England headed for A Caliphate

[Patooka]

God forbid you might ever indulge in a thought experiment.

The point of a thought experiment is to actually think about what would happen.

Tell us who you thought won the US 2020 Presidential election and some of us might be willing to talk to you in good faith.

 

[DrZoidberg]

The heck are you on about? I didn't indicate I think you believe anything except what you said: that we're "still behaving like Christians" and that liberal democracy is "a Christian way of thinking". You're giving Christianity credit for advances just because they happened on Christianity's watch. That in no way implies you'd be Christian -- lots of people give bosses credit for what happened on their watch whether the bosses deserve credit or not. Well of course those things all happened on Christianity's watch -- everything that happened in Europe and America happened on Christianity's watch, because Christianity ruthlessly suppressed every competing worldview. But I see no reason to think the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and the rise of human rights and liberal democracy wouldn't have happened anyway if Christianity hadn't been there. Christianity probably slowed them down -- it was a lot of the reason the Dark Ages went dark. Westerners came out of the Dark Ages when the Crusades put us in contact with Arabs and we found they'd preserved copies of vast amounts of knowledge from the ancient Greeks and Romans that our monks had scraped off parchments to overwrite with Christian prayers. If the Roman Empire had never turned Christian then when the Visigoths et al. overran it, the new rulers and the new societies they formed would have ended up adopting Stoicism and Epicureanism and so forth instead of scraping parchments and persecuting heretics. We never would have lost that ancient knowledge and the early modern era could have been born hundreds of years sooner.

That's ... Enlightenment era anti-Christian rant.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

The Enlightenment was the best thing that ever happened to the human race.

I agree

The thinkers of that era composed anti-Christian rants because they knew very well what Christianity had done to their world. It was Europe tearing itself apart for more than a hundred years fighting wars over who should be authorized to require everybody else to believe mountains of unfalsifiable mumbo-jumbo that convinced our intellectual fathers to bring forth on that continent a new way of thinking, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that "no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

But the Enlightenment values are based on that all humans are equal under God. Enlightenment values state that all humans are valuable and that we all matter. This value requires a belief in God. Because humans just aren't equally as valuable. We're just not.

Or as my brother once apptly put, "if all human life is equally as valuable, what exactly are we measuring?"

I'd argue that the secret sauce of the Enlightenment, the thing that made it work, was the fiction that we're all equal citizens under the law. This conceptual model requires a God. Once we removed God we got a big God shaped hole in the world. This needed filling. That's the story of the Napoleonic wars. The 19'th century was a god awful mess of us trying to figure this shit out. So we came up with a bunch of things, humanism, consumerism, nationalism, liberalism, socialism etc. Nationalism seems to be the only long-term viable contender. Which has obvious drawbacks.

We still haven't figured this out. We still have a big God shaped hole in the western world. I don't think God is coming back. So it might be as simple that it's kind of fucked, and we'll eventually go back to paganism. Ie we'll all be slaves to the Emperor of the world, and coups and eternal wars will be the norm. Or something along those lines.

The Dark Ages went dark because they previously wrote on papyrus. When west Rome lost Egypt they lost papyrous. Velum is way more expensive. Papyrous naturally desintegrates. Its like an inbuilt knowledge timebomb. So copyists had to be selective about which works to copy.

Eventually we figured out how to make paper. Now the price of copying books went down to previous levels.

The gap between papyrous and paper we call the dark ages. The books the Christian monks didn't prioritise disappeared. But that's a function of technology. Not persecution.

Yes. That. That was my point. I wasn't saying ancient knowledge was lost because of Christian persecution. It was lost because Christianity told people not to prioritize it. Somebody found a medieval vellum full of religious writings, examined it with modern analytical technology, and made the earlier text visible, the earlier text some semiliterate monk scraped off so his boss could reuse the vellum to record his higher priority prayers. The erased text was Archimedes explaining how to do calculus two thousand years before Newton and Leibniz reinvented it.

But the people who were told were the Christians telling it. It's like you have a conceptual model where the Christian authority is separate from the people ruled under it. But these are the same people.

S:t Augustine didn't stop fucking his sex slaves because anyone told him to. He stopped fucking his sex slaves because he decided, one day, that it was wrong to do so. Allegedly. This is what he wrote in his books that he did. Nobody can fact check this. But he came to see his slaves as equal to him in deserving dignity. I think his Christianity made it happen.

Or put even simpler. If everyone is Christian it has cultural side effects that persist even if people stop being Christian. It completely permeates everything in the west.

Socialism I'll give you. Atheism, liberalism and science, not so much.

Well... its even more complicated. Rome had a variety of paralell moral codes. The elite were various types of Platonists. These shaped Christianity. Christianity is like 1% judaism and 99% Platonism.

A lot of the elite weren't Platonists at all. Stoicism and Epicureanism were common, and of course lots of people still worshipped Jupiter et al. Platonism was just one of the pack until Christianity endorsed it.

Stoicism and Epicureans are versions of Platonism. Stoics and Epicureans kept writing polemics against Platonism, but they then repeat Platonic ideas, seemingly oblivious where the ideas came from. Plato, famously, was never a Platonist. He was a Pythagorean. Philosophers kept forgetting the roots of where their beliefs came from. Platonism was completely dominant 100 AD in Rome.

From ca 300 BC to 100 AD there's a evolution of thought within paganism where all of the faiths are slowly sliding towards monotheism. It kicks off when Alexander the Great conquers everything.

One interpretation is that the dominant religion is mirroring the political reality. Ie, we first have a bunch of city states and a bunch of gods. As the city states are absorbed into empires it's gods are synchretised. Eventually we have one Emperor and one God.

There's more to say about this. But around 100 AD the Roman elites are all Platonic. Some version or another of Platonism. And Platonist theology is very very similar to what ended up in Christianity.

Also... Christianity later came to influence Judaism. So we can be fooled by looking at modern Judaism and think that this is where Christianity came from. Nope. They're both 99% Platonic.

What judaism brought to the table was inclusion and intolerance. All Jews are welcome into the faith, even the poor. All Jews is equal in the eyes of God. And Jews who don't accept judaism need to be forced to behave.

Yes, exactly. What it takes for liberalism, atheism and science to prosper is tolerance. The 2nd and 3rd century Roman Empire had it, and then Christianity wiped it away. That's why it sounds so crazy when you give Christianity credit for them now.

In what way did Christianity wipe it away? I'd say it's the exact opposite. 300 AD the Roman elites could do wtf they wanted to. 1200 AD European knights continuosly ran into trouble by the church for misbehaving and had to make penance. Even kings. That's how equality under God looks like.

In Rome free speech died when Augustus took power. Free speech died with the death of the Republic. Augustus tried to impose morality laws onto the Roman people. Stuff like outlawing sex outside marriage. He did this because he wanted a strong army and lots of babies. The Christian morality laws mostly come from Augustus. This all happened way before Christianity became a thing.

BTW, we might be talking about different types of tolerance. In Judaism they're intolerant about other faiths. If you are a Jew you need to be Jewish. There's also a bunch of commandments you need to follow. In Judaism you're not allowed to take the lords name in vain. As long as you don't do that, you're, pretty much, free to say whatever you want. You couldn't criticise the emperor in Judea, not because they were Jewish, but becasue of Rome. When Rome became Christian they adopted both types of intolerance, and this became Christian values.

So Christianity has a moral code, ethics and theology, that is 100% platonism. ... But that little 1% of Judaism changed everything. Changed the whole culture. Instead of a kaleidoscope of faiths, beliefs, philosophies, communities, in groups and outgroups there was just one. That changed the culture in fundamental ways.

Yeah. You know Plato was a proto-fascist, right? Have you read The Republic?

Yeah. Christianity is basically a police state where God reads your mind and punishes you for wanting to do normal stuff. That sound exactly what Plato had in mind.

De-Christianisation will obviously be equally as slow.

I can't imagine socialism or liberalism surviving in a post Christian world. Both, I think, are products born out of Christianity.

Socialism was, sure; but it's straight-up slave-morality, and slave-morality has never been bound to any particular theology. Socialism derives its appeal from humans' innate zero-sum-game economic intuitions. The USSR was post-Christian as all get-out, and yet belief in socialism went on and on right up until the whole thing collapsed from its inability to be productive. Even Gorbachev was a true believer; he convinced himself the USSR's problem was corruption rather than admitting the concept itself was wrong. And now socialism is more popular than ever in the post-Christian West.

Yup. Ie super Christian. I'd argue socialism is the purest form of Christianity.

And of course socialism was wildly popular in China, which was never Christian. With or without Christianity, I don't think socialism will run out of believers until we've been farming as long as we hunted and gathered.

That's actually not true. About half the Mongols were Christian. There was a string of Churches that popped up in the wake of the Golden Horde. China has been Christian for about as long as Europe. The Boxer rebellion was a Christian movement. The difference is that it never crowded out Confusianism.

It was also not a one way communication. We've found ancient Buddhist temples in Egypt. Platonism was a mish mash of all kinds of stuff. Some eastern. Obviously China also had that.

Chinese communism was well prepared by Christianity.

As for liberalism, that appears to have been dying a slow death pretty much ever since the Liberal Party tore itself apart and was supplanted by Labour. That happened while Christianity was still the dominant belief. With or without Christianity, caring about one's outgroup's freedom is a pretty hard thing to sell.

I think socialism and liberalism has the same foundation, ie our equality under God/the law. Its just two different emergent manifestations of the same belief system. Are we as free to express ourselves as others or should we have the same stuff as others? These are just different ways to define equality.

People, obviously, aren't equaly as valuable. That's just a fact. Some are more capable than others.

Huh? Being more capable doesn't make anyone's value a fact. People can value whatever they like. Value is subjective. Liberalism recognizes this; it's one of the reasons reality has a liberal bias.

I think saying that human value is subjective is a lazy cop out. If your drain is blocked a plumber is objectively valuable to you. If your artery is blocked a doctor is. If someone steals your stuff a policeman is. It all comes down to your needs and other people's ability to fulfill those needs. The better people are at fulfilling your needs the more power over you they can get. This is what free market capitalism maximises. Your ability to solve other people's needs better than others is what money measures.

The moment you claim human value is the same you need to be able to say what we're measuring. If you can't you are talking shit. Saying it is subjective doesn't solve your problem. You still need to be able to say what people are subjectively tracking.

The nice thing about the human soul is that it's invisible. There's no tangible outward expression of the human soul. If God says that all human souls are equally valuable, then I guess it is. It's a brilliant system imho. And without souls or God, I think the system breaks down.

As Christian values fade, I think, powerful individuals, will increasingly amass power. Eventually kings and aristocrats will return and be the new normal. I struggle to see any other viable development.

That's just bizarre. Powerful individuals always amassed power when Christianity was in charge. Kings and aristocrats were the old normal through about 90% of the Christian Era. When was an individual ever more powerful than when people believed in the Divine Right of Kings? You're talking as though the last 200 years are representative of Christianity. No. The last 200 years are when the Enlightenment defanged the religion it was born in reaction against.

I disagree. Before Christianity no laws governed kings. They did what they could get away with. Always. Might makes right. Christianity changed that. The powerful needed to behave.

I think the Enlightenment was the logical next step after the Reformation. Martin Luther opened the Christian pandoras box. The Catholic church/pope could act as a break on Christian urges. Without the pope that break is off. The Enlightenment and atheism is at the bottom of that slipperly slope.

Just to make this perfectly clear. I'm not doing polemics. I'm not arguing for Catholicism. I'm an atheist. The problem is that I think Nietzsche nailed it. If we kill God, our entire world order will, sooner or later, unravel. I don't think Catholicism is the answer. Because I care about what is true. No, I don't have a solution. I'm not arguing for anything now. I'm just pointing out, what I think are problems. Sooner or later the powerful will realize that they don't need to follow the rules. That's what Napoleon and Hitler was about. Trump! It's not going to stop. I think it's going to accelerate.

 

[Elixir]

God forbid you might ever indulge in a thought experiment.

The point of a thought experiment is to actually think about what would happen.

Tell us who you thought won the US 2020 Presidential election and some of us might be willing to talk to you in good faith.

“Well, the answer to that question depends on how you define “won”.”
- Every RW hyper-rationalist I’ve ever caught trying to hide their bias.

 

[Bomb#20]

God forbid you might ever indulge in a thought experiment.

The point of a thought experiment is to actually think about what would happen.

Tell us who you thought won the US 2020 Presidential election

Biden. Duh!

and some of us might be willing to talk to you in good faith.

Who you calling "us"? A lot of people here were already talking to me in good faith. You weren't; I highly doubt you'll start now. I expect you'll keep thinking of me as a redcap because you're a tribal thinker and can't wrap your mind around anyone else not being one too.

 

[Emily Lake]

Good pst. Just want to throw in my two cents. You’re lumping all Christianity together, and sort of glossing over the fact that the enlightenment occurred as a result of Protestant values. The underlying concept that god gave you a mind with the expectation that you would use it to know gods creations is a pretty large part of it. Religious tolerance went hand in hand with that, as man can’t define how god is known and worshipped. Those set the foundation necessary for classical liberalism to arise in the first place.

The context of the Enlightenment is warfare - the Thirty Years War that laid waste to Europe, and the slightly later and more sedate Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the British Isles.

This warfare led to a loss of control across Europe, an increasingly anarchic society, in which lots of people wanted to stifle any deviation from their chosen religious orthodoxy, whether Roman Catholic or any of numerous Protestant sects (some of which were seriously odd); But all of those kings, princes, and bishops were, suddenly, incapable of imposing their will on the majority.

Religious tolerance didn't get handed out by leaders who realised its benefits; It was seized by a mass of people who made heresy so endemic that it became practically impossible to eradicate.

Before the wars, printing presses were tightly controlled, and only approved news and literature were being produced. During the wars, anyone with an opinion could get a pamphlet printed. It was like the advent of Twitter - any idiot with an idea suddenly thought his ramblings were as good as the king's - and the king was too busy on the battlefield to do anything to disabuse them of this dangerous notion.

(The) Man had been defining how god is known and worshipped for sixteen hundred years. The idea that he couldn't do that was a pragmatic response to the fracturing of power - he literally couldn't, because he now had to compete with other ideas, which led (at least in the Protestant countries) to the idea that he doctrinally couldn't, and that everyone was entitled to an opinion.

Once the paradigm changed from one of loyalty (everyone is entitled to agree with the king, on pain of, well, pain), to one of liberty (everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even though most of those opinions are bat-shit crazy), the enlightenment was inevitable.

And that change wasn't unstoppable; The kings and bishops had been very successfully stopping it for centuries. It happened because of a seriously devastating series of wars, that left nobody in control at all, for several years, across much of the continent. That led to a diversity of opinion that would take further wars to eradicate - but nobody could afford to pay for those wars anymore, either in gold or in manpower.

War was certainly part of it, sure. But I still think that the schism in underlying values from catholic doctrine was a driver that shouldn't be ignored.

Bear in mind that I'm not arguing on behalf of protestantism. But without that fundamental difference, I don't think the enlightenment could have happened at all. The scientific advancements are things I don't think could have occurred under catholicism.

Aside - it's nice to be on a real keyboard rather than my phone. Now I'm not stuck capitalizing things I don't think need it.

 

[Emily Lake]

Not really. I'm having a lark. You seem extremely comfortable dissing Yanks every chance you get, and that seems to be the case with most Australians on this BB. Highly opinionated cunts, the lot of ya.

At this point, I’m simply so tired of everyone shitting on my country while simultaneously acting like they have a say in out governance and spending that I have little patience left. I’ve had enough of this abusive relationship.

Sounds good.

Could you yanks start by not sticking your oars into the waters of other countries just because you can?
And for reference I am not just referring to Trump.

If they would listen to me, I'd be all for it.

I'm right on the edge of thinking we need to be isolationist and get our own house clean for a while.

 

[Emily Lake]

I think socialism and liberalism has the same foundation, ie our equality under God/the law. Its just two different emergent manifestations of the same belief system. Are we as free to express ourselves as others or should we have the same stuff as others? These are just different ways to define equality.

I suppose if you get super figurative and take your philosphy to the outer edge you could say that.

I kind of feel like the fact that one results in limiting what other people can tell you to do, and the other increases what other people can tell you to do, is kind of a big deal.

 

[Emily Lake]

Tell us who you thought won the US 2020 Presidential election and some of us might be willing to talk to you in good faith.

Are there posters here that think Biden did not win?

I get that some question the integrity of the election in some states, sure. But that shows up in damned near every election in some form or other. Sometimes it's accusations of fraudulent votes, sometimes it's accusations of voter suppression, sometimes it's hanging chads. Either way, there always seems to be at least some push-back by some people when their guy doesn't win.

But on IIDB? Have there seriously been people who think that as more than a passing discussion hobby?

 

[Patooka]

Are there posters here that think Biden did not win?

Yes. You need to pay more attention.

R

Thread 'The Democrats are going to rig the next election the same way they cheated last time'

Jul 9, 2024

IMO ballet mailing should be illegal if they can not design a way to prevent fraud. This is exactly why the republicans felt (and still feel) the last election was stolen. Because if you can not prove fraud that did not mean it did not happen. And there should also be controls to make sure the ballets are received from legal citizens. These should be federal laws for federal elections such as the POTUS.

"When combined with mail-in ballots, the system is *designed* to make it impossible to prove fraud.Mail-in and drop box ballots should not be allowed, as cameras on the in-person...

• RVonse

• 

 

[Patooka]

I get that some question the integrity of the election in some states, sure.

Donald Trump's own handpicked Attorney General said 2020 was the most honest election in history so please elaborate

But that shows up in damned near every election in some form or other

Most of those cases don't involve cunts wanting to hang a vice president, smearing shit all over walls or storming the fucking Capitol. I'm sorry this is so complicated for you.

Sometimes it's accusations of fraudulent votes, sometimes it's accusations of voter suppression, sometimes it's hanging chads.

Sometimes those are two different things, even though you've listed 3 examples. I'll let you put 2 and 2 together.

Either way, there always seems to be at least some push-back by some people when their guy doesn't win.

Again, "Hang Mike Pence". There is no Democrat equivalent.


But hey, both sides, right?

 

[Tigers!]

God forbid you might ever indulge in a thought experiment.

The point of a thought experiment is to actually think about what would happen.

Thought experiments are 99% thought and 1% experiment.

 

[Patooka]

God forbid you might ever indulge in a thought experiment.

The point of a thought experiment is to actually think about what would happen.

Thought experiments are 99% thought and 1% experiment.

Dude (and I'm saying that deliberately) maybe do some as you would call "Yank research" and check up on Project 2025. Your thought experiment isn't as theoretical as you'd prefer.

Unless you want Trump as your God Emperor, that is. (I don't think you do FYI)

 

[Tigers!]

Given how genuinely complex these legal realities are, why jump to the absurd conclusion that the UK's policy struggle is evidence of a grand, intentional plot to engineer a demographic "Caliphate"? We don't need a vast state conspiracy when the messiness of international law already explains why there are no simple answers.

Why did you write that? Are you trying to persuade people who disagree with you, or are you just grandstanding to the self-congratulation-as-social-policy crowd? Yes, yes, everyone who is concerned about the consequences of the open-border policy is just a stupid conspiracy theorist so you're perfectly right to look down on them and dismiss them and pat yourselves on the back about what superior life forms people who think like you are.

If and when England becomes a caliphate as the entirely foreseeable consequence of current trends being allowed to continue unobstructed, the fact that none of the successive governments that each for short-sighted political reasons of their own chose not to obstruct those trends ever meant for that outcome to happen will no doubt be a great consolation to the dhimmis.

First, there isn't an "open border policy" in the way that is stated, because most asylum seekers are eventually rejected during processing and vetting. Second, the conspiracy theory or alarmism--whatever you would like to call it--is an actual thing here. It isn't an ad hominem to recognize the huge overlap of alarmist, possibly xenophobic people who were pro-Brexit and now don't realize that they've magnified an immigration return problem.

"conspiracy theory or alarmism--whatever you would like to call it"?!? "Conspiracy theory" and "alarmism" are nothing at all like two terms for the same "it". Accusing your opponents of alarmism is perfectly normal discourse. In contrast, going on about a "grand, intentional plot to engineer a demographic "Caliphate"" is absolutely an ad hominem argument; furthermore, it's poisoning the well, it's moving the goalposts, and it's a distraction from the thread topic, which is the consequences of the demographic change, not whether they're intentionally engineered.

As for the open-border policy, yes, most asylum seekers are as you say eventually rejected -- but most rejected asylum seekers do not leave and are not deported. The UK is accepting them at 50,000 a year, rejecting them at 80,000 a year, and removing them at 12,000 a year. That is a de facto open-border policy cosplaying at border control.

However, all that said, when we discuss problems and solutions, we first need to identify precisely what problem is being solved, and here we have a fictitious problem as stated: the UK rapidly becoming a Caliphate. Basic arithmetic shows this to be false, and something that would take centuries at best.

Did you actually do any basic arithmetic, or are you just blowing smoke out your ass? Extrapolating from the last two censuses by basic arithmetic leads to a forecast that England will become majority Muslim in the year 2101. That's in the lifetime of today's schoolchildren. If you have basic arithmetic indicating it will take over 200 years, show your work.

That head in the sand attitude permeates the whole discussion.
One of the reasons that some are greatly exercised by the names that appear in the list of British babies names is not just the names that appear but the numbers associated with those names. It is the preponderance of the names that is the issue for many.
I think it was Don2 that provided a helpful link to the UK Bureau of Stats.



The year is 2024 and the non-English names despite being fewer in number are rapidly overhauling the English. See bolded numbers.
In a very few years at current rates the non-English > English.

 

[Tigers!]

God forbid you might ever indulge in a thought experiment.

The point of a thought experiment is to actually think about what would happen.

Thought experiments are 99% thought and 1% experiment.

Dude (and I'm saying that deliberately) maybe do some as you would call "Yank research" and check up on Project 2025. Your thought experiment isn't as theoretical as you'd prefer.

I am not saying that thought experiments do not have their place but we must already remember what is actually being done. Precious little experiment.

A good experiment will always trump (no pun intended) an excellent thought experiment.

Unless you want Trump as your God Emperor, that is. (I don't think you do FYI)

We have had more than enough by now.

 

[bilby]

War was certainly part of it, sure. But I still think that the schism in underlying values from catholic doctrine was a driver that shouldn't be ignored.

Bear in mind that I'm not arguing on behalf of protestantism. But without that fundamental difference, I don't think the enlightenment could have happened at all. The scientific advancements are things I don't think could have occurred under catholicism.

There is no "Protestantism" though, except from a Catholic perspective. Protestantism is any Christian belief based (however loosely) on Catholicism, but without belief in the Pope and the Catholic church heirarchy.

Today, most Protestant sects are fairly similar in their beliefs, and look like variations on a single theme, but in the late C17th, as the Enlightenment was really getting rolling, there were some truly bizarre Protestant sects, to the point where "Protestant" alone told you really only that one thing about a person's beliefs, doctrines, and religious practices.

So are you arguing that mere rejection of Papal authority was sufficient to enable the Enlightenment? Because if, as I suspect, you are not, then you will need to be more specific about which belief(s) you are attributing as "that fundamental difference", without which you don't think "don't think the enlightenment could have happened at all".

As a consequence of war, the breakdown of censorship, and the fracturing of belief and religious doctrine, Protestantism in Europe was shattered into myriad sects with widely differing practices. These then were slowly whittled down over time, as many failed to attract converts, while a few succeeded - often by attracting powerful people as converts, who then imposed uniformity on those they dominated. During this process, some who wished not to be dominated, but preferred instead to be the ones doing the dominating, fled for the New World, innoculating the American colonies with weird but fiercely held beliefs - of which religious tolerance was one of the weirdest and most rare.

It seems to me that invoking Protestantism as a cause for the Enlightenment and for reigious tolerance is to put the cart before the horse.

The idea of religious tolerance, of freedom of religion, is a very late Enlightenment value, inspired by repeated failure of the project to discover God (and His intents and desires) through a study of the natural world.

The idea of freedom from religion, and not merely freedom of religion, is even later - arising as the natural world stubbornly refuses to reveal any evidence whatsoever that any Gods of any kind ever existed.

So, if the Enlightenment is the cause of religious freedom, what then is the cause of the Enlightenment? Is it really just mere rejection of Papal authority?

Somehow that doesn't seem to be sufficient - and in the case of the early, Catholic, thinkers such as Galileo and Copernicus, it doesn't even seem to have been a thing at all, at a personal level - as I understand it, they were both lifelong and devout Catholics, who took their new ideas to the church, mistakenly believing that the Church would welcome them, and were surprised when those ideas were declared to be heretical.

 

[TSwizzle]

You couldn't make it up

An Islamic terrorist who belonged to Al-Qaeda and later Isis has been spotted shopping at King Charles’ local Co-op. Mohammed Yaseen was free to walk the streets near Windsor Castle after he was allowed to stay in Britain on human rights grounds. Yaseen was part of the Al Qaeda group that beheaded Briton Ken Bigley before joining a unit in Isis that carried out stonings, beheadings and mass executions. He was released from prison last week after serving just six months of a two-year sentence for illegally entering the country on a small boat, following a near five-year prison term in Germany for his Isis membership. Despite a court hearing that he ‘posed a danger to the whole of the UK’, Yaseen cannot be deported because he has applied to stay in the country. The Foreign Office has raised concerns he could face ‘mistreatment’ if he were returned to Iraq because of his terrorist past. A source at the Ministry of Justice said he was taken back to prison as he had apparently breached his ‘good behaviour’ requirement at the bail hostel.

News

 

[bilby]

In a very few years at current rates the non-English > English.

Non-English names are already the majority, by your figures. 'Jones' and 'Williams' are Welsh names.

But wait - how are Muslim, Sikh, or Hindu indicative of non-English status? These are religions, not nationalities.

The idea that there are no English Sikhs, no English Hindus, or no English Muslims is nonsensical. You might as well divide names into 'English' vs 'Catholic' or 'Jewish'.

Your analysis is absurd.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I think socialism and liberalism has the same foundation, ie our equality under God/the law. Its just two different emergent manifestations of the same belief system. Are we as free to express ourselves as others or should we have the same stuff as others? These are just different ways to define equality.

I suppose if you get super figurative and take your philosphy to the outer edge you could say that.

I kind of feel like the fact that one results in limiting what other people can tell you to do, and the other increases what other people can tell you to do, is kind of a big deal.

No, it's not figurative. It's very much concrete.

I think you are looking at what the result of communism was and ignoring all the steps that led to it. Liberalism led to economic liberalism which led to horrific standards for workers in Europe in the 19'th century. You'd hardly, from this, conclude that the point of liberalism is to make workers suffer?

We start out with values, and from that create ideological systems and theories, often utopian, and then we try building a world together. Nothing ever... ever... turns out the way we planned. This is as true for your personal basic carpentry in your house as it is for state building.

The words communism and socialism used to be interchangeable. Today socialism is the big tent, and includes "democratic socialism". Ie socialism with free speech and democracy. While we use the word communism exclusively for the style of socialism they had in USSR and China. So obviously free speech and free expression are compatible with socialism. You make it sound like they are impossible to combine, or that limiting free speech is a socialist ideal. Are you?

Socialism came out of anarchism. The French radicals of the Paris commune thought liberalism wasn't free enough. It is fascinating how a system promoting the most extreme freedom possible lead to limiting free expression in China and USSR. But it wasn't the goal for any of the revolutionaries who took part in either of those revolutions. That came later. Because the regimes weren't popular among the people. But that's never been a part of socialist or communist ideology. That's just how it turned out because... well... communism doesn't work. The only way you could make people not point out that obvious fact was to forbid them saying it. I think that's the only reason free speech was limited in any communist country.

 

[scombrid]

Only WASP is allow in the UK and USA. My primary care doctor Saminder isn’t American even though he was born in Dearborn and went to MSU.

But you know what makes him really un-American? He is resisting the finance bro vulture capitalism of pirate equity. He and his wife have opened a truly private practice and are trying to make a go with half the daily visits and double the length of time allotted for physical exams. Fucking pinko raghead.

 

[scombrid]

Before Christianity no laws governed kings. They did what they could get away with. Always. Might makes right. Christianity changed that. The powerful needed to behave

Too many examples through time of Christianity being used to justify atrocities for this to be true.