Based Camp - Why Did Muslims Go from Debauched to Prude？ (The Islamic World is Post-Apocalyptic)

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today.

00:00:02.640 Today, we are going to be talking about a concept that came up in our episode on

00:00:07.200 why Muslims almost never win wars of aggression after, like, within two generations of Muhammad's life. 0.91

00:00:14.680 And in that episode, I commented that Muslim society had become post-apocalyptic in nature. 1.00

00:00:22.440 And I want to talk about this.

00:00:23.760 In this episode, we're going to both talk about this concept of Islam as a post-apocalyptic society 1.00

00:00:29.880 and also discuss how they went from being seen as one of the most debauched societies on Earth

00:00:37.020 with the Jabba the Hutt-like scenes or belly dancers and dripping in jewels

00:00:42.740 to one of the most strict parts of the world morally. 0.57

00:00:47.840 You know, throwing gay people off rooftops, women covered 100%, not even able to, 1.00

00:00:54.420 in some Islamic countries, have both of their eyes unveiled at the same time, 1.00

00:00:58.560 while still staying in countries with high amounts of gay sex. 0.99

00:01:03.320 Although that's something we'll go into in a future episode. 0.98

00:01:06.320 In Islamic countries, they're often like, oh, don't, don't, it's not, it's with a child, it's fine, don't worry about it. 1.00

00:01:11.860 And it's like, well, that, you see, that might make it worse in some other cultural context. 0.98

00:01:17.120 Because, like, you see, when I talk to you and I'm like, what, what, what, what are you doing having sex with that little boy? 0.97

00:01:24.580 And you're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's chill. 0.99

00:01:27.520 He's a child.

00:01:29.220 I was actually, that was the thing I was worried about, was, was not the gay part, but the child part. 0.60

00:01:36.880 So you see, you see, from my cultural context.

00:01:39.260 But anyway, back to the Islamic world living in a post-apocalypse. 1.00

00:01:43.720 Because I think that we really do not understand how directly this is true.

00:01:49.740 If you, a listener, has traveled many parts of the Islamic world, we've traveled pretty extensively in the Islamic world,

00:01:57.980 you will notice when I say it is post-apocalyptic,

00:02:01.140 I don't just mean, like, the Muslim people at one point in the distant past, you know, had greatness and they don't have greatness now. 1.00

00:02:13.000 I mean that you see it all around you.

00:02:16.940 It almost feels like in those movies about apocalypses where you have people camping out in, like, a falling apart New York City or something like that.

00:02:27.780 Yeah, you don't have to imagine that if you go to, like, Morocco.

00:02:31.140 Because you can just do it.

00:02:33.220 Yeah, so I'll give an example of this that I thought was one of the most shocking to me.

00:02:37.300 It was when we were in Morocco and we went not far out of Morocco to, I pulled up the name of the place.

00:02:45.300 You found it?

00:02:46.440 Ait Benadado.

00:02:48.960 I love it when you butcher foreign languages. 1.00

00:02:52.740 Oh, it's so hot.

00:02:53.820 In southern Morocco.

00:02:55.880 And it's giant.

00:02:57.320 It's this giant complex.

00:02:58.860 But if you walk through it, and it's almost like a palace.

00:03:02.420 It was once owned by one of the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.

00:03:06.800 And it's just, I'll obviously put pictures on screen here of it.

00:03:10.140 Do you want me to send you the ones that we took?

00:03:12.540 Oh, yeah.

00:03:12.900 If you can find them.

00:03:13.640 Yeah, oh, absolutely.

00:03:14.380 What you think about it is that it, as you walk through it, some sections of it look almost perfectly maintained.

00:03:21.500 And some sections of it have just completely collapsed to almost nothing but rubble.

00:03:26.980 And there's things in all states in between.

00:03:29.560 And the reason is, is because as the family went on, they would split ownership of it with every generation.

00:03:36.920 And some descendants looted their parts of the castle for anything they could sell.

00:03:41.540 Other descendants tried to maintain it and use it as like makeshift restaurants and stuff like that.

00:03:47.460 But it is very much like a hermit crab in the shell of a castle.

00:03:54.260 And you don't need to be outside.

00:03:55.740 One of the craziest things about a place like, Morocco is a particularly good example of this, 1.00

00:04:00.680 is that you climb to the top of one of the roofs there.

00:04:04.960 And you will see, like, there could be buildings that people just forgot about that have been built around by other buildings in the way the city is built up.

00:04:16.660 And I suspect Rome was probably like this at one point, too.

00:04:19.740 Just like without any long-term infrastructure planning or anything like that.

00:04:24.040 And many of the buildings are obviously absolutely ancient.

00:04:27.440 And I say this, you know, as somebody who's living in a house from the 1700s.

00:04:30.880 These, just everything there was old.

00:04:33.460 And the other interesting thing about the Islamic world is if you go through old Catholic cities,

00:04:38.680 you will often see old, beautiful architecture.

00:04:43.200 But it is maintained.

00:04:45.540 Yeah.

00:04:46.020 Well, very common in Europe.

00:04:47.480 You know, things are carefully updated.

00:04:49.200 No, in the Protestant world, you typically get something different.

00:04:52.180 I'll talk about that in a second.

00:04:53.260 Okay, interesting.

00:04:53.920 So in the Catholic world, it's very common to walk by very well-maintained ancient, gloriful structures.

00:05:03.000 Even if their own civilization is like poor and impoverished and corrupt, they do have a reverence for things of the past.

00:05:09.820 If you go through a lot of, you know, whether it's Iran or Egypt or, you know, Morocco, you go through these places, you will see often old, beautiful structures sort of falling apart, like dilapidated, I guess I'd say.

00:05:25.780 But, but weirdly still in use.

00:05:28.920 It's not like they're dilapidated because they're misused.

00:05:31.560 What happens in the Protestant world was most of the, the, the old, like, glorified, like giant cathedrals and stuff like that were torn down or torn apart. 0.66

00:05:41.060 So it's very cool.

00:05:41.900 Yeah, and they're still architecturally sound.

00:05:43.380 I'm going through and looking at pictures of this one complex we visited that one of the descendants was still living in.

00:05:49.720 And we, we walked through his part of it and it's, it's crumbly, but like in the parts that he lives in, and you'll see this and Malcolm, I'll send you the photos on WhatsApp.

00:05:57.880 He's just going to put carpets on the ground and you can, you can kind of see furniture around and like, there are just parts of the place that are, that look genuinely like ruins and there are just holes and you can see where.

00:06:10.020 Yeah, like you'll reach the edge of one of his like second story hallways and it just is a hole to nothing because the, the person who maintained the part that connected to that fell apart.

00:06:21.840 Yeah, they're just like, I'm not going to bother to keep this up or they didn't have the money for it, you know, whatever.

00:06:27.140 And it's not like this doesn't happen in all parts of the world.

00:06:29.560 I mean, you can buy castles in Europe for basically nothing because no one can afford to keep them up.

00:06:35.960 Right, but this is not very different.

00:06:37.760 You don't have major architectural monuments in the center of major European cities that are basically falling apart.

00:06:43.720 That is very common in parts of the Musselmoor.

00:06:46.140 And what I wanted to talk to you about this is I wanted to contrast this current state of the Muslim world with the true hedonism and debauchery of Islam at its height. 1.00

00:06:58.200 Because I think that when people look at how strict the modern Muslim world is, they think of this as from Muhammad till today, that's how Islam was. 0.93

00:07:08.380 And they have broad images of like exotic belly dancers, maybe giant girls.

00:07:17.500 Didn't that have something to do with Aladdin?

00:07:20.240 It's like Aladdin something something.

00:07:22.560 Yeah, that, that was actually the core of Muslim civilization, that extreme level of hedonism. 1.00

00:07:29.980 Really?

00:07:30.340 For longer than the extremely strict interpretation of Islam that we have today.

00:07:35.640 Wasn't it very selective hedonism though?

00:07:38.380 Like you could be hedonistic if you could pay for it and everyone else was held to very strict standards and especially women were held to very strict standards. 0.71

00:07:45.400 So basically only if you were a wealthy man would you be subject to this and everyone else.

00:07:51.980 Kind of similar to how I would imagine it in ancient Greece, for example.

00:07:56.880 There was hedonism in ancient Rome.

00:07:58.920 If you were wealthy and not a slave and not a woman, but aside from that, most people live pretty austerely. 1.00

00:08:05.980 So actually, not exactly.

00:08:08.540 Okay.

00:08:08.860 So you've got to keep in mind how many of these Islamic societies were structured.

00:08:13.160 Okay.

00:08:13.280 First of all, at, at many of their heights, they were not majority Arab or majority Muslim.

00:08:18.040 They just made up the ruling class. 0.51

00:08:20.700 So their lifestyle was funded by taxing Jewish and Christian local populations. 0.70

00:08:28.740 So, so they didn't need everyone to be able to afford this level of hedonism.

00:08:32.940 The second thing is that they had like lots of slaves, like slavery and slave-like conditions were very common in the Islamic empire.

00:08:43.180 And so the people who frequently were not living these extremely hedonistic lives were living the lives of slaves or slave-like people.

00:08:52.220 Yeah.

00:08:52.300 Like you did have a middle class.

00:08:53.820 The, the percentage.

00:08:55.380 Was there a middle class?

00:08:56.460 Like actually, because I think the, this concept of the middle class is pretty new.

00:09:01.160 I mean, for the vast majority of human history, you were either a serf slash slave slash peasant slash subsistence survivor, or you were one of the very, very, very few people who owned the land.

00:09:13.260 Well, we're typically, if you're talking about middle class in a historic context, you're typically talking about the merchant class.

00:09:18.180 And again, the merchant class also was, I mean, that, that was a new thing starting.

00:09:22.980 What are we going to say?

00:09:25.200 Early Renaissance?

00:09:27.000 There wasn't really a merchant class so much in the relationship.

00:09:29.440 They did have Islamic merchant classes.

00:09:32.000 They were even quite famous for it, right?

00:09:34.180 The, the, the Silk Road trader, right?

00:09:36.720 Was even a stereotype.

00:09:38.000 Oh, oh, yeah, fair point, fair point.

00:09:40.040 Yes, you're right.

00:09:41.340 So, they did exist in the Middle East.

00:09:42.800 Wait, the Silk Road?

00:09:44.000 The Silk Road did not emerge until after the Renaissance.

00:09:49.720 When did the Silk Road emerge? 0.74

00:09:51.080 The Silk Road was an important, not, not necessarily in the Silk Road structure, but it was largely what kept the Islamic Empire wealthy because.

00:10:00.080 Okay, so it's been around forever, like 100 to 1, 130 to 114 BCE.

00:10:05.500 So, I'm totally off there.

00:10:06.620 The Silk Road got poor, and one of the things I didn't go as deeply in on that episode, but was a big thing, is that whenever you were trading for spices or goods that came from India or China or anywhere in that part of the world, and you were in Europe,

00:10:20.860 your traders, until they got the, the, the, the, the pass going really well through the canal, what, I forget what it's called, the Dead Sea, no, not the Dead Sea, what's it called, the Red Sea, the Red Sea passage going, you'd have to go through the, the Muslim territories. 0.96

00:10:36.820 And so they'd add these enormous taxes, because they could just put whatever taxes they want on stuff. 0.69

00:10:41.220 Sure.

00:10:41.340 And it was like a free money machine for anyone who was in, I mean, talk about getting lucky twice, that and then oil.

00:10:46.780 That's a really good point.

00:10:48.660 Wow, lucky ducks.

00:10:50.480 Although maybe not, right?

00:10:51.640 Because I think we, there's a general pattern in history, climactically and otherwise, like with, with just random luck scenarios in terms of trade here too, whereby, whoa, okay.

00:11:02.660 When you have it too easy, it breeds weakness, essentially.

00:11:06.960 Like you're not getting the sufficient forcing function societally, or even just genetically to be stronger and smarter and better.

00:11:14.380 And therefore you suffer in the longterm.

00:11:16.440 Kind of like, if you're not forced to get up and exercise every day, you know, you're more likely to become obese and unhealthy.

00:11:23.400 So it's better to be in a situation where you're forced to do that, even if it's unpleasant.

00:11:28.440 No, I agree with that.

00:11:29.840 I agree.

00:11:30.320 It definitely, I do not think, worked out civilizationally in their favor in the long run.

00:11:34.440 Another thing to keep in mind, or interesting point here, is if you're wondering, well, when did Islam become incredibly strict before we go into all the excesses of Islam in the past?

00:11:44.060 Yeah, well, but because also I, I just thought in general that Islamic law has been, it's not a new thing and that it has always been pretty strict, but maybe I'm wrong here.

00:11:55.460 This is a huge part of the strict and strictening of, of Islam. 0.99

00:12:00.400 I'd say probably 50%.

00:12:02.140 Now it wasn't the only factor.

00:12:03.340 We'll talk about some other factors.

00:12:04.200 Probably 50% was the spread of Wahhabism by the Saudi royal family. 0.77

00:12:10.760 So super recent.

00:12:12.180 In Wahhabism, yeah, wasn't even founded until the 18th century.

00:12:16.160 And for people who aren't familiar, Wahhabism is a very, very strict form of Sunni Islam.

00:12:23.480 And the Saudi royal family basically partnered with, to gain legitimacy, sorry, what is now the Saudi royal family, the House of Saud, partnered with the Wahhabist sort of school of theology and theologians.

00:12:37.320 And we're like, you back us, we back you.

00:12:40.300 That's the core agreement that made Saudi Arabia work and a legitimate state in the eyes of the other Muslims of that territory.

00:12:48.640 Because they expanded a lot through military conquest.

00:12:50.600 And then they have since then been pushing, I mean, they spend billions of dollars a year attempting to push the growth of this Wahhabist school in other parts of the Muslim world. 0.96

00:13:03.700 And then this leads to sort of a perception among, because if you are, you know, a wealthy Saud, right?

00:13:10.740 Or you are a wealthy, you know, in any of these Muslim countries, you're in this sort of dominance hierarchy with the other wealthy people in the other Muslim countries, right? 0.95

00:13:18.160 And you are ever aware of this, both your position within the dominance hierarchy of your own country, and much more so than like America, right?

00:13:28.060 Like in America, I do not think the wealthy families are quite as obsessed with their relative status and perception to other wealthy families.

00:13:37.680 They're more interested in like getting stuff done or what like the average person thinks of them.

00:13:42.460 Yeah, yeah. Or yeah, more, if we're talking about what Thorestein Veblen, was that his name, really popularized with this, this concept of American status signaling, it really was more of a broadcast.

00:13:55.380 You want everyone to know you're rich. You're not trying to, it's not a mean girl style situation where you're trying to convince certain people that you're awesome.

00:14:03.440 Yeah.

00:14:03.680 Well, I mean, you do, no, you do do that to an extent with Americans. I mean, that's why rich people wear like unbranded clothes and stuff like that that only other rich people know about, right?

00:14:11.980 You know, there is an extent to that, but it's not, it's not the same as like a list of known aristocratic plates.

00:14:18.700 And part of this status hierarchy became how you related to Islam with the dominance and rising of some extremely conservative Muslim families that basically are not rich randomly through oil money.

00:14:36.260 So typically people who are extremely religious do not get rich and powerful because-

00:14:43.000 They're too busy being devoted to God.

00:14:45.480 Well, it's not just you're busy being devoted. It's that being extremely religious adds a bunch of externalities to your ability to accumulate wealth.

00:14:53.740 My family has always been pretty religious and whenever they've gotten, and they've gotten super rich a number of times, they ended up donating most of their money to church or to charity.

00:15:03.220 Like, and that's just what you have to do if you have like, if you're not Hassan and it's not all a fake thing, you know, and you're like actually care about downtrodden, that's just a thing you do.

00:15:13.800 But in Islam, you're supposed to do that. 0.99

00:15:18.700 They just got so rich that they were able to both do that and maintain their wealth, right?

00:15:23.380 And so this happened in a number of places, whether it's through, you know, the gas in Qatar or the Saudis sitting on oil or the UAE and the number of interesting economic plays that they were able to pull off that required a lot more intelligence than the other players.

00:15:38.660 But the UAE empire is crumbling right now, but that's a whole other episode. 0.78

00:15:42.600 Basically, a bunch of diplomatic plays they made in like Yemen and stuff like that have super backfired.

00:15:47.540 I mean, they may even face problems in international courts finally for it.

00:15:50.920 But anyway, so because a bunch of random – like imagine in Texas you had something similar to this, sort of.

00:15:59.320 A bunch of random religious evangelical Christians end up sitting on oil money and now being an evangelical Christian is cool and high class in Texas, as it was when I was growing up.

00:16:13.580 So – which is usually not the case, right?

00:16:16.760 And so that's the other thing that caused this sort of flip.

00:16:19.820 But the flip in part happened because of the oil money itself.

00:16:23.000 Then there's the other thing that caused the flip.

00:16:25.380 I guess I'm just going to go totally into all of this.

00:16:27.620 Okay.

00:16:28.320 Please.

00:16:29.180 Which is called the closure of the gates of Ijita.

00:16:31.820 And it's a famous but highly debated concept in Islamic illegal and intellectual history.

00:16:36.840 It refers to the idea that at some point the practice of Ijita, the independent reasoned effort to quantify scholars, mutajids, to derive new legal rulings from the Quran, Sunnah prophets' teachings, consensus jinha, and analogies kihas, effectively closed or became severely restricted.

00:16:55.360 After this supposed closure, later scholars were expected to follow established precedents through takil, imitation or adherence to one of the four main Sunni schools of law.

00:17:05.820 Hanaf, Malaki, Shafi, and Habilib.

00:17:10.300 Again, do you want me to dive deeper into this concept or do you find this less interesting?

00:17:15.520 There are so many elements of this that I don't understand.

00:17:18.260 I lack the foundational context to find this interesting.

00:17:21.940 Well, it is interesting.

00:17:23.740 I'm sure it is.

00:17:24.720 I just don't know like half these words.

00:17:28.300 So I – more than that.

00:17:29.700 I don't know 90% of these words.

00:17:31.640 So it doesn't mean anything to me.

00:17:32.860 I'll explain it differently.

00:17:34.220 You're just saying like a Durka Durka.

00:17:37.120 Durka Durka, Muhammad Jihad. 0.72

00:17:38.880 Well, it's bad.

00:17:40.280 It's true.

00:17:41.340 Durk Durka-la.

00:17:44.840 Durka Durka, Muhammad Jihad. 0.72

00:17:48.080 Hakka Sherpa Sherpa, Abakala.

00:17:52.280 Oh, Durka Durka Durka.

00:17:53.700 So basically, if you go to our track series, if you remember, Simone, I talk about the concept of a living versus a dead religious tradition.

00:18:05.540 Yeah.

00:18:05.720 And I argue that a living religious tradition is a religious tradition where the rules, structure, and interpretation of that religious system or metaphysical system is still an ongoing and active debate.

00:18:18.040 And not just like an active debate, but it's often a conversation.

00:18:20.940 It's part of religious practice to have these conversations.

00:18:26.820 And then in other religions, that does not happen.

00:18:32.780 And you'll get religions that are on various parts of the spectrum. 0.94

00:18:36.080 So Islam is one of the deadest of dead religions. 1.00

00:18:39.940 You simply cannot easily add new concepts to Islam anymore.

00:18:44.340 And that's one of – and you used to be able to.

00:18:46.680 That used to be a core part of practicing Islam.

00:18:48.460 But it just lacks the religious infrastructure for that in the way that the Catholic Church doesn't, because you have a very functional, active –

00:18:56.620 No, the Catholic Church is a pretty dead religious system as well.

00:18:59.440 We'll get to that in a second as well.

00:19:00.860 Well, okay, at least the LDS Church has a fairly dynamic system.

00:19:04.780 LDS is a weird kind of dead, which we'll get to.

00:19:07.760 Okay.

00:19:08.400 Well, then what is alive then?

00:19:12.280 Evangelical Christians are pretty alive.

00:19:14.020 If you –

00:19:14.460 No, if you –

00:19:14.960 They're not exactly centrally governed.

00:19:16.980 I mean, how are they really alive?

00:19:19.240 Well, that's part of the problem with living versus dead religious systems.

00:19:22.060 So I guess I can use Judaism as a good sort of counterweight here to study, okay? 1.00

00:19:26.600 So in Judaism, there was this system.

00:19:30.300 And this is why if you read like medieval Jewish theologians, they're really all about like Muslim medieval theologians and vice versa. 0.90

00:19:38.100 These two groups really liked each other.

00:19:39.340 And this was because during this period, they were both very living traditions.

00:19:45.880 Like a new Jewish theologian would like have some idea and have a debate and write it down.

00:19:52.100 And that sort of stuff is still like required reading for anyone who's serious about studying Jewish theology today.

00:19:58.840 Right, you know, and within Judaism, you had this system and it sort of worked this way in Islam too in the early days where you sort of – you could sort of challenge things that happened one generation ago, but you can't really challenge things that happened more than two generations ago.

00:20:13.460 And so as time went on – and Judaism is interesting because it is definitely harder today to introduce any sort of a new concept within Judaism than it was historically.

00:20:24.040 Historically, you could introduce pretty radical new ideas in Judaism.

00:20:29.120 But these radical reinterpretations happened up until fairly recently within Judaism.

00:20:34.600 Probably the most famous recent one is the Baal Shem Tov who founded what is today like the Hasidic school of Judaism and everything like that.

00:20:42.940 And people know I have a lot of differences with that school and that religious figure.

00:20:48.280 But he did radically reshape what Judaism is. 0.86

00:20:53.160 And during his life, it was an active debate.

00:20:55.420 Most of the rabbinic scholars during his life, like the vast majority of rabbinic scholars during like the height of his activity during his life, like hated him.

00:21:04.820 They thought he was like a demon.

00:21:06.180 Like they were like, nobody talked to this guy.

00:21:07.740 Nobody go near this guy.

00:21:08.940 His ideas are crazy. 0.71

00:21:10.340 Don't interact with him. 1.00

00:21:11.660 He is a scam artist.

00:21:14.600 And despite that, his ideas ended up basically winning.

00:21:18.580 And for a number of generations, the descendants, I forget what they're called, they're called the Minjids or something, of the rabbinic scholars who were all against the Baal Shem Tov, they persisted as a Jewish school.

00:21:30.260 And they still exist within like Israel and stuff like that.

00:21:32.680 But there's just not like a on the rise or particularly relevant ideological faction within Judaism right now.

00:21:38.660 In Islam, this closed away earlier.

00:21:40.300 I guess I'll go to the other tradition so we can sort of talk about this.

00:21:42.560 Because Mormonism was one of the, at its height, the most living of living religions.

00:21:49.080 You know, this is the Orson Pratt period and stuff like that.

00:21:51.900 Where, you know, when you had all the colonists still coming over and stuff like that, the like higher ups in the Mormon community would just like go out and spitball and you could like read the writings and it's crazy. 0.67

00:22:00.600 It's like, hey, how do you think like a soul works?

00:22:03.000 Where they'd be like, well, maybe it like splits into pieces and can become pure.

00:22:08.800 And maybe like when you die, your soul splits up and then gets like resorted into different people.

00:22:14.200 Or maybe life, you need to like do it a certain number of times.

00:22:17.420 And they'd like have like completely different medical physical frameworks.

00:22:21.440 Leaders in the community, Orson Pratt is the best example of this, would just hypothesize about this stuff.

00:22:26.780 And they'd be like main characters in the Mormon tradition, right?

00:22:32.340 And they wouldn't even be like the sitting prophet, right?

00:22:35.260 And then as time has gone on, really the sitting prophet, basically, if he's going to make an update to Mormon theology these days, he typically makes it with the counsel of like a few other people in the community.

00:22:49.220 It's not like every Mormon meeting is like, hey, let's talk esoterica, man.

00:22:53.540 But there was a period in Mormon history where that was absolutely the case.

00:22:57.020 So it's weird.

00:22:59.140 And you can't easily do this as a Mormon either. 0.67

00:23:01.220 Like you can't be like, hey, I have a different theory about how this should be interpreted if it's like radically different.

00:23:07.600 People would be like, well, that's against, you know, what's the main church says right now, right?

00:23:12.320 Catholicism is sort of the same way.

00:23:13.720 With Mormonism, you can do it more. 0.98

00:23:15.380 But Catholicism is a living tradition, but in an incredibly structured format, right?

00:23:23.060 Like the living part of the tradition, if you want to be part of the living Catholic tradition, you have to become a priest or a nun. 0.88

00:23:29.560 Like if you, or at least found one of the major orders or something like that, right?

00:23:34.780 Like you, you have to be part of the bureaucracy and interacting with the bureaucracy.

00:23:39.860 And then that stuff gets passed up and you might be able to get into, you know, one of those big councils that they hold or something like that.

00:23:46.020 And then your ideas get put into Catholic Catholic doctrine, right?

00:23:50.140 Like it can update, but the updates become more obscure and bureaucratic.

00:23:54.680 Like if you look at the various, I forget what they're called, but when the Catholics all get together to say the stuff that's supposed to be unchangeable and not go back on it. 0.97

00:24:04.460 And once it's done, they have these conferences.

00:24:07.420 Councils, councils.

00:24:09.100 And if you look at the original ones, it's like a bunch of actual theological questions.

00:24:14.260 How should we conceive of Christ and stuff like this?

00:24:16.540 If you go later, it just gets more and more bureaucratic.

00:24:21.400 It's bureaucrats arguing about bureaucratic structure. 1.00

00:24:23.620 But what about the wild swings in favor of various progressive causes and ideals that the Catholic Church has made?

00:24:33.960 I don't think that those swings, I think that that is core to what it's always been.

00:24:39.160 Consolicism has been one of the primary champions of stuff like socialism since the very first socialist movements.

00:24:44.380 The idea that Catholicism was ever not, if you look at the United States, the Democratic Party was the Catholic Party pretty much until this last election cycle.

00:24:55.260 Like if you look at JFK, who is JFK?

00:25:00.480 Joe Biden.

00:25:01.320 Yeah, and Biden. 0.94

00:25:02.060 Yeah.

00:25:03.000 Okay.

00:25:03.860 Okay.

00:25:04.240 So, so this idea that.

00:25:07.720 Well, yeah, I mean, and even now with J.D. Vance, he's just being massively criticized by the current Pope, also American.

00:25:17.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:25:18.060 But, but I mean, and think about the tradition.

00:25:20.260 I mean, Catholics are all about like, you know, taking in, you know, immigrants, helping out the poor, everything.

00:25:26.880 Like, this is all, that's all their bag, man.

00:25:29.180 Like, I don't understand when people were like, you know, they haven't folded on stuff like women priests and, and, and the gay stuff yet. 0.73

00:25:36.600 Like, they haven't actually folded.

00:25:38.240 They're moving in that general direction.

00:25:39.960 They have not folded on anything that's in the Bible.

00:25:42.980 So they, they, they basically stayed, you know, I think the Catholic Church, like, didn't do some big veer in one direction or another.

00:25:49.880 They're just being what they've always been.

00:25:51.340 And I think it confuses people because they begin to think of the Catholic Church as like, not different from the evangelical church, which is always a very conservative church, a conservative, i.e. in world politics.

00:26:02.860 But if you're talking about the reason I call, obviously, techno-Puritanism would be like the, the most extreme example of a living tradition in a modern sense, because it is just a radical discussion about ideology that is meant to change with every generation.

00:26:16.400 But when you close off interpretation of, of structures, all any generation can iteratively add is basically new rules on top of the preexisting structures.

00:26:28.060 And this is where I think it causes a lot of problems for modern Judaism, because they, they just have so many rules at this point, right?

00:26:36.220 Because you can, you cannot like wipe out a lot of the previous rules.

00:26:39.180 And so it's just iterative, iterative, iterative.

00:26:41.760 And eventually I think it breaks if you do not have the ability to audit like the source code of your religious system.

00:26:47.440 Sure.

00:26:47.740 Yeah.

00:26:48.140 The code base becomes unmanageable.

00:26:50.380 Yeah.

00:26:50.980 I can't remember which Silicon Valley company had a code base.

00:26:54.840 There were like original code base was called the beast, I think.

00:26:58.140 And there was one person whose entire job was just to keep it from breaking every day.

00:27:03.300 I feel like this is RFAB's code base these days.

00:27:05.800 Oh God.

00:27:06.960 I have to keep going back and fix it.

00:27:08.160 Hey, it was mostly working now.

00:27:09.620 People playing it, enjoying it, which is cool.

00:27:12.060 But I'll go into how, how decadent the Muslim world was at its height, right? 1.00

00:27:17.820 So if we go for some, some poems, this is the kumiyat of Abu Nawal.

00:27:24.680 So some lines from it, his fine wine and his boy religion, no less than my cash.

00:27:31.280 Fine wines and a young boy.

00:27:33.860 What's interesting is that the one of these that Islam has given up more strictly is the fine wine and not so much the young boys. 0.97

00:27:42.380 If you go to many Islamic countries today, like Afghanistan, you will see higher rates of gay sex than you see in most countries. 0.96

00:27:51.020 But they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. 0.99

00:27:52.960 Don't worry about it, bro.

00:27:53.940 It's, it's, it's okay.

00:27:56.440 It's with a child.

00:27:57.920 And you're like, how, that makes it so much worse.

00:28:01.000 But in the Islamic mind, that actually okays it in, in many contexts.

00:28:04.840 And we'll get into why this is so common in Islamic countries today, in, in, I'm going to do some other episode on this.

00:28:12.580 Because yeah, like Islam, Islam got like really strict on some areas, like no adult gay sex and no alcohol, but anything you do with children is fine. 0.91

00:28:24.320 Wine coursing between the water and the force from the hand of the boy with the griddle on his slender waist, a straight, well-shaped lad. 0.68

00:28:32.520 Griddle.

00:28:34.000 Griddle.

00:28:34.400 Griddle.

00:28:35.720 I'm picturing someone with some kind of like griddle set up where they're like making pancakes, like a cigarette, cigarette style, like, you know, waitress woman, but he's just making pancakes instead of frying bacon.

00:28:46.460 I would dig that.

00:28:47.720 Well, they were really, come here, griddle boy. 0.97

00:28:50.280 Come here, griddle boy.

00:28:50.860 Empire as well.

00:28:51.540 Okay.

00:28:51.940 Yeah.

00:28:52.360 It's probably the, like the gayest of the major empires. 1.00

00:28:55.820 To the extent where, and I think Rubyard goes into this and you know, like he's.

00:28:59.240 More than the Romans though? 0.94

00:29:00.960 Oh yeah.

00:29:01.800 Way more than the Romans. 0.91

00:29:03.200 Really?

00:29:03.400 Yeah.

00:29:03.620 So here's an example. 0.99

00:29:05.480 Well, I mean, we'll get, the Romans at their gayest are about as gay as the Muslims at their gayest. 1.00

00:29:11.600 Okay. 0.99

00:29:11.880 On average, the Muslims were gayer. 1.00

00:29:14.280 Wow.

00:29:14.780 Okay. 0.99

00:29:15.080 The Romans at their gayest were extremely gay. 0.99

00:29:19.440 They were so gay. 1.00

00:29:20.280 They were so gay. 1.00

00:29:21.100 Yeah. 0.96

00:29:21.280 We should probably do an episode on that.

00:29:23.120 Like.

00:29:23.140 We did, but it was about like, does, does proliferation of gayness or broad acceptance of it predict the downfall of civilizations? 0.94

00:29:34.180 Remember?

00:29:34.360 Yeah.

00:29:34.680 One of my favorite, like just this level of psychosis of some Roman emperors, I think it's when they would cut off their members and then like throw them in a room full of snakes.

00:29:46.580 Another emperor used to love, I think, to just throw venomous snakes at the crowd when they'd like come to see him as a joke.

00:29:54.260 That's, that's fun.

00:29:55.300 That's pretty good.

00:29:56.100 It's, it's the t-shirt cannon of his kind, of his time. 0.97

00:29:59.240 But he said, this time you die.

00:30:00.660 Is he going to get through gold or snakes this time?

00:30:05.480 Yeah.

00:30:06.060 Well, you never know what you're getting.

00:30:08.220 It's, it's the original trick or treat.

00:30:10.420 So here I'm going to draw from a key source is Al-Takabriz, Takri, Al-Russo, Wal-Al-Muka, Durka, Durka, Durka.

00:30:18.920 It means history of the prophets and kings.

00:30:20.940 Okay, so the, he's talking about the, the Al-Tabri explicitly says that Al-Amin was inclined towards male servants, Gillam, to the exclusion of women, and was madly in love with a boy named Kothar, named after the heavenly river in paradise.

00:30:36.940 Al-Amin even wrote poetry about him.

00:30:39.480 Kothar is my faith and my worldly life, my sickness and my physician. 0.99

00:30:43.460 He is the most helpless of people who persistently seeks his beloved.

00:30:48.320 No.

00:30:48.640 On, so I was asking for sources here, because I want to make sure I have good sources on this.

00:30:54.160 On this guy dressing Zabahita, this was his mom.

00:30:59.220 Okay.

00:30:59.720 This guy's mom got annoyed that he was always sleeping with men, so she dressed up slave girls as boys. 1.00

00:31:06.140 Oh, surprise woman. 0.99

00:31:09.340 So she selected female slaves who resembled boys and dressed them in masculine attire with short hair and turbans, hoping to attract her son to them. 0.99

00:31:19.520 It didn't work.

00:31:20.720 She wanted grandkids so bad.

00:31:23.540 She wanted them so bad.

00:31:25.840 No, no, it gets worse.

00:31:26.980 So these cross-dressed girls were called Gillamati and became a fashion that Al-Muray popularized. 0.99

00:31:34.440 He organized whole corpse of them with bobbed hair, belts, and silk turbans who served at drinking parties.

00:31:42.160 And then this became popular in the region, because, you know, obviously the sultan is doing it. 0.67

00:31:48.460 They're like OG flappers, except not feminist at all. 0.97

00:31:54.740 Eyewitness style reports preserved in historical compilations via Philip Heide, citing medieval texts, describes Al-Amin's female pages as bobbed-headed and dressed like boys and wearing silk turbans, serving wine and blending erotic ambiguity. 0.82

00:32:09.020 That is so fascinating, just from a fashion standpoint.

00:32:13.640 That even the lower classes begin to imitate it.

00:32:18.180 Wow.

00:32:19.840 Fashionable cross-dressing based on one person's, not even one person's sexual proclivities, based on one mother's desperate attempt to get grandchildren.

00:32:31.640 That was totally botched.

00:32:33.360 That is so fun.

00:32:35.280 Oh, delightful.

00:32:36.100 I can't even imagine being that mother and just being like, I need grandchildren, right?

00:32:41.300 Like that's what it's all about.

00:32:41.600 Yeah, and then you start to see just normal people dressing like that and just being so freaking frustrated that, you know, I've managed to set off a major fashion trend, but do I have grandchildren?

00:32:54.660 No!

00:32:55.040 So if we're talking about under Akbar or Jongheer, Jongheer was notorious for heavy opium and alcohol use.

00:33:04.840 Detailed in his autobiography, he describes daily hunts, mango feasts, and wine sessions.

00:33:10.340 Mango feasts? 0.96

00:33:11.740 Oh! 0.60

00:33:12.080 Calling wine a source of ecstasy.

00:33:14.320 He owned hundreds of ornate wine vessels.

00:33:17.080 One of the fun ones here is-

00:33:18.240 Well, this just seems like super, I don't know, he just sounds ahead of his time, if we're being honest.

00:33:25.200 Okay, okay, okay, we'll go further here.

00:33:27.140 Honestly, no, people are all about mango feasts these days.

00:33:30.400 They love collecting wine.

00:33:32.080 Talk about addiction to opium and alcohol.

00:33:34.620 Let's talk about the Ottoman Empire here, right?

00:33:36.580 Tell me something that's unusual.

00:33:38.100 Been through their palaces, and their palaces are just like absurd, the Ottoman palaces. 0.99

00:33:43.340 Is it cool or what?

00:33:45.120 No, just in terms of their opulence and the way they were structured.

00:33:48.600 If you look at something like the main palace in France, what's that one?

00:33:53.960 Versailles.

00:33:54.960 Versailles, yeah.

00:33:55.700 Or the palaces in England.

00:33:58.140 Well, the palaces in England are not that impressive.

00:34:00.560 They're pretty uncomfortable, yeah.

00:34:02.200 If you go to something like the one in Scotland, what's it called, where they, Balmoral, where the royal family summers, that entire house is maybe five times as big as the house we live in.

00:34:15.280 And I don't consider my house particularly big.

00:34:18.580 And the grounds are fine.

00:34:21.460 They're just like regular rich people grounds.

00:34:23.660 If you look at the-

00:34:24.960 It wasn't meant to be, it wasn't, it was always meant to be a private estate.

00:34:29.340 The reason why some palaces are very big and grand is they were meant for entertaining.

00:34:34.540 They were meant as a place of state.

00:34:36.640 Balmoral was always meant to be a country retreat.

00:34:38.900 It is-

00:34:39.540 If you look at even like the main British palace, it's just not that big.

00:34:44.080 Buckingham Palace.

00:34:44.860 Buckingham Palace is pretty big.

00:34:46.560 And most of it is dedicated to statecraft, not for like living in.

00:34:50.040 If you look at Versailles-

00:34:51.420 I think, look, what you're missing though, and I don't know why this might not have been the case,

00:34:54.880 but I think this has to do more with like epidemiological history and not other things.

00:35:00.420 Because a big trend that seems to have existed or been very common among English kings was

00:35:09.120 you wouldn't really have one big palace investment because you were constantly moving from one

00:35:14.580 to the next to avoid the plague or some other disease outbreak.

00:35:18.080 Well, also they had to clean it out.

00:35:18.960 So you had to have a network of palaces that were small.

00:35:21.460 Because people didn't have working sewer systems some of the time. 0.57

00:35:24.360 Yeah, you had to air them out because they'd get too gross and crappy.

00:35:27.580 And so then you'd just wait and let someone, I don't know, roughly, metaphorically hose them down.

00:35:34.260 And then you'd go to another one.

00:35:35.420 Something like Versailles, and this was very much the point of Versailles,

00:35:38.420 was to bring all of the nobles together.

00:35:40.900 Yeah, it was to create a jail for all of the elite and nobles who otherwise would be on their own

00:35:46.620 plotting against the kings.

00:35:47.860 It was a guilted jail.

00:35:49.080 It was basically meant to overlook.

00:35:50.360 Look, so the Ottomans were at a different layer.

00:35:54.040 Like, if you look at the structure of the palace, it was just clearly pleasure room after pleasure room.

00:36:00.240 Which is not a thing you had in the Versailles or the English palaces.

00:36:06.280 So at its peak...

00:36:07.000 The design choices, just to be clear, about European palaces really had to do more with granting people

00:36:14.820 increasing access to the king or the reigning monarch.

00:36:20.060 And it was more about meeting spaces and whatnot.

00:36:22.760 It wasn't about...

00:36:24.000 I mean, not really parties so much.

00:36:27.240 Yeah.

00:36:27.460 Yeah, it had 400 rooms at the Tepaki's palace. 0.96

00:36:31.380 400 rooms?

00:36:32.540 400 rooms.

00:36:34.520 And so, if we're talking about a sultans like Marad III, who expanded the harem to up to 40 wives,

00:36:42.080 each in separate quarters, alongside dormitories for hundreds of slaves,

00:36:46.160 and fathering over 100 children through relentless sexual pursuits, 1640 to 1648.

00:36:50.340 Known for his insatiable lust, he kept 300 concubines in addition to his 40 wives.

00:36:57.600 That is exhausting.

00:36:59.200 I would not want to put up with that.

00:37:01.120 That is...

00:37:02.680 That's just too many for you.

00:37:05.280 Yeah, too...

00:37:06.580 300 too many.

00:37:09.140 And these palaces, when Europeans would go there, like in 1862,

00:37:15.240 they were shocked, not just at the polygamy, but the regular nudity in the palace.

00:37:20.760 People walking around naked.

00:37:23.160 The...

00:37:23.880 I want to be clear...

00:37:26.500 Well, you act as though the UK is so high and mighty with their palaces,

00:37:31.620 and no one was walking around naked there, but it was just too freaking cold.

00:37:34.880 I'm sure they would have that they could...

00:37:37.380 You know, had the ability to...

00:37:39.260 They did potentially get up to hijinks, like in the UK, like farting competitions and stuff like that.

00:37:44.200 No, that was France with the whole famous...

00:37:46.700 That was France, okay. 0.87

00:37:48.080 Yeah, again, the UK, as we've pointed out, you typically get a gradient in the Muslim world, 1.00

00:37:53.620 like the highest level of debauchery.

00:37:55.620 Then you get medium debauchery in the Catholic world. 0.70

00:37:58.220 But they really got up to some stuff.

00:37:59.740 Any good stories you can tell us about Louis' court or...

00:38:03.820 Oh, well, King Louis XIV.

00:38:05.420 That is the one that was famous for the Muslim... 0.97

00:38:07.960 Yes, good stories about crazy... 0.90

00:38:09.200 Well, yeah, they would...

00:38:10.560 Well, they wasn't...

00:38:11.480 I mean, there was debauchery for sure.

00:38:14.920 But that's obviously...

00:38:16.160 I always talk about Louis Philippe, the brother of Louis XIV, who famously dressed like an 0.99

00:38:20.260 absolutely fabulous woman and had a persistent male partner very much in the open.

00:38:24.360 But no one really made a big deal out of it.

00:38:26.440 There was...

00:38:27.360 It was...

00:38:28.480 Maybe this was actually Marie Antoinette's court.

00:38:30.440 But in one of the French courts, either the 16th or the 14th, they had a farting contest

00:38:35.620 to determine whose fart could sound most like a fine trumpet, which is just wonderful.

00:38:39.300 And...

00:38:40.180 But to be fair, when they talked about the same-sex relationships, I think they called

00:38:45.820 it the Italian vice.

00:38:46.980 So I think that was more seen as an Italian slash Roman thing.

00:38:50.120 Who were also Catholics, by the way.

00:38:52.380 Yeah.

00:38:52.740 But then, like...

00:38:53.180 So I think the further south you go, the more debauched it got.

00:38:56.660 Because remember, also, in the court of King Henry VIII, the whole thing with the...

00:39:05.180 Oh, my gosh.

00:39:08.660 King Henry VIII.

00:39:09.540 No, the second wife. 0.99

00:39:10.780 And Boylin.

00:39:11.520 The Boylin sisters were kind of famous for being sexually mature and they could do all 1.00

00:39:17.560 the fun stuff because they learned it in the French court.

00:39:20.440 So basically, the further down you got.

00:39:22.360 But then the French court was, oh, those Italians. 1.00

00:39:25.560 Oh, my gosh.

00:39:26.000 The Italians, yeah. 0.75

00:39:26.460 Yeah.

00:39:26.760 So like, everyone's south is just a little more sexually out there.

00:39:31.100 And I'd also point out with King Henry VIII, I'm actually a big fan of King Henry VIII.

00:39:34.660 I think he was a pretty excellent monarch.

00:39:37.000 And I think he is really unfairly thought of today.

00:39:41.880 He was not...

00:39:42.900 Like, his idea of debauchery was hunting tournaments.

00:39:45.860 Like, that's not...

00:39:46.560 Like, when he was younger, he was apparently, like, very fit.

00:39:49.080 He was.

00:39:49.400 And would go on, like...

00:39:50.600 But he was very, very, very devoted to his wives.

00:39:54.220 I mean, is my...

00:39:55.140 Yeah, he slept around.

00:39:56.260 And the only reason that he kept going through wives, by the way... 0.99

00:40:00.140 He wanted a male heir.

00:40:01.760 Yeah.

00:40:01.940 It's because he didn't want a male heir for himself.

00:40:05.100 He knew, because all British monarchs know this, if you don't produce a male heir, that

00:40:10.660 is existentially bad for the kingdom.

00:40:12.400 They go to war with each other if you don't...

00:40:14.100 Like, you almost always have a revolution where, like, hundreds of thousands of people

00:40:19.180 are going to die. 0.95

00:40:19.880 Two millions of people are going to die horribly if he cannot produce a male heir.

00:40:24.900 Not producing a male heir was existential for the safety of his kingdom, right?

00:40:30.740 Like, that is what he believed from the history.

00:40:34.160 And he also believed from medical knowledge at the time that women, when they couldn't 0.99

00:40:39.100 conceive, it had something to do with their fault, right?

00:40:41.820 Like, he did not...

00:40:43.000 There was no medical understanding.

00:40:44.560 But he was also a very faithful person.

00:40:46.600 So he, I think, got, for his time, reasonably paranoid that God was trying to send him messages,

00:40:53.040 that when there were miscarriages and when there were other mishaps, that he was being

00:40:57.520 told something's wrong and he was trying to listen and respond accordingly.

00:41:01.480 And the Vatican could have just given him a dispensation.

00:41:03.680 Well, yeah, except that there were corrupt ties and Catherine of Aragorn hadn't been in.

00:41:07.680 No, they were completely nepotistic.

00:41:08.480 The core reason, I remember, they didn't give a dispensation is because his first wife,

00:41:12.280 who he was married to, was the sister of a king in, I want to say, Spain or France that

00:41:19.160 had huge connections with the Pope, maybe even related to the Pope.

00:41:22.020 Yeah, I think Catherine of Aragorn had some kind of familiar relation.

00:41:25.260 She was not very far removed from the Pope himself, so...

00:41:28.500 Yeah, which is obviously super corrupt for religion to do that and put that many people's 0.87

00:41:32.380 lives at risk, but they don't care. 0.92

00:41:34.180 You know, historic Popes, they kill people, no problem. 0.98

00:41:36.960 But anyway, the point I'm making here is the level of degeneracy of Islam. 1.00

00:41:41.720 And if you watch old movies about the Middle East, like when you're like, how recent was

00:41:46.800 the Islamic religion, just a completely debauched religion? 1.00

00:41:49.960 It was recent enough that pretty much all 18th century explorers saw it that way.

00:41:54.380 If you watch any of the old movies, it's like, go watch a 1920s movie or something like that.

00:41:58.820 If any scenes take place in, you know, Arabia, as they would say, or something like that,

00:42:03.760 they're typically pretty debauched.

00:42:06.580 But it's really hard for me, at least, to tell as an outsider how much of that is just

00:42:11.800 fetishization of another culture.

00:42:13.920 You see this across a lot of different cultures that, oh, well, the Native American woman is frisky, 1.00

00:42:23.140 although I guess Pocahontas' name, wasn't that actually, like, it meant frisky?

00:42:27.200 But, or the Asian woman or whatever, like, there's a tendency to... 1.00

00:42:33.560 No, I actually, I actually would strongly encourage you.

00:42:35.680 I do not know, I think it's because my family, they liked watching old movies, so I've seen

00:42:40.460 a lot of them.

00:42:41.100 Okay.

00:42:41.300 Old movies that take place in the Orient, as they would have said back then, you typically

00:42:46.480 see, like, the lavish, like, parties and stuff like that.

00:42:49.580 But you do not see the sexualized women dancing on stage constantly, or slaves dancing in the 0.76

00:42:55.820 corner, or, like, you don't see that.

00:42:58.080 If you look at the old Westerners with a lot of Native Americans, you might see the concept 0.92

00:43:03.380 that Native American women or tribal women walked around without tops on, but they were 1.00

00:43:08.200 not constantly, they didn't have, like, slaves in cages constantly doing sexy dances, right? 0.98

00:43:14.040 Like, the, the, if you want a modern, if you haven't seen what these, these old depictions

00:43:18.520 look like, I think Java's palace is a pretty good depiction of the way that the Islamic 1.00

00:43:23.140 world was historically depicted.

00:43:25.120 You had, like, slave guard eunuchs guarding, like, slaves in couches.

00:43:29.160 Java the Hutt's palace was insufficiently fancy.

00:43:32.760 The, these Islamic palaces were incredibly gorgeous.

00:43:36.740 By the way, if you want to know, I thought, I wanted to dive into, like, what is the life

00:43:39.720 of one of these female harem slaves? 0.97

00:43:42.280 Yeah, was it decent?

00:43:43.900 Would this be an aspirational role?

00:43:46.380 Yeah, so they entered the channel, the harem, typically at 7 to 15, they're sometimes younger.

00:43:51.740 They were either purchased on slave markets, captured in war raids, given as diplomatic gifts

00:43:56.640 from governors or foreign ruling elites, or recruited or presented by families at later periods.

00:44:02.380 Upon arrival, selection was strict and multi-stepped.

00:44:05.440 Physical, physical examinations by wildlife, experienced caray, or chief eunuchs, checked

00:44:10.680 for health, beauty, virginity, so there was no defects, to ensure suitability for service

00:44:15.360 or intimacy.

00:44:16.480 Psychological slash behavioral evaluations assessed docility, intelligence, and potential.

00:44:22.780 Not only the most promising, beautiful, graceful, and intelligent advanced towards higher roles.

00:44:27.700 Others stayed at menial tasks.

00:44:29.560 They were immediately converted to Islam, if not already, given new Muslim names, often

00:44:34.100 poetic, reflecting appearance or personality, and cut off from family contact to foster loyalty

00:44:39.800 to the palace.

00:44:40.440 Kind of like a dog, so you'd be named, like, Spot, or...

00:44:43.660 Yeah, the training process, right?

00:44:44.940 Newcomers started out as alchemy or novices, and they entered a Navateen period called Ace 0.97

00:44:52.160 Miliki that lasted several years in segregated dormitories under the supervision of senior

00:44:58.500 women and eunuchs. 1.00

00:45:00.580 The training focused on assimilation and skill building.

00:45:03.320 They studied language and religion, learning Ottoman Turkish, ethnic recitation, and Islamic

00:45:07.720 precepts and core creeds, court etiquette and manners, palace protocol, graceful movement,

00:45:12.680 speech, deference, and behavior in hierarchical settings, art and talents, so they had to learn

00:45:18.600 music, dance, poesy, recitation, embroidering, reading, and writing.

00:45:22.840 Yeah, but you had food and lived in a nice place for any period of most of human history.

00:45:27.680 That's pretty great.

00:45:29.580 Yeah, and they had to learn cleaning, cooking, and child care as well.

00:45:33.580 What an average day would have looked like is you would rise early in the morning for

00:45:36.880 prayers, absolutions, and personal groomings.

00:45:38.920 Then you would go to a communal meal where you were assigned tax, served by higher ranking

00:45:43.580 women, such as cleaning chambers, etc. 1.00

00:45:45.940 Then you'd go to your education training, and you'd get a little bit of leisure time in

00:45:50.020 the evening.

00:45:50.700 Now, I mean, sign me up for that.

00:45:51.980 If I'm born in that period of history, absolutely yes.

00:45:55.380 If you want a really good show about what it's like, because you are always trying to win the

00:46:02.000 sultan's attention.

00:46:03.020 You were trying to win favor.

00:46:04.480 You were trying to sort of politic with the other women or the women who were in his attention.

00:46:10.560 Unless you were just quiet, quitting, and trying to keep your head down.

00:46:12.960 You didn't get bothered by the sultan to get three square meals a day, and you got some

00:46:16.680 leisure time.

00:46:16.940 Yes, there's a great anime about this if you want to see it.

00:46:19.820 It doesn't take place in the Ottoman court.

00:46:21.320 It takes place in the Chinese court.

00:46:23.400 Yeah, this sounds similar to Chinese harems.

00:46:25.860 Called the Apothecary's Diaries.

00:46:28.520 What was the autistic princess who reminds me? 0.99

00:46:30.780 She's not a princess. 0.81

00:46:31.380 The main character is an autistic physician girl, like very obviously canonically autistic

00:46:37.080 and very dispositionally, I think, similar to Simone.

00:46:40.460 But she's just a great main character.

00:46:43.520 But you really get to see that these courts are just these places of constant intrigue.

00:46:47.360 And her character, like Simone said she would, is basically quiet, quitting, as a concubine. 0.99

00:46:53.540 She could be a higher-ranked concubine if she wants to. 1.00

00:46:57.060 Like, some of the, there are instances in which high-ranking officials show interest

00:47:01.580 in her, or even purchasing her, but she's always avoiding it so that she can just mess 1.00

00:47:07.320 around with her books and her biology, which is what she's really into.

00:47:12.340 She's just a nerd, is basically the story. 0.99

00:47:14.620 That's good to me.

00:47:15.240 Yeah.

00:47:15.420 But I think that it's important that we remember, because one of the things that I think a lot

00:47:22.920 of people think of Islam today, like, you know, you hear somebody like Andrew Tate or

00:47:27.000 something say, you know, say like, well, in Islam, they actually still all follow their

00:47:30.960 religion and stuff like this.

00:47:31.880 So this is a new thing, and it is something that has been allowed to arise and metastasize

00:47:38.660 in Islam, in part because Islam is living through a post-apocalypse of their own civilization 1.00

00:47:46.040 right now.

00:47:46.960 And I do not really see any realistic mechanism for them to reclaim that civilization at this

00:47:56.180 point.

00:47:56.420 But you cannot, as you know, when I talk about a religion being an active conversation, right? 0.86

00:48:01.520 And I talk about like Protestantism, various parts of it, obviously, if you go to the time

00:48:06.600 of the founding fathers and you read the founding fathers of our country's works on religion,

00:48:12.620 a lot of them did exactly what we are trying to do, which is sort of find ways to combine

00:48:17.900 the modern science of the times with Christian metaphysics, right?

00:48:22.840 And that's what I mean when I say I'm founding like an active religion.

00:48:26.100 Like they were constantly in communication with each other within the wider community

00:48:29.880 around like, okay, so how do we integrate this new scientific finding with our religious

00:48:36.960 understanding?

00:48:38.280 Actually, I think that that's a perfect example of what a living religion is versus a dead 0.81

00:48:42.380 religion.

00:48:43.140 A living religion will say, how do we integrate X new scientific finding with our religion 0.96

00:48:48.740 metaphysical understanding?

00:48:49.760 How can it advance our understanding of God and of religion?

00:48:52.360 Whereas a dead religion will say, oh, there is a new scientific finding, either the world

00:49:00.480 of science and the world of religion are two different things, and we do not need to integrate

00:49:03.400 them at all.

00:49:04.260 Or they will say, well, I just don't care that there's a new, like it's wrong if it goes against

00:49:10.640 my religious interpretation, right?

00:49:13.300 And when you get that, there's a certain level of just sort of societal advancement that is no

00:49:18.940 longer possible.

00:49:20.120 And as I also often say with Islam, as I pointed out in another recent video I did on Islam,

00:49:24.380 which is I think one of our best videos ever, why Muslims don't win wars. 1.00

00:49:27.700 Wars of conquest, I should note, not wars of defense.

00:49:29.580 Obviously, they win wars of defense.

00:49:31.060 Anyone can win a war of defense.

00:49:32.980 The core thing I say there, like if I was going to update, Islam worked, and when it worked,

00:49:39.680 it worked as a religion of a ruling minority.

00:49:42.180 It has never really been particularly functional as a dominant religious group, and it really

00:49:49.000 was never structured to be the dominant religious group, which makes it quite different than

00:49:53.740 something like Judaism, which evolved and was always structured to be the religion of

00:49:58.980 the masses.

00:50:00.280 And then if you look at Christianity, Christianity was a religion that took Judaism and then augmented 0.75

00:50:09.140 it and used it to, you can look at my video on like, was Christianity really as revolutionary

00:50:14.760 as people claim it as?

00:50:15.580 I think it's one of our better videos historically.

00:50:17.600 And I point out that the reason that Constantine took Christianity and adopted it as a state

00:50:23.900 religion is it allowed for an alternate sort of deep state.

00:50:28.300 Like Rome had a big deep state problem at the time.

00:50:30.720 The Praetorians were constantly causing problems for people, constantly offing emperors, basically 1.00

00:50:34.880 acted like they ran everything at that point in the same way that Janicieres eventually

00:50:37.860 did within the Ottoman Empire.

00:50:39.840 And so he has all of these officials executed.

00:50:43.280 Thank God.

00:50:43.940 The total boss.

00:50:44.980 I love Constantine, by the way.

00:50:46.440 And he's like, okay, well, I need some-

00:50:48.480 Didn't Constantine have a, oh no, he was, he was the, the Catholic one.

00:50:54.920 Yeah.

00:50:55.060 He's the one who really founded what I think of as modern Catholicism.

00:50:58.500 Yeah.

00:50:59.420 And I really like Constantine.

00:51:00.680 So Constantine then says, we need a deep state, right?

00:51:05.300 Like we, but I cannot trust the existing bureaucratic deep state because it's all like nepotistic

00:51:09.160 and tied to everything.

00:51:10.080 And it's like, oh, this new Christian thing, they've got churches in every city, right?

00:51:13.860 Like they've got an existing governance structure.

00:51:15.800 And if I favored them because they've been disfavored and persecuted for so long, they're

00:51:20.420 going to be really loyal to me.

00:51:21.940 So like, let's just make that the deep state.

00:51:25.500 And then he's like, and now we have to get a consistent theology.

00:51:28.880 We need to get up.

00:51:29.480 And so we kept holding councils and stuff like that to, you know, when they, when the, when the

00:51:32.740 theologians would fight, he'd be the, the Constantine would be like, no, you guys get

00:51:36.200 on the same effing page.

00:51:37.780 I am doing this for bureaucratic reasons.

00:51:39.960 Okay.

00:51:40.600 Like we need the empire to function well.

00:51:43.120 So it was constructed as a religion for governing a large imperial system.

00:51:51.280 Like when, when, when it was being constructed and it's very like sort of nascent as it was

00:51:55.920 being applied, obviously Jesus didn't have that in mind, but Christianity changed a lot

00:52:00.500 in its early days that you can watch any of our videos on that stuff.

00:52:03.180 And, and some of these early, not even like theological concepts, but just like how you

00:52:09.520 structure like the election of popes and stuff like that, right?

00:52:12.660 Like this, this is all bureaucratic structure that matters a lot to the way the religion

00:52:16.300 works.

00:52:16.760 But Islam, when Islam was created by Muhammad, it was a ruling elites religion, right? 0.97

00:52:24.380 They would go, they would conquer territory and then they would rule this non-Muslim territory. 1.00

00:52:28.900 And that is also why it became a religion of such excesses.

00:52:32.620 And there's been iterations of Islam that tried to eschew those excesses. 0.95

00:52:36.120 There is, there's even like this communist branch that ended up, it's still practice

00:52:39.940 in Oman.

00:52:40.580 Really?

00:52:41.300 Constantly have rebellions.

00:52:42.340 They're not as extreme as they used to be, but they didn't believe that like leaders

00:52:44.560 should live super luxurious lifestyles.

00:52:46.500 But that always sort of falls apart in Islam after a while because, and I guess the question 0.68

00:52:51.300 is, is why is Islam not as good at protecting against debaucherous lifestyles? 1.00

00:52:57.380 And I guess it is because it's doing it now.

00:52:59.760 It's doing it to such an extreme now that it's preventing, I think, a degree of like

00:53:05.120 real commerce and dynamism within its particular regions.

00:53:09.220 So it basically, I will say that this happened in reaction to that.

00:53:12.360 Like Wahhabism actually happened because you made a bunch of random people rich. 0.90

00:53:15.920 That's, that's the real answer of what happened to Islam. 0.94

00:53:18.280 I think the lack of dynamism is, is, is a product of, among the areas where you could

00:53:27.820 have that dynamism, you don't have it because you don't have the historical hardship due to

00:53:33.980 the amount of wealth that everyone has inherited by sheer luck that would enable that.

00:53:41.160 A lot of people though, in response to your video on why Muslims haven't, you know, been

00:53:48.700 famous for their manifest destiny and taking over the world is, is due to excessive cousin

00:53:54.900 marriage causing too much sort of like accumulated genetic damage.

00:53:59.720 I think more it's, it's a matter of circumstances, not, not breeding both a culture and people

00:54:08.560 and societies and economies and governments that are built to make resourceful and enterprising

00:54:15.080 people.

00:54:16.600 But I mean, the cousin marriage is, is a real thing.

00:54:20.440 It doesn't help.

00:54:21.080 It doesn't help.

00:54:22.020 Yeah.

00:54:22.900 Yeah.

00:54:23.240 And, but, but they've been doing that forever.

00:54:25.080 They did that even before the Arab raids that conquered most of the world. 0.99

00:54:28.900 So, you know, I don't, I don't know if that alone can explain the, the state of the community

00:54:37.040 at this point.

00:54:38.160 No, it doesn't help.

00:54:39.260 Of course it doesn't help.

00:54:41.180 Well, I think there's a lot more to it than that.

00:54:43.440 Another interesting thing about Islam is if you're familiar with modern Muslim cultures,

00:54:47.040 it's like a very high power distance culture and they still very much have this ruling elite.

00:54:51.140 Like that's the part of Islamic society that still functions is the ruling elite. 0.99

00:54:55.480 It is the other parts of Muslim society that don't really function. 1.00

00:54:59.200 And it's because they never really were meant to exist.

00:55:02.520 The ruling elite made the mistake of converting their pores. 0.94

00:55:06.940 And, and it wasn't really ever structured for that.

00:55:11.460 Well, interesting.

00:55:12.700 Yeah.

00:55:12.920 Thanks for walking me through this.

00:55:14.240 Cause I've just, my understanding of, of the history of Islam, et cetera, is just non-existent.

00:55:21.060 It's just not there.

00:55:22.380 So anything you tell me is, is new and a benefit to me.

00:55:25.620 And I appreciate that.

00:55:27.200 All right.

00:55:27.920 Love you to death, Simone.

00:55:29.140 I love you too.

00:55:31.720 I'll see you in the next room.

00:55:32.920 Gotta get to, oh, there we go.

00:55:35.520 Friend.

00:55:36.740 I was teasing Octavian today as one must, of course. 1.00

00:55:42.040 You want to tilt your camera down a little bit.

00:55:44.500 So we're closer to.

00:55:45.200 So I was teasing Octavian about how much he loves his helicopter.

00:55:56.240 And I'm trying to, you know, I'm trying to channel my first grader history to speak on his level.

00:56:05.120 And I say, well, if you love helicopters so much, why don't you just marry one?

00:56:10.680 And I had this instant regret feeling because I'm like, oh no, what if he unironically identifies as an attack helicopter?

00:56:18.960 Because of you.

00:56:19.800 That's the thing. 0.59

00:56:20.660 That's where you screwed it up.

00:56:21.320 And decides to become like that Eiffel Tower woman and just actually marry a helicopter. 1.00

00:56:28.380 And I actually, I had mentioned the Eiffel Tower woman to Torsten's ABA therapist at one point.

00:56:36.100 And she was like, no, no one marries a building. 0.96

00:56:39.460 And I'm like, lady, you don't even know.

00:56:41.560 And so I looked her up and that hussy left the Eiffel Tower for another architectural wonder. 1.00

00:56:50.580 With a bridge or something?

00:56:51.700 You can't trust women who marry edifices and buildings and whatnot. 1.00

00:56:56.780 No, because they just leave them.

00:56:59.200 They're totally unreliable.

00:57:01.200 Can't even stay with you.

00:57:02.380 It's the Eiffel Tower.

00:57:03.900 You know, it's like leaving a wonderful housewife, you know, who just does everything right.

00:57:08.300 What did the Eiffel Tower ever do wrong?

00:57:10.480 Anyway, Octavian, much to my relief, says, oh, of course I wouldn't marry a helicopter.

00:57:18.140 And then I think he's going to finish the sentence with something along the lines of, I'm a human and it's a helicopter and we can't get married.

00:57:25.100 But no, he's like, because the ring would just fly right off.

00:57:29.100 The ring would just fly right off.

00:57:32.740 The ring would just fly right off.

00:57:34.960 So now I know his criteria for can I marry it, which is, will the ring stay on?

00:57:41.720 Good to know, Octavian.

00:57:45.520 Thanks.

00:57:46.660 I have so much faith in your prosperous pairing eventually.

00:57:52.080 Oh, God.

00:57:54.780 I love first graders, though.

00:57:56.620 I love six-year-olds.

00:57:58.220 They are delightful people.

00:58:00.580 He's getting better at flying his RC helicopter.

00:58:03.320 It's insane to me.

00:58:04.660 Like, how do people do group-based lessons when you can't bribe children with individual things?

00:58:10.620 Like, okay, you know, finish this milestone and you can go fly your drone.

00:58:15.020 You know, you can't do that on a group scale.

00:58:18.000 Yes.

00:58:19.420 And he has his little helicopter.

00:58:21.480 It's so sweet.

00:58:22.160 It's really durable.

00:58:23.180 He likes it a lot.

00:58:23.820 Do you know what it's called if we're recommending it for other people?

00:58:26.080 Oh, yeah.

00:58:28.020 Let me look it up because I did a lot of comparison shopping on Amazon.

00:58:31.400 And he can actually fly it pretty well.

00:58:32.960 Like, he can fly it through my ring light and everything like that.

00:58:35.140 Yeah, after just one day.

00:58:37.140 Yeah.

00:58:37.540 So it's great for younger kids.

00:58:41.300 Helicopter, helicopter.

00:58:43.420 Whoever told me about the Bosnian song, I hate you now. 1.00

00:58:46.000 Because after every lesson, one of the rewards, going back to that, is to play the Bosnian song, Helicopter, Helicopter.

00:58:54.680 And he can't even really wrap his head around the idea of languages yet.

00:58:59.260 But now he's just mumbling Bosnian lyrics to himself.

00:59:03.300 Farakopter, farakopter.

00:59:04.880 He has no idea what it means.

00:59:06.480 I don't either.

00:59:07.320 I don't.

00:59:07.660 The farakopter doesn't seem to, like, translate to anything.

00:59:10.920 Like, maybe fathercopter.

00:59:12.560 But I don't understand.

00:59:14.340 Anyway, it's the Busco, B-U-S-S-G-O, RC Helicopter on Amazon.

00:59:20.740 Remote control helicopter for kids with 30 minutes flight.

00:59:23.880 Two batteries.

00:59:25.180 Seven plus one LED light modes.

00:59:27.700 Altitude hold RC toys.

00:59:29.400 Yeah, it has literally a takeoff and landing button.

00:59:31.660 So you don't even have to really, you can just have, the kid can just start off by having their drone take off and land.

00:59:38.180 And they feel like they've accomplished something and they get really excited about it.

00:59:41.000 The whole family is excited about it.

00:59:43.280 Last night, the kid threw a rager well past our bedtime.

00:59:47.500 Flying the helicopter around.

00:59:50.060 Every night, because we're in a really old house, we can hear absolutely everything through the floors.

00:59:54.940 So we don't even need cameras in their room, even though we have them also, because I can literally just lie in bed in this bedroom and hear them and hear every little sound and know exactly what they're doing based on my knowledge of who's, like, the footfalls and everything.

01:00:12.400 They were going hog wild last night.

01:00:14.740 It was, people think, I guess, you know, this whole episode has been about debauchery, but, like, no one knows debauchery until you've encountered a roving band of small children at night, past their bedtime.

01:00:31.700 All right.

01:00:33.540 Excited.

01:00:35.320 Well, we'll.

01:00:37.500 Oh, gazootectex.

01:00:39.900 Little man.

01:00:40.700 By the way, people are wondering why we're not talking directly about the situation in Iran right now.

01:00:45.740 I really want to talk about this more, but Simone just had major surgery on her face and jaw, and she can't talk. 1.00

01:00:52.420 I can't.

01:00:53.540 Oh.

01:00:54.580 Ah.

01:00:55.400 Oh.

01:00:56.980 Wait.

01:00:58.920 I'll go.

01:00:59.980 One of us.

01:01:01.020 One of my men.

01:01:02.640 You are going to go be on my team.

01:01:05.100 Oh, no.

01:01:05.960 He's stuck in me.

01:01:07.220 We are sorry.

01:01:08.480 We are sorry.

01:01:08.980 We are sorry.

01:01:09.920 We are sorry.

01:01:10.700 We are sorry.

01:01:15.120 What happened?

01:01:16.140 You lost your blanket?

01:01:17.660 Then go fight for it.

01:01:19.820 Hey, can I get it?

01:01:21.060 I can find you.

01:01:23.340 Ah.

01:01:24.140 Fire tight, Deb.

01:01:25.440 Mmm.

Based Camp - March 05, 2026

Why Did Muslims Go from Debauched to Prude？ (The Islamic World is Post-Apocalyptic)

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