You most likely know it as Myanmar… but it will always be Burma to me:
At the entrance to Thaungtan village there’s a brand new sign, bright yellow, and bearing a message: “No Muslims allowed to stay overnight. No Muslims allowed to rent houses. No marriage with Muslims.”
The post was erected in late March by Buddhist residents of the village in Myanmar’s lush Irrawaddy Delta region who signed, or were strong-armed into signing, a document asserting that they wanted to live separately.
Since then a couple of other villages across the country have followed suit. Small but viciously insular, these “Buddhist-only” outposts serve as microcosms of the festering religious tensions that threaten Myanmar’s nascent experiment with democracy.
….Nanda Kyaw, a Muslim taxi driver who was beaten outside Shwedagon Pagoda, from which Islamic vendors were evicted a few weeks earlier, says he is still getting headaches.
“I have to drive every day for my survival,” says the slight 31-year-old…
A group of young people wound down their windows and shouted racially charged insults. Then, he said, they swerved in front of his car and beat him with iron rods. They left him bleeding from his mouth and head.
Bear in mind, these are the Buddhists. Imagine what the Hari Krishnas, who’ve always looked a little off to me, will be like.
In-grouping/out-grouping arises because the amygdala cues in only on major, easily detectable stimuli, such as in this story, the Muslim goatee. It quickly gets irritated by those who have any major trait associated with adverse experiences in the past.
Some would say this is a flaw, but it is not. The amygdala focuses more on the negative than the positive because in K-selection, survival comes first and kicking ass comes second. When the cost of failure is death, the amygdala does not take chances – its motto is better safe than sorry. In this case, the out-grouping of all Muslims protects against any Muslim which might feign common cause, so as to gain the opportunity to act as a saboteur.
Since things are still somewhat r this seems silly, but as they head much more K its utility will become apparent.
Again however, we see how the subtle strains of shortage activate the amygdala, place it in a higher state of agitation, and trigger outbursts which initiate the Darwinian culling of K-selection. If all of these people were fat and happy, nobody would be motivated to dish out beatings based on a goatee, and almost everybody would love the Cuckservatives who wish everyone could just get along. Instead resources are scarce, guys have to drive constantly to survive, and now periodically, you get beaten down by people you’ve never even met. That’s the beginning of K-selection – and you are lucky if it doesn’t get any worse than that.
Given how easily panicked amygdalae have become, and how bad things are going to get, I expect this turn of the K-cycle will be epic when it goes down. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.
[…] K-selection Begins In Myanmar […]
It does seem very strange in our current milieu. People who discriminate based on appearance are ostracized and ridiculed. That’s the logic of r/K though. When resources are plentiful it doesn’t make sense to beat people over a goatee. It’s just not productive nor necessary. Yet when resources contract…
I saw a well-presented video that said Trump blocking muslim immigration would contradict american values of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, and that it would basically be admitting the american institutions are inferior to islam because they have to be subverted or contradicted to save them. Maybe it’s more the people upholding those institutions don’t have the will to do so.
Anonymous, you suggested in one of your posts last week that people would begin to channel their anger at “religious minorities” or “ethnic minorities,” yet here, you seem to be viewing the attacks on Muslims as positive. (Muslims are, of course, a minority in Myanmar.)
Am I interpreting you wrong?
If not, what makes this kind of mob violence acceptable, rather than a lamentable example of “r-selected amygdalae-trigger” causing Buddhists to take their anger out on Muslims?
I try not to judge, or even classify to much in terms of r and K. I do take a position on being beheaded, however.
In this case, to render judgment, you’d have to know how much of a threat the Muslims in the area present, how much the “moderate” Muslims oppose their more radical brothers, and the backstory on the people attacking. My guess is the attackers are K’s led by r’s who are fomenting the violence to keep themselves out of the crosshairs, simply because that is how it often works. I do suspect there are radical Muslims, and the moderates are happy to see them try to oppress others, as rabbits enjoy seeing other violent individuals oppress their enemies. On an intellectual level, I just recognize this all is how K-selection happens as resources get thin.
That said, Islam seems more of a problem than most religions, since there seems to always be a violent component you cannot get rid of, and the majority of the rest of the religion seems perfectly cool with that violent component taking control of out-groups by force, oppressing all non-Muslim competition, and even views them as brothers. To the extent I think that when things turn K you will either brutalize that particular group as a whole, or get brutalized by it, I am not sorry to see it driven from areas, since I am not a Muslim and I don’t wish to be ruled by sharia.
That said, if a Muslim K wanted to live peacefully, and fight to allow everyone else live in peace, I’m cool with them. But until they kill a radical, I assume they aren’t going to do shit when their brethren start killing my kind.
I try to stay impartial, but there are practicalities to living in the world, and I am not exempt from them. As much as I like to try and see r/K from afar, it will inevitably be moving in all around me very soon.
That’s a great point AC about the moderate muslims tolerating or even tacitly supporting their radical brothers. I’ve gotten so use to being brow-beaten by “peaceful” muslims into accepting their religion as peaceful, I didn’t think about how it helps the violent faction and thus helps the more r muslims survive. What in your mind would be sufficient opposition for them to prove they genuinely want peace?
Making the radicals want to kill them as well as us. The rabbit avoids conflict. If you want to prove you oppose the radicals, make the radicals oppose you too.
If any Muslim had a Fatwa against him, I’d think he was on the right track to supporting freedom.
The elephant in the room, of course–the elephant that’s always in AC’s room–is that Muslims have only ever gained access, and only ever continue to gain access, to western societies because those societies have first been penetrated and liberalized by the Muslims’ closest kin.
Without centuries of wealth transfers and social conniving to benefit Muslim Arabs effected by their closest kin, Arabs wouldn’t have ever been allowed to immigrate into the west, nor would they possess automatic weaponry or jet planes. Arab Muslims, homosexuals, Aztecs, or Sub-Saharan Africans, are the barest of dangers to the west without carefully orchestrated Jewish social policies first having mocked and belittled K-behavior in favor of r-behavior.
Are my posts not showing up because of a technical glitch, or am I being censored out? I had asked a question about using Muslims as scapegoats.
For unknown reasons, the software throws legit posts in the trash. Sometimes I restore the posts to the pending que, approve them, see them in the approved que, and when I come back later they are either in Spam or in Trash.
I stopped asking about the ghosts in this blog software a long time ago.
Ah, thank you for finding things. Must just be WordPress.