Is Germany Serious?
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@GNU Pepper said:
Yeah! Let's fucking nuke those rag-head bastards!
Why would you use nukes at such close range? Are you an idiot or something?
@GNU Pepper said:
I'm with this guy. It's time for us to do what we all know needs to be done about these people. I think it's high time we went ahead with a Final Solution to the Muslim Question in the western world, isn't that right morbs? An entire group of billions of people is exactly as you generalize them in a sentence: misguided, violent, somehow less worthy or worse than you and yours.
Yeah, because that's exactly what I said. Still, if you can't recognize Islam as a problem, you are a fucking dipshit.
@GNU Pepper said:
I do enjoy a good lecture on not destroying humanity from the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons in combat.
Nuking Japan certainly led to less damage and fewer casualties than conventional warfare. But it's clearly you're so hopped-up on bullshit that you probably aren't aware of that, and wouldn't believe it anyway. Regardless, nuclear weapons put an end to world wars and ushered in a new age of (relative) peace. The truth is, the world has never been safer, wealthier or freer than it is now, under American control. When Europe was in charge we got slavery, colonialism, world wars and death camps, so I'm feeling pretty good about our successes.
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@morbiuswilters said:
So your argument is "Israel is racist, so that excuses Germany being antisemitic"? Also, I never saw Israel as particularly racist. They're certainly a lot less racist than any other Middle Eastern country I can think of, and all European countries, too.
And if you disagree, why, just try to take (say) a Bible into (say) Saudi Arabia.
Yes, I know, that's not really racism per se, but then again, neither is the relatively recent practice of claiming "Islamophobia[1]" is racist, when both are religious discrimination.
[1] There's at least a couple of reasons this is a bad term, starting with "fear" is probably not the right emotion.
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@Rhywden said:
Yeah, they're fighting racism, alright, by taking a page out of the playbook of the Nazis and sterilizing Ethiopian Jews...
Wait, who is sterilizing Ethiopian Jews?
@Rhywden said:
Not to mention that, as muslim, you're not very secure in Israel's streets.
Bullshit. Overall Muslims are very safe in Israel--where the fuck did you get this idea? Now I'm sure there's some isolated violence against innocent Muslims, and that's unfortunate, but for the most part Muslims are well-treated in Israel, when they aren't committing acts of violence or terrorism. Meanwhile, a Jew in pretty much any Muslim country is going to die within minutes.
@Rhywden said:
You're not secure either if you happen to only have a muslim friend while being a Jew yourself.
Also bullshit. Where the fuck are you getting this shit from?
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@boomzilla said:
So I didn't get into the WTFishness of the "boycott" itself, but let's do that now. This is all about pre vs post 1967 borders. Europeans are apparently butt hurt that Israel's neighbors attacked Israel and got their asses handed to them by Israel and lost some territory to Israel in the process. Fuck you, Europe. Fuck you Arabs. You're the idiots who lost that land because you couldn't get along and you thought Israel would be as easy to defeat as they defeated you. Also, when governments do it, it's not a boycott, it's a trade war, which is pretty much always a WTF.
Also, blaming Israel for taking the land runs counter to the usual doctrine that if you take land from an enemy in a war, and win the war, you get to keep it.
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@TDWTF123 said:
You want to know what really makes me angry about the whole mess? That we do actually know how to end it, and it wouldn't be expensive, but no-one on the outside gives a flying fuck. All we need to do - literally, the only thing - is spend a few billion dollars on construction projects in the Palestinian territories, raising their economy out of the shits and giving them something better to do with their lives than throw rocks at tanks. Then we just wait a decade or so, and we'll have peace and co-operation, just like in Ireland and so-on.
That's a fascinating idea, except it's already been partially disproved. When the Israelis gave back some of the occupied territory about a decade ago, they deliberately left behind a number of greenhouses for the Palestinians to use to grow stuff. The Palestinians immediately destroyed them.
Looters strip Gaza greenhouses
Palestinians looted dozens of greenhouses on Tuesday, walking off with irrigation hoses, water pumps and plastic sheeting in a blow to fledgling efforts to reconstruct the Gaza Strip.
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@dhromed said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Fuck
Your intense, crazy, warmongering paranoia is unsettling.
Warmongering paranoia? Because I think people have a right to fight back when being attacked? What the fuck is wrong with Europe? You guys have, like, two modes of operation:
- "If you're being attacked, try to curl up in a ball--but don't curl up too tight! You wouldn't want your attacked to stub a toe. Oh, and if you're a woman who's being raped, just lie back and think of violence-free England. Eventually the military will be to maybe arrest your attacker, and give you a free abortion and a medal for refusing to fight back."
Or
- "Let's put all of our economic output into building things to kill every other human in Europe! Death camps, medical experiments on prisoners, torture! Yay!!"
And then you get all pissy because we took the middle ground, fighting back when attacked but generally trying not to make trouble where none exists.
Yeah, I think if someone attacks you, you pound them into the ground until they surrender. And you make damn sure they remember the ass-kicking they got, lest they decide to try and attack again.
My biggest regret is that the US ever wasted so much money, lost so many lives and risked so much defending Western Europe. At the end of the day, I don't think it was in our interests and I sure as fuck don't think you guys appreciate it. We had nukes after WWII--the Soviets weren't going to invade the US, and their system was doomed to collapse. I think 50 years of working in a munitions factory and eating food I wouldn't give to a dog might have given you guys some perspective on what's at stake. Instead, you got fat and giggly and worse than useless--you've became an active impediment to building a safer, freer world.
- "If you're being attacked, try to curl up in a ball--but don't curl up too tight! You wouldn't want your attacked to stub a toe. Oh, and if you're a woman who's being raped, just lie back and think of violence-free England. Eventually the military will be to maybe arrest your attacker, and give you a free abortion and a medal for refusing to fight back."
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@They call me trouble said:
Wait, you guys are literally arguing that any decision that is bad for Israeli* business interests amounts to Nazism?
I don't think he was saying it was Nazism, just that it's a return to retarded, antisemitic form for Europe.
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@dhromed said:
@boomzilla said:
It's about the least violent thing they could possibly do to defend themselves.
Israel is not in the defensive position here.
Right. They were the ones shooting rockets into the occupied territories and suicide bombing.
BTW, there was already a place for the Palestinians. It's called Jordan. You should look into the various plans of the UN in 1947 and 1948.
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@boh said:
The Israeli should not occupy foreign territory and call it its own...
I love how Israel is basically the only nation on Earth that is forced to abide by this rule. "Hey, you were attacked, without warning or cause, by an overwhelmingly larger alliance of nations set out to destroy you. You fought back amazingly, and managed to capture some of their territory. How dare you hold onto land you fought and died for?? You disgusting racists, you probably just took it from them because they are brown, and not because they attacked you!"
Meanwhile, every nation in Europe is sitting on lands that it conquered from someone else. Of course, many of these fights happened long enough ago that nobody fucking cares anymore, although there still are several areas which legally belong to one country, but historically don't fit in.
Apparently the lesson Europe wants us to learn is "You can conquer territory and hold it, just don't think about doing it if you're Jewish."
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@TDWTF123 said:
@spamcourt said:
A few greenhouses don't really affect the greater Palestinian economy. The point is simply to give some relatively well-paid work to a large proportion of the Palestinian working population so, over time, they stop choosing terrorism and mob hatred. Simpy improving the economy slightly doesn't lead to an immediate brainwashing of an entire population, obviously.And what was the first thing done with them after the Palestinian Authority took over? The greenhouses were destroyed.
Tell me again about them "finding better things to do with their time"?
You should go read that article I linked in another comment. This wasn't a "a few greenhouses." It was 3000 of them, which would've provided--I don't know, hundreds?--of jobs.
The Palestinians aren't inherently bad people. Mainly they're semi-willing dupes of people like Yasser Arafat and the Saudis, who are using them to cause mischief and as a scapegoat. So the problem with your theory is that they've been taught for about 3 generations to act this way, and they're not going to just sit down and turn into model citizens if $insert_appeasement_here takes place. It's going to take a long time to work those attitudes out.
Results matter, but intentions matter too. The Israelis kill more Palestinians than the other way 'round, but that's mainly because the terrorists/"militants" deliberately hide among the general populace. If the attacks stopped tomorrow, the Israelis would stop what they're doing the next day.
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@FrostCat said:
@dhromed said:
@boomzilla said:
It's about the least violent thing they could possibly do to defend themselves.
Israel is not in the defensive position here.
Right. They were the ones shooting rockets into the occupied territories and suicide bombing.
BTW, there was already a place for the Palestinians. It's called Jordan. You should look into the various plans of the UN in 1947 and 1948.
Yeah, but none of the other Arab nations want the Palestinians. Oh, they'll hire them as low-paid manual laborers rather than do the work themselves, but they DO NOT want the Palestinians having a right to live in their country. Part of this is the Palestinians well-earned reputation for violence and disorder, and part of this is the fact that Arabs aren't just racist against Jews, they also hate a lot of other Arabs for being from the "wrong" ethnicity.
You want to see some real war crimes, look at what the Egyptians do to Palestinians who try to sneak into Egypt.
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@pjt33 said:
...really it's Scotland that's occupying England.
Teehee.
<br.@pjt33 said:
...how about Britain goes back to its pre-1776 borders?
Fine by me. When do we vote on our new Constitution? Obviously it will have a very strong gun ownership clause. Oh, and we absolutely must do away with this ridiculous socialized healthcare thing you have going..
The Royal Family? Freeloaders. Although maybe we can make a reality TV show about them. Oh, and we'll sell off all these stuffy old castles to Disney so they can make theme parks. I can't wait to get started!
Of course, I wasn't the one arguing that every nation should be forced to return to it's "original" borders. It was reductio ad absurdum: I was trying to show how ludicrous such a proposition was, and how it only seems to be applied to Israel and no other nation.
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@eViLegion said:
If the nations of Europe were returning to their pre-1000 borders, how about the USA returns to an appropriate state of non-existence?
How are you people this fucking stupid? Do you not have debates in your country? I don't get it.
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@morbiuswilters said:
You want to see some real war crimes, look at what the Egyptians do to Palestinians who try to sneak into Egypt.
Use them to <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/shortcuts/2013/may/19/kfc-smugglers-of-gaza>smuggle fried chicken? The process seems worthy of stuff around here:
The service, according to the New York Times, requires first placing an international telephone order, making a payment by wire transfer, an Egyptian taxi driver to pick up the food from a franchise in El-Arish in the Sinai, couriers to bring it through the half-mile tunnels, a Gazan taxi driver to deliver it from the southern Gaza border to the northern Gaza office of the entrepreneur behind the scheme, and a fleet of motorbikes to take the chicken and chips – by now, presumably cold and limp – to their final destination.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@FrostCat said:
@dhromed said:
@boomzilla said:
It's about the least violent thing they could possibly do to defend themselves.
Israel is not in the defensive position here.
Right. They were the ones shooting rockets into the occupied territories and suicide bombing.
BTW, there was already a place for the Palestinians. It's called Jordan. You should look into the various plans of the UN in 1947 and 1948.
Yeah, but none of the other Arab nations want the Palestinians. Oh, they'll hire them as low-paid manual laborers rather than do the work themselves, but they DO NOT want the Palestinians having a right to live in their country. Part of this is the Palestinians well-earned reputation for violence and disorder, and part of this is the fact that Arabs aren't just racist against Jews, they also hate a lot of other Arabs for being from the "wrong" ethnicity.
You want to see some real war crimes, look at what the Egyptians do to Palestinians who try to sneak into Egypt.
Yeah, I've heard of most of that. Dhromed claimed the Israeli wall--which drastically cut down on the amount of suicide bombing--is a bad thing. I wonder how he feels about the wall the Egyptians built on the edge of the Gaza strip for the same purpose.
For that matter, we can generalize the concept: Mexico screams about how the wall people in the US talk about building on our southern border is racist and whatnot...but that didn't stop them building one on their OWN southern border. For that matter, the way THEY treat illegal immigrants leaves them no moral standing to complain about the US on this issue.
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@Severity One said:
The little detail that you're forgetting is that people had been living in Palestine (the historical region) for nearly 2000 years when the Jews came and kicked them out of their villages. It's not like there was an Jewish majority; the Romans took care of that.
This is a gross, ludicrously-ignorant oversimplification. The Jews didn't just come in and kick the Palestinians out (how could they?? they came in small waves and had virtually no weapons..) No, the Jews bought land and moved in and settled and this started pissing the Palestinians off, because they did not want more Jews there. They threw such a tantrum that Britain decided to permit no more Jewish immigration from Europe, even turning around ships and sending them back to your gas chambers during the height of WWII.
But Jews continued to sneak in (aided by sympathetic individuals who wanted to help them escape persecution in Europe, particularly Americans). This led to more tensions. And I'm not saying the Jews were some angels who did nothing wrong, but for the most part they just wanted to buy up land and live there and it was the Palestinians who started forming paramilitary groups to harass them. The Jews formed their own paramilitary groups and I'm sure there were awful, unjustifiable things done by both sides.
At the end of WWII, Britain did not have the resources to enforce it's own anti-immigration mandate, so refuges from Europe flooded into Israel. This further escalated tensions. In 1948 Britain basically threw up their hands and said "We can't deal with Palestine!" and dumped it into the lap of the UN. The Jews correctly realized this was their best time to declare themselves a sovereign nation, and they did so. They didn't force the Palestinians out, but the Palestinians mostly left on their own since they didn't want to live in a Jewish country.
Twenty years later, they were attacked by an army of millions from several of their neighbors. They were out-manned and out-gunned. The one advantage they had is the Arab armies were poorly-trained and had poor morale, and crumbled rapidly. Israel won some territory, and they've been gradually giving it back ever since, trying to win peace.
@Severity One said:
What you're claiming is that the European settlers into the New World were absolutely right to kill the natives, because land-grabbing is absolutely no reason to get all upset about.
How the hell did you read this into what I said? Seriously, do they teach Retardonomics in your guys' public schools, or is that something you have to go to college for?
@Severity One said:
As for the restraint, Palestinian casualty figures tend to be a factor of 20 to 40 higher than Israeli ones, so this "restraint" you're mentioning isn't all that obvious.
Israel is better-armed and better-protected. The Palestinians have a wide-eyed, religious zeal to die in battle against The Little Satan. Duh?
@Severity One said:
Israel does not, however, have the right to continue grabbing areas on the West Bank...
[citation needed] They've mostly spent the last 40 years giving back land they conquered. What land are they currently "grabbing"?
@Severity One said:
Oh, and they must hope that there won't be another Arab Spring. Because that would be very bad for them.
Eh, they're fucked anyway, and I think they know it. The only country left on Earth which hasn't embraced Muslim notions of antisemitism is the US. Israel is under siege by religious fanatics who are happy to die by the millions if it means they can finally finish off the Jews. It's probably going to end with Israel wiped off the map, along with half the Middle East.
My solution: they just need to buy a nice, tropical island somewhere very remote from the Middle East. Somewhere they'd be within the US's orbit. Then rig all of their cities with nuclear devices set to go off after they leave, and walk out the door as the whole place goes up in flames.
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@FrostCat said:
You should go read that article I linked in another comment. This wasn't a "a few greenhouses." It was 3000 of them, which would've provided--I don't know, hundreds?--of jobs.
This seems to be hard to understand, so I'll try again - because it is actually a somewhat different approach to tackling the problem. There's no need to change attitudes, just to create enough jobs that (effectively) every fighting-age man has reasonably paid employment. The violence stops fairly rapidly - a few years - whether or not the attitudes change. Apart from anything else, when an unemployed man gets a job, he has 5/7ths less time available to be a terrorist.The Palestinians aren't inherently bad people. Mainly they're semi-willing dupes of people like Yasser Arafat and the Saudis, who are using them to cause mischief and as a scapegoat. So the problem with your theory is that they've been taught for about 3 generations to act this way, and they're not going to just sit down and turn into model citizens if $insert_appeasement_here takes place. It's going to take a long time to work those attitudes out.
Results matter, but intentions matter too. The Israelis kill more Palestinians than the other way 'round, but that's mainly because the terrorists/"militants" deliberately hide among the general populace. If the attacks stopped tomorrow, the Israelis would stop what they're doing the next day.
The big difference to the greenhouses is one of scale. Hundreds of decent jobs will stop hundreds of people from being attracted to a basically hopeless fight, but we need to give a million or so better things to do.
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@morbiuswilters said:
The Royal Family? Freeloaders.
Actually, they pay us for the privilege of being the Royal Family. I would pay not to have their job, but that's a different discussion.
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@FrostCat said:
For that matter, we can generalize the concept: Mexico screams about how the wall people in the US talk about building on our southern border is racist and whatnot...but that didn't stop them building one on their OWN southern border.
Oh, but the US has a moral obligation to allow unrestrained, illegal immigration. I mean, we get lectured all the time about how we're racist (despite having some of most open immigration laws in the world) by countries that don't even have the concept of letting foreigners from poorer nations in. The fact we want to make sure the rate is manageable and the people can be assimilated so we're not creating a Balkanized nation divided by race, well that just makes us dirty little racists..
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@TDWTF123 said:
@morbiuswilters said:
The Royal Family? Freeloaders.
Actually, they pay us for the privilege of being the Royal Family. I would pay not to have their job, but that's a different discussion.Yeah, and where do they get that money? Vast swathes of property they took from you in the first place. That's like claiming some guy who cleaned out your house isn't a thief because he sends you a check for $10 every month..
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@morbiuswilters said:
Oh, but the US has a moral obligation to allow unrestrained, illegal immigration. I mean, we get lectured all the time about how we're racist (despite having some of most open immigration laws in the world) by countries that don't even have the concept of letting foreigners from poorer nations in. The fact we want to make sure the rate is manageable and the people can be assimilated so we're not creating a Balkanized nation divided by race, well that just makes us dirty little racists..
I think you could make a good case that Western Europe and North America (and various other rich places around the world) do indeed have a moral obligation to open their borders - and if they all did it, wouldn't have a problem. Of course, the morals are irrelevant: the British Empire allowed unfettered immigration to the UK up until about the start of the Twentieth century, and was gone within fifty years of that. The US closed the doors in the forties, and their decline was clearly evident by the nineties. Unless you think a bit of competition is bad, you can't be against free migration. It ought to be considered one of the fundamental human rights, too, but just in practical terms it's daft to hold any other view.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Yeah, and where do they get that money? Vast swathes of property they took from you in the first place.
Why should they be treated differently to every other rich family with inherited wealth acquired a long time ago?
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@TDWTF123 said:
This seems to be hard to understand, so I'll try again - because it is actually a somewhat different approach to tackling the problem. There's no need to change attitudes, just to create enough jobs that (effectively) every fighting-age man has reasonably paid employment. The violence stops fairly rapidly - a few years - whether or not the attitudes change. Apart from anything else, when an unemployed man gets a job, he has 5/7ths less time available to be a terrorist.
Except, you see, there's no path from here to there. The greenhouse example gives us hints as to why. I suspect we all agree that if these guys would put away the ski masks and explosive vests and get a job they'd all be better off. But people are actively conspiring against this. Here, I'll modify your solution in equally realistic ways:
If everyone would get a job, it would solve the bankruptcy of the welfare state.
If Ethiopians would get jobs, it would solve famine there.
If we could all just get along then Rodney King wouldn't have drowned in a swimming pool.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Yeah, no shit. I'll support Israel returning to its pre-1967 borders when the fucking nations of Europe return to their pre-1000 borders.
I think Europse is within its pre-1000 borders, quite probably within its pre-50000BC borders. I'll take you more seriously when you hand the power back to the native tribes and leave the country and crawl back to the Eurasian slums where your greatgrandparents were petty criminals.
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@TDWTF123 said:
Of course, the morals are irrelevant: the British Empire allowed unfettered immigration to the UK up until about the start of the Twentieth century, and was gone within fifty years of that. The US closed the doors in the forties, and their decline was clearly evident by the nineties. Unless you think a bit of competition is bad, you can't be against free migration. It ought to be considered one of the fundamental human rights, too, but just in practical terms it's daft to hold any other view.
You can have open immigration or a welfare state, but you can't have both and be a success long term. Except you can't have a welfare state.
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@TDWTF123 said:
I think you could make a good case that Western Europe and North America (and various other rich places around the world) do indeed have a moral obligation to open their borders - and if they all did it, wouldn't have a problem.
I don't have a problem with immigration, I have a problem with: 1) circumventing the law; and 2) immigration above a threshold we can manage. Sorry, but if we let 50 million foreigners move into America in 2014, that's going to seriously fuck the country up. It's going to make us more Third World than it will make the immigrants First World. So, yeah, I believe it needs to be controlled.
Also, this country is too fucking crowded as it is. The whole world is too crowded. The more people we let in, the more crowded and miserable the US is going to get, and by relieving population pressures elsewhere in the world, we just guarantee even more damn people. Quite frankly, I don't want to see every nice area paved over and people crammed in like sardines just so we can fulfill some moral obligation to the third world.
@TDWTF123 said:
Of course, the morals are irrelevant: the British Empire allowed unfettered immigration to the UK up until about the start of the Twentieth century...
True, although there were significant other reasons why people did not immigrate en masse.
@TDWTF123 said:
The US closed the doors in the forties, and their decline was clearly evident by the nineties.
Huh? What the hell are you talking about? Sure, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries we allowed higher rates of immigration, but we still have very significant rates today.
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@TDWTF123 said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Yeah, and where do they get that money? Vast swathes of property they took from you in the first place.
Why should they be treated differently to every other rich family with inherited wealth acquired a long time ago?I think Old Money families that made their wealth through industry are fine, but those that inherited vast fortunes from feudalism should have it confiscated. Of course, we don't really have any of the latter in the States..
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@morbiuswilters said:
@eViLegion said:
If the nations of Europe were returning to their pre-1000 borders, how about the USA returns to an appropriate state of non-existence?
How are you people this fucking stupid? Do you not have debates in your country? I don't get it.
Well, you yourself were weighing in heavily on the subject of fucking stupid, so I simply contributed the only logical response.
Obviously, the idea of the USA going back to 1000 is absurd. No less absurd than your conjecture.You wanted serious? Be less needlessly flippant and inflamatory and you might earn some reciprocation on that front.
Until then: UP EUROPE AND DOWN WITH THE USA!
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@TGV said:
I think Europse is within its pre-1000 borders..
You think all the nations of Europe are currently within their pre-1000 borders? Besides, I went on to further clarify that we need to trace proper ownership of the land back to its true, original owners. That's Neanderthal land you're sittin' on, boy.
@TGV said:
...quite probably within its pre-50000BC borders.
Oh, I get it, it's a race thing. In your mind it's okay for white people to fight over land, because at the end of the day it's still in the hands of white people. But white people and brown people should never stray outside of their respective territories.
Also, isn't Israel just trying to re-establish it's ancient borders?
@TGV said:
I'll take you more seriously when you hand the power back to the native tribes and leave the country and crawl back to the Eurasian slums where your greatgrandparents were petty criminals.
WHAT IN THE FUCKING FUCK?? Do they not fucking teach reductio ad absurdum in your stupid goddamn schools? You're like the fifth fucking Euro-wad who apparently thought my proposition to return Europe to its pre-1000 borders was a serious argument and not an illustration of the glaring hypocrisy Europe engages in every time it opines on the Israel-Palestinian conflict!! Jesus Tapdancing Christ!
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@morbiuswilters said:
Why would you use nukes at such close range? Are you an idiot or something?
A couple hundred kilotons isn't all that bad at around 5 miles distance.I have no idea what the rest of this thread is about, though.
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@eViLegion said:
Obviously, the idea of the USA going back to 1000 is absurd. No less absurd than your conjecture.
No.. I.. Jesus Christ, I don't fucking get it. Do you people not have debate classes? Rhetoric? What the shit??
My suggestion that Europe return to pre-1000 borders was deliberately fucking absurd, to illustrate how hypocritical Europe is when it demands the same of Israel. Okay? Do you get that?
If tomorrow Germany invaded Poland and Poland repulsed the invasion and won a bit of a Germany's land, would you guys be screaming about how Poland shouldn't be trying to "steal" Germany's land? Would you be like "Hey, Poland: not cool. When Germany attacked you they had a reasonable expectation they should be allowed to take your land, but when you defeated their surprise attack you went too far by taking some of their land."
I mean, it's just glaring goddamn stupidity on the surface. It's like you all are so incapable of empathizing with a Jewish person that you can't even put yourself in Israel's position and see how it's stunning victory in 1967 over a much larger, better-armed surprise attack by several of its neighbors might actually have been just cause for taking a small bit of land from those same countries.
And what's more, Israel has been adamant for 20 years now that it wants to give the land to Palestinians and let them have their own country, if only they'd fucking stop with the terrorism and calls to eliminate Israel and all Jews. I mean, you literally have one side that's will to do everything you ask of them, and another side that is intent on genocide and wiping Israel of the map, and you still act like Israel is the bad guy here.
Please, tell me the last time Israel was the first to violate a mutually-agreed upon peace accord. Please show me when Israel started a conflict by firing rockets at civilians in Palestinian territories.
Then take a long, hard look at the Palestinians, who have been the first to violate every carefully-negotiated agreement. Look at the Palestinians, who have always made the first move to interrupt periods of relative peace by using suicide bombers and cowardly attacks on civilians.
Your argument boils down to "Israel, you have a moral obligation to stand there and do nothing when you are being attacked and your citizens are being murdered." And that's asinine. But I think I know why Europeans believe this: you guys are still really ashamed of colonialism and slavery and all that, so you see white people fighting brown people with superior fire power and your first instinct is simply to see the whole thing through the lens of your own twisted, racist past. Now it's the brown people who are the noble defenders and the white people who are the evil invaders--but that's not the fucking case here, and you're basically demanding that Jews suffer and die for your White Guilt, which is totally fair after the shit you did to them.
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@Vanders said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Why would you use nukes at such close range? Are you an idiot or something?
A couple hundred kilotons isn't all that bad at around 5 miles distance.I have no idea what the rest of this thread is about, though.
Ugh. There would still be severe health and environmental impacts. The bombs we dropped on Japan were in the low double-digit kiloton range, and they still caused severe, long-term health impacts. A "couple hundred" kt would be a nightmare. It would probably kill a third of Israel's population.
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@boomzilla said:
Except, you see, there's no path from here to there. The greenhouse example gives us hints as to why. I suspect we all agree that if these guys would put away the ski masks and explosive vests and get a job they'd all be better off. But people are actively conspiring against this.
Are you deliberately missing the point now, or is this really such a hard idea to grasp? The path is established and proven: when people do better economically, they just don't care to fight. That doesn't mean their attitudes change, just that what they do about them does.
The whole point of this solution is that it doesn't require the willing cooperation of anyone in the region.
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I can't decide if Europeans are really dumb or if they're just successfully trolling Morbs.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Vanders said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Why would you use nukes at such close range? Are you an idiot or something?
A couple hundred kilotons isn't all that bad at around 5 miles distance.I have no idea what the rest of this thread is about, though.
Ugh. There would still be severe health and environmental impacts. The bombs we dropped on Japan were in the low double-digit kiloton range, and they still caused severe, long-term health impacts. A "couple hundred" kt would be a nightmare. It would probably kill a third of Israel's population.
The US was dropping hundreds of kilotons on itself for decades. Turns out it's not so bad, the fallout tends to either be massively localised (within 20 miles or so) or hundreds of miles away. Even then you're only looking at a couple hundred millirads above background. That's almost healthy.
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@TDWTF123 said:
@boomzilla said:
Except, you see, there's no path from here to there. The greenhouse example gives us hints as to why. I suspect we all agree that if these guys would put away the ski masks and explosive vests and get a job they'd all be better off. But people are actively conspiring against this.
Are you deliberately missing the point now, or is this really such a hard idea to grasp? The path is established and proven: when people do better economically, they just don't care to fight. That doesn't mean their attitudes change, just that what they do about them does.The whole point of this solution is that it doesn't require the willing cooperation of anyone in the region.
Yeah, money fixes all problems. If people had money they wouldn't be greedy for power, they wouldn't cheat or steal or kill or anything else.
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@TDWTF123 said:
Are you deliberately missing the point now, or is this really such a hard idea to grasp?
I'm saying your suggestion is the equivalent to saying the solution to peak oil is perpetual motion. "All you have to do is get something that keeps moving and you have all the energy you want!" And yes, I have a very hard time grasping an argument that relies on perpetual motion, traveling faster than the speed of light or the year of the linux desktop.
@TDWTF123 said:
The path is established and proven: when people do better economically, they just don't care to fight. That doesn't mean their attitudes change, just that what they do about them does.
The whole point of this solution is that it doesn't require the willing cooperation of anyone in the region.
So...how do you get them to do better economically without any cooperation from them, and can we point that magic wand on Detroit?
Seriously, what's the mechanism that improves them economically? How do you make that happen? Literally, what sort of industry do you propose? How would you introduce it? How would you staff it? How would you defend it?
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@TDWTF123 said:
@FrostCat said:
You should go read that article I linked in another comment. This wasn't a "a few greenhouses." It was 3000 of them, which would've provided--I don't know, hundreds?--of jobs.
This seems to be hard to understand, so I'll try again - because it is actually a somewhat different approach to tackling the problem. There's no need to change attitudes, just to create enough jobs that (effectively) every fighting-age man has reasonably paid employment. The violence stops fairly rapidly - a few years - whether or not the attitudes change. Apart from anything else, when an unemployed man gets a job, he has 5/7ths less time available to be a terrorist.The Palestinians aren't inherently bad people. Mainly they're semi-willing dupes of people like Yasser Arafat and the Saudis, who are using them to cause mischief and as a scapegoat. So the problem with your theory is that they've been taught for about 3 generations to act this way, and they're not going to just sit down and turn into model citizens if $insert_appeasement_here takes place. It's going to take a long time to work those attitudes out.
Results matter, but intentions matter too. The Israelis kill more Palestinians than the other way 'round, but that's mainly because the terrorists/"militants" deliberately hide among the general populace. If the attacks stopped tomorrow, the Israelis would stop what they're doing the next day.
The big difference to the greenhouses is one of scale. Hundreds of decent jobs will stop hundreds of people from being attracted to a basically hopeless fight, but we need to give a million or so better things to do.Ah, got it. The billions the world has spent propping up Yasser Arafat having done nothing whatsoever to help the Palestinians being irrelevant, we should pour billions more down that rathole under the universally-recognized theory that "do it again, harder, and maybe it'll work this time!"
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@morbiuswilters said:
Sorry, but if we let 50 million foreigners move into America in 2014, that's going to seriously fuck the country up.
If you let fifty million in, do you think fifty million will come? Some people will get up and move immediately, of course - the ones with money, who you want. Then there'll be those who want to move straight away, but aren't dumb enough to up sticks without a penny in their pocket, so will take a year or two to save up the money they need. Then there'll be those who don't want to move immediately, but might a bit down the line, and haven't really any money anyway. And within a few years, the money the first lot are sending back home has raised the living standards enough that the vast majority of the population don't bother to move.
Mexico's doing pretty well by itself these days, and it's not like fifty million starving Africans are going to somehow swim the Atlantic.@morbiuswilters said:
Also, this country is too fucking crowded as it is.
Now that is utter bollocks. Not only that, but selfish bollocks. The US is almost entirely empty. North America is. There are no other proper countries with such low population densities, or anything like. Wyoming has six fucking people per square mile. Well, clearly not much fucking going on or they'd be up to seven by now, but... You could drop down a city the size and density of NYC in Wyoming and not even notice it, then rinse and repeat five hundred times and still have a fucking low density of population in the US.
For some comparison, France, which is far from a densely populated country, has four times the population density. You could add a billion people to the US before you'd reach the same population density as a fairly rural place like France. (Of course, that's the only way anyone would ever advocate emulating France.)@morbiuswilters said:
The whole world is too crowded.
And I didn't even mention the vast (habitable) empty spaces in less developed countries like Russia or China. The idea the world is full up is nonsense.@morbiuswilters said:
@TDWTF123 said:
Bollocks again. Your doors are all-but shut to legal immigration. A middle-class professional from Europe can't get in, let alone "your tired, your poor,The US closed the doors in the forties, and their decline was clearly evident by the nineties.
Huh? What the hell are you talking about? Sure, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries we allowed higher rates of immigration, but we still have very significant rates today.
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."
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@mott555 said:
I can't decide if Europeans are really dumb or if they're just successfully trolling Morbs.
The entire continent is just one giant joke on me. One day I'm going to travel to Europe (after getting all of my Freedom Shots&tm;, of course) only to discover there isn't a fucking thing there but ocean.
"Oh, Europe isn't a real place," is what the airline employee at the ticket counter will say. "It's just a metaphor for mental retardation, like how Neverland symbolically represented childhood and escapist fantasy. There actually is no Europe."
Then I will die a happy man.
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@Vanders said:
The US was dropping hundreds of kilotons on itself for decades. Turns out it's not so bad, the fallout tends to either be massively localised (within 20 miles or so) or hundreds of miles away.
Yes, but nobody lived anywhere close to where we tested those bombs. Israel nuking the Palestinians would be like the US testing nuclear weapons in New Jersey (wait, it's possible we did do that..)
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@TDWTF123 said:
@boomzilla said:
Except, you see, there's no path from here to there. The greenhouse example gives us hints as to why. I suspect we all agree that if these guys would put away the ski masks and explosive vests and get a job they'd all be better off. But people are actively conspiring against this.
Are you deliberately missing the point now, or is this really such a hard idea to grasp? The path is established and proven: when people do better economically, they just don't care to fight. That doesn't mean their attitudes change, just that what they do about them does.
The whole point of this solution is that it doesn't require the willing cooperation of anyone in the region.Here is a person who has clearly never seen the Palestinian Mickey Mouse, or any of the many other rabid TV shows the Palestinians have to whip up hatred of the Joooos.
Seriously, these people dress up their babies as suicide bombers and say "I wish my children would grow up to be suicide bombers" and you think those people are just going to one day give that up and get a job at McDonalds or a bank or whatever?
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Vanders said:
The US was dropping hundreds of kilotons on itself for decades. Turns out it's not so bad, the fallout tends to either be massively localised (within 20 miles or so) or hundreds of miles away.
Yes, but nobody lived anywhere close to where we tested those bombs. Israel nuking the Palestinians would be like the US testing nuclear weapons in New Jersey (wait, it's possible we did do that..)
Funnily enough (Haha!) it seems that Rochester, NY, seemed to get a particularly bad time of fallout being deposited on it from tests in New Mexico. They would have actually been better off if the bombs had been tested in New Jersey; Las Vegas pretty much escaped any fallout at all, after all.
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@boomzilla said:
So...how do you get them to do better economically without any cooperation from them, and can we point that magic wand on Detroit?
You appear completely confused, so par for the course there. You could do the same thing to Detroit, of course: subsidise their economy with a good wodge of billions, and watch the crime and so-on clear up by itself. Because you're not doing anything that's designed to show economic returns, just to make the people wealthier. The economy then, obviously, picks up by itself from then on, but that's not the point.@boomzilla said:
Seriously, what's the mechanism that improves them economically? How do you make that happen? Literally, what sort of industry do you propose? How would you introduce it? How would you staff it? How would you defend it?
A good start would be building infrastructure in the Palestinian territories. Schools, roads, hospitals, even some empty malls (with low rents once they're open), that kind of thing. Frankly, though, you could build roller-coasters or statues of My Little Pony being shagged with a purple dildo for all the difference it would make.
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@morbiuswilters said:
And what's more, Israel has been adamant for 20 years now that it wants to give the land to Palestinians and let them have their own country, if only they'd fucking stop with the terrorism and calls to eliminate Israel and all Jews. I mean, you literally have one side that's will to do everything you ask of them, and another side that is intent on genocide and wiping Israel of the map, and you still act like Israel is the bad guy here.
It's not as if HAMAS' charter explicitly calls for the elimination of the Israel and they've repeatedly declined invitations to remove that. Oh, wait.
(Some) Europeans have an interesting blindness about anti-Semitism. I knew a guy on a mailing list--who would regularly decry the latest thing the Israelis did, and eventually I called him a racist, and he said "no, I'm not, I deplore the acts by both sides. And it's funny you'd call me an anti-Semite, because my wife's Jewish." I challenged him to name one single thing the Palestinians did that was wrong, and of course he couldn't. And as for the second part of his response, well, in the US he would have said "why, some of my best friends are black."
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@FrostCat said:
@TDWTF123 said:
You appear utterly blind to the arguments being presented. Which isn't terribly surprising given the bigotry this subject engenders. The point is that attitudes don't matter. The KKK is full of virulent racists, but they don't generally do anything about their views.@boomzilla said:
Except, you see, there's no path from here to there. The greenhouse example gives us hints as to why. I suspect we all agree that if these guys would put away the ski masks and explosive vests and get a job they'd all be better off. But people are actively conspiring against this.
Are you deliberately missing the point now, or is this really such a hard idea to grasp? The path is established and proven: when people do better economically, they just don't care to fight. That doesn't mean their attitudes change, just that what they do about them does.
The whole point of this solution is that it doesn't require the willing cooperation of anyone in the region.Here is a person who has clearly never seen the Palestinian Mickey Mouse, or any of the many other rabid TV shows the Palestinians have to whip up hatred of the Joooos.
Seriously, these people dress up their babies as suicide bombers and say "I wish my children would grow up to be suicide bombers" and you think those people are just going to one day give that up and get a job at McDonalds or a bank or whatever?
It's become amusing lately to watch the racists of various allegiances arguing amongst themselves about whether it's the Jhooz or the Muzlins to blame for all the problems in the Middle East. You're not a million miles from that, with your sweeping generalisations.
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@TDWTF123 said:
@boomzilla said:
So...how do you get them to do better economically without any cooperation from them, and can we point that magic wand on Detroit?
You appear completely confused, so par for the course there. You could do the same thing to Detroit, of course: subsidise their economy with a good wodge of billions, and watch the crime and so-on clear up by itself.Hahahah, how can you be under the delusion that that's what's happening? The city is a crime-ridden dump full of abandoned skyscrapers, and the suburbs are rapidly reverting to wilderness.
@TDWTF123 said:
@boomzilla said:
Seriously, what's the mechanism that improves them economically? How do you make that happen? Literally, what sort of industry do you propose? How would you introduce it? How would you staff it? How would you defend it?
A good start would be building infrastructure in the Palestinian territories. Schools, roads, hospitals, even some empty malls (with low rents once they're open), that kind of thing. Frankly, though, you could build roller-coasters or statues of My Little Pony being shagged with a purple dildo for all the difference it would make.That's true: it wouldn't make any appreciable difference.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Wait, who is sterilizing Ethiopian Jews?
Bullshit. Overall Muslims are very safe in Israel--where the fuck did you get this idea? Now I'm sure there's some isolated violence against innocent Muslims, and that's unfortunate, but for the most part Muslims are well-treated in Israel, when they aren't committing acts of violence or terrorism. Meanwhile, a Jew in pretty much any Muslim country is going to die within minutes.
Yeah, right.. Just because you don't want a problem to not exist, doesn't mean that it's not there. Not to mention that your own attitude pretty much reeks of racism.
@morbiuswilters said:
Also bullshit. Where the fuck are you getting this shit from?
The article in Der Spiegel is in German and in dead-wood-form, so I'll have to cede the point because I can't find the newspaper (it's from 3 weeks ago.)
It's not a mirage, however. Or how do you explan the shenanigans around the soccer club Beitar from February this year? Were or were there not actual riots because two muslim soccer (from Chechnia, not that that made any difference...) players were to join the club? Did or did not the club's home go up in flames over the issue?
It doesn't matter if you want to see it or not: Israel is not a country of saints. I'd compare it to Ireland from 30 years ago.
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@TDWTF123 said:
@boomzilla said:
So...how do you get them to do better economically without any cooperation from them, and can we point that magic wand on Detroit?
You appear completely confused, so par for the course there. You could do the same thing to Detroit, of course: subsidise their economy with a good wodge of billions, and watch the crime and so-on clear up by itself. Because you're not doing anything that's designed to show economic returns, just to make the people wealthier. The economy then, obviously, picks up by itself from then on, but that's not the point.I think you need to study some economics. This is a good way to waste money and make people dependent on the subsidies. Look at the Nth generation welfare families in Britain, for example.
@TDWTF123 said:
@boomzilla said:
Seriously, what's the mechanism that improves them economically? How do you make that happen? Literally, what sort of industry do you propose? How would you introduce it? How would you staff it? How would you defend it?
A good start would be building infrastructure in the Palestinian territories. Schools, roads, hospitals, even some empty malls (with low rents once they're open), that kind of thing. Frankly, though, you could build roller-coasters or statues of My Little Pony being shagged with a purple dildo for all the difference it would make.Why would anyone take a job when they can get fame and glory (and money for their surviving family) by martyring themselves? You're also assuming that economic benefits would flow down, but given that they're already a pretty autocratic, extractive place, this is unlikely. More likely, Hamas appropriates the wealth and uses it for their own benefit. Nice lifestyles for the elites and more bombs for everyone else.
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@TDWTF123 said:
If you let fifty million in, do you think fifty million will come?
Yes. We have 7 million people apply for the "green card lottery" each year, of which only 50k are given out. Obviously, not everyone on Earth can afford to come here, but a lot of people are going to do whatever they can do make it work. Also, it would not shock me if American entrepreneurs fronted cash for people to move here on the condition it is a high-APR loan.
And, shit, even if we only got half that--25 million--that would be too many to handle. Even 5m /year is probably unsustainable.
@TDWTF123 said:
Now that is utter bollocks.
No, it's a reasonable opinion. We're supposed to pave every national park and ruin our country just so we can let more people in? (And those people will just make room for more people to be born in the places they are leaving, meaning that the overall situation for the people in that country stays the same.) Fuck that. I'd be happy if the US had half it's current population on the same land.
@TDWTF123 said:
Wyoming has six fucking people per square mile.
It also has lots of farmland and national parks. It's not unallocated land, you're saying we should destroy natural land to make way for more fucking humans. Fuck that. People are awful. We need fewer people, not more.
@TDWTF123 said:
You could drop down a city the size and density of NYC...
NYC is a miserable shithole. The people there are miserable assholes who make everyone else around them unhappy. Why the fuck would we want five hundred more of them? Sure, we can cram people in like animals shoved into cages, but why the fuck would we want to? One of the best things about America is our vast areas of natural land. I have no intent of letting that being ruined.
@TDWTF123 said:
For some comparison, France, which is far from a densely populated country, has four times the population density. You could add a billion people to the US before you'd reach the same population density as a fairly rural place like France.
France is not "fairly rural", as far as I'm concerned. It's a densely-populated nightmare. Look, I understand you guys don't really have much in the way of large, natural areas left, but we do and I don't want to see us ruin them just to be more like Europe. You're also ignoring some obvious facts: for example, Alaska is massive, but nobody is going to live there. There are vast areas of the southwest and west that are basically uninhabitable. America is already being paved at an alarming rate--at a rate that literally makes me sick to my stomach and filled with rage--we do not need more fucking people.
@TDWTF123 said:
Your doors are all-but shut to legal immigration.
We naturalize over 1 million new citizens each year. How is that "shut"?
@TDWTF123 said:
A middle-class professional from Europe can't get in, let alone "your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."Well, first, we don't give preference to middle-class professionals like you guys do (well, with non-permanent visas we do, but not citizenship). And we certainly do not give preference to Europe (nor should we)--you'd probably have a better chance of getting in if you were Indian or Chinese. Second, the reason it's hard to get in is because we have tens of millions of people vying for the million-plus spots available. As I said, if we let 50 million in, 50 million would come.
