31–40 of 149 posts
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Thank our spineless European leaders. I can't believe we are letting Muslim nations pull the strings here--how did we let this happen? It was usually the opposite.
Thank our spineless Western leaders for committing war crimes in Yemen... From american white phosphorus weapons [0] to british cluster bombs [1]. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/09/19... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/19/saudis-dropped...
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Most terrorist acts in the U.S. are committed by white people, and the people pushing to make their religion the basis of law are also Christians, not Muslims. Your statements have no basis in facts or data, which leads me to suspect plain old racism.
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Pretty good, all things considered.
> I'd prefer they integrate, speak the language, and stop blowing shit up.
Guess what: For 99.999% of them this already holds true.
> Apparently that's too much to ask.
No it isn't, and the refugees actually agree with you.
> I'd also prefer they stop preaching support for fucking Sharia law, but that's too much to ask.
Oh, the old Sharia law saw. Again, in no Western country is there a realistic chance of Sharia law being applied to you or me. But if two parties consent to having a non-official arbitration done then they are welcome to do so. Similar things happen in the Vatican and in the Jewish community and nobody ever thought that that was a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Vatican_City
(Note that the Vatican holds a very special position in spite of being inside the borders of Italy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beth_din
> You've got some real cognitive dissonance.
Do you see me as supporting Sharia law? As for being against integration, teaching immigrants the local language or being pro 'blowing shit up':
I'm against Sharia law as much as I'm against religion: but I recognize the law of the land here that says that people are allowed to do this since they are consenting adults, even if the net effects of both are quite possibly negatives. Just like I can't stop you from eating bad food or from smoking. Those are freedoms we give to everybody in order to not limit ourselves. Reduce those freedoms for others and we too will end up with reduced freedoms.
I'm hardline against genital mutilation, whether done by Islam adherents or Jews is not relevant to me. That is the sort of invasion of bodily integrity that I really strongly disagree with and that no person should have the right to do to another, even when we're talking about parents and children.
I'm 'pro' integration, but I also recognize that not everybody integrates equally well. And some simply don't care. Most notably: American, British and Japanese friends who after having been here decades still don't speak the language because they simply do not need to. Contrast with most Turkish and Moroccan immigrants who speak the language just fine.
Other than that their 'integration' is their affair, not mine and the embarrassing integration courses that the government forces on refugees here are more hinder than help (and cost a fortune). Who gives a damn where our (immigrant) queen comes from?
As for blowing shit up: the people that have the most to lose from assholes blowing shit up (or, you know, white guys running people through with swords) are the refugees and the immigrants. Because they (and their children) are going to be the ones to pay the price, not the idiots that blow themselves up.
History is written by the... victors. It's not surprising to get a single-sided story when the other side didn't care much about leaving written detailed records.
The Huns were victors though, so the age old adage may need some updating
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About as ironic as the Romans taking Visigoth refugees kicked out of the Black Sea area by the Huns... and that the Visigoths ended up sacking Rome within a few generations. http://www.ancient.eu/visigoth/
From the linked article: > Mistreatment by provincial Roman governors soon led to widespread discontent among the Visigoths and, by 376 CE, open rebellion had broken out. In other words: treat your refugees as if they're people.
By the mid-470s, the Eastern Empire was rich, but the Western Empire was poor and struggling in every capacity. The Western Empire's army was so dependent on Germanic soldiers that the Emperor was a puppet of the commander of the Germanic forces, Ricimer. Ricimer would even kill emperors who stopped acting as loyal puppets! After Ricimer died, the emperor of the Eastern Empire decided enough was enough, and he took the opportunity to restore Roman rule to the Western Empire by sending Julius Nepos to lead an army to depose both Ricimer's successor Gundobad and his puppet Glycerius.
Julius Nepos was successful, establishing himself as the new emperor of the Western Empire. He appointed two key generals who he believed were loyal to him: Orestes leading the Roman forces, and Odoacer leading the Germanic forces. Shortly after this, there was an uprising in Gaul by a group of Germanic tribes who were upset over not having enough land. Julius Nepos sent Orestes to put down the rebellion, which wound up being a fatal mistake. Orestes had a dream his entire life of restoring the Western Empire to its former glory, and he believed Julius Nepos wasn't strong enough to do so. In fact, he believed that the only person who could make Rome great again was himself. So when he arrived in Gaul, he made a deal with the rebels. He told them that if they followed him home to the capital in Ravenna and helped him overthrow Julius Nepos, he'd grant them all the Italian land they want.
And so Orestes and an army of Germanic rebels entered Ravenna and sent both Julius Nepos and his remaining general Odoacer into exile. Orestes knew that it would be a mistake to take the throne himself -- nobody would tolerate an emperor who had the last guy kicked out -- so he instead appointed a puppet he could control, his nephew Romulus Augustulus ("Augustulus" being a nickname for "little emperor", not his actual name). But then Orestes made his own fatal mistake. He turned his back on the Germanic forces who helped him defeat Julius Nepos and said "I lied". He gave them no land and told them to beat it back to Gaul.
They weren't happy at all. They were so pissed in fact that they tracked down Odoacer in his exile and begged him to lead them to overthrow Orestes and his puppet. Odoacer agreed. In the civil war that resulted, Orestes and his brother were both captured and executed, Ravenna was sacked, and Romulus Augustulus sent into exile. Odoacer was nice enough to actually give the kid a generous stipend and sent him to live with the rest of his family, since it wasn't really his fault Orestes put him on the throne. Tired of the cycle of conflicts over the emperorship, Odoacer declared himself King of Italy and sent all the imperial regalia to Constantinople along with a note saying that an emperor in the west is no longer needed. And the Germanic refugees got all the land they could ever want.
And that is how the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist. Breaking your promises to your refugees is a good way to get overthrown.
(edited to fix a typo; thank you jacquesm for pointing it out)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the linked article: > Mistreatment by provincial Roman governors soon led to widespread discontent among the Visigoths and, by 376 CE, open rebellion had broken out. In other words: treat your refugees as if they're people.
So, this is also how Rome fell in 476. My source for this is a documentary I watched about a decade ago (back when the History Channel actually aired history stuff). By the mid-470s, the Eastern Empire was rich, but the Western Empire was poor and struggling in every capacity. The Western Empire's army was so dependent on Germanic soldiers that the Emperor was a puppet of the commander of the Germanic forces, Ricimer…
The Fall of Rome podcast had a really interesting episode on The Huns: https://m.soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast/fall-of-rome-epis... He makes the argument that in the later Roman Empire, the Huns treated the Roman Empire as either a vassal or a buffer state to their own empire. They demanded tribute from them and even forced the romans to chase down and return refugees. It's really interesting to look at the Roman…
"They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous. Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today."
Declaration of Arbroath, 1320.