MIT Should Not Be Supporting the Saud Monarchy
web.mit.edu
web.mit.edu
The situation in Yemen is bad. However it is not totally one-sided pain inflicted by Saudi Arabia as portrayed in the article. The Houthis are after all well armed militants who were/are trying to overthrow the Yemen government.
Some people at MIT have hardline stances which should not be mistaken to be the institute's opinion or the majority opinion. A year ago there was a movement by some to have MIT divest from oil/gas-related companies which failed.
Houthis being armed militant does not excuse the blockade of essential supplies that is leading to the death of thousands of children.
Yemen is a complicated situation with a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran neither of them are particularly bastions of human rights or values.
Unlike Iraq there isn’t a substantial enough Shi’a population in Saudi Arabia to serve as an Iranian proxy to fill the void.
The other two major Sunni powers in the region are AQAP and ISIS both of them are far worse than the Saud family could and would ever be.
Pure and absolute moral objectivism is just as bad as pure moral relativism.
While you can assert that we should never support such regimes, let them fall or even actively push for a regime change on pure moral grounds you aren’t the one that needs to deal with the fallout on the ground for years and decades to come.
Regardless of how bad the situation in Saudi Arabia is now it can always get worse, much worse and I don’t think that you should advocate for a social experiment you wont be willing to participate in.
The world's majority Muslims are Sunni, does that make AQAP and ISIS the mainstream? Absolutely not. They have been used as a red-herring before (not that I am saying it is something that can be ignored) for oppressive regimes to continue (e.g. Egypt, Syria), as they are nowhere near powerful enough as they are made up to be. That is precisely the reason they rely on individuals to attack civilians at western countries. Also, no one is calling for a regime change, that is what US and its allies do unless they don't like the person in charge. In this case, they like Bin Salman.
It’s not about liking or not liking the person in charge it’s about being able to do something about it without causing even more mess.
The entire region is royally fucked with the exception of one country and it’s not just the US (NATO) and Russia (USSR), not to mention colonialism to blame.
Heck look at the election results in Lebanon this weekend, they are perfectly capable of fucking themselves over without any US intervention.
P.S. If your measure of power is ones ability to attack the US at home then by that definition alone AQAP and ISIS are the most powerful entities in the region as no one else has any logistical capabilities to project their force outside of their geographical sphere of influence.
In a hypothetical scenario possibly the only one in the region that could do that currently is Israel if they modify their satellite launch vehicle into an ICBM and even It might not have the range to hit the continental United States with any payload.
The Iranians are probably half a decade away from a similar capability.
They might be able to use the stronghold they established trhgouh Hezbollah in South America but that wouldn’t be any different from the asymmetrical warfare AQAP and ISIS are capable of implementing just with an IRGC flare to it.
No one in the region has military bases within striking range of the US,no one has an aircraft carrier, no one has the logistical capabilities to wage even a ground war further than a few 100’s miles from their borders.
1. https://meduza.io/en/news/2015/09/15/another-foreign-faculty...
2. https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/09/chill-out-russias-skolkovo...
1) Yemen is a result of Saudi-Iran Proxy war: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/un-probe-details-fallou...
2) There will surely be challenging times but every country that had liberated itself from monarchy has gone through similar struggles.
3) >The Saud family is understood to be more liberal than the general Saudi population I don't have an answer on this but what is well known is that the Saud family partnered with Wahab family to push Wahabbism, since the start of Saudia Arabia. This alliance of faith & state was done to control the people similar to many times in history when faith has been hijacked to recruit supporters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism
Saudi rule throughout the peninsula is legitimized through the support of the ulama, who by right of being the stewards of Islam in the world (the keepers of Mecca, Medina, and the cube, the most important sumbols of Islam) wield enormous power, not just through their leadership of their local populations but through their religious significance to the larger Islamic world. In exchange for their support, the Saudi family has historically granted the ulama a wide berth in their regulation of the Saudi people’s moral and religious lives, support they were forced to concede after their near deposal in the ‘79 seige of the cube.
You’re correct that the Saudi family is a liberalizing and moderating force in their lands, who are currently in a long battle to wrest control of their countries moral and religious lives away from the ulama. It seems lots of westerners are under the idea that if the Saudi family was destroyed then the ulama would all become liberal and Islam would move further away from wahhabi style interpretations - when the reality is undermining MBS would just give more power to hardline wahhabists and the peninsula would move from a conservative state slowly liberalizing to a theocracy run by wahhabists.
But first, an aside - I wish I could remember the name of the YouTube video that described the UK as a theocracy - because the Queen is also the "pope" of the Church of England.
A lot of people - MIT and myself included - fall into the trap of comparing places like Saudi to a theoretical perfect state which we'll call Utopia. The pitfalls of such comparisons I leave as an exercise to the reader.
But let's talk about MIT's overall contribution to the advancement of human rights. How many of their grads have gone on to work for the NSA? How many of their Chinese students now find employ with the Chinese government? How many government contracts for intrusive surveillance or weapons of mass destruction has MIT taken over the years?
Answer: Classified. But probably a lot.
Only a repressive, fascist society would attempt to enforce a guarantee of 'due process' in public perception. I hope that day never comes in America, but given how liberally some people seem to take protection of speech and due process, I worry we may be closer now than ever.
However, anyone can easily find many, many, many examples of right-wing extremists in the United States hanging, burning, and committing other atrocities. Hm, weird, it's almost as if both sides are not equivalent, like one is much worse than the other...
Please correct me if I am wrong here. If every use of the term social justice warrior is immediately offensive then I won't use it again.
It's not offensive at all.
> I phrased it in such a way to specifically avoid a statement of attack by calling it my personal feeling and further more I did not direct that description at any person but in response to the written article.
Ah, I see. you meant it as a compliment! In that case, good on you! It is a wonderful thing when someone stands up to injustice, and I'm glad you see that in the author of this article.
> Social justice warrior (commonly abbreviated SJW) is a pejorative term for an individual who promotes socially progressive views, including feminism, civil rights, and multiculturalism,[1][2] as well as identity politics.
There is nothing wrong with stating an opinion, but everything to its appropriate context.
https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...
> so I'm one of the SJWs now?
Please do not try to troll me. The article and these comments are not about you. I am not attacking you (or anybody else).
Please review the part of the comment I quoted. It is essentially an ad hominem in rhetorical question form. Attacks in any form are unfortunate. Pointing to and asking for the attack to terminate directly and politely is a generally preferred response, but if this is unwelcome then next time I will immediately flag the communication for moderator review.
It's an editorial. That's generally what they are are: Someone's opinion.
It is, in fact, an editorial published in the MIT Faculty Newsletter. A hundred years ago, the only people who would have read it would be MIT faculty. But thanks to the internet, now anyone with internet access can read this editorial.
If it were a random person on the internet having a cow about what MIT does as if people at MIT should care about their opinion, okay, fine, sure SJW makes sense as an accusation. But it makes no sense to act like the faculty of MIT are up to something questionable for expressing opinions about how MIT should comport itself.
Edit: I mean, it's fine if you want to express your opinion that 'Hey, this is not really HN-worthy.' Maybe that's what you meant. It certainly isn't what you said. Though that inevitably leads to someone quoting the guidelines as to what is appropriate to post here and linking to them and blah blah blah.