Egypt's Country Club Conservatives

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http://www.salon.com/2012/01/26/the_gop ... _of_egypt/

Honestly, why is socially conservative religious idiocy so often coupled with rightwing economic policies?

Rightwing economic policies create poverty, and religions thrive on poverty, since poverty makes charity an essential part of the economic system.

+1

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/paul07/paul07_index.html

Haha, that's a funny joke. Excuse me while I donate to the poor, impoverished citizens of Hong Kong.

Wait, what? Is this some kind of troll? Hong Kong is well-known for its high poverty rate.

How is the poverty rate calculated? Relatively?

And this is why Egypt is screwed.

They get to choose between right wing conservatives or a military dictatorship.

That's not much of a choice.

The Brotherhood is still preferable to the Salafists and other hardliners I guess. The whole talk about them being threatening is pretty silly, they're pretty close to the Al-Nahda party that won elections in Tunisia and nobody seems to mind them. It's up to Egyptians whether or not the Brotherhood is preferable to the Mubarak/military regime now I guess and I'm not sure they'll really have a choice by the actions of the military recently. It seems their 'revolution' accomplished very little. If I were a Christian in Egypt, I'd probably even miss the stability of the Mubarak regime. I've felt these 'Arab Spring' revolts were all being manipulated in some way, I didn't trust them at all.

Honestly, I find them less frustrating than libertarians. It's easier to dismiss the religious right. And at least they still tend to think in terms of public good (although in a very warped way), whereas libertarians use a rather alien moral system that is impossible to argue with because the basic premises are different from mine.