WIP

Christianity came to Spain by way of Visigoth invaders a couple of centuries prior to the Muslim invaders. I don't think the Visigoths were held in high regard. No, judging from some of the important players in the Moor kingdom, there were a lot of Jews in positions of power, so it doesn't hold true. The Jizya taxes were not always enacted and enforced in the Caliphates, and it has to be noted that non-Muslims were exempt from military service, while Christian nations made no exceptions, when they were raising armies. The conquistadors weren't viewed highly in the New World! According to legend, the Mayans poured molten gold down the throats of some captured Spanish adventurers. The gold plundered from the New world, was needed to offset the economic decline that occurred in Spain during the time of Columbus. It is noted as the first historical examples of: midnight raids, forced confessions, forced conversions....and there were a lot more than 2000 killed, because most were not brought in for trial. Christian Palestinians weren't persecuted or discriminated against prior to the establishment of the state of Israel; now they are subject to the same ethnic cleansings of being forced out and replaced with Jewish settlements and infrastructure...nothing is said in their defense by the Christian Zionists in America, who look the other way and pretend they don't exist! Similar thing goes on in Iraq, as one million Christians were living in Iraq at the time Bush decided he had to do regime change! Then, they did nothing to protect Christians or other minorities who were targeted by Sunnis and Shias during the fight against the occupation and control of the country. Bush Administration, nor any bible-waving Christian leaders lifted a finger to help them. They were not being held hostage by Saddam Hussein or any previous government. The right wing narrative fails to explain how all of these religious minorities...including Muslim splinter sects, were able to live in the Middle East prior to western meddling. So, that's why they're dangerous - they breed like rats! And their birth rates never change, whether they live in the ME, Africa, Asia, Europe, or North America....except that they do, like every other immigrant group in North America, the 2nd and 3rd generations have fewer children for the same reasons that most people here have fewer children. All that buildup, just to tell me that Maher Arar's wife wouldn't accept NDP policy on gay rights? Good thing there are no fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews who think the same way!

Because there are no positive stereotypes for Neoconservatives (just a fancy name for colonial imperialists), and our age has seen us go too far down the road of greed and individualism, so the right needs to sit in the penalty box until our present environmental ills and warmaking comes to an end.

No, oil is not a mineral....neither is tar sands! But, it doesn't matter because it should be left in the ground anyway...even when the present glut of cheap oil runs out. Same goes for the tar sands deposits in Venezuela and India...unless you want to make extinction a certainty.

It's worth resurrecting this thread, since the rise of the right wing evangelical Christian nationalists in the U.S. are definitive proof that you can turn an established religion's 2000 years of history on its head, and still call yourself a Christian! Every religion (and non-religion) can have its dangerous, belligerent extremist groups, and can find reasons to make their religion line up with their own goals and desires.

Bullsh*t! We have a wide range of behaviours, and whether we are violent or peaceful, greedy or generous, are adaptive traits, NOT hardwired human behaviour! That's just bullshit made up by the psychopathic few who thrive in a system based on greed and deceit. If there is enough of a groundswell of support to dump this psychotic system we have today, it can be done! It will be difficult because of the enormous wealth and power that a handful of ruthless greed monsters have taken for themselves, but they are small in number, and losing allies among the vast majority of people. Fewer and fewer people believe their rhetoric and promises anymore.

Welcome to the world of the WTO and globalization! Assuming those "professionals" still have to work for a living, they would have to eat that 75% tax rate (if accurate) and get their tax lawyers to work finding them loopholes and tax shelters. The "talent" drain, is not any working person leaving to avoid taxes, it's the businesses trying to cut labor costs by outsourcing. A long, long, long, long time ago, nations used to have the power to decide whether or not to allow imports, and if so, decide rates of tariffs and duties. And if a manufacturer decided to outsource manufacturing to a 75c an hour sweatshop paradise, they had to have some concern that they would get hammered when they were trying to import it back to the host nation. No more! Now corporations set the rules, and free to outsource labour to the lowest common denominator.

I loved Edward Scissorhands......just sayin....one of my all time favorite movies.....not sure if I like anything else by Tim Burton.

No, what galls us "muslim-huggers" is that 90% or more of the verbal and physical assaults are done to women or children by gutless patriots I suppose!

And your very long history lesson failed to acknowledge the fact that while the nations of Europe claim to have spread enlightenment values around the world, the view from the rest of the world, was a pack of vultures and opportunists, plundering their lands for wealth, enslaving their people on a scale never known before in history (prior to England and America, no slave-holding culture practiced eugenics and deliberately tried to breed slaves for field work, domestic work and sex slaves). And of course we could mention that as Europe spread forth and colonized the world, they caused more death and destruction than any other empires in history....although part of that was from the diseases they spread with them....I'll give you that! And, in the 20th century, America worked behind the scenes to displace England and become the global empire that is still trying to control the entire world! Put it all in perspective, and a lot of those Arabs, Asians, Latin Americans, have a lot that they can bitch about!

An atheist philosopher (who evangelical new atheists seem to hate) Alain de Button, made the observation a couple of years back, that the problem with atheist morality or atheist claims of having morality, is that it contains no ritual...like regular time-consuming practice to focus attention, it requires no personal sacrifice, nor any social obligations. It can just be a collection of handy phrases for rhetorical purposes, but morality has to be put in practice, not on a wish list, or some clouded humanist claims of promoting general wellbeing. That can mean almost anything. Even Dick Cheney is a utilitarian today! Claiming his promotion of the use of torture, the Iraq Invasion, secret prisons, the surveillance industrial complex etc. was all necessary for the greater good. One thing that needs to be said regarding systems of ethics is that some people...for whatever reasons, do not have that inner voice guiding them to make good choices, and without a clear set of rules, they are completely amoral. So, for some, divine command ethics is better than nothing!

I don't know what you determine to be "fellow lefties"....Bill Maher perhaps? But, moral relativism has nothing to do with left and right political ideologies. The actual relativists in this world, are the ones who demand that every other nation in the world work for their interests....rubberstamp global capitalism, foreign troops and most important - allow the speedy access to their natural resources for our economies. That's the kind of relativism that makes most of the third world anti-western! As for the "violent foreign culture," most of the growing violence breaking loose in the Middle East leads right back to regime change and attempted regime changes. If not wanting to go half way around the world and tell people how they are supposed to live, makes me a relativist - so be it! I got sick of evangelists a long time ago. People in other parts of the world have to sort out their own problems in their own ways. Assuming that they cannot develop their own reform movements without a foreign hand to guide them, is condescending and demeaning.

It still provides an example of how disaster/gangster capitalism functions today. These corporatists and their investors earn more money by destroying jobs and gutting companies than they do by establishing businesses and growing them! A case in point...since they are both failed presidential candidates in the U.S. are George Romney and his son - Mitt. Both Republicans, George Romney began American Motors, and became Governor of Michigan, and was asked to run for president in 1968 by that now extinct moderate wing of the Republican Party. Mittens on the other hand, earned his fortune as an arbitrager - a disaster capitalist...although rumors fly that his appointment was mostly about patronage and his family and political connections, not his earning value. Regardless, Mitt somehow became Governor of Massachussets when he was pretending to be a moderate Republican, until he reversed polarity to try to become president....which he is still trying to do. What the Romneys' show us is a microcosm of the difference between how tax and business laws and just plain old ethics and morality change from one generation to the next. So, I don't really give a crap about how much Target's CEO has earned, I still want to see him in a jail cell!

No, but then again, the last time I was in a Canadian hospital for a reason other than visiting was when I received burns from an industrial accident back in 1980.....so, it's been awhile! If I was looking at medicine and health from a purely selfish or self-interested perspective, I could say that I could have saved a lot of money over the years under a ruthlessly capitalistic, survival of the fittest system....like they have in the U.S.! Because for me personally, I have been in optimal health and attention to fitness and proper nutrition etc., has been my personal primary health plan. Now, I have to admit that I am married and have now grown children, so I would have had to buy health insurance at some point in my life if I was living in the U.S. Nevertheless, the main problems we have with our health and medical systems is that we have an aging and increasingly unhealthy population. And on that count I blame your kind of capitalism for much of our problems today! Since it is so expensive and difficult to buy decent food if you live in a city (it's the one thing I really miss about living in the country), and so many people don't have the luxury I have of providing a modest living from 40 hrs of work per week, and have to take on 2nd and 3rd jobs to pay for all the garbage they have been brainwashed into buying for themselves. So, they are stressed out by their jobs and their debts and their lack of time to enjoy life. That is the basic synopsis apparently of why self-reporting data on personal happiness and wellbeing peaked in the 1950's and has been in decline ever since! All of these factors put increasing burdens on medical systems that cannot be fully solved by either public or private initiatives. My personal choice is that health and medical spending should be prioritized on the basis of need/ not how much people can afford to pay for it! And....this is going to be difficult for aging narcissists to deal with, but as I grow older, I still believe that there should be cutoff points on expensive treatments based on age and expected quality of life after treatment. In the old days, this is something that many from previous generations took upon themselves. So, 15 years ago, when my father was in his mid-80's and had a mild stroke caused by an aneurism; he went through the operation, but a couple of years later, when informed that he had another even larger aneurism, the question he wanted answered was 'was that it, or would more operations for more repairs be needed?' When he didn't get the prognosis he wanted, he informed the specialist that he would not have that operation, but continue on living without it. As it turned out, about a year and a half later, he collapsed from internal bleeding and suffered a stroke, dying almost immediately. But that's the way he wanted to go....not living in a hospital bed or convalescent home for his remaining years. And I think I will make the same sort of choice when the time comes! Too much is spent for too little value today on extending life. If you can't have the quality of life you desire, why bother? Now, that we have so much expensive medical technology, a lot more people are going to have to make these quality of life choices, or the system will be bankrupt however its run! Latest news is that Target only has severance money for management. So that CEO pig got the lion's share and way down the line, the store managers get about $11,000....not much, but better than hourly employees got - NOTHING! To me, that's the greatest indictment of the basics of capitalism. Capitalist economics is a system of slavery dressed up as free choice. The owners of capital in a non-union environment, have dictatorial powers over their workers, if unemployment is high...and it usually is. Most people don't have much power to negotiate better earnings and working conditions on their own. And the basic framework of capitalism, is that every worker on down the line, has provide a surplus value from their work to give to that owner....not much different than slavery, at least in principle. Capitalist systems try everything in their power to stop cooperative manufacturing and commercial operations from getting established. Seems that a cooperative movement would allow most people to get a better return for their work, even out inequalities, and eliminate the need for an adversarial union representation system in the first place.

If you asked 0% I could say yes.

Yep, racists never read anything written from the perspective of non-white minorities; and yes, misogynists have no interest in trying to understand a feminist perspective on such issues as rape, sexual harassment, abortion rights etc.. I can't go into details, but we have had to deal with sexual harassment issues of varying degrees of severity where I work. When the first female employees were coming in, they weren't talking about it...or at least not openly or making formal complaints and pressing charges in a few cases. It took a number of years before the threshold was reached where all of a sudden, everything started to boil over. In the most serious cases, the guys are obvious sexual predators who were following a plan. But, in the cases of verbal harassment, it was mostly idiots who keep falling back to 'what they meant' or intended. No thought seems to be given to how others....such as a new female worker with low seniority might interpret those jokes....comments etc.. And, that is half the problem. If they are capable of developing that outsider perspective, then they can be reformed. If they only think of everything they say or do from their own perspective, they are likely unreformable. And, this could apply in so many other issues today, from personal interactions to global international events.

I could say the same thing for the modern State of Israel.

I am wondering if some combination of capitalism becoming increasingly ruthless and new personal devices increasing narcissism, are combining together to make internal and external conflicts more common and more dangerous....we still have thousands of nuclear warheads out there as best I recall! What I'm noticing is that every international issue is viewed almost solely from our vantage point - i.e. how does it affect us or allies' interests? I don't care if it's about the civil war in Ukraine, or the Hebdo Shootings in France, Israel/Palestine, the rise of ISIS, the growing international tide of refugees traveling by land and by sea.....whatever the issue is, it's all about ME. If I am to believe today's rightwing...almost fascist propaganda, I have to believe that some races of people (blacks, Arabs and others tagged as enemies) are different than us, at some core level, and are intrinsically barbaric, stupid, violent etc., and all that can be done is to ethnically cleanse them out, or kill them, build walls, imprison them in a system of mass incarceration etc., but all the rightwingers do is leave a trail of breadcrumbs to try to lead others to their chosen conclusion. They never come right out and say what's on their mind.....at least not in public! The other big failing I see, besides a complete unwillingness to try to understand how others might see the world and view various issues, is a total lack of comprehension or interest in history! Because in this specific case - France, they have a long history of being an imperial power, and then trying to preserve their colonial powers through subterfuge - proxy dictators in Africa, and in the case of Algeria, it took a long, bloody war that killed millions before they would give up that colony. And yet their policy for dealing with the Algerian population that moved to France during the colonial era and the many more who came afterwards, has been to just ignore the issue and pretend that it never happened! There is no way that the writers and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, or any other new atheists, can legitimately ignore history, ignore the legacy effects of economic inequality, and pretend that it's all about their religion! According to present day anti-Islam revisionist history, Christendom is better than Islam....which has no worth...so 1.5 Muslim adherents either have to be killed or deconverted before the world is a safe place in this new mythology. Nevermind that real history informs us that religious persecutions, fundamentalisms and reform eras come and go in cycles, mostly dependent on external events. The revisionists have no explanation for how and why the Moor kingdom of Andalusia was the most advanced and progressive region in Europe back in the Middle Ages. It was multi-ethnic, multicultural, and very prosperous, until the Catholic autocrats took over and made the kingdom of Spain a theocratic tyranny. They killed any Moors or Muslims who fell behind their lines, and demanded that Jews remaining, convert to Catholicism or be similarly executed. But, when the Inquisition really got rolling, they didn't trust their Jewish Conversos anyway, and started killing them off also just in case they were secretly practicing Judaism or possibly returning to it at a later date. In the more recent examples cited of purges of Christians, Jews and different minority sects in Muslim nations; the question is never asked: how did those minority religious groups live there for so long, and why are they being killed or forced out today....if the story begins and ends with Islamic theology? So, what we have today are "clash of civilization" Neocons, who want to fight against encroaching Islam, and sometimes claim they are just fighting the extremists - the 'Islamists,' and supposedly they are going to accomplish their goals by: -giving aid and unqualified support to Israel, regardless of their ethnic cleansing operations -sending troops throughout the Muslim World and usually taking sides of corrupt unpopular despots, who allow easy access to their oil. -demanding that all Muslims in the west make continuous apologies every time there is a terrorist attack by self-proclaimed Muslims in the west or against western soldiers or officials in their lands.....without apologizing or acknowledging our governments' killings, war crimes and interference over there. If Neocons of various types had any actual interest in reform within the branches of Islam, it sure as hell isn't going to happen by labeling all Muslims as irrational, violent, irredeemable, and telling them they have to accept U.S. and allies strategic and economic interests in Arab and other Muslim nations.

Sounds like it's time to start building that border fence.

In other words the Hebdo shootings had nothing to do with religion - the root causes are France's unacknowledged racism and it's equally unacknowledged colonial past, which it still carries on by proxy today trying to protect its economic interests in Africa.

It's a shame we don't have a low cost efficient health care system like they have in the U.S.........no, wait a minute.....................

With climate change, we're going to have the opposite problem: millions of Americans fleeing the Southwest as it dries out and crossing our borders in droves.....then they'll start planting flags and claiming it was their country all along!

I like your spirit, but under the trading regimes we are governed by today, we've lost the ability to set our own economic goals and run an independent foreign policy, rather than having a Prime Minister who just repeats everything U.S. officials say.

Our economy has been U.S. owned ever since FTA - NAFTA abolished Canadian content provisions and similar protections for our industry. Seems a little pointless these days to be a Canadian nationalist in an age when our economy is completely foreign-owned.