Europeans, here's a funny tidbit

Discussion in 'Off-Topic' started by super71, Feb 9, 2017.

  1. badgerale

    badgerale Warchief of Wrath

    That's a different argument. I guess that comes down to whether you think a country, or an individual, has any responsibilities outside it's borders.
     
  2. BurnPyro

    BurnPyro Forum Royalty

    Or whether or not you think their culture and their willingness to work would be of benefit.
     
  3. Geressen

    Geressen Forum Royalty

    there is no reason I can think of where you benefit soceity.
     
  4. super71

    super71 I need me some PIE!

    That's not true, their is plenty of ways migrants could benefit society if we knew who they are, where they actually came from and were vetted properly. To say none of them would be any use at all is just foolish, even though largely I agree that many of them at one time can cause more problems than solutions. Letting in migrants slowly after being vetted properly gives people from Bane Shift parts of the world opportunity, however letting in a couple hundred thousand at a time is utter foolishness. It also depends on if they are going to adapt to their surroundings and accept that where they live now should always come first, but the thing about hard core religious people is it's always religion first and everything else second.

    To say none of them would add anything of value to European or American society is a close minded approach.
     
  5. super71

    super71 I need me some PIE!

    I agree with a lot of this, mostly the part about the wealth being siphoned to the top because that's exactly what keeps happening. The Trump articles and migrant crisis is a large distraction from the elimination of the working middle class and instead of asking our government tough questions why were all bleeding money we argue over silly stuff. The migrant crisis could also be looked at as a new cash drain on American and European citizens to help put the final nail in the coffin for the middle class.

    I'm from the United States and I agree we need to stop Firking around in the Middle East, if they wanna still be barbarians over there Firking let em. Nothing has changes in the Middle East in thousands of years because they don't wanna change, and religion is brainwashing them.

    Pretty much everything I agree with though.
     
  6. Dagda

    Dagda Forum Royalty

    wrong

    right
     
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  7. MaruXV

    MaruXV Corgi Lord of FW

    you are so wrong on so many levels. Get them, give them a decent way of living and a chance. educate them at best you can, like you should be doing with your citizens, and you will have a bigger resource than you can even imagine. You view of "useless" immigrants its because most of them are abandoned to their fate, and when you dont have a chance for a decent living you do what you can, and thats where micro-criminality arises.

    Also, we are not talking about getting more cows, or cutting the prouction of plastic bags. The migrants are firking HUMAN BEINGS, and so they should be threated as what they are.
    Only THEN, you can start discussing about political choices.
     
  8. super71

    super71 I need me some PIE!

    Curious, have you ever been to the middle east ? If they wanted to change women would have rights, they wouldn't kill gays, they wouldn't behead people and the list goes on. They are still mostly the same as they were thousands of years ago, except now they just strongly dislike Europeans and Americans more.

    Ah blaming America again, cracks me up when everything that's wrong with the world is always America's fault, yet when anyone in the world needs help it's always the United States first and everyone else last. Sure America destabilized the Middle East, but then again they haven't exactly helped themselves either in a couple centuries. I put part of the blame on the United States as well, but to say the Middle East was perfectly fine until we got there is a ridiculous statement. The Middle East has changed since America went there, much for the better in certain parts, a lot of good change for women's rights and human rights in certain areas. If people from the Middle East thought their country was so wonderful, they wouldn't ever have tried coming to the United States or to Europe in the first place.

    Also go read up on the Middle East religion, and tell me how wonderful it is.
     
  9. BurnPyro

    BurnPyro Forum Royalty

    Since Germany is often brought up in these discussions, I decided to check how many homicides were recorded there recently.

    The latest statistic I found was from 2015 and it states that 296 murders were committed in Germany then. Keep in mind this is a country with a population of 80.000.0000.

    Compare that with California, same year. Population circa 37,253,956, with 1861 homicides reported.

    You can blame mental health, blacks and a lack of education all you want, but it's painfully obvious that America is about to be taken over by Sharia Gun nuts.

    Sources:
    https://de.statista.com/statistik/d...rdopfer-in-deutschland-entwicklung-seit-1987/
    https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/cjsc/publications/homicide/hm15/hm15.pdf

    Or a city vs all of sweden
    Location Population Homicides in 2016
    Baltimore 620,000 120
    Sweden 9,593,000 90

    or


    Population of Chicago - 2.79 million ---- Chicago homicides in 2016 - 750 homicides
    Population of the UK - 65 million -------- UK homicides in 2016 - 574 homicides

    You could add about another 7 european countries and it wouldn't hit the homicides in Chicago. With remarks like Trump has made why are our politicians not shitting all over their country and publically calling the US a failed state?

    Norway - 23

    Bosnia(not exactly known for its stability), pop 3.5 mil, 41 homicides

    Spain - 292 homicides - 46.5 million habitants

    New york is a population of 8 million and had 354 murders last year. You could fit about 7 european countries fewer than 354 homicides and a population of arround 40 million. Take any US city and its murder rate is shocking compared to the rest of the first world.



    All these immigrants causing all this unrest in the US! We need a strong leader! The US is already gone, in 2-3 years it will be a Sharia controlled state. Only Europe will remain strong against the invasion.
     
  10. Geressen

    Geressen Forum Royalty

    hahaha no, this is wrong on multiple levels.
     
  11. Ohmin

    Ohmin Forum Royalty

    I mean, if nothing else... The Ottoman Empire rose and fell, the whole Israel existing then getting destroyed then existing again...

    Egypt is now predominantly Arabic rather than native Egyptian because they got conquered and stuff... or do people consider that not part of the ME? Anyway...

    Oh, also, Islam is less than 2k years old (and Christianity is basically not quite there yet but very close, technically, within a couple decades). It'll be another 600-ish years before it gets to it's second Millennial anniversary.
     
  12. Dagda

    Dagda Forum Royalty

    well, to start with i think we need a clear baseline- i know you're dumping on islam here, and we'll get to that in a bit more detail, but here are the basic points i want us to agree on. ready?

    like, really ready?

    here goes-

    islam didn't start spreading til the 630s or 640s CE. so "thousands of years" feels kinda off when it's about 1.5k years since the religion held one of the largest empires ever known to man (by land mass) in its grip. that's not a huge deal, but when possible i do prefer precision in language.

    next thing- middle eastern religions include, but are not at all limited to, christianity, judaism, islam, zoroastrian, bahá'í, and many of the various branch-faiths of each of those. it's false to think that islam is the only religion, or that islam by itself is a corruptive influence in any sense beyond how any of the rest of those religions work. again, i understand that you're focusing on islam. we'll get there. i promise.

    "when anyone in the world needs help"- you mean the world wars? where we came in late twice when the rest of the superpower countries and many smaller and far less important countries (lookin at you, belgium) were already involved and there were very few other significant forces that could reasonably be expected to fight? and sure, since then we've acted in many ways as the world's policeman, but that job has given us a large amount of money on top of prestige and global pre-eminence. it has cost us, and it has rewarded us.

    i don't think anyone is saying that the modern middle east is a particularly stable place, or good place to live for the average person. i don't know why that's even in the discussion.

    last thing i wanna get out there- a few centuries ago, let's say in the 1700s to early 1900s range, most of the middle east was owned by the ottomans. a primarily muslim empire that, as a general rule, practiced tolerance (or at least indifference) when it came to heretics and heathens (heretics defined as other branches of islam, heathens defined as everyone else). this did not prevent them from, early on, making use of the jizya (which is in the quran, so go figure). or, later, from practicing various forms of ethnic cleansing (the most famous of which being the armenian genocide). however, their millet system allowed many minority religious communities near autonomous reign over themselves, so long as they didn't interfere with the ottoman/muslim agenda. minorities were not given parity by law, but if we compare to how europe's religious struggles were going at the time, the ottomans were in some ways one of the most tolerant countries in the west for a time (while being a decidedly sunni nation).



    moving on, islam.

    this is probably the part of this whole word-wall that i've read the least about as a primary subject- the rise of islam and its subsequent spread and empires are things that feature heavily in my reading, but i've not, for example, actually read the quran (or the bible, or the torah) in its entirety yet. if any of you have, i'll bow to your knowledge of the subject as it pertains to any points i make in the following


    my understanding of the history of the abrahamaic religions is that they were made for different purposes. i'm not sure how much more judaism is than a peculiarly well remembered canvas of local superstitions, events, and beliefs layered over an old rough zoroastrian framework, and painted by the well-documented history of oppression and minority-status (outside of a few countries or holdings that were primarily jewish, or jewish upperclass at least). it's a unifying tool that says we are jews and you are not, and that's how it is (though typically little stigma is attached to those that are not). it's a good identifier of in-group/out-group.

    christianity was a reformation of judaism, it was jesus coming in and telling everyone he could that many core values of judaism needed changing. perhaps primarily a shift towards softer hearts, and a larger shift towards accepting those that are not us to instead those that can be as us. it was largely a peaceful beginning, at least by the christians, but it bears remembering that the roman empire was in its early years when christ spoke. there was no good option for military action, the romans were simply too strong and christ's words took a while to reach a large audience outside the levant.

    islam, by contrast, appears first in the 600s and hasn't spread past arabia (though has converted arabia) by the time of mohammed's death around 630. at this point, the byzantines and the persians were the two primary powers nearby, and their wars had done much to not only alienate many of the smaller bystanders but also to weaken their own positions with regards to the rise of a new power. the short version is that the earliest caliphate empires were likely built to begin with as a way to continue a unified arab state in the wake of mohammed's death- as is often the case when a great leader comes along, the transition from their rule to the next is often marred by schisms and fractures. in this case, the expansion of arabia's empire was at least in part a way to demonstrate strength by following rulers (as well, mohammed died while preparing for an attack on the byzantines, so it could be argued as his will).

    the caliphates continued to expand, and at some point began to be less hostile to the idea of converting the new peoples it ruled (initially, muslim arabs were jealous of their higher status, and were loathe to share. i imagine that the change of heart came fairly hand in hand with the sheer number of non-islamic people that were conquered)



    in my view they're all political tools at their core, but the scale of the politics increases greatly from religion-start to religion-start.



    moving on to modern islam, as i'm fairly confident that i'll hear complaints about the world then being different than the world now and so on and so forth, regardless of the fact that i was not the one who initiated talks of the world then

    the modern middle east is pretty ****ed up. pretty sure everyone here would tend to agree. the question, for me, is "why". why is this region, one that historically has spawned some fantastic empires, that has birthed massive global religions, why is that ****ed up now?

    it's ridiculous to think that it's always been this way, or rather it's ridiculous to think that it's always been an unstable warzone consistently more than the rest of the world has been.


    i sorta lost steam when i broke from writing this, but here's the gist of the rest of what i had in mind-

    there are a large number of muslim dominated countries, many with some variety of islam as their national religion, that do not spawn terrorists. that are not heinously wracked by civil war. bangladesh is a muslim country (before they separated, they were part of pakistan when pakistan was partitioned), and yet they've had a female prime minister.

    put another way, (and a tl;dr) it's improper (read- wrong, stupid, overly simplifying) to blame an individual religion for anything- it always comes down to the understanding of the religion by the individuals (and groups) that follow it.

    (started writing this this morning, may've gotten a lil sidetracked)


    edit: re-read it this morning, realized i left the question of why the middle east is the way it is now up in the air, so here goes (and bear in mind, this is all a rough distillation of a lot more info. most of this post is generalization- bangladesh, for example? fiendishly poor, and hugely overpopulated. they have potential, and they have perhaps not the most stable government. their role as an example here, though, was to show that muslim countries aren't inherently anti-us, or necessarily oppressive to women. that it all comes down to the popular interpretation)

    next lil disclaimer- i'm an american. i don't get some sort of perverse satisfaction out of saying my country, where i was born and raised, is garbage. i'm just fond of facts, of understanding how and why things are and not bothering too much with the bullshit. this doesn't mean i assume i'm correct, but i do tend to assume that you don't research much past what fox news tells you.


    pre ww-1, the ottomans still held most of the middle east (persia was its own country). a quick skip through history has the ottomans falling apart and the french and the english trying to gain their territory (also the russians, but that was less middle east and more caucasus. mostly relevant because it helped lead to the armenian genocide). the west was in its last phases of imperialism, and the legacy they left in the middle east (this isn't really even the US yet) is one of fractious countries with often arbitrary or a-historical boundaries. also the brits (and then later the brits and us) aided a couple military coups in persia for their own benefit, thereby destabilizing the country and perhaps aiding khomeini's ascent, though that revolution is pretty ****y

    where we really come in is the cold war, where we're trying to push as many countries as we can towards one extreme of a spectrum, away from the perceived russian other end. didn't much help either


    gotta go, but the tl;dr is that it doesn't have to be all our fault to still be our fault/responsibility
     
    Last edited: Feb 21, 2017
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  13. BurnPyro

    BurnPyro Forum Royalty

    Super, you're very much out of your league when it comes to information here.
     

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