Lorenzo Becker is bing crucifed on YouTube

[mango]

This is that G4P Crap again. I mean crap as in issue, not as in shit. Apparently, and this has probably been posted here already, Lorenzo put out a video talking honestly about doing cam shows for money. Well you'd think he'd admitted to keeping half a dozen girls locked in the basement for sex. Here we go with the "ADVISE" from Hell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2uu495J5cM

[arpeejay]

http://www.facebook.com/arpeejay

[anpuZA]

Lui Marco is an opinionated asshole. I used to watch his posing vids and after a while it became obvious that size wise he wasn't going anywhere much, but his self appointed right to comment on others was expanding along with his ego. The fact that he even mentions camming as a lower standard of morality is ridiculous to me, yeah there are people who do it and don't give a fuck and they are even lower on his "standard" poll than Lorenzo Becker. Well Fuck me, thank you Lui Marco, the messiah of muscle.

Calling cam shows, where a guy flexes gay for pay is still imho, ridiculous. Even if he was doing it butt naked. Check out a guy like Str8 Muscle or Alain Lamas, that is not gay for pay, it's just fucking soloing for pay FFS.

The current witch hunt, and that is what it is, for these bodybuilders who cam for money must be coming from some entitled otherwise employed tiny dipshits that just can't handle the fact that they don't even have to have an "office" job to pay for all their stuff. And I am damn sure that getting to a point where you can support yourself and your bodybuilding from online "sponsors" is quite a bit harder and way more speculative than getting an office job. Whatever, to each his own.

And then you run into something that is completely news to me...

Lui Marco is a muslim.

Luimarco , Did You Become Muslim ? - YouTube

Lord knows, I have no interest in his religion since you are free to believe what you want, but it is interesting to me that he chose the religion that is probably one of the most intolerant religions when it comes to same sex relationships and anything even remotely related or considered to be homo (and sometimes hetero) erotic.

FYI, his explanation of how the Islamic occupation of Spain had such a positive effect on the renaissance doesn't make sense to me. The Renaissance began in Italy and expanded outwards, and it began in roughly the same time that the Reconquista ended in Spain. So I kinda draw a different conclusion.

[plasmatic20]

It seems that the least educated, least informed, and the easily mislead individuals always have the biggest opinion, especially in the advent of Youtube and other social media sites. It seems to be too difficult for such individuals to learn something much less seek it out. So instead of attempting to raise the ceiling of knowledge they just try to drag everyone down to their capacity as to not feel inferior. The irony is that in the presence of all this new communication technology, this technique still works.

[vlad.911]

Honestly as a personal trainer, from what I've seen in Lorenzo's videos his work out aren't good enough to get him to his size. I am assuming that he is abusing roids. However I'm not 100% sure.

[Perados]

Originally Posted by anpuZA

Lui Marco is a muslim.

Luimarco , Did You Become Muslim ? - YouTube

Lord knows, I have no interest in his religion since you are free to believe what you want, but it is interesting to me that he chose the religion that is probably one of the most intolerant religions when it comes to same sex relationships and anything even remotely related or considered to be homo (and sometimes hetero) erotic.

FYI, his explanation of how the Islamic occupation of Spain had such a positive effect on the renaissance doesn't make sense to me. The Renaissance began in Italy and expanded outwards, and it began in roughly the same time that the Reconquista ended in Spain. So I kinda draw a different conclusion.

It looks like you are just as stupid and intollerant as lui marco...
Just as him, you have no clue what you are talking about.

Sure did the moslemic occupation of iberia had a big positive effect on europe - why else do you think it was spain and portugal, who were the first one that reached america? The technology to builed the needed ships was islamic.
Why do you think the renaissance started in north italy? Its cause they traded with the islamic world.
The islamic world was, till the 17th century, the way more liberal world, compared with europe...


And the islam is less liberal, when its about gays, as the christianity??? Did you ever lissen to what the pope says? Both are in total intollerant, when its about gays.


Your arguementation shows, moslems become the jews of the 21st century... Watch out, that we dont repeat the same mistakes of the 20th century

[mango]

I respect Islam where it is the religion but I have no respect for a Christian, or a grandchild of one who deserts his mother's faith. In Islamic countries that is a capital offense. I'm against making it criminal but among civilians we can have any opinion of assholes like this we want. Fucking convert. A crucified God aint good enough for you you want one who sent armies out in his name to conquer. Yeah Christians did more than their share of that evil bloody shit, but Christ never even talked about hurting anyone, he saved an adultress from stoning, he walked in public with a prostitute. Damn anyone who has a problem with people in ex-Christian countries getting upset with their neighbors converting to Mohammedism. We didn't stop going to church for our fucking children to start worshipping fucking Allah.

Excuse me if I offended anyone. That certainly was not my intent. I like to think of myself as a decent non-church-going very liberal Christian. If I offended any Mohammedans or Koran readers please accept my heart felt apologies.

[mango]

He is scum. And I wasn't even mad at him before. Churches are burning in Egypt and this piece of scum...

[bigbearny]

this hits a few more religions.. I was brought up catholic but now consider myself agnostic with strong Wiccan tendencies (I live with my catholic parents so can't practice more than the Wiccan philosophy)..

Faith and Belief should be personal and a choice not something forced on you (my parents still wonder where they "went wrong" raising me since i haven't gone to church since i was 18)

If the Faith/Belief system you were brought up on isn't right for you and you're not turning to something inherently wrong (ie satanism, etc) you shouldn't be judged for it..

Now I didn't watch the video of the person criticizing people on YouTube but he sounds like a douche-bag regardless of the religion he follows..

Originally Posted by mango

I respect Islam where it is the religion but I have no respect for a Christian, or a grandchild of one who deserts his mother's faith. In Islamic countries that is a capital offense. I'm against making it criminal but among civilians we can have any opinion of assholes like this we want. Fucking convert. A crucified God aint good enough for you you want one who sent armies out in his name to conquer. Yeah Christians did more than their share of that evil bloody shit, but Christ never even talked about hurting anyone, he saved an adultress from stoning, he walked in public with a prostitute. Damn anyone who has a problem with people in ex-Christian countries getting upset with their neighbors converting to Mohammedism. We didn't stop going to church for our fucking children to start worshipping fucking Allah.

Excuse me if I offended anyone. That certainly was not my intent. I like to think of myself as a decent non-church-going very liberal Christian. If I offended any Mohammedans or Koran readers please accept my heart felt apologies.

[raven79]

Guys stop this! I actually think Lui sounds decent in that video. I don't know where the religion came into this, but just stop spreading hate.

[mango]

Yeah he sounds very reasonable, that's what I thought when I saw it, but then I learned on this thread that he is a convert to Islam. And then I remembered his remarks and how they hang homosexuals in Iran and decapitate them in Saudi Arabia and I saw his remarks very differently. I'd rather kick that asshole in the ass than kiss up to him Raven.

[Perados]

Originally Posted by mango

Yeah he sounds very reasonable, that's what I thought when I saw it, but then I learned on this thread that he is a convert to Islam. And then I remembered his remarks and how they hang homosexuals in Iran and decapitate them in Saudi Arabia and I saw his remarks very differently. I'd rather kick that asshole in the ass than kiss up to him Raven.

You mean, like it was illegal to be gay in europe, 50 years ago? - like it is still difficult for gays in southern usa? - like the good christs in russia act today?
Christs are no better or worst then muslims, nor does any religion...
Its a question of a developed sociaty - something europe and the usa have prevent in the arabian/muslemic world.

[anpuZA]

"Sure did the moslemic occupation of iberia had a big positive effect on europe - why else do you think it was spain and portugal, who were the first one that reached america? The technology to builed the needed ships was islamic."

Really? Well I will give you that there must have been some innovations / ways of doing things that they might have garnered from the Muslims wrt shipbuilding, but the technology of building ships had existed in Europe centuries before Islam even came into being. Don't know if you know a group of people generally called the Vikings? I believe they were the first Europeans to ever (as far as we know) set foot on the Americas. And their ships looked NOTHING like the Carracks Columbus sailed in. And the Carrack has its origins in the Cogs that plied the trade in the Med and up the Western Coasts of Europe - Cogs being apparently of Dutch origin.

So here is the simple truth - the method and style of building ships was widely shared / copied and improvised from since it didn't take much for someone with shipwrights know-how to inspect a vessel visually and then apply the concepts when they got back to their workshop. Meaning that if the Europeans copied from the Muslims, you can be damned sure the muslims copied from them.



Why do you think the renaissance started in north italy? Its cause they traded with the islamic world.


Yes, and no. You see, the Italians became rich because they were centralized in the trade networks of Europe / Mediterranean and the surround countries. They traded with many people (Muslims too), got rich and this obviously had a positive effect on education since you need a shitload of educated people to wangle the numbers so that you can get even richer. You also need artisans / entertainers etc. so this all meant a great deal for art, philosophy and so on. But the icing on the cake was something completely different, you see the fall of Constantinople was also a major contributor. When the Muslims invaded the city, quite a few intellectuals fled with their knowledge and aggregate writings / scrolls of ancient knowledge in tow. And guess where they went? Away from the "liberal till the 17th century" Islamic world, right towards Italy.



The islamic world was, till the 17th century, the way more liberal world, compared with europe...


Compared to Europe of the middle ages yes. Compared to Europe of the 17th century, I'd say less so and from then on it all went steadily down hill wouldn't you say? I'm not saying every Muslim and every Muslim country on the planet is as intolerant as the media would have you believe, but the majority, unfortunately seem to be. Ah but such are the ways of religion I guess.



And the islam is less liberal, when its about gays, as the christianity??? Did you ever lissen to what the pope says? Both are in total intollerant, when its about gays.

Perhaps you didn't quite read my statement: "... that he chose the religion that is probably one of the most intolerant religions when it comes to same sex relationships "

I am pretty sure if I told the pope I was gay, I might get a prayer said, he might even give me a stern talking to and douse me with holy water, but I am damn sure he isn't going to require someone to whip me 1000 times (unless he's in to that) or even have me beheaded, like they do to some gays in, ...oh what is that incredibly liberal country where they don't allow women to drive called again..., Saudi Arabia (dubyah's BFF's for life).

However I might be wrong.

Also, for the record, I didn't say "Islam is solely intolerant nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah... " in fact I know most religions are fucking intolerant.


Your arguementation shows, moslems become the jews of the 21st century... Watch out, that we dont repeat the same mistakes of the 20th century.


Achtung, Muslim!!! Okay, well now you've insulted me, the Jews and the Muslims in one go. Way to drag anti-Zionism into the discussion, or is that now anti-Islamism?

The Moslems are the Jews of the 21st century? Yeah... no. The Jews are the Jews of the 21st century. 6 million of them died because the Germans apparently have a problem discerning between a good man to follow and a psychopathetique egomaniac loudmouth from Austria. (Never trust an Austrian who dates his own niece I always say.) I don't think the yanks have imprisoned and executed 6 million muslims, yet - though they seem to be trying to do their level best.

As for the repeating history part, honey, that's all we humans ever seem to do these days, repeat ourselves. (Or that might just be the Television schedule I'm thinking 'bout.)


So, now that I've probably riled up a few people, let me rile up the rest and make on thing clear, I don't care if you are a Christian, a Muslim, Hebrew, Buddhist, Sikh, Satanist or even a Mormon, I think most of it is a bunch of hooey, and the non-hooey was just the framework that we humans needed some 2000 plus years ago to get through the day. It might have some philosophical value, but for the most part it's a huge convoluted fairy tale by the modern standards. If you want to believe, fine with me, but don't try to shovel that brand of merchandise down my throat, I don't want it.

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by Perados

You mean, like it was illegal to be gay in europe, 50 years ago? - like it is still difficult for gays in southern usa? - like the good christs in russia act today?
Christs are no better or worst then muslims, nor does any religion...
Its a question of a developed sociaty - something europe and the usa have prevent in the arabian/muslemic world.

But it's also worth noting that when a society becomes "developed", religions of all stripes start dying off, and if religions start making resurgence the amenities of the "developed" society are precisely what get attacked. Correlation does not imply causation, but it nods and winks and points at causation.

[anpuZA]

Oh and what I mean by "the ships look NOTHING like the..." obviously generally it will fit the same kind of concept, unless some people thought Europeans were rowing with logs on the open sea, but in a refined sense the Carrack and the Viking Longboat have some very distinctive differences. Perhaps a Ship-a-phile can help us out here?

[mango]

Lorenzo Becker Post-Contest Shooting - 20YearsOld



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80KeLGmWMs

[Perados]

Originally Posted by anpuZA

"Sure did the moslemic occupation of iberia had a big positive effect on europe - why else do you think it was spain and portugal, who were the first one that reached america? The technology to builed the needed ships was islamic."

Really? Well I will give you that there must have been some innovations / ways of doing things that they might have garnered from the Muslims wrt shipbuilding, but the technology of building ships had existed in Europe centuries before Islam even came into being. Don't know if you know a group of people generally called the Vikings? I believe they were the first Europeans to ever (as far as we know) set foot on the Americas. And their ships looked NOTHING like the Carracks Columbus sailed in. And the Carrack has its origins in the Cogs that plied the trade in the Med and up the Western Coasts of Europe - Cogs being apparently of Dutch origin.

Did spain had access to the viking technology or did anyone out of europe knew that the vikings reached america?
No... So, its undenyable that the occupation of iberia influenced europe on a positive way.
But the ship technology isnt the only thing. Spain and by this whole europe learned mutch about health care and architecture, as they conquered iberia from the moslems...

So here is the simple truth - the method and style of building ships was widely shared / copied and improvised from since it didn't take much for someone with shipwrights know-how to inspect a vessel visually and then apply the concepts when they got back to their workshop. Meaning that if the Europeans copied from the Muslims, you can be damned sure the muslims copied from them.

WRONG... The moslems copied from the greeks and rome (conversated by east rome) and from india.
We lost nearly all these informations with the end of west rome - thanks to the islamic world that the conversated these knowledge for us

Why do you think the renaissance started in north italy? Its cause they traded with the islamic world.


Yes, and no. You see, the Italians became rich because they were centralized in the trade networks of Europe / Mediterranean and the surround countries. They traded with many people (Muslims too), got rich and this obviously had a positive effect on education since you need a shitload of educated people to wangle the numbers so that you can get even richer. You also need artisans / entertainers etc. so this all meant a great deal for art, philosophy and so on. But the icing on the cake was something completely different, you see the fall of Constantinople was also a major contributor. When the Muslims invaded the city, quite a few intellectuals fled with their knowledge and aggregate writings / scrolls of ancient knowledge in tow. And guess where they went?

just to get ritch isnt enough to become educated.
Think about what renaissance means.
And the influence of this was constantinopel and the trade with the islamic world - why else do you think its called arabic numbers? Without them, we would never had a zero and by this no working mathematical system
(and by the way, the center of european trade was the german hanse. North italy only got ritch by the trade with moslems)

Away from the "liberal till the 17th century" Islamic world, right towards Italy.



The islamic world was, till the 17th century, the way more liberal world, compared with europe...


Compared to Europe of the middle ages yes. Compared to Europe of the 17th century, I'd say less so and from then on it all went steadily down hill wouldn't you say?

right, but it has nothing to do with the arguement.

Moslems showed that they can be liberal and this shows that it has nothing to do with the religion

I'm not saying every Muslim and every Muslim country on the planet is as intolerant as the media would have you believe, but the majority, unfortunately seem to be. Ah but such are the ways of religion I guess.



And the islam is less liberal, when its about gays, as the christianity??? Did you ever lissen to what the pope says? Both are in total intollerant, when its about gays.

Perhaps you didn't quite read my statement: "... that he chose the religion that is probably one of the most intolerant religions when it comes to same sex relationships "

i understand your post
And my answer is: he switchs from one intollerant religion to an other. So what?

I am pretty sure if I told the pope I was gay, I might get a prayer said, he might even give me a stern talking to and douse me with holy water, but I am damn sure he isn't going to require someone to whip me 1000 times (unless he's in to that) or even have me beheaded, like they do to some gays in, ...oh what is that incredibly liberal country where they don't allow women to drive called again..., Saudi Arabia (dubyah's BFF's for life).

However I might be wrong.

Also, for the record, I didn't say "Islam is solely intolerant nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah... " in fact I know most religions are fucking intolerant.


Your arguementation shows, moslems become the jews of the 21st century... Watch out, that we dont repeat the same mistakes of the 20th century.


Achtung, Muslim!!! Okay, well now you've insulted me, the Jews and the Muslims in one go. Way to drag anti-Zionism into the discussion, or is that now anti-Islamism?

The Moslems are the Jews of the 21st century? Yeah... no. The Jews are the Jews of the 21st century. 6 million of them died because the Germans apparently have a problem discerning between a good man to follow and a psychopathetique egomaniac loudmouth from Austria. (Never trust an Austrian who dates his own niece I always say.) I don't think the yanks have imprisoned and executed 6 million muslims, yet - though they seem to be trying to do their level best.

As for the repeating history part, honey, that's all we humans ever seem to do these days, repeat ourselves. (Or that might just be the Television schedule I'm thinking 'bout.)

Right, they havent killed 6 millions, yet - but if you compare their current media with the german one out of the early 1930's, they are on a good way

So, now that I've probably riled up a few people, let me rile up the rest and make on thing clear, I don't care if you are a Christian, a Muslim, Hebrew, Buddhist, Sikh, Satanist or even a Mormon, I think most of it is a bunch of hooey, and the non-hooey was just the framework that we humans needed some 2000 plus years ago to get through the day. It might have some philosophical value, but for the most part it's a huge convoluted fairy tale by the modern standards. If you want to believe, fine with me, but don't try to shovel that brand of merchandise down my throat, I don't want it.

But you seam to care if someone is christ or muslem... Otherwise you wouldnt have cared that he became a muslem

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by Perados

So, its undenyable that the occupation of iberia influenced europe on a positive way

Yeah, sure -- Spain got several centuries of unbelievably cruel and increasingly inbred monarchy, followed by a repressive military coup, plus grinding poverty for most of the population. Portugal got rich -- but I would hesitate to hold them up as role models to anyone because they did it by going heavily into piracy and the slave trade. To me, it certainly looks like they're just barely recovering, now, from the contact they had with the Muslim world.

just to get ritch isnt enough to become educated.

That's quite true -- you not only need to be well-off enough to have the leisure to think, you also have to be willing to ask questions whose answers may make you uncomfortable. That's really why the Muslim world is now stagnating intellectually (as are, again, the Catholics, the Mormons, and the less-well-known and smaller sects like the Seventh-Day Adventists -- but since they mostly live in less homogenous countries than a lot of the Muslim world does, they aren't getting quite to the same level of disconnect from reality).

You can't discover very much if you're afraid to discover that, say, there's fairly strong evidence against the notion of a soul, or that the Israelites were apparently never in Egypt, or that the astronomy your priests have been claiming is true is based on things which are factually wrong, or that [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source"]parts of your holy book which you claim were written by different people seem from textual analysis to be plagiarisms of another source[/QUOTE].

Muslims who got educated might start to question the authority of the Koran, which would never do. Or they might learn about other countries, where people don't live in fear of upsetting an Imam, and wonder if maybe the Imams really have all the answers. (And the women might decide they'd like to live somewhere where they stand a good chance of getting killed by the authorities if someone rapes them.) Islamic authority, in those countries where Islam has authority, rests directly on keeping people backwards and ignorant, just as Catholic authority rested for centuries on keeping people backwards and ignorant, and the modern Christian fundamentalists want to make everyone backwards and ignorant as part of their attempts to establish their own authority. The difference is a matter of verb tense.

And the influence of this was constantinopel and the trade with the islamic world - why else do you think its called arabic numbers? Without them, we would never had a zero and by this no working mathematical system

Just plain false. The concept of "zero" was originally discovered and explored in India (although it was also invented in the Americas independently). We use Arabic numerals more or less because there was no particular reason to make up new symbols when switching from the Roman system to digit symbolism when there was one already around locally -- but we could just as easily have taken the Indian or Chinese systems. (The Japanese, for example, did the latter.) The one genuine mathematical accomplishment that Muslim culture actually produced was algebra (which is to say: using symbolic substitution and notation to manipulate equations), and it didn't take long for the Europeans to run rings around the Muslims after learning that; within a couple of centuries it leaked into weapons design and the Muslims were blown away quite literally. (Arabic numerals also didn't really speed anything up for ordinary people; using Roman Numerals and an abacus, if you're good at both, is faster than figuring simple arithmetic on paper. It's only when you're trying to move into algebra and beyond that the abacus ceases to help you.)

Or there's chemistry -- the Muslims basically discovered how to distill spirits, and let everything else descend into mumbo-jumbo and superstition. And distilled liquor became a huge social problem pretty much everywhere it showed up for the next few centuries (on a par with, say, crack or meth today -- people did things like selling their children for money to get gin, or buying a huge amount of gin and drinking themselves to death in a single sitting). It was western, non-Islamic culture which systematized chemistry, discovered atoms and elements and eventually subatomic particles, and everything that follows.

The language of math and science reflects this -- the names of things in basic geometry in modern languages are largely greek and roman; the names of basic algebra terms are arabic -- but once you get bast basic algebra, everything is named by or after non-Islamic culture, because they didn't come up with any of it. There's basically nothing in a calculus textbook (other than things which are also in a basic algebra textbook) which has an arabic name.

Muslim medicine had some high points in comparison to the European version (there was, for example, a Muslim doctor who hypothesized that the black death was spread by things like flea bites, and even came amazingly close to theorizing the basics of germ theory, while the Europeans were convinced it was either magic or the will of god or caused by bad air -- but that didn't particularly help anyone because the Muslim religious authorities insisted that the plague was god's wrath and eventually had him executed for disagreeing, IIRC). But as with so much else, once the Europeans stopped letting their religion get in the way of common sense, they ran rings around the Muslim world. And a substantial segment of the Muslim world doesn't even want to catch up -- there is, for example, significant popular resistance to the very idea of vaccination, like Jenny McCarthy's idiocy but religiously-based and in a much larger portion of the population. They're hardly unique on that, though, since nearly every religion, despite claiming that the human body is essentially just a suit that you have temporarily put on, doesn't like the idea of tinkering with it. So the Catholics hate stem cell research, most Christian sects hate abortion (so important that Jesus said a whole zero words about it!), the Christian Scientists refuse blood transfusions, etc. (About every four months, there's a news story that some hyper-Christian family somewhere has let a child die rather than take them to a doctor, because they believed that prayer would heal right up to the point where the kid dropped dead of hypoglycemia or something.)

[Rarity]

Sometimes I think those people don't know how the Internet works. He must be new here.

So to sum it up:
Lui Marco's video is basically a drawn out message that reads "stop doing things I don't like because I think it is bad, I am morally superior and I know better. Um. That is. If you want to or something." In other words, no matter what the context is, he is an opinionated asshole. So you can either agree or disagree with him since you are free to have your own opinion about someone else's opinion - it won't make him any less of an asshole. Also, there's no reason to bring religion into it or debate it.

SOOOOOOOOOOO~
No.
Please.
Get off of the Internet, Lui.
Get off and stay off.

[incognito]

The thing with the so-called "Islamic science" is that it wasn't Islamic. Yes, those nominally Muslim scholars reached heights which justify calling the period the Arabic Miracle -- but that was despite Islam, not thanks to it. What was caused by Islam was the tragic demise of the whole open rational culture, followed by centuries of superstition and bigotry.

[anpuZA]

First, I have issue with the fact that you seem to think that Europe learned architecture from the Muslims... hellooooo, the Romans were Europeans and as far as I know so are the Greek, and between them we got Corinthian (amongst others) columns, the basis of modern science, the first steam engine (Well sorta, google Hero of Alexandria), cement / concrete (the precursor of), aqueducts, arches and domes. Yes, the very same domes that feature so much in Islamic architecture.

Secondly, I have noted before that I am aware of the influences Islam had on Europe, some good, some bad. The fact that there was such a great amount of interaction between the two religions simply validates the fact that there was a great deal of knowledge exchanged. You can literally drag every older Eurasian and North African civilization into the fray as well since they all had an effect on one another. And don't forget China.

In fact, if you are looking for a somewhat pristine We-Did-Our-Own-Thing type of Civ then you can basically only look at those of Mezo- and South America. Well, to be honest, if you look closely enough you'll see that even there, some degree of exchange, albeit diluted through the ages, had happened. And then the Spanish showed up and blew the whole lot to hell and gone. And you know why the Spaniards were sailing that way? They were looking for a way to the Far East, to trade with them and bypass the Muslims all together. So in actual fact it was the need for cheaper things whot done those poor injun's in. (Well it started out as the Spanish anyway.)

Isn't human civilization just absolutely grand? (SARCASM ALERT)

Oh. Yeah, it's all one civilization by the way, one continuous stream of enterprise and misery all rolled up into one little sphere, orbiting a nondescript ball of gas, in a somewhat boring neighbourhood of a rather mediocre galaxy on the arse end of the universe.

[mango]

Kenneth Clark did a famous 13 episode series in the UK (I would have typed England here a couple of years ago but next year the UK may become history depending on the vote in Scotland, so I'll use it while I still can) on Civilization. It focused on Western and Central Europe and there were nods at the Arabs for saving a lot of classical works that had been lost in the Latin and Greek worlds. Maybe they wouldn't have been lost if the Arabs hadn't conquered the Bizantine, or East Roman Empire's, richest provinces, Egypt and Syria, but that's another story. The Arabs before the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258 had the most enlightened western cvilization. The Mongol invasion which reached the gates of Constantinople was an evil curse on everyone in its' way which included Russia. Europe was spared that, thanks to a city that is called Istanbul today, a misnomer if there ever was one.)

OK, that being said, Europe is the heart of the world, I'm a European American, and we Europeans whether back in the old world or in the 3 other continents that we came to populate created the "modern world", from representative government, to what we call science and the industrial revolution.

But if I wanted to be a chauvinist I would add that allowing Arab to replace Greek and Latin, and Islam to replace Christianity was a great diasaster in those parts of the old universal Roman Empire that fell under the heel, largely a light heel, but a persistent and pernicious one, of the Arabs. But Europe, on the other side of Constantinople, was a bleak, dark series of kingdoms set up by different Christianized German tribes on the ruins of the northwestern quarter of the Roman Empire, the Franks became France, the Visogoths would have given us Spain but for the half-millenium Arab conquest, the Angles gave us England, and the Lombards gave us the northern half of Italy which sort of wants to secede from "Italy". Europe was a darkened, bloody disaster. But the organization of the Christian Church saved part of classical knowledge, as well as the classical languages and the Germans became a co-partner in the Europe that would rise out of the Renaissance to "discover" and conquer the world. For good or bad. Like the Roman Empire, the Europeans created a new world order whether you spoke Spanish or German or French or English. Their empires are gone but the world is still shaking from that act of destruction/creation.

Anyway I know the Caliphate centered in Baghdad before 1258 was then a much more enlightened place than the Europe of my ancestors but fate, the Mongols, changed the course of history. And so it is, that despite repeated near extinctions, the Persians under Xerxes, the Barbarians (Germans!), the Vikings, the Arabs and finally the two Great World Wars between Europeans 1914-1945 that shattered much of Europe and destroyed its' political hold on Asia and Africa, the European dream is as strong today as it was when the Greeks defeated the Persians in the 400s BC. (I know that the European Dream, like all other cultural narratives is missing a lot of key facts but it will be a few decades or centuries yet before a new world culture supercedes it.)

And finally I will admit that the West's influence on the Arab world has turned into a disaster in recent decades when compared with China and India and of course the Americas. And that is something we may all end up paying for.