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Comment by AlecSchueler | Hacker News Reader

An interesting thing that happens here is also the conflation of company and country. You mention the oil companies blocking and obscuring the research, but GP was putting the blame on the shoulders of the "oil countries." Something to be aware of with the rise of weaponised xenophobia and general background islamophobia.

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That's hardly a "conflation". If you can meaningfully distinguish Aramco policy and Saudi policy, please do.

I would more readily distinguish Aramco from the people who live under the Saudi regime, which was installed by outside forces. The country is not just it's government.

Corruption and undue political influence stemming from a large source of extractive income isn't a an issue particular to Islam as I can see it; in fact I'd say it's something endemic to the human condition.

But, when it comes to oil production what I would say is that due to the overlapping geography of the foundation and consequent spread of Islam and largest and easiest to extract oil resources in the world being very large combined with human tendency to overfit pattern matching that it is all too easy to see why some would conflate the two.

But Islamic majority nations aren't the only "oil countries", and not all "oil countries" are corrupt (but I'd guess the overwhelming majority of "oil countries" are corrupt, not least because of Dutch Disease).

Your sentences are quite difficult to read so I apologise if I'm misunderstanding, but I think it's good to remember cases like Saudi where religious fundamentalists were placed into power by Western powers. These days we see them as representative of the Islamic world but it's largely our own doing.

I'm aware that there are non Islamic "oil countries" of course and I don't think the GP comment was equating oil with Islam. It's just something that does happen in other contexts and that we should be aware of when speaking, because there are very real real would consequences.

"It's just something that does happen in other contexts and that we should be aware of when speaking"; I guess my point can be mostly boiled down to this one point, "jumping to conclusions" (meant in both the none emotive and emotive sense) cuts both ways. Again, something that comes as a part of the human condition.

Big money from resource extraction is always boom/bust and always struggling with corrupting influences. The folks who control the political strings are always flush with cash, and their only priority is maximizing return on their assets.

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