ScottSA

What "facts" are you talking about? That the "dangers of the Religious masses have been at the root of most blood letting in the last two millenia?" That's silly. WWs I and II alone probably killed more people than had ever been killed in warfare before then, combined. Most of the ideological proxy wars since then have been ideological; usually caused by a profoundly humanist/atheist ideology at that. If you want people to belief the "facts," then stop making them up.

I thought the unhappiness was Iraq's fault, since that is so often trotted out as a reason for terrorism. Now we learn from MM that the real reason is that immigrants are not made to feel welcome enough, and so must either seethe loudly or explode in anger, sometimes literally. And KO2 assures us that it's the fact of religion itself is to blame for all violence everywhere and always. I'm having a hard time keeping track of these leftist "root causes."

Is this just jamming or do you have a fetish you'd like to share with us?

At the risk of being accused of being Argus' "bum buddy" again (one wonders what latent homosexual tendency is responsible for the choice of that analogy), I'll say again what I alluded to and what Argus painstakingly tried to spell out in detail for you: culture is not synonymous with "icons." Icons are, if anything, a minor subset of culture, but lets look at some of those icons anyway. Let's look at the association between the Eiffel Tower and France, or the Peace Tower and Canada. Both speak volumes about the culture that built them. The Eiffel tower speaks not to "French" culture so much as western culture. Its steel spans, its sweeping lines, are a celebration of science, but far beyond that they are a statement of the culture that bred the science. The Peace Tower does not have an onion dome or a crescent on top, and there is a reason for that. It is built in neo-gothic style for a reason, as a statement of its European roots and as a statement of the permanency of those roots, that culture. It hosts a government and a regime wholly based upon western tradition, western culture. Culture is not baseball and apple pie or mounties and the Rocky Mountains. It's the social foundation of a society, and ours was once intact and is now atomizing. Hingeing culture on such trivialities as hockey and musical rides is shallow at best.

Have you stopped beating your sister's baby yet?

Wow, man. If the bumper sticker is, like, really long, we might be able to fit a cannabis leaf beside that far out slogan. Stick it to the MAN!

Well, I certainly didn't report you to the mod, and I can't imagine why anyone would...you haven't done anything wrong that I can see. But on a completely unrelated matter, you are spouting pap. "Racism and hate" are "symptoms of religion?" Yeah, they're symptoms of a lot of things, like economics, tribalism, ideology, bad moods, and drunktalk, like Mel's. One might profitably make the case that Islam is based on hate, but I think you'd be hard pressed to pin "racism and hate" on the average Buddhist, or on a Christian monk. Making the claim that religion is the sole or even main cause of racism and hate (however it is you define those terms) is as specious as claiming that faulty tires are responsible for all car crashes. That's not "rational," as you announce with a slap on your own back, that's just stoned.

That's the 'just one question' I'd like the answers to as well. I don't know. You don't know. Why don't we debate it? Why are you scared to? Why don't we look at all those aspects honestly while they are still relevant? What if you're right and all of those scenarios never come to pass? Don't you feel strongly enough about it to defend your implied position, or is there a sneaking suspicion on your part that the vision of a shining multicult New Athens is becoming a tad tarnished and logically hard to defend these days? Have you abandoned what I believe is an indefensible intellectual position, and retreated instead to a faith-based moral certainty that allows no debate? Is that wise? Have you so much faith in the perfectability of Man that you are willing to gamble the lives of future generations on an experiment of this magnitude with no debate? It seems a tad foolhardy, to say the least, to have so much faith in a vision with so much historical evidence against its probability of success, that we are willing to close off debate in the hope that it will go away. It won't. It can't, in the therapeutic grievance society we've created. I think you're just scared to talk about a potential tiger we both know is lurking out there. But if indeed you think it's nothing more than a mythical bogeyman under the bed, then you ought not be afraid to try to explain why the mythical bogeyman keeps shoving its head in the window and snapping at us.

Very few people have the ability to distill a position and set it in analogy as well as this. It captures the ethos, the logic, even the self-deprecatory humour of the issue, and does it while stripping away the rhetoric of both sides.

"I am ethnocentric, and proudly so, if what you mean by that is that I think my culture is superior to other cultures. " "Of course my desire to preserve the the caucasian race is based on my ethnocentrism. Duh. When did this particular penny drop? When did I ever claim it wasn't based on my ethnocentrism?" Well you defined ethnocentrism as your belief that your culture is superior to others and then you said your desire to preserve the caucasian race is based on your ethnocentrism. So if we take your second statement and substitute 'ethnocentrism' with the definintion you gave it in your first statement we get: Of course my desire to preserve the the caucasian race is based on my belief that my culture is superior to other cultures. Duh. When did this particular penny drop? When did I ever claim it wasn't based on my belief my culture is better than other cultures.? Yup, I see that was a bit of a mixup on my part. I fell into the same trap of sloppy definition as I accuse others of. "Ethno" is a weird word...according to all the sociological material I've seen, it means a combination of race and culture, with no real emphasis on either; a properly academic word, and one that revels in the false gravitas of social "science." Unfortunately, on the other hand, it's often used as synonymous with one or the other. Because it's so broad in its definition and usage, and assumptive in its compound, it's probably a word to stay away from in discussions like this. Anyway, suffice it to say that I don't think race has anything to do with culture. I believe they are two separate facets of society. To the extent that they cross over, or appear to operate together, I believe it is simply a congruence based on the genetic homogeniety implicit in the geographical development of historical "culture" (there's another word to tread carefully around). But that doesn't assume in any way causality. I believe that western culture is superior to all others. In spite of its recent intellectual slide toward nihilism. I do not believe that any categorization of "race" is inherently superior or inferior to any other race. With the possible exception of the Picts of course, and I'm Scottish, so I can say that. As long as I meant that the Picts are inferior, of course, according to the lexicon of proper meanings as defined by the neo-liberal School of Grovelling and Snivelling in Apology for Everything. I can't remember what I meant just above, and I frankly don't care and neither should you. But really what you are doing is sniffing suspiciously around my ankles, darting in now and then to attempt a snap at my butt, in an effort to see if you can detect a dreaded Nazi lurking inside. And using innuendo about as subtle as a rabid jackhammer at full throttle, I might add. Let me suggest to you that you are barking up the wrong tree, baying at the wrong moon, nipping at the wrong ass. I'm the least Nazi I know. It's because I don't want a return of that whole paradigm that I want to stop setting the conditions for it. Just so you know. Not because I feel any particular need to defend myself from silly innuendo. And in truth, this foolishness that we have allowed the forces of right-think to perpetuate, the drawing off limits and submerging of certain topics in a sea of distrust and suspicion, is wrong and dangerous. It was wrong to avoid debate on issues like floodgate immigration before it began, and its wrong to perpetuate that avoidance now. Debate about homogeniety of race, and culture, and the face of 22nd century Canada, and all the other aspects of immigration that should have been debated without the squeamishness of learned distaste. And since it wasn't then, it is even more important to debate it now, while it still has meaning, while we can still reduce the impact until we do have that debate. Stifling debate on it by creating a climate of fear around the subject results in the very agar that allows silly theories of racial superiority to take hold and grow in the semi-believability created by censorship. It restricts information flow, leaving a semi-vacuum into which rumours and half-truths flow, at least initially, but then leaves a stagnance in its wake, a cesspool where silly ideas can fester and eventually calcify into moral certainties. Once someone becomes entrenched in a moral position, all argument is useless and the only thing left is action. That's exactly what I don't want to see happen. So anyway, you can keep sniffing around and trying to scare up a mob of angry peasants with torches if it makes you feel better, but since I think I've stated my case here fairly, I hope succinctly, you will just look silly trying.

When useful fools hold forth...

Oh, I guess you must have forgotten what we're talking about. Ganga will do that, y'know.

We're not speaking in Urdu. When you get up to pee, you have a sit down toilet, not one of the fascinating footpad toilets of the east. When you fly, you fly in a western invention, when you drive, you drive in a western invention, when you pedal, you pedal in a....why am I bothering to explain what any moderately sentient human being knows already? Are you quite alright? Just having a fit of the Really Stupids?

So, what exactly is your argument...that private healthcare is cheap and fast, and public healthcare is slow and expensive? And you don't like that why?

Yeah yeah...bet it doesn't even make it past the provincial court.

Progressives is a dirty word. It has about as much to do with progress as "gay" has to do with happy.

Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Che. If there's a hell, I bet they're still tortured.

Would you like to have a contest over how many letters is appended to each of our names? Or how much of the world each of us has seen outside the insular neverneverland of the west? And while we're wondering which one of us is smarter, better educated, and more travelled, why don't we examine some of your notions... Never mind icons, what about government? Did we all get together in a rainbow of colors and decide we'd like to have democracy? Well, no. Even the ridiculous myth making the rounds in the US about democracy evolving from the Iroquis doesn't apply. Parliamentary democracy evolved in Britain, not a skin tent in the northwoods. Or a yurt, for that matter. Our predominant religion, our tradition of freedom, including free speech, our economy, our predominant language, the philosophy from which our ideas spring; even your marxist mindfarts; all of it comes from the west. Even the third world immigrants came here on planes and ships developed in the west. Pretending that we don't have a culture well rooted in western traditions is foolish and displays a profound ignorance on your part. Denying that it is in danger of being lost is just plain stupid.

Amen.

Sensation sells. If the world is warming, it can't just warm as it always has, it has to be a DisEtaR!!11!!1!! hLEp!1!!1!! If we take a casualty or two, it can't just be a casualty or two, it has to be RuN!1!11! rUn aAWY QcIUK!!!!1!1!

Regardless of what one calls it, it was a period of cooler temperatures that followed a period of warmer temperatures, that followed...you get the message. The point is that man didn't make any of the previous warming periods, yet they happened. One would think that this is strong evidence for natural warming periods having nothing whatsoever to do with man.

I think that's his problem. People like you, wandering blissfully toward the edge of the cliff assuring everyone that the way down will be entertained with "vibrant" and "diverse" street festivals, and accusing everyone who doesn't like the side effects of all this peachy "harmony", including Asian gangs, bullets flying, bomb plots hatching, and any number of new found ills, of being "bigots." Hell I'd rather be a bigot any day than a deaf, dumb and blind lemming.

I've not tried to shut you up. Rather your "bigotry" IS an opinion...just a rather ignorant and uneducated one..... Ignorant and uneducated, huh? I sincerely doubt you have the slightest notion...not the slightest.

I hope democracy was really a good idea. When I read insipid shite like this, I have my doubts.

Its already here. You exemplify what you fear. And while you may attempt to provide a rational argument to racism and bigotry, no matter....it is still racism and bigotry. When you can truly acknowledge that then the fear of fascism will have reversed its course. Yes, no doubt bland agreement and passive accceptance of everything that happens around you is far preferable to directing it in some way. Why do your ilk persist in trying to shut people up by trotting out these idiocies like "bigotry" every time someone has an opinion on the world they'd like to live in? How lame.