Did you know every confirmed case of violent rape in Norway in 2010 were perpetrated by Muslim men?
The bottom line is, multiculturalism does not work. Anywhere.
I think we need homogeneity. Probably the greatest desire of humanity other than getting sex is avoiding diversity. Mostly, people can’t stand each other. I respect their judgement.
Does not diversity just cause trouble, almost everywhere? As much as one might want it to lead to comity, it doesn’t. Consider: Shiites and Sunnis, Irish Protestants and Catholics, Hutus and Tutsis; blacks, whites and Hispanics in the US; Turks and Kurds; Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Turks and Armenians; Indians and Ugandans; Turks and Germans; Jews in many places; Christians and Moslems in Sudan; Chinese and Indonesians, and so on for pages. None of these groups is evil, but none mix well. Usually they kill each other.
A staple of political correctness is that groups eventually merge into happy indistinguishable citizens. Occasionally, yes, if the groups are similar and want to assimilate: The Irish and Italians in the US did. Jared points out that, whatever one might wish, it usually doesn’t happen. Sunnis and Shiites have been around since the seventh century. They celebrate diversity by exchanging car bombs. In the US, neither blacks nor Amerindians have assimilated to the dominant European culture, nor have the cultures blended.
Similarly, Muslims in Europe don't see to have any will or intention to assimilate, so I can only see the division, hatred and crime rise.
(post partially adapted from Fred Reed articles)
also I can easily see a future in which people will feel the need to "shoot first, ask questions later" whenever they need to cross foreign territory, because they will never have met those foreigners before
ethnic separatism doesn't work
I do not oppose immigration. People should be free to go and live wherever they want, and have equal opportunity everywhere. However, for societies to work, everybody has to work together to build those societies. This means that the people who move from one place to another have to want to integrate and contribute to the target society.
This is where the worship of diversity is at odds with the practical goal of a successful society. What might sound good on paper causes only division for the detriment of the society in practice. In practice the worship of diversity, the ideology that people not only have the right to, but moreover should retain their original culture and customs as far as possible, is detrimental to the wellbeing of the society, which can only prosper if everybody works together, rather than separate isolated groups being formed.
Of course not all societies are equal, even if they are homogeneous. That may be politically incorrect to say, but it's just a fact. There are many societies where draconian barbaric inhuman laws are enacted, where there is no freedom, equality and democracy. Those types of society do not belong to free democratic countries. Freedom, equality and democracy are virtues that should always be held as the golden standard, and any immigrant subcultures that want to subvert them are not welcome. These groups are detrimental.
This has absolutely nothing to do with skin color. If a group of the whitest nordic people you could imagine would want to establish Sharia in Europe, I would oppose it exactly as vehemently as if the darkest African people you could imagine would do so. Who advocates this barbaric law doesn't matter. It has no place in a free society.
Similarly, Muslims in Europe don't see to have any will or intention to assimilate, so I can only see the division, hatred and crime rise.
This is definitely true. I don't understand why they want to live in our countries if they'd rather they turned into the same kind of hellhole they came from. It makes no sense to me. If you move to Europe, you're accepting that it's a better place to live than where you came from, so why are you trying to change our way of life?
I pretty much agree with what Johannes said about multiculturalism being impossible.
It's basically that they want to keep the cake and eat it too. They want the welfare system of first-world countries and they want Sharia and the islamic culture (even the aspects that are detrimental to a welfare system) at the same time.
A multiculturalist fundie will immediately protest that the islamic culture and a welfare system are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps a heavily modified one might not be, but the prevalent one certainly is.
Just as an example of this, compare the number of Nobel prizes awarded to jewish people, and the amount awarded to muslim people. The difference is staggering. (Over a hundred Nobels have been awarded to jewish people, while something like three have been awarded to muslim people, two of which have been the completely useless peace prize.)
Why is this so? Is it because the Nobel prize committee discriminates against muslims? No. Is it because muslims are dumber than jews? No. The real reason is that it's a consequence of the islamic culture. This culture shuns scientific education and progress (in favor of religious education). Not in every islamic country in the same amount, of course, but enough so that very little scientific progress has come from any islamic countries. (Compare to the amount of scientific discoveries and inventions that have come from Israel. You would be surprised.)
And no, not all muslims in the west are like this. However, a non-insignificant portion of them is, and that's the problem.
This has absolutely nothing to do with skin color. If a group of the whitest nordic people you could imagine would want to establish Sharia in Europe, I would oppose it exactly as vehemently as if the darkest African people you could imagine would do so. Who advocates this barbaric law doesn't matter. It has no place in a free society.
Yeah, I agree with this too. It's easy for the multiculturalism sympathisers to call people "racist" for slandering Islamic culture because most Muslims happen to have dark skin. The reality is that it's got nothing to do with skin colour, it's just the primitive, barbaric ideology that they happen to adhere to. And of course, not all of them are bad, I mean I don't care if you're a Muslim and practice it privately, it only becomes a problem when people start trying to change laws about it and stuff.
I know that at least in the past, a lot of scientific discoveries have come from Islamic countries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Agehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haythamhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_medieval_Islam
It could be because the Quran encourages muslims to try to understand the world and do science.
From what I've heard in the news, some muslims today seem to be a lot different though; barbaric and ignorant. It might be true, but it could also be that our rulers are preparing for a WW3, so they're trying to feed us propaganda so that the whole world would hate muslims, like the world hated jews before WW2 because they were fed with propaganda.
Well, it's not an impossibility.
But what about my other comment? You said that no scientific progress had come from Islamic countries, and I proved you 100% wrong. No comment on that?
You just thought: "oh crap, nfq proved me 100% wrong, I don't know what to say, I'll just respond to this other crazy comment he made."
You seemingly have some reading comprehension problems. How do you jump from "very little scientific progress has come from any islamic countries" to "no scientific progress..."?
I know perfectly well that in the distant past arabic countries were at the height of the world's scientific civilization. It is no coincidence that the digits we use today are called "arabic numerals". Also quite many stars and constellations have arabic names, and that's not a coincidence either. (Yes the naming comes from those times.)
One of the main reasons why they were at this height, a position they indirectly inherited from the earlier hellenistic culture (which was the previous height of human scientific advance) was because the Roman church had basically shut down most of the scientific progress in Europe.
But then something changed something like a thousand years ago, which set back islamic cultures back to the bronze age. What is it that happened? Islam happened.
With that I don't mean that immediately when islam as a religion was first created it shut down all the scientific progress. However, at some point islamic religious leaders decided that science, especially math and astronomy, are the work of the devil and started preaching against them (there are pretty good records of this). This effectively stopped scientific research and education and set up a culture of permanent medievalism which has mostly prevailed to this day.
When I talked about little scientific progress having come from islamic countries, I was talking about modern times, which should have been clear from the context of Nobel prizes and comparison to Israel (which is just 50 years old).
Or maybe I have writing problems, because I missed a word: it should have said "hardly no scientific progress". Anyway, thanks for clarifying.
Perhaps at the same point that scientists discovered that the earth is not the center of the solar system. That's when Christians also started to say that astronomy is from the devil. That was the beginning of the dark ages and the separation of science and religion.
My first world problem of the day: Seeing that the previous posters don't understand that my initial post was an intential spin of the thread's purpose to showcase that the first world has real and not just frivoulous problems.
It is indeed very true that the purpose of this thread was to be humorous and lighthearted, and it got sidetracked to politics and controversial subjects. While these are also "first-world problems", it was not the intent of this thread. On the other hand, it's sometimes difficult to keep the controversial discussions at bay when the subject comes up, so it's easy to see why the sidetracking happened.
So to return to the original intent of this thread:
I hate it when I order something from play.com and it takes almost 3 weeks to arrive.
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2161
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
I hate it when you take the ice cream out of the freezer and it's too hard to cut. Since you don't want to wait for it to defrost (you want it now, not 10-15 minutes from now), you put it in the microwave for a few seconds, but accidentally put it there a bit too long, so that is has melted completely when you take it out. It's a tough life.
Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
I will have 4 days of paid time off that I will have to use by the end of the year, or else it will expire, but I won't be able to take it in one lump for vacation.
Pfft. I have around 290 days worth of vacation per year on my current job (shift schedule + 28 days of paid time off), and I still want more free time. Now that's a huge problem.