The mixture of valid points, exaggerations, ignorance of context and completely false information makes it a bit... difficult to digest.

Generally speaking, a lot of errors were made regarding Cologne.

The police fucked up entirely and basically was unable to maintain control of the square in front of the central train station where shitloads of theft, sexual harassment and even a few rapes were committed.

The public media did not report on it properly. They did, in fact, refuse to report it at all at first. But that doesn't stem from an obession with PC nor is it special treatment for refugees/immigrants -- it's good old-fashioned pro-government bias. A few days later, they were all playing the same tune again: bad immigrants, bad muslims, need more law-and-order, close the borders, need new laws, etc. Same shit as always.

And yes, you cannot expect all these refugees to be model citizens from the get-go. Different culture, different language, segregation, no work permit, no familiy, maybe first-hand experience with war -- they are bound to commit crimes, assuming otherwise would be naive.

And accepting a million refugees might have been a bad idea after cutting down public personnel and services for two decades straight. But what's done is done. The question now is what can be done to improve the situation for everyone involved. What doesn't help is further segregation (refugee camps), private security (aka mobs hunting brown people, happened in Cologne already) or downplaying the massive problems.

As for that wierd tirade from 1:07 onwards about true Germans: except for all the people from Bohemia, Prussia and Silesia, aka Poland; or the millions of immigrants from Italy and Turkey; or the folks from former Yugoslavia; etc. Two thirds of the bloody country has family names that mark them as n-th generation immigrant. Half of my extended family is from what is now Russia (Kaliningrad) while my family name is distinctively Dutch. "Paid German taxes" gives a hint to his motivations. Folks in East Germany didn't pay German taxes: do they count? Refugees from former German enclaves ("Russlanddeutsche") didn't pay German taxes, nor did they speak proper German: do they count?

All in all a very misguided rant, too eager to abuse real fuck-ups for his own ideology. Rape culture, SJW, PC -- doesn't apply in this case. It's small government, media with establishment bias, a general inability for open discussion of problems, and a shitload of incompetent arseholes in positions of power (e.g.: chief of police in Cologne, gone now).

By the way, he forgot to mention the hundreds(!) of refugee shelters that were set on fire during the last few months. Bands of immigrants committing crimes are a problem, bands of Germans committing crimes are a problem.

We had a six digit number of prime suspects for trouble already: young, male, unemployed, un(der)educated, no fucking hope. It's the main cause for the persisting problems with Nazis in East Germany: no hope. Adding a million additional people, lots of them with equally bad prospects, without any serious effort to integrate them is bound to blow up in our faces eventually.

The best thing that can happen for the entire Eurozone would be a massive integration program in Germany. And by massive I don't mean a meagre billion Euros. We're talking 15-20 billion a year, for at least five years. The more the better. Even in the current economic regime, it would be much cheaper than the repercussions from staying the current course: doing fuck all.

From what i understood, he wasn't complaining that the finished joint could be separated and reorientated - that's the whole point of the joint. The problem is that the joint is made by chopping bits off and gluing them back on, so the joint is only as strong as the dab of glue you used to put it back together.

Payback's got a great point though, with a 3D printer it might be possible to put it to good use. I say 3D print these type of joints as sockets into which you stick some wood or metal. A bit like old fashioned tents or gazebos that have plastic sockets to connect the poles. Could be a good way of building large amounts of shelters very quickly, maybe for things like the huge refugee camps we've got going right now due to western imperialism in the middle east.

I'm fine with your other points, but you really think there are not working, funded refugee camps in Turkey?

An_Aerial_View_of_the_Zaatri_Refugee_Camp.jpg

http://sheldonkirshner.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Turkish-refugee-camp-for-Syrians-e1413585834309.jpg

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/pb-120411-syria-refugees-ps2.photoblog900.jpg

Are they amazing? No, but I've never stepped foot in a refugee camp that was (and, yes, for the record I have visited several). Compared to the 30-year-old jungle camps on the Thai-Burma border, these places look pretty well outfitted. They clearly have the infrastructure, support and funding to serve the populations that are there.

What they don't have is the economic infrastructure to allow for good, rewarding work for these refugees. Of course, that is generally the situation for every refugee population. The biggest difference here is that some Syrian refugees have the financial resources to reach Europe whereas most refugees in other parts of the world don't.

OK.
Point 1. I do agree, the inability of many migrants to assimilate to their new homeland, and to expect the new land to change to suit them, is an issue...one not limited to Muslims, but one they certainly share.
Point 2. I would say 'asylum' does not exist if one must wait 5 years to even APPLY for it, and during that time must not work. That's ridiculous, just like saying they're running from asylum to asylum. They are moving to where they believe they might be able to eat, and maybe live outside a small, overcrowded cage. If honest, working refugee camps were to be erected in Turkey on the borders, funded by the EU and others, most of the refugees would go no farther...but that hasn't happened...at least not in any working way for the numbers coming.
I won't assume there's much 'insertion' of non-refugee migrants in the masses, they would have to travel across numerous closed borders and through numerous wars just to join the group...I don't think that's happening. Maybe a few that crossed the Mediterranean to Greece, but that's not many if any.
Point 3. Yes, the numbers are overwhelming. That does seem to be a good incentive for the EU and America (and the other Arab nations), and eventually Russia to do more to stabilize Syria, however, and also a good incentive for them to create systems to deal with these people while treating them as people.
Obviously, though, the only permanent solution is to stop them from being forced out of their homeland. No?

3 things, I may have mixed them a bit.

1 - past experience specifically with muslim migrants (some may have been refugees) in Europe - overall not great, mostly they consider our social system and political correctness as signs of weakness. They consider themselves superior, the first generation may be grateful for a better life than back home but the second and third generations feel superior to non-muslims (especially jews and atheists, but also christians) and entitled to benefits while hating the secular state. Will the current and future waves accomodate better? This has nothing to do with our imperative to help those in need, it is a practical problem. Also not racist - although I do admit racism and xenophobia are a major problem in many parts of Europe and trouble me very much in my own country. More so than the Vietnamese or Ukrainians or people from the Balkans "these people" organize in clans and tribes and will try to impose their view of the world on us, who organise in tiny families and on facebook. Albanian thugs are well organised but they dont hold the view that everyone else should be an Albanian thug too.

2 - current wave of migrants and refugees - lets assume we are talking only about real Syrians boarding boats in Turkey trying to reach Greek islands and not people from all over north africa trying to reach Italy or anyone else trying to reach the EU (possibly pretending to be Syrian). So we have this exemplary Syrian family which has run away from a war to Turkey. They are safe there, only they have to either stay for a couple of years in a refugee camp before they can try to find work or they have to survive in a grey economy sort of like Mexicans in the USA. They know that if they dont apply for asylum in Turkey and manage to set foot on EU soil they can ask for asylum there and be treated better than in Turkey. So these boat people are actually not running from war to asylum but rather from one asylum to another. They make sure not to stop in Greece or Croatia or Austria or Hungary but head for Germany or Sweden. Mostly I believe they have no idea of political geography but they have mobile phones and friends who have already made the journey and know how to milk the local system. So for purposes of compassion they are refugees and totally need our help but from a clinically economic (yes, materialistic) point of view they are very much migrants. Migrants we feel obliged to help because they are sort of refugees too.

3 - the mass and speed of the exodus means we are stretched to accomodate them and they will later start to passionately hate us because Europe will not be the heaven they expected it to be.
A few thousand refugees every year are no big deal even for a small EU state. Hundreds of thousands will be very difficult to take care of in the entire union. Inviting more is just irresponsible.

The good news is that the real Syrian refugees who make it to Europe will probably be the more resourceful, better educated part of the current wave of incoming people and will be able to take care of themselves fairly quickly by my estimate. Also they are mostly variants of Shia - the less orthodox branch of muslims. I am worried more about future waves than the current one.

Maybe we have messed up a bit but we need to learn from our mistakes, and even Germany is now guarding its borders. It would be better if we were able to guard the Shengen perimeter.
Then if we wanted to save more refugees we could send trains or planes to pick them up in Turkey or Jemen. You know, set up an EU consulate there so they could directly apply for asylum in the EU country of their picking. But we have to make a conscious decision first - how many people from the desolate and failing parts of the world do we want to save over a given time period so that we dont fail ourselves. Are we failing? Ask the jewish families who used to live in Malmo until recently.

I'm guess from you're tone your American, or at least only figure Americans are going to be reading? You note that 'we' can't get to the moon, while Chinese rovers navigate it's surface. You note with alarm what coastal Florida will face from sea level rise, and not an entire nation like Kiribati. When we look at a global problem we can't ignore technology just because it's Chinese, or focus so hard on Florida's coast we ignore an entire nation in peril.

Sea levels aren't going to be fine in 2099 and then rise a foot on the eve of 2100. They will continue to rise about 3mm annually, as they have already for the last 100 years.(on a more granular level slightly less than 3mm nearer 1900 and slightly more nearer 2100 but the point stands). Coastal land owners aren't merely going to see this coming. They've watched it happening for nearly 100 years already and managed to cope thus far. Cope is of course a bad word for building housing near the coast and at less than a foot above sea level. It's like how occupants at the base of active volcanoes 'cope' with the occasional eruption. All that is to say, the problem for homes built in such locations has always been a matter of when not if disaster will strike. The entire island nation of Kiribati is barely above sea level. It is one tsunami away from annihilation. Climate change though is, let me be brutally honest, a small part of the problem. A tsunami in 1914 would've annihilated Kiribati, as a tsunami today in 2014 would, as a tsunami in 2114 would. And we are talking annihilate in a way the 2004 tsunami never touched. I mean an island that's all uninhabited, cleared to the ground and brand new, albeit a bit smaller for the wear. That scenario is going to happen sooner or later, even if the planet were cooling for the next 100 years so let's be cautious about preaching it's salvation through prevention of climate change.

Your points on food production are, sorry, wrong. You are correct enough that local food growth is a big part of the problem. You are dead wrong that most, or even any appreciable amount is to blame on climate change now or in the future. All the African nations starving for want of local food production lack it for the same reason, violence and instability. From this point forward referenced as 'men with guns'. The people in Africa have, or at least had, the means to grow their own food. Despite your insistence that men with guns couldn't stop them from eating then, they still did and continue to. A farmer has to control his land for a whole year to plant, raise and harvest his crop or his livestock. Trouble is men with guns come by at harvest time and take everything. In places like the DRC or Somalia they rape the farmer's wife and daughters too. This has been going on for decades and decades, and it obviously doesn't take many years for the farmer to decide it's time to move their family, if they are lucky enough to still be alive. That is the population make up of all the refugee camps of starving people wanting for food. It's not a climate change problem, it's a people are horrible to each other problem. A different climate, better or worse growing conditions, is a tiny and hardly worth noting dent in the real problem.
CO@ emission restrictions do not equate to global economic downturn, they could just as easily mean global economic upturn as new tech is adopted and implemented.
I stated meaningful CO2 emission changes. That means changes that will sway us to less than 1 foot of sea level change by 2100 and corresponding temperatures. Those are massive and rapid reductions, and I'm sorry but that can not be an economic boon too. I'm completely confident that electric cars and alternative or fusion power will have almost entirely supplanted fossil fuel usage before 2100, and because they are good business. Pushing today though for massive emission reductions can only be accomplish be reducing global consumption. People don't like that, and they jump all over any excuse to go to war if it means lifting those reductions. That's just the terrible nature of our species.

As for glaciers, I did read the article. You'll notice it observed that increasing the spatial resolution of models changed the picture entirely? The IPCC noted this and updated their findings accordingly as well(page 242). The best guess by 2100 is better than 50% of the glaciers through the entire range remaining. The uncertainty range even includes a potential, though less likely GAIN of mass:
. Results for the Himalaya range between 2% gain and 29% loss to 2035; to 2100, the range of losses is 15 to 78% under RCP4.5. The modelmean loss to 2100 is 45% under RCP4.5 and 68% under RCP8.5 (medium confidence). It is virtually certain that these projections are more reliable than in earlier erroneous assessment (Cruz et al., 2007) of complete disappearance by 2035.

If you still want to insist Nepal will be without glaciers in 2100 please provide a source of your own or stop insisting on contradicting the science to make things scarier.

This video isn't about how great Norwegians are (even if they are great), it's basically saying "You wouldn't stand by and watch a child freeze in front of you but what about children in Syrian refugee camps, how about stepping up to the plate for them"

Though I'm down with a little bit of lyrical grandstanding, I agree with the earlier sentiment that the length of a shot doesn't make it great, but the content does. If we're talking about long cuts, then the refugee camp scene from Children of Men takes every award. Though there are periodic cuts in that scene, it was shot in full a few times and spliced together. The emotion and gravity of that scene are matched with the action, the dialogue and the acting. The scene somehow shows the dreadful reality of that kind of situation without detracting from the story, and the amazing moment where the baby's crying stops everyone in their tracks momentarily for a common goal. This was good, but it's not even close to the greatest i'll see this week.

Children of Men:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twcKoAQ7HIg - though it's only the first part of it.
Some stuff missing, followed by:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5vmo_oUnJo

Hope someone can find a full video!

The regions of which you speak belong to another era...
They've never really been conquered or been part of established empire. People are still organized along tribal lines, with the tribes engaged in continuous inter-tribe warfare...
I know it sounds racist but those boys are like klingons, the Pakistani government has never really dared to take them on.

Thank you, that was largely how I understood things to be within the tribal regions as well.

I have troubles with calling the tribal regions not really part of Pakistan when it's pointed out how bad some of the boys there are, but later when an American drone kills some of those bad boys in that region it is a gross affront to Pakistan's national sovereignty. It's either part of Pakistan or it's not, and if it is part of Pakistan and America is supposed to mind it's business what is America expected to do when the bad boys from that tribal region keep killing Americans and more importantly and in even greater numbers the moderate Pakistani's who are the closest America has to true allies in the region.


Despite all of that they've never really bothered us until the "war on terror". They've always bbeen kind of our crazy cousins. We don't wanna be around them but they're family.

I'd argue that they never really bothered anyone because they'd largely been getting what they wanted. That's not the kind of problem that gets better just because you keep giving the extremists what they want. It leads to a situation where a guy like Osama can find enough friends to hide within a mile of the very Military Academy that Musharraf graduated from. I firmly do not accept that the 'war on terror' created the problem, it just forced it to be recognized and dealt with.

Americans will leave, leaving Pakistan with a mess. They did it before and we've been screwed since. There's a huuuuge (as in a small city big) Afghan refugee camp near where I live that's some thirty years old, from the last time American boys were in the region playing their geopolitical monopoly game. It's horrible.

Agreed on both counts. As far as America is concerned it's more cost effective to just reset the clock in Afghanistan every so often so the problems there are kept localized and not something that will bother them for another decade. It's a twisted game and I desperately want to see real solutions embraced that will see the moderate locals have a real chance at being the victors in the end instead of the perpetual victims.

Saudi's are equally nuts and there's not a single American president who doesn't go pay a visit right away upon taking office. Best friends.

I'd say the Saudi's are even worse. They've spent billions of dollars in Pakistan's tribal regions setting up jihadi training camps and calling them 'schools'. Regrettably the male only students come out illiterate but well trained in extremist Wahhabi doctrines and guerrilla warfare. The Saudi 'charities' have spent more money on 'education' in these tribal areas than Pakistan's own government and have been doing since long, long before the 'war on terror' ever was recognized by the West or Pakistan. That building block of an internal war against Pakistan itself has been building for a long time and without the hard push Bush made I firmly believe that would still be official Pakistani policy. The situation would be worse and when ever the militants decided to start pushing it would have been far more unpleasant than what Pakistan has faced so far from those elements.

I guess my point being, we're actually not a bad bunch. Just in a shitty situation. Come sometime and I can show you around. Most of the country is safe. Safer than mexico anyways.

I would honestly love to take you up on that. My kids are a bit young but I do hope to make it over there someday. I too believe you guys are a great bunch in a bad situation, the road out of it though is just so long, difficult and nasty. I wish all of you there the best of luck and honestly spend a lot of time trying to understand what is happening there and what small part little old me can play.

The regions of which you speak belong to another era. Villages out there take days to walk to along mountain trails in some of the highest mountain ranges in the world. Is similiar to a lot of terrain in Afghanistan. Natural forts.

They've never really been conquered or been part of established empire. People are still organized along tribal lines, with the tribes engaged in continuous inter-tribe warfare. Every kid is handed a gun as soon as he's old enough to shoot and raised to abide by the honour code (pashtunwali, yes they even have a name for it). When the tribe is under attack, you don't question right or wrong, you defend the tribe. They're no electricity, television, newspapers, literacy, or any other medium that counters this message. I know it sounds racist but those boys are like klingons, the Pakistani government has never really dared to take them on.

Couple that with the decades of training provided in the arts of guerilla warfare; including drug running, weapons manufacture, crude bomb manufacture, etc. by the CIA and ISI during the cold war and the Soviet invasion, means they are a force to be reckoned with as the US is finding out in Afghanistan.

Despite all of that they've never really bothered us until the "war on terror". They've always bbeen kind of our crazy cousins. We don't wanna be around them but they're family. Most of the country is similarly undeveloped (as in people still live like 3000 years ago undeveloped) and backwards. Bringing them into the modern era is a long term project but there's a 150 million more people on that waiting list.

Since the war on terror Pakistan has taken a serious beating. This was supposed to be our decade of growth instead the economy is in shambles. We've been through yet another round of Western supported, foreign policy obsessed, military dictator leaving our civil institutions in shambles. We've lost around 4 thousand soldiers another 8.5 wounded. 40 thousand civilians killed and 3.5 million internal refugees (dirt poor and starving variety).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_North-West_Pakistan

Those are big numbers, people are angry. The Americans are unlikely to win in Afghanistan. They're putting tribe against tribe. All this talk of democracy vs. extremism/terrorism is not something the average Afghan understands. The average Afghan is illiterate and does not understand complex ideas. He understands this: foreigners, christian army, my tribe has chosen this side because we always hated those other fuckers anyways. Americans will leave, leaving Pakistan with a mess. They did it before and we've been screwed since. There's a huuuuge (as in a small city big) Afghan refugee camp near where I live that's some thirty years old, from the last time American boys were in the region playing their geopolitical monopoly game. It's horrible.

From the Pakistani perspective the War on Terror has been a disaster. It's solved nothing and created tenfold the problem it aimed to solve. The Afghans are a primitive bunch (made more so by warfare) and need to establish a government, after which they will slowly over time, maybe a century, join the civilized world. Pakistan wholeheartedly supported the Taliban (as did the US) when they took control of the country and brought peace to it. Warfare is the real bitch not how "extreme" they are. Saudi's are equally nuts and there's not a single American president who doesn't go pay a visit right away upon taking office. Best friends.

Now the government/military of Pakistan is in a tricky situation, we have to play both sides, thus the lack of trust. Either side has the ability to seriously take Pakistan on and bring it to it's knees. The government the American's have propped up in Kabul wouldn't last a month without them, is corrupt, and allied to the Indians, with whom we see ourselves as being in a state of justified war. What to do!? What to do!? (in a indian accent).

I guess my point being, we're actually not a bad bunch. Just in a shitty situation. Come sometime and I can show you around. Most of the country is safe. Safer than mexico anyways.

Sorry that was a long post





>> ^bcglorf:

>> ^FermitTheKrog:
Thanks for having a more nuanced understanding of the matter... thought I'd share a Pakistani perspective:
-Yes, no arabs here. Lots of Muslims though as in loads of other countries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Muslim_population
-Pakistani's despise the drone strikes for the same reason we despised the Bin Laden assasination. It is a terrible loss of sovereignity to have foreign soldiers killing with impunity, racking up civilian casualties, within your borders. It makes the matter worse, Pakistan is radicalizing tremendously fast and every time the US flattens another village in Afghanistan or our border regions, everytime American troops accidentally kill ours, that pace accelerates.
-An analogy: If Mexico had drones over the US taking out gang leaders in LA, the US would flatten Mexico in response. All we do is get angry.
-Things are not that bad: Liberals are not dying off. We are in government by popular vote. The Pakistani military is not some tinpot force, it is very much in control of itself and thus of it's nukes. We will deal with the militancy problem over time; education, economic opputurnity, writ of law; not bombs. We are a third world country, Afghanistan has been a war zone forever now, these things take time, most of us still shit in fields, out people are hungry, we have bigger problems to deal with than car bombs.
-In Pakistan, conservatives want the American's gone because they are an imperial force at our doorstep. All talk of human rights and democracy is hogwash. Palestine is the example. Amongst the ultra right (3-4% of the population, I'm sure you have them too, wherever you are) the "we" is Muslims and the "them" is a collaboration of Zionists and American bible thumpers.
Liberals want the American's gone because they are an imperial force at our doorstep. All talk of human rights and democracy is hogwash. Saudi Arab is the example. If they go away we can educate our people out of the mental cesspit they seem to be headed into. American bombs make us look like traitors to our people and weaken our stance.
Thanks for listening. Open to discussion


>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^vaire2ube:
well the trick is eventually we dont tell the kids running the drones that its actually REALITY! Ahh! Ender's Game!
But by then the arabs formics will be gone.

The populations in Afghanistan and Pakistan are primarily Muslim, not Arab. There are in fact more Arabs living in America than there are in Afghanistan and Pakistan combined.
I know, not your point at all, but if you try and hash out the real news by reading through middle eastern news outlets you won't be able to make head from tails wondering why a pro-Arab outlet like Al Jazeera would willingly say anything bad about Iran. It's not until realizing that Iran is largely Persian and not Arab that it makes any sense.
I rant about this because it's crazily important and the details matter. American drone attacks have killed hundreds within Pakistan, but even by Pakistan's most anti-American media those people were largely militants responsible for killing Pakistani civilians. The Pakistani Taliban have meanwhile killed thousands of civilians, including former PM Benazir Bhutto, and there is infinitely more outrage and hatred for America's drones than for the Pakistani Taliban. It's something important to think about. What's more, there is MORE hatred in Pakistan over America's raid that killed Bin Laden than there is for the unmanned drone attacks. That's even more important to think about.
The reality is that the moderates in Pakistan are fighting an uphill struggle in Pakistan. We need them to win but they are being killed off faster than we can defend them, and even attempting to defend them is hurting their cause to boot. It's easy to declare that a strategy is bad and has horrible consequences, it's a lot more important though to propose a better alternative. Stop the attacks and do nothing means a Pakistan where the Taliban where still best friends with the military and intelligence agencies. It means a nuclear armed state that was best friends with terrorist organizations eager to use those nuclear weapons in their jihad while we lacked any way of assessing just how close and willing their partnership was. Don't dismiss this assessment as doomsday fear mongering. One of the debates in Pakistan's national assemblies after Osama's death included elected representatives bemoaning Pakistan's failure to protect a great Muslim hero like Bin Laden. Pakistan is a battle ground between extremist and moderate populations and we have a very vested interest in who wins that struggle.


Thank you for adding so much to the discussion, very much appreciated.
Yes, I do understand the sovereignty issue looms huge in the opinion of American actions within Pakistan's borders. I can really understand how that would enrage anyone with any manner of national pride. America is in a tough spot though too. The mountainous tribal regions along the Pak-Afghan border are not under the control of the Pakistani central government. On paper the border may run there, but in practice militants can relatively safely travel back and forth between the two. What's more, there still remain places within Pakistan's proper borders that are controlled by the local tribal leaders, and NOT the central Pakistani government. Those local tribal leaders are allying themselves to the Pakistani Taliban and providing them safe haven within Pakistan to launch attacks in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Afghan part does make it America's business. The Pakistani part in my humble opinion, should be a source of greater public outrage than it is.
I guess I find it worrying that extremists can be in de-facto control of large swathes of land within Pakistan's proper borders. So much so that it is still unsafe for the Pakistani police and even military to patrol there. To me, that seems like it is already an enormous sovereignty issue. America's attacks against militants in that region I can understand being a source of outrage. I don't understand why there isn't equal or greater outrage that those regions on the ground are no longer under the control of the Pakistani government at all and being used as a base of operations for launching attacks on the rest of Pakistan.
I think America's problem is knowing whom they can trust within Pakistan's power structure to work against rather than with extremists like the Taliban. Hamid Gul, former leader of Pakistan's ISI, scares the crap out of me. How many of his friends are still in the ISI that think like him? The JUI-F party declared Osama a muslim hero in Pakistan's National Assemblies. How much support has that party been able to hold onto within Pakistan still after taking that stance? Political parties like the PPP seem to share alot of moderate values, but have historically been ridden out of office by the military every few years.
Do you have good reasons that those fears are unfounded? From what I see and read(largely from "The News International") the moderates like yourself have always been in an uphill struggle against extremists and the opportunists willing to work with them.

Good, I hope the CIA is abducting, killing and otherwise terrorizing Al-Shabab's members. I hope every nation in the world is contributing to such a mission.

The entire problem of starvation and suffering in Somalia is because of monsters like Al-Shabab. There is no problem loading cargo planes with enough food aid to feed Somalia's people. There is no problem with enough land in Somalia to grow food for them. The problem is Al-Shabab murders the farmers because no-one can protect them. The problem is Al-Shabab steals the food aid or murders the aid workers because there aren't enough people to protect them.

The sooner Al-Shabab is gone the sooner Somalia's poor and starving people have a chance at something better than slowly starving to death in refugee camps on Somalia's borders.

Blow me.

>> ^honkeytonk73:

Really, are direct vulgar personal attacks necessary? Surely you are more capable of a more intellectual and productive discussion on a topic of disagreement?
You should read the site's FAQ and abuse guidelines. You just violated the terms of use for the site.

>> ^budzos:

I'm an atheist.
The emotional part of my response, if any, is irritation at a lifetime of hearing other atheists try to argue against the existence of god by saying that bad things wouldn't happen if god was real. A lack of suffering is not a proposition of god's existence. So it's a terrible argument to say the presence of suffering is any indication of his lack of existence.
You fucking retard.
>> ^honkeytonk73:
>> ^budzos:
>> ^honkeytonk73:
More evidence to prove the existence of "Our Merciful Lord and Savior Jesus Christ(tm)". For a loving and merciful God(tm) would not allow such suffering to exist in His(tm) beautiful creation under his omnipotent/omniscient watch. Yeah. That's the ticket.

I'm an atheist and this has always seemed to me to be the DUMBEST possible argument against the existence of God. You must be completely ignorant of the story of the bible? It's full of bad things happening to good people.

But it is still a -fictional story- don't you agree? Your response indicates an emotional state that the people in the story were REAL and were actually impacted by the so-called 'bad things' (often incurred by the magical invisible being known as God) that purportedly occurred to them in said fictional tale. That indicates somewhat of a sympathetic stance towards characters and situations there were purely fictional.
Who is ignorant of reality my friend?



Really, are direct vulgar personal attacks necessary? Surely you are more capable of a more intellectual and productive discussion on a topic of disagreement?

You should read the site's FAQ and abuse guidelines. You just violated the terms of use for the site.

I'm an atheist.

The emotional part of my response, if any, is irritation at a lifetime of hearing other atheists try to argue against the existence of god by saying that bad things wouldn't happen if god was real. A lack of suffering is not a proposition of god's existence. So it's a terrible argument to say the presence of suffering is any indication of his lack of existence.

You fucking retard.

>> ^honkeytonk73:

>> ^budzos:
>> ^honkeytonk73:
More evidence to prove the existence of "Our Merciful Lord and Savior Jesus Christ(tm)". For a loving and merciful God(tm) would not allow such suffering to exist in His(tm) beautiful creation under his omnipotent/omniscient watch. Yeah. That's the ticket.

I'm an atheist and this has always seemed to me to be the DUMBEST possible argument against the existence of God. You must be completely ignorant of the story of the bible? It's full of bad things happening to good people.

But it is still a -fictional story- don't you agree? Your response indicates an emotional state that the people in the story were REAL and were actually impacted by the so-called 'bad things' (often incurred by the magical invisible being known as God) that purportedly occurred to them in said fictional tale. That indicates somewhat of a sympathetic stance towards characters and situations there were purely fictional.
Who is ignorant of reality my friend?