meaning of the expression as it spread to the rest of the public changed quickly and without any conscious intention on the part of the people spreading it or picking it up. Another part of USG culture is that the first non-military "influencers" to pick up on and start using military-cool-guy jargon expressions in a way that will make it go "viral" are ... the top civilian and political leaders who work hand-in-hand with military cool-guys on a regular basis, usually those in White House, Executive Office of the President, and National Security Council.
So it's little surprise that only a few years later political tacticians in the Nixon administration were using this expression to convey (1) Making sure any new information was closely-help by a small inner circle that wouldn't leak it except in the planned fashion, (2) the pre-emption of the lag inherent in process of public dissemination of information by the dominant institutions in the media sector ecosystem, and (3) maintaining message and interpretation control by avoiding either an Omerta-like refusal to report on it, or the manipulation and spin and slant the media would use in their coverage of such stories, by using an ally at some paper to put the story out there first, surprises everyone, take credit for making it known, and force the media to play catch-up. That was "getting ahead of the power curve" to Nixon, and the big papers which hated him were often caught off guard because they were "behind the power curve".
This all makes sense, but I’m not sure it’s as complicated as all this. Nerds/geeks love new technology just because it’s neat (and it is!), but normies only care if the new technology is *useful* for them, and I just don’t think these new technologies (AI, VR, AR, crypto, etc.) are that useful for normies.
I mean, sure, you can use ChatGPT to compose generic text for emails or whatever, but that’s much less generally useful than, say, having the ability to keep connected with your friends all the time using a smartphone/social media.
My impression is when there's a trade-off and all else being equal, normies choose cool over useful to the extent they can afford to do so. The income effect on conspicuous consumption tends to be relatively biased in the direction of increasing cool vs increasing utility past what one requires for sufficiency and for the purpose of showing off costly signals, as if coolness was higher on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It would be really hard to explain observable consumption patterns if this fact weren't true.
I think that the acceptability of the AI goggles thing and related devices will probably vary based on geography and class. I could see them maybe becoming somewhat acceptable in the Silicon Valley culture, but much less so elsewhere. I don’t see these devices moving down market because they just don’t have that Veblen luxury appeal to them unless somehow geek culture can spread more widely.
However, the larger issue to me is why someone might want one. What does it do that cannot already be accomplished on a smartphone? As an example, I don’t see that large of an adoption of smartwatches in my social circle despite them becoming available over a decade ago and their being much less fringe or obtrusive in everyday conversation.
Full disclosure: to be a hip female in my neck of the woods, you need On running shoes, a lululemon skirt (preferably with pleats), fake eyelashes, Botox treatment and drive the kiddos around in a full size SUV.
"I could see them maybe becoming somewhat acceptable in the Silicon Valley culture, but much less so elsewhere."
I am skeptical. If something doesn't take off with the coolest people in the coolest places, it gets abandoned by most people anywhere exposed to this state of affairs. Even most nerds, except maybe for the least socially savvy among them.
These days cultural convergence happens at the top of all the various hierarchies, because elites of all kinds are *constantly* interacting with tons of other elites of all the other kinds, indeed, seem to be driven by a manic urge to seek out opportunities to do this as much as possible, probably because they accurately perceive it as opportunity-expanding and status-amplifying even for top elites who already have lots of opportunities and status.
What that means is that Silicon Valley elites can deviate in some minor and inconsequential "local cultural flavor" ways from what is mainstream for the elites in the other major status hierarchies, but they are going to have to interact with and impress and not appear to be weird to those other kinds of elites, and anyone operating at that level will immediately pick up on what they must do or drop to avoid negative social judgments from others in that class. Bringing Silicon Valley back into the fold politically was a major contributing factor to the recent "Great Silicon Valley Exception Revocation."
The thing about the goggles is that while human aesthetic tastes are culturally malleable that is only true to a point and can only go so far, and sometimes not very far at all for things which are deeply hard-wired by evolutionary programming. And what people find most attractive about other peoples faces, bodies, figures, and the rest of their physical appearance is NOT just some arbitrary social construct or norm that can be nudged with ease to any point in the whole space of possibilities, but obeys some narrow ranges of formulas which have been well-known for a long time to people who are in the business of having to make images of people look attractive.
And I strongly suspect that those hard-wired aesthetic taste formulas *do not include* gushing releases of emotionally rewarding neurotransmitters in reaction to seeing someone's face covered up with giant bug-eye computer-screen goggles.
In general if very attractive young women do not perceive that they will appear just as attractive when wearing some device, they just won't do it, will laugh mean-girls-style at anyone who does, and by operation of the chain of influence, no one else will want to wear them either. I suspect Zuckerberg, Cook, and the rest of them already know this, but have enough money to keep trying longshots, just in case one of them unexpectedly takes off.
All fine, but you still haven’t provided any analysis of my core question: why would anyone want one of the goggle things, even if it did look attractive or at least not butt ugly? What is someone supposed to do with it that changes things in some positive breakthrough way?
As you know, we’ve been here before only 10 years ago (link below). Google glass never made it past a beta product and was shelved. Why was that? Was it just too ugly (kinda, but not really) or was it just a product in search of practical uses? I’m going with the latter, which is why I’ve always thought of this AI stuff as a “technology tuck-in” to preexisting platforms like search or Alexa or Google Home and not broadly transformative in the consumer space. It’s just not that interesting or useful.
As an aside, Apple gets to go next at the WWDC on 6/10. Will it be another “me too” event where everyone cheers over completely useless AI applications (“where did I leave my glasses” and the bot remembers where it last saw them…cheers and clapping from the enthralled audience) or do they maybe have something more useful up their sleeves? My guess is that Cook will say the word AI like millions of times, but that Siri will still suck once the masses get their hands on the next version of iOS in the fall.
https://youtu.be/elXk87IKgCo?si=4KYZJuvZbPTTL_E6
I don't see much space between you and Mims on tech adoption. His phrasing is just a bit more positive.
I don't know that I agree that Microsoft 'did it right'. I've used their products for years and found plenty of quirky and erroneous functions. What they were was sufficiently powerful to get everybody else to conform to their implementation of the specs.
My favorite, or rather least-favorite current thing, is that starting a week or so ago, every time I open my laptop, I get a box for weather (fine), a box that I think is news but I haven't really studied it, and a third box, Trending in the NBA.* I went to the internet to find out if I could get rid of Trending in the NBA, partly because I have no interest in it, and partly because I didn't like the idea that we were now putting NBA categorically on par with weather.
No. You cannot get rid of Trending in the NBA. Or perhaps you can get rid of all - NBA and weather now being linked in terms of importance. Or weather is secondary perhaps. No one buys the weather. Or no one buys the laptop user's interest in weather.
*Not sure what would happen if the national news suddenly involved an NBA player; that might break the scheme, I suppose.
I run both a MS branded Windows 11 laptop and a MacBook Air. Both OSs are top notch after Windows played catch-up for decades. Track pad still superior on Mac.
But…I find Windows super frustrating because every time a significant update is applied, 1) MS screws around with my default settings that I then have to figure out how to undo (e.g. a recent update disabled the minimize all virtual button at the lower right of the screen) and 2) MS serves up a bunch of MS bloat popups (e.g. continual prompts to move to their browser as a default even though I said “no thanks” a million times previously).
Long story short, there is no way to eliminate the NBA trending stuff on the Lock Screen *without* also eliminating weather and other useful widgets. It’s all or nothing. I think this is *by design* since the NBA and MS have a long running partnership.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-do-i-get-rid-of-trending-in-the-nba-from-my/d4f9025f-52b4-401a-b9b9-266a20d6aab6
My husband is in a state of simmering rage against Microsoft all the time, because he has to do work on the computer. I suppose most people are more like me, and do not have to do work on the computer. So my issues are always trivial, like the NBA thing.