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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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As an aside, if this isn't too off-topic, in fifteen minutes of Motte browsing I have now encountered the word assabiyah twice, having never seen it before. What's the pronunciation? And from whence the apparently now popular usage?

And from whence the apparently now popular usage?

There was one guy who loved using it in every post he could. Coming back several times on different alts after being banned for one reason or another. I'm still not sure if it's him again or if finally the word has "memed itself over" into other people's heads.

I assume it's pronounced "ah-sah-bee-yah," but I wouldn't know for sure and I have zero connection to the culture it came from.

Thanks. I assume the same just following ingrained rules of reading, but apparently it's also spelled asabiyya which would make me want to extend that Y sound. Unless your bee is more of a beee than mine.

Ibn Kaldun was an Arab sociologist (the first of his field) and, exceptionally for a man of his time, did not accept the 'god willed it' explanation for why the Rashidun Caliphate collapsed. He came up with a term to describe the social cohesiveness and trust of society that degraded over time (of which I would call social capital).

It serves as a warning to elites who assume a high-trust society is a given: that abusing one's legitimacy by acting in arbitrary ways will lead to the decline and decay of one's empire, no matter how divinely guided. A bourgeoise state is reliant on high societal trust for contract enforcement and stability for business. It is the exceptional malefactor that would burn this trust for a temporary boost to quarterly figures.

A fantastically informative post, but you didn't answer either of his questions!

Others had already answered the question, so I felt that adding the historical content would be more helpful than digging up the old SSC post that introduced the concept to the rat sphere in the first place.

no clue on pronunciation, but the popularity comes from it being introduced to the rationalist lexicon by (I believe) Talib, and then absolutely run into the ground by an extremely prolific single-issue poster back in the reddit days. This guy would post between three and five very large top-level comments and a whole host of replies each week, all of them centering on "assabiyah", to the point that every poster unfortunate enough to have been here at the time has the word carved indelibly into their forebrain. It's sort of a meme for the old-timers now.

I must have missed it; thanks very much for the clarification.

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