Americans never ran? Who the fuck are these americans you refer to? You guys are mainly british, dutch, french and german immigrants who committed genocide and mass-slavery to make sure you can force your worldview and way of living on everybody else. You people are to the world of the 18th and 19th century what ISIS is to today's world. Just because you changed a bit for the better doesn't mean you get to sit on any horse, high or not, and judge others. You can't even own the terrible, terrible shit your ancestors did and your patriotism ramblings show that. The reason you're so terrified of muslims is because they just might start returning your smallpox blankets.

I give a shit about political correctnes and that's why I wrote this.

The article linked above mentions Röpke and Eucken as champions of free market capitalism, so to speak. Ironically, Bernie Sanders is quite in line with many of Walter Eucken's core ideas. For instance, Eucken declared legal responsibility to be an absolute necessity for competition within a market economy. Meaning that under Eucken's notion of capitalism, US prisons would be filled to the brim with white collar criminals from Wall Street and just about every multinational corporation, including Volkswagen.

Ludwig Erhard, credited by many to be the main figure behind the German "Wirtschaftswunder" (nothing wonderous about it), postulated real wage growth in line with productivity and target inflation as an imperative for a working social market economy. Again, very much in line with Bernie Sanders. Maybe even to the left of Sanders. A 5% increase in productivity and a target inflation of 2% requires a wage increase of 7%, otherwise your economy will starve itself of the demand it requires to absorb its increased production. You can steal it from foreign countries, like Germany's been doing for more than a decade now, but that kind of parasitic behaviour is generally frowned upon. Minimum wage in the US according to Erhard would be what now, $25-$30? So much for Sanders' $15...

Sennholz further mentions the CDU as a counterweight to the SPD. Well, the CDU's "Ahlener Programm" in 1947 declared that both marxism and capitalism failed the German people. In fact, it put significant blame for Germany's descent into fascism at the feet of the capitalistic system and called for a complete restart with focus NOT on the pursuit of profit and power, but the well-being of the people. They called for socialism with Christian responsibility, later watered down and known as social market economy or Rhine capitalism.

As for the economic policies conducted by the occupation forces: German industry, and large corporations in particular, were shackled for the role they played during the war. If you work tens of thousands of slaves to their death, you lose your right to... well, anything. If they had stripped IG Farben, Krupp and the likes down to the very bone, nobody could have complained. No economic liberties for the suppliers behind a genocide.

Next in line, the comparison with Germany's European neighbours. Sennholz wrote that piece in '55, so you can't really blame him for it. Italy had more growth from '58 onwards, France had more growth than its devastated neighbour from '62 onwards. The third Axis power, Japan, had significantly more growth from '58 onwards.

Why did some European and Asian countries grew much more rapidly than the US? Fair Deal? Nope, Bretton-Woods. Semi-fixed exchange rates caused the Deutsche Mark and the Yen to be ridiculously undervalued compared to the Dollar, thus increasing German and Japanese competitiveness at the cost of the US. Stable trade relations created by the semi-fixed exchange rates plus the highly expansive monetary policy in the US – that's what boosted Germany's economy most of all. Sort of like China over the last two decades, except we were needed as a bulwark against the evil, evil Commies, so the US kept going full throttle.

Our glorious policians tried the same policies (Adenauer/Erhard) in East Germany after reunification, even though global conditions were vastly different, and the result is the mess we now have over there. The entire industry was burned to the ground when they set the exchange rate too high, thus completely destroying what little competitiveness remained. Two trillion DM later, still no improvement. A job well done, truly.

Anyway, if anything, Bernie Sanders' program is closer to post-war German social market economic principles than to the East-German bastard of socialism, state capitalism and planned economy imposed by an autocratic system. However, even that messed up system produced significantly less poverty, both in quality and quantity, than the current US corporatocracy. No homelessness, no starvation, proper healthcare for everyone – reality in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). And despite the fact that they were used as cheap labour for western corporations, no less. My first Ikea shelf was produced by our oppressed brothers and sisters in the East. The Wall "protected" the West from cheap labour while letting goods pass right through – splendid membrane, that one.

PS: Since that article was written in '55, I have to mention one of my city's most famous citizens: Otto Brenner. He was elected head of the IG Metal, this country's most influential trade union, in 1956 after having shared the office since 1952. The policies he fought for, and pushed through, during his 16 years in charge of the union are very much in line with what Sanders is campaigning for.

@SDGundamX

We can criticise religion generally - for it's falsehood, for it's stultifying effect on the mind, for the shadow the faithful cast over an enlightened world.

We can criticise religions individually - for the divine exhortations to genocide in each of the abrahamic canons, for the promise of infinite torture by a benevolent god in both christianity and islam, for their arbitrary or bigoted taboos, and particularly of the newer creeds - islam, mormonism, scientology - for what we know to be the bad character of their founders.

And, as you say, we can criticise the behaviours of individual believers, communities or sects - catholicism on condoms and the spread of aids, genital mutilation in africa (which you're quite right to point out has cultural roots that pre-date islam, though it would be disingenuous to claim religion has no reinforcing or propagating effect on that practice).

I wholly disagree that this last is the only or most meaningful critique to offer of religion. There are fundamental tenets of these ideologies on which all their denominations, however fractured, can be said to agree.

Allow these people their diversity, their specificity and their subtle variation of interpretation and you're in danger of chasing a thousand little fish at once, in a thousand different directions, while the religious school as a whole shifts, shimmers, dazzles and slips away. I prefer to play the dolphin pack: surrounding, corralling, squeezing and finally devouring the enemy entire.

No, the bible is fucked up all on its own.

That its adherents have made it worse is no surprise, when your moral code comes from a book that endorses slavery, rape, xenophobia, child sacrifice, genocide, war, homophobia, torture.

Oh and 12 year olds getting married? Oh look, religion endorsed that too.

And there's a reasonable argument to be made that rapists and child molesters were "born that way" in that they may have serious mental issues. That doesn't excuse them acting on it, but one day with enough study, we might be able to identify and treat them before it becomes an issue.

I'll quote you again for emphasis:
'Fuck the Irish and Jews, they don't get murdered at rate of 1 every 28 hours.'

Dude, fuck you for that statement. I'm german, most of my life I've been told to feel sorry for the fucking holocaust. It ain't my fault.
I take issue with parts of the jewish community that keeps complaining about their history and ignoring all the other, smaller holocausts, the ethnic cleansings and whatever else you want to call the genocides happening after WW2 but I will not accept you taking a dump on it.
You have it bad, no doubt, and black people in the US always had to endure unimaginable suffering. I have absolutely no clue how horrible the shit you and your ancestors had to go through is.
But...
My great-grandfather and his peers build fucking corpse factories. My ancestors shipped people in train cars to a place to literally destroy them, to murder them. They called it 'Endloesung'.
My ancestors industrialised genocide. The Shoah claimed at least 6 million lives.
As justified your rage and your hurt is, as much unimaginable suffering your ancestors and those like them had to endure, you don't get to tell those that survived and their families it to fuck themselves.
I wouldn't dare to do that to you or your ancestors.

There's a lot of terrible shit going on around the world and it's part of why I'm not fond of my own species. We both wish the world would be different and I like to think I understand, or at least have a vague idea, why you're so angry. But how could I? I never suffered that awful shit. I'm sorry but that's just what I was born into. Nobody ever asked me what I thought about it.
However, maybe I'm wrong but telling a group like the jews, a group of people whose history of being treated horribly as long or even longer than your own people, to go fuck themselves...
you're just loosing me here. I have no other choice than calling you out on that. You're dead wrong on that. How can you do that? Don't you have any decency, haven't you seen the mountain of corpses?

They murdered them. All of them. Blacks and jews. It doesn't matter. They're all lost. We lost them.

Pretty pessimistic and defeatist attitude there.

With displacement from various global warming issues, genocides, wars, and extreemists, we're ALL going to see influx of immigrants to our countries. If we can't figure out how to get along, and prosper together, the species, or at the very least civilization, is doomed.
I don't think anyone thinks it's surprising that a near homogeneous society is having trouble integrating new cultures, but to say it's impossible (and imply it will never work in other situations) is not only not true, it's quite harmful and fosters xenophobia in the extremes.
This writer comes from that homogeneous culture, and apparently believes America has the same thing today, a homogeneous culture...not understanding that the USA is comprised nearly SOLELY (since natives often remain separate and essentially non-citizens on the reservations...another topic for another day) of immigrants from every country and culture in the world, if we could not deal with immigrants from other cultures, we would never have existed.

So the lesson to be learned for Denmark : this CAN and HAS been done, even with a country of more than 300 million armed opinionated inhabitants and a population mix that runs the entire spectrum in nearly every way.

I'd genocide all IP if such a feat were possible. Tyler Durden has gotta be kickin around somewhere in the collective unconscious.

If there is such a force, be it far future grey goo or gods that dwell within or without, I dedicate the abstract concept of my fictitious soul to the undoing of all corporate power.

Corporations are people and their IP is what? The thoughts within its brain? Well, I'd murder one or all so easily. Prey on their greed.

As the datum of my prayer festers in the digital realm, my only desire is for vengeance. I will rise from within the 1s and 0s, Viggo the Carpathian style.

So, we agree that since to be a muslim requires the absence of consistent, rational thought, then muslims are necessarily intellectually inferior to humans. Obviously that implies moral inferiority also, which is what I posted originally. It's nice to build consensus.

Humanity is defined by intellect. It's the distinguishing characteristic of our species, and when it's lacking, as it so often is, then the result is something literally sub-human.

It can be an amusing distraction to map out the ramifications of preposterous belief systems, and alright I'm guilty of that, I admit it. Actually, stupidity is stupidity. Tyrant, astrologer, anti-vaxxer or just some sad little idiot pointing its carpet at mecca and dutifully reciting its prayers, they're all the same to me; I hate them all and I want them all dead. Stupidity is no small crime; it's no less than the ultimate source of all the evil in the world.

The moral gap between stupidity and the consequences of stupidity is non-existent. What real difference is there between the merely hypocritical and the genocidal, beside the opportunities they had to inflict their defective thinking on the world?

Given you are a proponent of corrective rape, child pornography, genocide, mass murder, and political assassination, what makes you better? Not having millions of followers?

What a load of horseshit.

I have no intention of arguing that Mohammed was anything other than a terrible human being.

But to say that all Muslims are guilty of mass rape or genocide is so patently absurd it's barely worth rebutting.

Are they guilty of cognitive dissonance? Hell yeah.

I've argued in the past that almost all members of religions are hypocrites; either you believe your religion is divine and therefore, infallible, or you're just making up your own morality and therefore tacitly acknowledging your religion is a flawed man-made thing.

But since the alternative is insane fanatical fundamentalism, I can forgive a little hypocrisy.

The moral gap between hypocrisy and mass rape or genocide is pretty fucking substantial. If you can't or won't understand that, then you're looking at the world in terms of absolutes and little better than a fanatic yourself.

Oh, and ordinarily, I would take this as given, but just in case you really are that simple, I think mass rape and genocide are Bad Things.

Do not rape people. Do not murder people. Especially do not do this to lots of people.

Clear?

This is certainly hate speech. I hate muslims; not islam, muslims.

Muslims, like jews, christians and neo-nazis, are by definition not decent people. It's islam that we're concerned with in particular, and islam is substantially the worst of those ideologies.

It's easy, isn't it, lazily to accuse your opponents of ignorance - but I'm obliged to wonder how much you actually know about islam, its texts and its history.

It is a historical and scriptural fact that mohammed was a rapist and promoter of rape among his followers, as well as being a slaver and warlord and murderer of many thousands of people. All muslims know this, and all have chosen to endorse his crimes and follow his teachings and are, as a fundamental tenet of the islamic faith, expected to emulate his behaviour.

Can you dispute even a single word of what I've just asserted? All muslims are guilty of mass-rape. All muslims are guilty of mass-murder.

It's sad to see those who flatter themselves that they're progressives descend into rape-apology and collaboration with genocidal fascism.

The fact that we can look critically at the instructions we are given in the Bible and judge them to be moral or immoral is evidence that we do not get our morality from the god described within its pages, nor its human avatar.

On the flipside of the argument, the killers and thieves you mention have access to this book too, and behave badly despite certain instructions to the contrary. We look at its instructions regarding genocide and slavery and stoning adulteresses and it's an easy "no, I won't do that", at least for most of us. We also look at its instruction regarding theft and murder and some people do those things anyway. So what I wonder is, what effect is this god supposed to have, exactly?

There is misogyny in some mainstream games (from memory, I found GTAV to occasionally veer in that direction) but the examples she gives are so wrong they're either exaggerated, ignorant or purposefully misleading.

Dragon Age? Hitman? Really? Neither of these games can be in any way characterised as misogynistic. Dragon Age has strong main female characters, it displays the mistreatment of women but also racism and genocide. Hitman actively punishes you for killing civilians and gender really has little bearing on the game at all.

Slightly more women play mobile games than men today. Even before that we had the success of the Wii's general appeal and the huge sales of The Sims series before that. AAA titles still veer towards violent themes but that is not misogyny. If her views gain traction it's more on the basis of the preconceived and uninformed views of the general adult public rather than reality.

""Since 2 of those 3 [religions] have already internally dealt with the most horrendous of their ideas"

Now that is fucking funny, and the crux of Sam Harris's ignorance"

To think that they haven't, it would seem to me, is to be either forgetful, or ignorant of their pasts and just how horribly they behaved.

To pretend that you've made a point by sneering dismissively is just juvenile. Explain your stance.

The wholesale, unabashed genocides in the old testament seem to me to be more horrible than anything that jews are doing, for religious reasons in the present day. And that is taking Israel into account.

The picketing of soldier's funerals seems altogether less bad than the spanish inquisition.

It's not to say that Judaism and Christianity don't still have some work to do. Of course they do. But they've already climbed quite a distance.