Groups find some tiny theological wrinkles (almost always of no real substance) to separate from others (say, Northern E

And, of course, Sunni Islam’s attitude towards Christianity has changed over time: a rise in intolerance since the late 18th C. Consider the continuous drop of Christians in the Levant.

However, there was another problem I noticed: Videos that had been published longer ago had a higher chance of getting more views. They simply had longer to accumulate them.

I played around with various thresholds and these ones seemed to filter out these low-sub low-view videos pretty well. I tested the code on a few different topics and was starting to get pretty decent results.

This identity-mentality business is responsible for many other things. Suicide bombers in the East Mediterranean and the Middle East weren’t initially Salafi Muslims; it was in the late 20th Century that the practice (reintroduced almost two millennia after the sicarii) started spreading, with Greek Orthodox Pan Levantine followers of Antun Saadeh. Nothing to do with the virgins one meets in heaven, the kind of ex post attribution one hears today.

Amin Maalouf, another Christian Lebanese, understood the problem rather instinctively and saw the contradictions in the current historical accounts². How come Islam is the one currently associated with intolerance, when it was the Catholic Church that’s traditionally held that role. Just consider the obvious evidence: you find many more Christian minorities in the traditional lands of Islam than the reverse. It was Catholic groups that did the (viciously murderous) Albigensian crusade, the Great Inquisition, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and others. Catholicism has not changed; people and their culture did. Last time I checked, the scriptures have not been modified; they were the same during the Inquisition, before the inquisition, and now.

Nor does comparing theologies make sense, unless of course one has been brainwashed by sociology texts and becomes unable to think with minimal clarity. The (Protestant) Puritans who inhabited New England and the Salafis of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf have nearly identical theologies, based on shared communitarianism (refusal of a centralized authority), iconoclasm (absence of representation, of saints, and of any elaborate aesthetics), absence of an organized “church”, and very stern practice of the religion. And never forget that it is the exact same God that they are worshiping.

Weber introduced, or promoted the idea that Protestants have a certain work ethics thanks to the values imparted by their religion. The idea — like almost all of sociology — is marshmallow-soft. Consider the reverse: that Protestants at the time happened to have a certain culture, and other protestants were likely to embrace the culture of their peers because religion acted as an attractor for identities. For one can always find (thanks to the narrative fallacy) some stuff in a religion that confirms a given theory. Weber and the Weberians missed that the Industrial Revolution hit very early on northern France and Belgium (both extremely Catholic), while the Catholic South remained agricultural and socially conservative, so one can see with the naked eye that it cannot be about something proper to the theologies or the associated doctrines and practices. It is just that cultural norms are contagious within identities, and too mush so. Incidentally such cultural norms haven’t yet hit the Mediterranean since it skipped the industrial revolution. To any statistician, the “Protestant ethics” is a North-South marker, not a Protestant-Catholic one.

Unlike other networks and pagan creeds, the three Abrahamic religions are mutually exclusive — owing to the minority rule — even if somewhat backward compatible (Islam accepts, theologically, Christianity and Judaism but not the reverse; Christianity unrequitedly integrates the Old Testament). You could worship both Jupiter and Baal, just as you can have Franco-Japanese cuisine, but must be either Christian or Muslim. And the differentiation — and the loss of synchretism — which started in Judaism during the rabbinical era, has accelerated in modern times: Jews and Muslims in Morocco shared shrines; at some point it was the same for Shiites and Maronites in Lebanon. It is that absence of media and television allowed local customs to override remote religious edicts. In Doura Europos, c. the 6th C., the same room acted as synagogue, pagan temple, and church. And in Lebanon for a long time the difference was between Qaysi and Yamani (Northern and Southerner), a wedge perhaps inherited from the Byzantine Green and Blue, and that cut across religions (the Druze Qaysis viciously battled the Yamanis in their largest battle, Ayn Dara, leading to the resettlement of the Yamani Druze in the Golan heights).

So, it matters, for economic development, who you identify with. You embrace their appetite for boring, repetitive tasks, a focus on industrial growth and working in a hierarchy, the extraction of an individual from her or his family, the appetite to wait in line for hours without beating anyone, virtues (or defects) that allowed for the West’s industrial revolution.

The robust alternative, that people imitate the (contagious) mores of those of their group, tradditionally defined by religion, makes vastly more sense. People like to dress, act, even think in broad terms within the style of others members of their group, people they identify with — what we tend to loosely call “identity”. We will see further down that schisms and heresies look theological but, typically, in an inverse manner: group invent theological differences in order to separate — heresies have the attributes of ethnic or cultural separatist movements.

When I looked at the results, some of them looked promising. However, I did notice a problem: For videos with really small subscriber counts, the score would get heavily amplified and surface to the top.

So my point here is that the Weberian narrative built on the notion that religious transformations (say, as with the reformation) determine attitude and culture fails historical logic. And trying to change the theologies and doctrines makes absolutely no sense. You need to change the mentalities, and cultural norms — if you can.

Firstly, if a channel has built up a large audience, then it will be much easier to get a comparable level of views compared to a smaller channel. Some of this may reflect more experience leading to better videos, but I didn’t want to discount potentially high-quality videos from smaller channels. A 100,000 view video from a channel with 10,000 subscribers is probably better than a 100,000 view video from a 1 million subscriber channel.

http://news24.gruposio.es/ydd/videos-porto-robur-costa-ravenna-v-gi-group-team-monza-v-it-it-1ari2-24.php

http://live-stream.munich.es/exd/Video-porto-robur-costa-ravenna-v-gi-group-team-monza-v-it-it-1aom2-20.php

http://go.acaps.cat/npt/Video-norge-v-danmark-v-no-no-1lwn-19.php

http://streaming7.actiup.com/nez/v-ideos-cska-moscow-v-saski-baskonia-v-es-es-1vmm-13.php

http://streaming7.actiup.com/nez/Video-Valencia-Basket-Barca-Lassa-v-en-gb-1ifh-.php

http://news24.gruposio.es/ydd/video-porto-robur-costa-ravenna-v-gi-group-team-monza-v-it-it-1ttu2-2.php

http://go.acaps.cat/npt/videos-norge-v-danmark-v-no-no-1djw-13.php

http://streaming7.actiup.com/nez/Video-Valencia-Basket-Barca-Lassa-v-en-gb-1tvf30122020-19.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/videos-skelleftea-v-vaxjo-lakers-v-sw-sw-1vat-15.php

http://go.acaps.cat/npt/v-ideos-norge-v-danmark-v-no-no-1hbf-27.php

http://news24.gruposio.es/ydd/video-porto-robur-costa-ravenna-v-gi-group-team-monza-v-it-it-1aui2-15.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/v-ideos-skelleftea-v-vaxjo-lakers-v-sw-sw-1bwv-24.php

http://streaming7.actiup.com/nez/v-ideos-Valencia-Basket-Barca-Lassa-v-en-gb-1bmu-5.php

https://assifonte.org/media/hvc/v-ideos-brynas-v-linkoping-v-sw-sw-1zhn-21.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/videos-Skelleftea-AIK-Vaxjo-Lakers-HC-v-en-gb-1pff30122020-.php

https://assifonte.org/media/hvc/videos-brynas-v-linkoping-v-sw-sw-1zpm-12.php

http://main.dentisalut.com/zwo/v-ideos-Skelleftea-AIK-Vaxjo-Lakers-HC-v-en-gb-1lay-29.php

http://go.acaps.cat/npt/v-ideos-norge-v-danmark-v-no-no-1hsj-26.php

http://news24.gruposio.es/ydd/videos-porto-robur-costa-ravenna-v-gi-group-team-monza-v-it-it-1yvp2-23.php

http://live-stream.munich.es/exd/Video-Fenerbahce-KK-Crvena-zvezda-v-en-gb-dmn30122020-.php

risis had rolled forward a series of events that many financial experts had fathomed for decades. People started defaulting on their loans, businesses went bankrupt and an asset class which people believed would never “tank” came down drastically in value due to speculation and other widespread bets placed through various derivative contracts.

And secondly, videos can get lots of views for the wrong reasons, such as clickbait titles or thumbnails, or being controversial. I’m personally less interested in these types of video.