ISIS and the Coming Dark Age

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Well if ISIS where to come near me and my viking brethren, we may have to start collecting heads to decorate the spikes with . But as of now I am not very worried about ISIS showing up on my doorstep, I am sure before that happens there would have to be some kind of system collapse first in which case I'd have to go into survival/game of thrones mode.

What really bothers me about this whole ISIS issue is that we Americans are more concerned with Kylie Jenner's lips than we are with this dangerously fanatical ideology that is spreading around the world.

Our politicians talk about ISIS and do nothing after they stop talking. Our people click on articles and think ''I'm so glad that's not here.''

ISIS only exists because the U.S. withdraw its forces from Iraq putting their faith in the local army to defend the country. They also didn't support the local Syrian opposition against president Asaad allowing the fascist religious nut cases who claim they represent the Islamic faith (they don't) to kill off the rest of the opposition and take over large swaths of Iraq and Syria. They will never overtake the south of Iraq where the Shiites live, or the north of the country where the Kurds live. They control about 8 million Sunnis in the north of Iraq, but there are about 20 million Kurds living in the north of Iraq and Turkey and about 50 million Shiites living in Southern Iraq and Iran. So the numbers say that ISIS are never going to expand past the regions they already occupy, but they will attempt to saturate the media with their propaganda and attempt to influence events in the countries where other Sunnis live such as Libia, Sauda Arabia and Tunisia. Sadly the gutless West who allowed these events to occur in Syria and Iraq will continue to do next to nothing to liberate the enslaved population living under ISIS. Hopefully the next president of the U.S. will have the courage to do something.

This thread needs a "forget the politicians" clip of George Carlin...

Do something?

Do WHAT exactly?

That ISIS is a kind of degraded state is one of the things I note. That's a potential sign that it's getting harder for states to maintain their integrity.

By 'dark age', I don't necessarily mean Middle Ages, but instead what is meant is a time period in which few records will be left for future generations. This tends to occur where you have a weak political system, a weak economy, and sociocultural fragmentation for a prolonged period, say a century or more. In these time periods, people don't have time or even the means to leave much in the way of records.

As things are, I believe, though I'd like to see the numbers, that the paper we currently use would not last a century, and the same is true for our storage media.

By that definition, the "coming Dark Age" would be in an improbability.

Too many people.

Too many computers.

Too many networks created by people using computers.

ISIS won't expand beyond the Middle East.

Yes, ISIS likely won't. It's not so much about coming under ISIS as it is about weakening political integration.

As for computers and computer networks, how would they do under a prolonged period where, due to the weakness of the political system and the economy, as well as sociocultural fragmentation, it is difficult to protect the systems against factors like theft and power outages?

What about a solar storm the likes of which last happened in 1859 (I believe), where many electrical systems would be fried? If our political, economic, and social systems were strong, we'd probably be able to bounce back, but what if they were weak? If anything, if our systems were stronger, we'd probably be able to take steps now to mitigate such effects, but the will to do so appears to be weak:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/solar- ... onics2.htm

The article discusses creating a smart grid to mitigate the effects of such a solar storm, but have you heard a whole lot in Congress or regulators regarding that? It's not much different, if you think about it, from the way our infrastructure is aging and being degraded, and civil engineers have warned us about the consequences of such weak infrastructure, but has there been much action to follow up on the engineers' recommendations?

Last edited by beneficii on 29 May 2015, 3:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The GOP are actually just as extreme as ISIS (they advocate torture too, for criminals etc all the time) they just haven't totally dominated this country yet! I think America is going downhill and is being overtaken by extremists too.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/solar- ... onics2.htm

This article discusses creating a smart grid to mitigate the effects of such a solar storm, but have you heard a whole lot in Congress or regulators regarding that? It's not much different, if you think about it, from the way our infrastructure is aging and being degraded, and civil engineers have warned us about the consequences of such weak infrastructure, with little apparent action to follow up on the engineers' recommendations.

They left records in the Middle Ages... even if we didn't have computers, we'd still have printing presses, literacy, and efficient agriculture that would free people up to write.

It is well-known that in the Middle Ages, there was a paucity of records at different times in different regions. Even the Byzantine Empire did not escape having a period where there were very few Greek records surviving from the 7th and 8th centuries.

There has also been discussion on a digital dark age, which features issues not just of storage media becoming degraded, but also issues such as obsolete data formats. Some of these issues have come up recently:

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/20/scien ... space.html

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/mar/ ... .elearning

Thankfully, we were able to preserve these records.

The west is declining in relative terms. Not absolute terms. That is because the rest of the world is catching up and becoming more, and not less, civilized.

ISIS is a flyspeck on the map. China is one forth of the human race, and its has been industrialzing at a breakneck speed. India is a fifth of the human race and is also rising.

But on the other hand our industrialized society is more fragile than pre industrial societies that came before. Not less so.

In the 1700's if you wanted to plunge a city into darkness you had to run down each street, invade each home and business, and knock over each household's oil lamp. Today all that you have to do to plunge a city into darkness is take out a power plant. And in the 20th century you at least needed bombs to do that. Today you could theoretically could take out a power plant by typing a few words on a keyboard thousands of miles away.

The current Democratic president has continued and expanded drone murders, political assassinations and torture, and, like the former Republican president, has joked about it publicly. It came out last week that ISIS was created, armed and funded by the U.S. government as a way to destabilize Syria's Assad regime. Insofar as Hillary is concerned, she admitted that the U.S. government also funded the Mujahideen which morphed into the Taliban, which morphed into al Qaeda which, as everyone knows, morphed into ISIS -- all of whom were supported by at least one U.S. president during their reigns of terrorism.

So, while I agree with your comparison of the Republican Party with ISIS, both parties were heavily involved with it and its terrorist predecessors. I would include the Democratic Party within your comparison.

Talk to Saudi Arabia, talk to Iran, talk to the Russians and Chinese.

Organize a coalition army to retake all the regions occupied by ISIS.

Arrest all the leaders of ISIS and try them in the international court in Haag for war crimes.

Is this humor?

The Saudis are funding them.

We only talk to Iran and Russia to threaten them with ISIS.

We are threatening to go to war with China over the Spratlys.

On a good day you would lose 20,000 taking out ISIS, and that day would last ten years.

Assad has lost 100,000 over four years fighting the Saudi American Plan.

This is a Saudi CIA op to build a wall between Iran and Syria and Lebanon.

Russia and Iran have already proposed a joint force to destroy ISIS.

The US said we wont play with you. Then they over threw the government of Ukraine.

The US would not sell Iraq planes, the Russians did. The US would not supply weapons that would stop an armored truck bomb. That is ISIS main weapon.

So put the US on trial, go ahead.