Reply To: The North Atlantic Current

[Duke Leto]

Let me make that more clear then, and for Full Disclosure I graduated in History so I was demeaning myself as well. He was making an argument for a historical interpretation by egregiously cherry picking his data. There’s no attempt at what the Freakanomics boys call regression analysis.

At the top of page 15 we find that he says insurgency is a natural Muslim/polygynous response to foreign occupation, and that monogomous countries have no such response. He cites only the examples of Algeria, Angola and Oman, as insurgencies against occupation by polygynous societies, and only the postwar occupations of Germany and Japan as examples of monogomous societies being inclined to passivity. He did not try to anticipate the obvious counterargument that Vietnam is not particularly polygynous and the level of resistance there made Iraq look like a cakewalk, or that the Vietnamese on Vietnamese killing was much more horrific.

He could have strengthened his case by reviewing the recorded history of occupations and insurgencies and setting certain variables describing the characteristics the societies involved in each case: the nature of the occupation, the amount violence exerted towards the populace, religious distinctions and attempts to force changes to the societies involved, and then showing that all other things being equal a polygynous society is more likely to violently resist occupation than one which is not. That methodology of assembling all historical data and analyzing it to death is the most effective method of experimentation in the “historical sciences”, cosmology and evolutionary biology included.

He didn’t do this. One reference to someone else’s study was enough for him to prove a universal pattern. That reliance on other people’s work and habit of not considering potential counterarguments is a habit that permeates the piece. As I said above, the colloquial style doesn’t inspire confidence either.

More than all this, he overreaches badly in his Conclusion. He does not make the eminently defensible claim that polygymous societies tend to be more unstable and violent than monogomous ones, he states “Maybe the Muslim suicide bombings are not