SpankyMcFarland

Kurds and Iranians are different but at least culturally related. For example, Kurdish is classified as an Iranian language. Now many peoples can end up with a language that arose separately from most of their group e.g. Irish, English in America, and Turkish. One of the anxieties of the Turkish state arises from the self-evident fact that most Turks are not descendants of the Central Asian nomads who brought the language to Anatolia.

At the risk of stating the obvious, opioids are incredibly addictive. However, I'd say most people don't realize how a few days use can begin to increase the risk of long-term dependence: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/with-a-10-day-supply-of-opioids-1-in-5-become-long-term-users/ The message is clear - if you are young and have useful years left get off them as quickly as possible.

One use is for breakthrough pain in cancer patients that can't be controlled with other drugs. Here's an example of a drug rep misrepresenting a patient's problem as just that: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/opioid-maker-posed-as-doctors-office-lied-to-push-deadly-opioid-on-patient/

Yes, in anesthesia and pain relief. It acts more rapidly than most opioids.

We are reaching a point where patients with drug overdoses are too toxic to treat: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-paramedic-drug-exposure-1.4273479

You'll have to ask them. I'm no friend of their regimes. There is a reason Saudi threads are short and rare - witnesses for the defence are hard to find. Tribal attitudes do harden but the blame goes both ways. Both sides want the land and the border is heading one way now.

The word 'racist' is inaccurate in the I/P context because we are talking about two groups which are predominantly Caucasian. Something like 'discrimination on the basis of group identity' might be closer. Palestinians and Jews may have had a common origin but all groups that marry amongst themselves must become different over time as random mutations accumulate, leaving aside other selective pressures that will tend to cause divergence.

So those Jews in Hebron call themselves Palestinians? Try and debate in a mannerly fashion.

You may want to read up on this topic a little more. Just as there are differences in facial appearance and height across Europe, subtle but definite, so there are differences in the ME. Why would this NOT be so, given the very different histories of these regions?

I start with the proposition that everyone is 'racist'. We do a better job than most at overcoming our natural tendencies, and Canada is less racist than most countries. There's a clear as day difference between us and the Israelis, though. We don't live in a Christian state. We don't have a West Bank where everything you can do is determined by your tribal identity. Israel May Beverly less racist and bigoted than the countries around it but it is very different from Canada.

Is that a reply to what I wrote? I don't think I excluded the possibility of Muslim bad behaviour and whatever the heck else you wrote up there by pointing out one more example of how developing countries treat refugees of the same religion.

Yes. All I am saying is that surveys are a tricky way to measure this. Behaviour is a far more reliable indicator. Forget about Syrians - look how India has treated Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, for example. Given that you have severely criticized Canadian immigration policy elsewhere, do you see developing countries as having better policies and attitudes?

Those Afghan refugees in Iran have suffered a lot of discrimination, though.

If I put a hundred Egyptians in front of you and a hundred Syrians, you would probably be able to see some general differences in appearance which are reflective of genetic differences. Their appearance overlaps but it is not exactly the same.

He did run deficits. I don't blame him for that but he did do it. The final surplus was a gimmick. He also presided over an opioid crisis in this country and seemed to think that closing safe injection sites reduced the problem.

There was a scandal but it's a small part of his legacy compared to free trade and the GST. Harper continued in Mulroney and Chretien's footsteps on most fronts because he knew Canada wouldn't tolerate a serious shift to the right.

I'm sure you could fool me every time if you picked the exceptions and being half-blind at this stage I probably wouldn't be the best man to ask anyway. Leaving Israel out of the discussion, there are Iraqis who are whiter than I am (I worked with a Syrian who looked like that) but they are not the average Iraqi. So sure, there is massive overlap between these three groups of Arab speakers but they are not the same - the populations have significantly different means. In terms of producing photographs, the internet can do that. Race is a reality, just as families, clans and tribes are real. It's what we do about this that counts.

The pro-conflict fanatics in the US and Iran are strong right now. Both want brinkmanship but not outright war to strengthen their domestic positions. Unfortunately, the Straits of Hormuz are, as described, a narrow waterway and right next to Iran so the possibility of catastrophic miscalculation has risen considerably.

Israel did not create Hamas - that's a straw man - but I do remember reading many years ago (I think in The Economist magazine) that Israel was supporting Hamas against the PLO which is plausible. Israel/Palestine is a tribal war. Anybody talking about absolute good and evil in such matters knows nothing about human nature.

Putin may eventually surrender to China to save his own hide for a while but that will be his doing.

Not identical in appearance, even to me, and certainly not the same at the molecular level. If one took African, Arabian and Iraqi-Levantine Arab speakers as three groups, there would be differences between them in appearance.

Wealthy people can afford to be more tolerant of racially diverse neighbours. For a start, their neighbours are a lot farther away and are unlikely to be competing directly with them for jobs and other resources. Israeli Arabs can tell you that Israel proper has problems with discrimination. They experience problems renting apartments, for example. Given the history of the region, such tensions are hardly surprising. We are all naturally tribal. Conflict and poverty accentuate these tendencies. Anyway, as Canadians, we should probably look to ourselves first before casting aspersions on others in this matter.

You mean the people who are most honest about their racism? These surveys may not be complete junk but they're not far off. For example, where are the Chinese, a notoriously racist group? I can't imagine that India and Pakistan would be so different either. Wealthier, better educated interviewees know what the right answers are and give them. Survey Canadians and you'll think racism has been all but abolished in this fair land. One of my South Asian relatives preferred South African whites to Canadians on this subject because they got the truth from them.

I'm not exactly a spokesperson for BLM or Mr. Obama. That's a subject for another thread.

Because Donald Trump is not supported by the alt left. If antifa suporters had killed somebody, I would expect a hypothetical President Sanders to condemn them unequivocally (and not repeatedly mention the other side 'for balance') because some of those leftists would have voted for him. It would be his first responsibility to condemn his own side. Corporate America already made its mind up about this and many in the Republican Party are muttering nervously. Threads like this seem to concentrate the true believers.