CaptainPanic

! Moderator Note Please note that this thread is from 2011. Not all the participants in the discussion are still active on our forum.

A classic: I've found them to be untrustworthy, mostly because they make up everything. (any rep should go to the original authors)

From XKCD:

I don't like that.

It is my experience that the people who stick to the science generally receive more positive than negative rep. Negative rep is sometimes generated by those people who either complain about the forum or its members, or otherwise get themselves in a position of them vs. everybody else. (Or just the ordinary crackpots and trolls, but I think we can ignore that in this discussion). Sam, you have joined an existing community, with its own rules and values. Most people here stick around because they like what they see. If you are trying to change that, it is only logical that you will receive some negative rep, because you're going against the flow. Also, as the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If you adopt a positive style, you will get more positive rep. Yes, it's sometimes emotional and unfair. And I will explain below in a very dry way why this is logical and to be expected. You seem to think that science should be very dry, and without opinions. While the school textbooks can be like that, real-life science is actually full of opinions. If you want to get some funding for cutting edge research, you have to write a proposal in which you put some expectations. This will be evaluated by some people who just form an opinion. At the largest scale, its our politicians who form an opinion about the fields of science and who decide on funding. We all know how clueless they are. Likewise, a peer review is, unfortunately, not 100% objective. People can bitch about style or details. And in many scientific subcultures, little fights break out in the scientific community all the time. At a conference, you can generally hear by the type of question if the person asking the question likes or dislikes the speaker. I have seen people who deliberately ask a mean question in front of hundreds of people. Also, there are great battles being fought in the grey area between fundamental and applied science. Applied science is very subjective. There is never a single best solution to a design problem. You mentioned the religion forum, and I think that's worth a remark all by itself. I would actually agree that we might as well cancel the rep system in religion altogether (but I don't think that's possible for technical reasons). Religion, on our forum, and in my opinion, is just a fight between religious people and non-religious people. And they never ever agree. That discussion is not scientific at all, even though one side claims to be the scientific side. The structure of every religious discussion is like one based only on opinions. Therefore, rep also follows that trend. My solution is to avoid our religious forum like the plague. I don't post on it and I don't moderate it either. I just pretend it is not there at all. So therefore this forum, with all its quirks, its negative rep, its emotions, and its lack of objectivity, is a really good representation of the scientific community in general. I hope you can learn to appreciate it. Btw, every forum needs its rebels, and therefore I respect your posts.

Did you even read the whole thread, or did you just join our forum to troll around a bit? Anyway, you score 10 points for stereotyping and having prejudices. I am involved in this thread, so I only point to our board rules. Check especially section 2.1.c, regarding prejudices.

Welcome to all new people. As Phi for All said (4 posts up from here), we've already started the party. In fact, the Scienceforums.net is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year!! W00t!

After a discussion among the staff, we have decided to give alpha2cen a 3-day suspension for continuous thread hijacking with off-topic nonsense.

From all the staff of the forum, I wish all the new people a warm welcome. Hope you have fun learning/reading/writing/posting/thinking/discussing/laughing/etc...

eric555 has been banned for failing to successfully engage in a two-way communication with a fellow human, and generally just not making any sense. The ban was discussed among the moderators, and was approved with 6 in favor, and 0 against (a minimum of 4 is required).

Hello! My name is CaptainPanic. I've joined this forum somewhere in 2008, and I already have about 3,600 posts on this forum, and I am a moderator here. I thought I'd just say hello (and show that other people really do read all your introductions). I hope you will all participate in our existing threads, or your own threads, with questions, answers, opinions or other types of posts. Anyway, you're all welcome to the forum.

Here's a link to an article about seeing spots (not necessarily blue though). It can be as simple as low blood sugar. But it can also be more serious. Of course, getting professional advice is always a good idea. I certainly encourage you to see a doctor. But I would also take a critical look at your diet... and if you go to see a doctor be sure to mention your diet too - so you don't get diagnosed with something weird when you only should eat one more slice of bread at lunch, or occasionally take some fruit. I've experienced the low blood sugar spots myself a few times... and often when I was so engaged in something (mostly work or gaming) that I kinda forgot to eat or drink enough. It's nothing that some fruit, a decent lunch or even some soft drink can't help. It went away within (approx.) 30 minutes. Obviously, there is no instant remedy - it takes a little while before your blood sugar is up again... but fruit sugars seem to be the quickest in my limited experience.

Hello! I thought that I would be pointing you in the right direction (or, rather, point you all away from wrong directions). If you think it is better to spend months building a dream (which won't work), then don't come to a science forum. If you want to build something that does work, then please take some advice from engineers who know what they are talking about. When people plan to build something which is obviously not going to work, why should I keep quiet? When someone is hungry, you can either give him a fish, or teach him to fish... but you are asking me to let him starve, and find out how to fish by himself. I do not agree with that kind of thinking. You can follow classes and do research - that's always a good idea. But maybe there are some people around who can save you a lot of time by giving some advice. So far, the majority of the people in this thread have shown no idea of the power that is needed, or how to control the power output (making it only on or off will not work). I'm sorry if I only pointy out problems, without solving them. But I just do not have any interest in building such rollerskates myself. That doesn't mean I cannot reply to this thread.

Mahna mahnam! Is there a post limit to this thread, or shall I write my next post in 2.26 min, after this brilliant song is over?

Again, I am not convinced that this is any different in other countries in the world. Over the last years, in almost every country in the world, the gap between rich and poor has grown. But that's a different topic altogether. Probably best dealt with in another thread. My work here is done.

Ah, and there we have the core of our disagreement. I have said earlier that rich and poor should be compared worldwide. Compared to the rich west, everyone else is poor. If we take the rich western nations as the reference point, we can conclude the following: - All muslim countries are poor - All Asian countries are poor - All South-American countries are poor - Heck, all the world except us and a few small exceptions is poor Therefore, we can safely correlate "not being us" with "poverty". Still, it has nothing to do with Islam.

You quoted the following from that link: But a quick Google search revealed that according to the UN, worldwide: What I have said all along: Muslim countries, not even Saudi-Arabia, are either extremely rich or poor... they're quite average.

I get tired of fighting this discussion... some people seem determined to make the point that Islam and poverty are related, but show no proof, use definitions in a very broad way, and place the burden of disproving it on the other camp. Just do me one favor: YOU look up the income distribution of Saudi-Arabia, and compare that to some other non-Muslim country... then we're talking. Until then, I will just ignore this. I have posted multiple posts here to show that Islamic countries are quite average in an economic sense, and by no means exceptionally poor. And you just blunder in with a post that Saudi Arabia also has poverty. Well, so does the USA. That also proves nothing.

According to wikipedia, it means "voluntary submission to God", which has quite a different sound to it than just "submission".

Those two countries also happen to be democracies... Even though the Iranian one doesn't seem to get along very well with most other democracies in the world.

Thanks that you added it. This entire thread is a very selective presentation of facts, so I am not surprised that this has been ignored so far... Why use facts when you have already made up your mind that Islam is a bad religion? Facts can only undermine this bias. Something else which was ignored so far is that many Islamic states were colonized by Western powers at some point, and many only became politcally independent after WWII - and many countries are economically still dependent on the more powerful economies. The main purpose of colonization was to increase wealth of the Western countries (it was not philantropy), so goods and resources were shipped back to the colonizers. This, obviously, was not very helpful for the local economies. None of that has anything to do with Islam. The Western countries did not selectively pick out Islamic countries to colonize.

Ok, I found the one graph that I think is the answer, namely this one: The white circles are the current GDP per capita in 2010, averaged for entire regions of this earth. Note that MENA (click for wikipedia picture) is "Middle East and Northern Africa"... It excludes the extremely poor Afghanistan, but also the relatively wealthy Turkey. I hope that we can agree that it's still a reasonable representation of the "Muslim countries"? Then please note that the white circle representing the current GDP per capita is larger for the MENA than for the following regions: - Sub-Saharan Africa - 800 million people - China - 1.3 billion people - India - 1.2 billion people - CIS (Russia and other former Soviet republics) - 300 million people - Asia excluding China/India/Japan - (couldn't find how many people) ----------------------------------------- + - A total of 3.6 billion people So, MENA has a higher GDP per capita than more than half of the world's population. And I therefore conclude that we cannot make a point that links Islam to poverty... because the region is not poor. We (I guess most people on this forum) just belong to the top 10%, and we are just incredibly rich.

Ok, so you say that the GDP per capita is not the perfect tool to evaluate wealth of the population. The OP mentioned that "Muslim countries are poor and do not compete well in the global economy". In such economic terms, GDP per capita is an accepted tool to evaluate the economy of a country. But if you do not accept it, please provide us with another tool to evaluate the average wealth of the populations of Muslim countries in relation to non-Muslim countries? Because it is essential that we evaluate this before we can discuss the alleged link between Islam and poverty. That graph is a rather selective presentation of facts. I have the following problems with it: - From the top-10 most populated countries, China and Nigeria (both non-Muslim) are missing in that chart. - Relatively rich Muslim countries like Malaysia or Iran are missing too. - Wealth is - as far as I'm concerned - something which should be plotted on a log-scale, not a linear one. In a linear scale, the large majority of all countries fit in the lowest category. - I count only about 80 dots on that chart, there should be >200. - The black dots are pasted over the yellow/red ones in the top-left corner, emphasizing the black ones. - In the top left corner, only the black ones are named, while other colored dots do not have a name. Also, I would claim that this graph does not link poverty to Islam. It does however suggest that Muslim countries have a very high percentage of Muslim population (namely about 100%). In that respect they distinguish themselves from other countries, where the percentage of "people who say that religion plays an important role in their lives" is lower than 100%... This graph shows the map of the world, and how religious people are (without leaving half the world out). But that's not the point we're trying to prove, is it? We're trying to (dis)prove a significant correlation between poverty and Islam. So, India (poor and mostly non-Islamic) disproves the correlation. All sub-Saharan Africa disproves the correlation. Rich Muslim countries disprove the correlation. In fact, if you would run the numbers, I bet there is no statistical significant correlation at all. I think that the correlation between the Hindu religion and poverty is a lot stronger, because of the economic state of India. Poor countries do have things in common, but the type of religion it is not. So, before we re-enter the discussion trying to find out why Islam and poverty would be linked, I think we should either broaden is (and make this non-religious, and include sub-Saharan Africa and India at least) or really prove that the correlation is there. So far I am not satisfied at all.

They are usually asked to back up the claims and/or explain the assumptions that were made, but hardly ever succeed. Most threads that are moved to speculations cannot be backed up because they are based on assumptions which aren't true. And that's why I think this thread belongs in speculations. Threads in the speculations section suggest a certain (lack of) scientific rigor and I think this thread should be placed there as well, because the main assumption on which the entire discussion so far is based is not true, or at least not proven: Muslim countries aren't significantly poorer or richer than other countries.

In order to ask yourself why the Muslim countries are so poor, you first have to prove that they are poor. And they are not (click for a list of Gross Domestic Product per Capita). Muslim countries are quite average - on average about the same as most Asian, South American or some African countries. Muslim countries are distributed quite evenly across that list of GDP per capita... They are not present in the bottom 20 (those are (almost) all sub-Saharan countries). And there are two Muslim countries in the Top-5 of highest GDP per capita: Qatar and United Arab Emirates. Sure, that's because of their oil. But aren't large Western economies running well because of access to resources too? There is a clear link to access to resources, access to cheap labor (abroad) and the success of an economy. I conclude that this attempt to link Islam to poverty is based on thin air. The numbers do not suggest any significant correlation between religion and economy... so the entire discussion is pointless, and should be moved to speculations. The opposite might however have some foundation: that poor (and uneducated?) people more often fall victim to religion (in general). But I cannot believe that this correlation would be stronger with regard to Islam than any other religion.