Political discussions and other rants about useless things like culture

[Maxim1110]

Islam is as much a threat to free speech as christianity is.

The problem here is that Wilders completely dismisses a large group of people, most of which have nothing to do with the trouble caused by some Muslim-extremists. The common Muslim woman who does her groceries at the local supermarket and cleans houses here doesn't cause any trouble. Islam is not the problem, extremists are the problem. I think that one of the main reasons for people to vote for Wilders is because they're jealous. And it's true: immigrants study harder, work harder and climb their way up the ladder faster than many Dutch people who aren't born with the biggest brain. The reasoning is just the same as Hitler's: Germany was in a crisis, a deep crisis at the start of WW2. The only ones that still had some money because they were in profitable businesses where the Jews, practising professions such as bankers and jewellers.

 

[Maxim1110]

Naglfar was first...

 

[Naglfar]

Naglfar was first...

lol you still made a good point, friend. I agree with you.

/cheers

 

[stizzleomnibus]

I would add that polarization makes the entire problem worse. Much like our near Koran burning in America, inaccurately targeting Islam instead of extremist Islam forces everyone into one group. If you push, say, mass deportation or a banning of religious practice or dress, you put every Muslim in the same category. The progressive Muslim man who bring his wife and daughters to America to see them succeed, the traditional Muslim who comes here to live under a less oppressive government, and anyone who wants to start a business are welcome. When you attack them as well as the extremists, you create cultural warfare. The only people really fighting the war on their side are the extremists. Thus, peaceful people rally around their most hateful element, and all of Islam and all of America/Netherlands/etc are enemies, regardless of what they have in common.

You know, like Americans granting super-constitutional powers to Dick and Bush, or Palestinians supporting Hamas.

 

[stizzleomnibus]

Interesting development. Per Slashdot, Finns are apparently fleeing from their national church en masse.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/10/16/019219/Internet-Dismantling-the-State-Church-In-Finland

 

[Maxim1110]

Interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if something alike would happen here now that people know what has happened in the monasteries here in the past 100 years.

 

[Villain]

Islam is as much a threat to free speech as christianity is.

Historically, sure. Today, at least in Europe, not so. Catholic Church has tried its best to silence its critics in the last few years - and failed. Christianity is on a downward slide (and rightly so), because people are no longer afraid to speak negatively of them.

Meanwhile, mentioning that its a widespread Muslim practice to marry underage girls to adult men even in Europe today can lead the police to your door. The double-standard is ridiculous.

What frightens me is that Islamic countries have for years lobbied for international laws that would make criticising any aspect of their religion (including fun things like mutilation of children or killing of homosexuals) a hate-crime. A year and a half ago they took a step towards this goal in the United Nations Human Rights Council ( http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2009/03/the-slow-death-of-freedom-of-expression/ ).

I agree that grouping all Muslims together is wrong, but I'd say the problem is not so much the extremists per se, but the literal interpretation of Islamic laws that are not compatible with the values and laws of Western democracies. About a year ago the so-called "moderate leader" of Finnish Muslims admitted in an interview that he had married 14-year old girls to adult men in Finland (the age of consent here is 16). Media made some noise about the issue, but it was quickly hushed down, apparently to avoid offending anyone. While there are virtually no Muslim extremists in Finland, there are hundreds of Muslims who don't follow Finnish laws and allow their children to be sexually abused, simply because the Islamic traditions and their religious leaders tell them to. This is a real issue, yet even mentioning it is often considered hatespeech.

As for the "Church gay issue" and the massive resignation campaign around here last week (some 30 000 people altogether), it was to be expected. While Finland is practically a secular country, some 80% of the population have nominally belonged to the national Lutheran church. In recent years, that number has been slowly declining as people have realized they don't really believe in what the church preaches.

Last week, some members of the homophobic Christian-democrat party (a minority party with less than 5% of supporters) debated a bunch of smart people on gay rights on national TV. Not too surprisingly, when the religious whackos had all their arguments destroyed they hid behind the wall of "the bible says gay sex is sin and that's why you're wrong". This apparently opened the eyes of thousands of non-religious Finns who realized how full of hypocritical hate-filled bullshit these "good Christians" are. Amusingly, this happened despite the fact that officially the Lutheran church has for some time now tried to stand on both sides of the fence, in a futile attempt to please both the hardcore bible-thumping loonies and the more liberal majority.

-Villain

 

[stizzleomnibus]

Interesting insight. In many ways, we face the same problem with Islam that we do with Christianity: explaining to it's adherents that they must live as members of the nation first, their faith second. In America, this often means fighting over education, such outlawing anti-gay bullying despite the fact that some people really do think that gays deserve death (if you don't follow U.S. news, we've had a number of teenage suicides related to anti-gay bullying in the last month). Similarly, we aren't teaching creationism because it has absolutely no basis for its existence outside of the bible; it should not and will not be taught in public schools.

With Islam, I tend to find American Muslims to be pretty indistinguishable from any other Americans. They dress like everyone else, date and marry at the same ages, etc. I don't know how widespread the more unsavory practices are, but I tend to find the small-scale existence of such practices gets magnified and used as tool of the right-wing hate machinery. We actually had a political on the other side of the country suggest that there are already two U.S. cities operating under sharia law, one of which is the city where I will be going to school next year. Having visited the city numerous times, I know that her statement is bullshit. In many ways, our Muslims are even more willing to abide by American standards than evangelicals; most recent immigrants came here for opportunity, or to practice their faith in a more progressive fashion, i.e. to escape sharia bullshit.

As for the issue of bible-thumping hate-mongers, I will simply let Jim speak for me on this issue.

 

[stizzleomnibus]

I will update everyone briefly on the U.S. elections.

As expected, the Republicans took a whole bunch of seats. Interestingly, because of quirks of our political system, they didn't do as well as they might have hoped. Democrats still have a slim majority in the senate, but the House of Representatives is overwhelmingly Republic now.

Interesting races:

In Delaware, the Republican establishment candidate would have slept through a victory. Luckily, right-wingers overwhelmed the primary and gave the primary race to a complete nut-job by the name of Christine O'Donnell. She lost because she is a witch. Her witchcraft actually handed the Dems that seat.:Shedevil:

Alaska had a similar problem with an overwhelmed primary, but early reports look like the establishment candidate (and current office-holder) Lisa Murkowski may have won on an unprecedented write-in campaign. (Because she did not run as an independent, and her party's nomination went to a nutter, you could only vote for her by writing her name in on the ballot).

The Democratic senate majority leader, Harry Reid, managed to keep his seat. He also should have gotten his ass kicked, but his opponent was a wacko who opposes flouridation of our precious bodily fluids and thinks that Hispanics look Asian.:Spin:

So, while everything went Republican as expected, the party fumbled in its own rage-based politics and things actually turned out pretty nicely for the Democrats.

Also, Dems won pretty much everything in California, but pot is still illegal.

 

[Defiance]

^ Oh yeah, so was that already decided? I'm talking about the legal status of Mary-Jane. It'd be stupid not to make it legal in California, since most people there smoke it . It'd be a good way to create "legal" businesses, since having a job is what most US Americans want/need nowadays.

So, Palin for president? Damn I was watching TV in the US, and it's really stupid how much coverage the woman gets. Just ignore her, I know, but she's so retarded that she makes want to listen to what she says. Nooo not Paliiiiiin!

 

[stizzleomnibus]

Palin is basically an enormous joke. Politics as usual really frustrates Americans, and the current climate has created the raging anti-incumbent attitude. Palin is fortunate to be able to feed off of that energy.

I'm not sure if the demographics work the same elsewhere (probably to a lesser extent in parliamentary nations), but in the U.S. each party has a set of devoted followers, and they fight each election for the moderate voters in the middle. The average American voter is a lot smarter than one might think, and they tend to run screaming from the especially extreme and especially stupid candidates. The races that I highlighted above show this. In a time when voters were ready to behead the entire Democratic party, people turned away from right-wing extremists and towards the Dems.

Palin is so dumb, so ill-informed, and such a walking joke that she will never get the support of anyone other than those just like her (and really, there aren't that many of them) and those who will always vote Republican. She cost the Republicans the presidency in 2008 (though Obama probably had it wrapped anyway), and there's no reason to think she would win a party nomination or election in 2012. While your (and sometimes my) opinion of the average American is probably pretty low, we know better than Palin.

 

[Defiance]

^ yeah, I guess the only ones that would vote for Palin live in Texas hahaha. It was interesting to see some people wearing Jon Stewart shirts and pins, very funny. I went all "OMG is Jon Stewart here?" Turns out they were only showing some live video from NY, but it still was pretty funny.

 

[stizzleomnibus]

So, Danny, how do you feel about being Nicaraguan now?

http://www.nacion.com/2010-11-04/ElPais/NotasSecundarias/ElPais2577867.aspx

 

[Maxim1110]

Danny is Costa Rican, right?

 

[stizzleomnibus]

From the article, apparently a Nicaraguan military commander was navigating via Google maps, which had a small error regarding the border with Costa Rica and he accidentally invaded.

They went right back home after a while, but it's still pretty funny.

 

[Defiance]

So, Danny, how do you feel about being Nicaraguan now?

http://www.nacion.com/2010-11-04/ElPais/NotasSecundarias/ElPais2577867.aspx

Oh crap here we go .

I don't have anything against Nicaraguans per se, some are hard-working, honest people who come to CR for a better life.

But the government?

FUCK IT.

Just a small lackey of Cháves, "governing" the poorest country in the continent (after Haiti). Every time that there are elections the f* Nica government starts bashing in CR because they want to create a nationalistic feeling of hate towards the country. It always used to be about the San Juan River (a shared one, even if Nicaragua "owns" it), but now that Den Haag (The Hague( Court settled the dispute; they went one step further.

The Nicaraguan army actually went into Costa Rica, settled in a small island (Calero), and changed the CRn flag for a Nica one.

Shit, that is too much, really.

Nicaragua is pathetic, they said that they were correct because they were using google maps and that the afore-mentioned maps said that the island belongs to Nicaragua…, no comments there ; simply pathetic.

But Nicaragua is achieving what they want, meaning distraction from the real problems the country has such as (1) Nicaragua being a worthless servant of Chavés's so-called "Bolivarian Revolution" (lame excuse to stay in power, what is it, like 14 years now?), (2) Nicaragua being the poorest country in the continent (not counting Haiti, but who cares about Haiti anyhow? Where's all the promised help? People are still living in tents and there's a new cholera outbreak), (3) the original "fighters" of the war(s) now using them to seize control of the country and (4) previous war enemies (Ortega and the guy who went into the country, some general) now being "allies" in order to stay in power.

Yesterday I was walking down the Philology/Philosophy department of the UCR (Uni of CR) and there was a "fuera nicas!" (missed the first exclamation mark) grafitti. Even if I understand the situation and what the government is trying to do, fuck it makes me want to hate them too. CR has done nothing but welcome Nicaraguans into the country, and CR is repaid with hate messages, and, technically speaking, a reckless and shameless invasion. CR doesn't have an army (first one in the world to legally abolish it!), so we can't do anything besides hoping that the Insulza imbecile will do something.

But seriously, I'm not happy at all with these actions; I'm really, really pissed off.

EDIT: The guy didn't "use" an error on the map, he simply invaded the country. They're still here as far as I know.

Danny is Costa Rican, right?

Technically speaking, yes. I don't consider myself one, to be honest. Legally speaking I'm Canadian too, but I, in my ethos, consider myself Canadian, German, British and (lastly) CRn. I can't deny my CRn background, but I'm like a foreigner here, with very different mental, social and cultural views. When I went to and came from the US I left and entered with my Canadian passport, which was kind of a big deal for me. Always left with the Canadian (so I don't have any problems when I enter the US), but never came back to CR with that one. A lot of people here think it's rubbish, but that's because CRns are very hypocritically proud of the country and don't know about many other cultures. So I always say to those people "Fuck you, a passport doesn't determine how I feel".

I can actually get my German nationality, since Ohpa was German. I would trade the CRn passport, and wouldn't be too sad about it. Of course, when I said this to my former best friend he said "Fuck u you're so fukin' arrogant". So I just left the table and declared the end of a 20 year friendship. (Obviously it wasn't only because of that, we can barely stand each other.)

 

[Maxim1110]

 

[Maxim1110]

I remember Danny was talking about the poor situation of Italy some time ago. This list supports that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_employment_rate

I was surprised to see Italy that low. I knew it wasn't the richest country in Europe, absolutely not, but 56%, that's low! Even lower than Greece and Mexico.

 

[Defiance]

^ Yeah, Italia hasn't been doing well since… the Roman Empire fell apart. Haha just kidding, but the country hasn't really recovered since WWII.

Nothing on my previous post? Or on the whole Nicaragua invading Costa Rica situation?

 

[Maxim1110]

Well what shall I say. It's terribly stupid of course. Furthermore, I had never heard of this issue before so I must admit I don't know enough about it to fill a well-built post in a discussion.

Concerning you, it's complicated As far as I understand you're 1/4 German, you live in Costa Rica and you don't consider yourself Costa Rican. Furthermore you're British and Canadian. Because you have relatives (e.g. parents, grandparents?) there? And how did you ever end up in Costa Rica then?