re: #210 SanFranciscoZionist

If there’s a link, it’s probably a couple of different things.

Engineering is big in the Middle East, as it was in the Soviet Union. What used to be called the ‘Second World’ produces a lot of engineers, because that’s what they need. People who can create infrastructure.

I imagine it might also be popular with creationists, since practical physics and mechanics are, I think, seen by fundamentalists as being less dangerous to faith than creepy things like biology (with its evolutionary taint) and the sort of stuff that makes you get into the origins of the universe and what’s going on up there. And since Muslim fundamentalists also seem to be getting bogged down in this junk, that might lead back to the ME connection again. Engineering is a practical science that isn’t associated with any potential challenge to faith.

As for whether such people are more likely to be jerks, I have no idea. I suspect that in the case of Morsi and the Iranians, it’s a coincidence—millions of Egyptian and Iranian boys got engineering degrees, but only the jerks rose to public prominence.

Salem hypothesis.