Iraq: Out of the desert into Mosul (closed)

[Ray]

So, if I may generalize, what I hear Ray and Outlaw saying is that, it is not being Islamic, or being Arab, or being Slavic. It is having an in-group identity that is powerful enough to disallow any recognition of another group's equality or the potential for them being right. That in this situation, power sharing between groups is not possible ... one group must dominate the other, and they will fight to the death until that domination is established.

That is what mankind is all about.

Check history.

[ganulv]

[Dominating one another] is what mankind is all about.

Check history.

Well, it’s all relative. This is the region where food crops were initially domesticated. It took a lot of generations working together to pull that one off.

If you think humans are unable to act in social cooperation and you really want to look at history history, try lecturing to a hall full of chimpanzees some time and see how far you get. Individuals in our species are actually pretty good at not tearing one another apart just to get their way.

I take the point that humans can be barbaric to one another because of ideology, but acting in concert is also what mankind is all about. There are hundreds of miles of ancient canals throughout Mesopotamia attesting to that fact, as well as spacecraft on the surface of our moon and laboratories circling our planet.

That is right. More than they hate others, they hate each other i.e. Shia vs Sunni.

To be fair, Muslims take it on the chin from non-Muslims sometimes, too.