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At 12/30/14 06:58 PM, Wegra wrote: Ah you speak it?

I'm a native speaker. I only moved to the UK about two years ago.

On the new card policy for football/soccer proposed by Platini - "The white card is a new initiative. It is related to the behaviour of the football players. Play-acting, criticism on the field, these are not accepted by people who love the game."

*in Dutch*

Platini wants a white card for criticism on the field

Player: "why does it have to be a white card"!?

Referee: "oh for Christ's sake"

aaaaaaaaaaaa.

At 12/29/14 06:10 PM, RydiaLockheart wrote: Golden Dawn isn't German though, or is it?

That's a good point, but I think the irony was lost on most of the protesters who compared Merkel to a Nazi a couple of years ago. It must be said though that support for Golden Dawn seems to be on the wane, especially after some of their leaders were put in prison.

Still, even today I find the amount of times that Germany or Merkel gets mentioned both by journalists and by commenters on newspaper websites to be excessive. You don't really see the word Nazi or a variation thereof thrown around that often, but the idea of austerity being forced on the poor, hapless Greeks - something that regularly appears in comments - seems to at least allude to historical stereotypes, even if the Germans are just asking for guarantees for the billions that they've pumped into Greece, together with the World Bank (who, in fairness, don't seem to be much more popular, and are often dismissed as neoliberal vulture capitalists).

I mean, in general, I think it's perfectly reasonable for Germany to insist on budget discipline; it's explicitly what countries signed up for when they joined the euro. As a short historical recap: the euro was always a political project meant to homogenise the economies of the participating countries. The main proponent was the European Commission itself, which was naturally in favour of closer integration, but the two main member states pushing for a single currency were France and Italy, both not particularly renowned for their commitment to a stable currency. West Germany was pretty strongly opposed, as they were pretty happy with their stable currency which they saw as crucial to their post-WW2 resurgence. When the Soviet Union was about to collapse in 1989, West Germany was hoping to reunite with East Germany, but France and the UK were opposed because they wanted to keep Germany as weak as possible. The Germans and French then struck a deal where the Germans would back a single currency in return for France dropping its opposition to German reunification. However, as part of this deal the Germans demanded that the new central bank would basically treat the euro as the German Mark. It was pretty much understood at the time that the new currency would require budget discipline, resulting in the Stability and Growth Pact.

Although the Stability and Growth Pact was regularly flouted by important member states, including not just France and Italy but also Germany under the left-wing chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Greece is really in a league of its own. They basically got through the entry requirements through outright fraud, facilitatetd by (if I remember correctly) temporiaily shifting debt towards US hedge funds. I don't think it's really reasonble to lambast Germany for not forfeiting the guarantees they were given when they signed up for the single currency. In the end, austerity was simply the inevitable result of Greek politicians being eager to join the euro.

The Greek government has collapsed today after the candidate put forward by the two ruling parties (also the only candidate in the race) failed to secure enough votes from parliament. While the ruling coalition has 168 out of 300 seats, it needed 180 votes in this round for their presidential candidate to be appointed. The position of president in Greece is largely ceremonial, but the Greek prime minister had called for early elections to strengthen his democratic mandate. Or, that was the plan; now that parliament has been unable to elect a president, Greek law stipulates that new parliamentary elections have to be called as well, and it has only been two-and-a-half years since the last elections.

The current coalition is made up of three parties, which include the two parties that between them have ruled Greece for the last few decades: PASOK and New Democracy. They do not seem poised to retain their parliamentary majority; the biggest opposition party, Syriza - a coalition of far-left parties - is currently on track to become the largest party according to the opinion polls (although their lead has become smaller recently). This is particularly important because 50 of Greece's 300 parliamentary seats automatically go to the largest party. Still, it seems unlikely that they would be able to form a majority government even if they form a coalition with the Communists and the right-wing anti-bailout party Independent Greeks. If no coalition can be formed, new elections will be called, possibly leading to months of instability.

The main issue dominating Greek politics for the past few years has of course been the economy; GDP has dropped 25% since the crisis began and unemployment is at 25.7%. Still, only a few months ago there were signs that Greece had seen the worst, and that the economy had started to recover slightly. Of course, if you've been unemployed for three years then the prospect of maybe getting a new job a few years from now is not exactly enticing, so many are angry with the current government over the speed of recovery and the effect of austerity policies.

The main reason for Greece's economic collapse has probably been the fact that, before the crisis, wages increased quicker than productivity, and a bloated and costly public sector dominated by the cronies of the two ruling parties. On one hand, the present government is made up of the parties that messed up Greece in the past, and I'm not sure whether I had much confidence in them being able to sort out the mess they created. Syriza is fresh, and that might make them more able to sort things out. Then again, most of their platform seems to revolve around throwing out several austerity-motivated reforms. Their pitch is that the crisis should be fixed on the demand-side rather than the supply-side, meaning that the best way to get the economy to recover would be a government stimulus plan that boosts consumption. Of course, Syriza doesn't have the money to do this, so I fear their plan will boil down to asking the EU and the World Bank for another hundred billion euros, and blaming a German Neo-Nazi conspiracy to destroy Greece if that fails.

In any case, Greece is back in the news again.

At 12/28/14 02:21 AM, Ranger2 wrote: the Kemalist President Erdogan

*Islamist

I think had Europeans swallowed their pride/fears and made Turkey an EU member, we would not be seeing this Eastward shift.

Sorry, but I basically completely disagree, and as a European, I'm very glad that we didn't undermine the long-term stability of the EU by letting in an Islamist-run country.

There are two main ways in which EU membership could have mitigated the shift to the East: 1) it may have made Erdogan and the AK Party more friendly towards the West or 2) it may have made Turkish voters less inclined to vote for them. I find the first highly unlikely and the second one a gamble definitely not worth the risk.

Regarding 1), Erdogan is basically of the same ideological school as the Hamas, namely the one of the Muslim Brotherhood, represented in Turkey by Milli Görüş. You mention him claiming that Muslims discovered America, but that isn't him having grown radical over the years, he was saying similarly outlandish stuff in the early 90s and he's just increasingly comfortable wih being honest. He made his famous statement that "democracy is like a train: when you reach your destination, you get off" when he was mayor of Istanbul between 1994 and 1998.

He's on a video from the same time period saying: "you cannot be both secular and a Muslim! You will either be a Muslim, or secular! When both are together, they create reverse magnetism. For them to exist together is not a possibility! Therefore, it is not possible for a person who says “I am a Muslim” to go on and say “I am secular, too.” And why is that? Because Allah, the creator of the Muslim, has absolute power and rule!" And: “when [does the sovereignty belong to the people]? It is only when they go to the polls [every five years] that sovereignty belongs to the people. But both materially, and in essence, sovereignty unconditionally and always belongs to Allah!”

The quotes are from this article from the Jerusalem Post, which isn't exactly an unbiased source, but which deserves to be mentioned anyway because it makes a very valid point, namely that the EU accession process has only emboldened the AK Party by weakening the secular military. In your list of reasons why Europeans did not want Turkey in the EU, a third item should be the fact that due to its human rights record Turkey did not have any business joining the EU at any point in the past five decades.

Using EU requirements as an excuse, Erdogan was able to shift power towards the Islamist-controlled police and judiciary (although these include a lot of supporters of the UD-based Islamist Fethullah Gülen, with whom Erdogan has recently fallen out), from the military. The (waning) power of the Turkish military is basically the only thing that keeps Erdogan from running Turkey like Hamas runs the Gaza Strip - it staged three coups since the 60s to remove Islamists or their supporters from power. The only other Kemalist force are the remaining Turkish seculars that also protested against Erdogan during the Gezi park protests, but they are a minority and will eventually lose the struggle for Turkey's national identity through a succession of small losses that will probably still last several decades.

Erdogan has also used his time in power to allow the historically cordial relations with Israel to deteriorate; after already clashing with Peres in 2009 over the 'killing of children' on Palestinian beaches, he seized on the Mavi Marmara incident, called Zionism a "crime against humanity" and even blamed Israel for the coup against his Egyptian fellow Muslim Brother Muhammad Morsi. His foreign minister proclaimed publicly that Turkey would never "cooperate with Israel against a Muslim country". (I definitely remember similar remarks involving espionage in Iran, but I've been unable to find a source.)

Regarding 2), EU accession might as well have boosted the AK party as harmed it. It may have made him more appealing to people sitting on the fence between the seculars and the Islamists, whereas the hardline Islamists unhappy with EU membership would still prefer Erdogan over the seculars. Basically, within the EU he would have been just as able to shift ower from the military to the Islamists; he would ignore EU directives that he'd find harmful to his long-term strategy and if it came to a confrontation he would blame an anti-Muslim conspiracy and threaten to leave, destabilising the entire union.

Remember that many consider the EU to be a club of states with shared values, not a club of countries inside the USA's sphere of influence; that would be NATO. Even if EU accession for Turkey would mitigate its shift towards the East, that doesn't mean that the benefits of this would outweigh the costs of the erosion of solidarity within the EU, at least not from an European viewpoint.

Especially with ISIS on its border, Turkey needs a safety net

I doubt that Turkey is afraid of ISIS at the moment, it will barely lift a finger against it. The Shia axis, the secular Arab regimes (e.g., Jordan) and Israel are all higher on ISIS' shit list than Turkey.

Turkey's government has also been calling for the ouster of al-Assad (why, I will never understand)

Because Assad is a Shiite and religion is basically the sole thing driving the loyalties and long-term strategies of the Turkish government. They'll deal with Shiites if they have to, in fact relations between Turkey and Syria were warming in the years before the civil war, but once Sunni Islamists seemed poised to seize power in many of the countries that used to make up the Ottoman Empire, Erdogan dropped Assad in a whim.

But in the long run, now that Turkish sentiment is pivoting eastward, and with Turkey's seeming lesser role in NATO, and European spurning of Turkey, could we see Turkey leaving NATO in say, 10-15 years?

I don't see what Turkey would gain from leaving NATO. It's not like it's going to be a called into a war, and if it were it would either ignore the call to arms or provide negligible support and wait to be kicked out. As it is, it can ask other NATO members to provide them with 2-million-dollar-a-piece Patriot missiles to intercept grenade shells shot from Syria into Turkey.

In the meantime, there might be some degree of warming between Erdogan and Putin, although there are still some major sources of disagreement (like Syria and Egypt).

At 12/26/14 10:38 PM, aviewaskewed wrote: 2. Address perceptions of elitism of the poli boards to the rest of the BBS. Because I honestly think this has always been an issue for this board, it's always been tightly knit, always been kind of the "elite smart guys" and honestly? There's just not too many of them around these days and new blood is rare and we really should encourage that for the health of this section. We're sort of an odd ball on NG, kind of like C & C is.

It's hard to keep people in. Up until a month ago, SentForMe was making a lot of threads, which was good, but his latest activity was from a month ago, so we apparently did not manage to pull him in. Maybe I'm reading too much into it - maybe he just got bored of the website in general or moved on to something else - but the couple of times I posted in his topics I basically just told him what I thought was wrong with the OP. I did wonder at times if I wasn't helping create a negative atmosphere.

If people really do feel that the atmosphere in the forum is negative (or even elitist) then maybe we (or at least I) could try to more positive towards other posters? As in, thanking people for their posts or telling me which parts you like or what parts you agree with. I mean, for as long as I've been here I basically never posted just to tell the forum that I agreed with someone else, but that of course means that most of my posts are/were negative and just me expressing how much I disagree with people. This is maybe something that users could do to improve the forum other than open-door observations like making more or better quality posts.

Then again, maybe he stopped posting these threads because not enough people were posting in them. There's not a lot we can do about that. considering that activity across the entire website is down: if you look at the number of online users in General it's (I think) below 20% of what it used to be, and if you look at the number of reviews submitted on the first day for a less-than-stellar Marc M. flash you find that it's six now and 15 in 2010 and almost 30 in 2004 (although this might be misleading because of the differences in content). There's just not a lot we can do about that. I mean, even if due to improvements to the atmosphere on the forum we eventually attract 25% more users, we'll still just be at 25% of the level of 2006 rather than 20%.

Maybe we could PM SentForMe? Then again, I don't want to make this just about him, I just thought the point could best be made using an example.

Historical reference to earlier BBS Politics guides: by Poxpower (2009), and by JMHX (2006).

At 12/23/14 11:51 AM, Camarohusky wrote: Well, the strange realization that a suburban Sydney accent somehow sounds like a mixture of Hotlanta and New York black vernacular is a reason to bring race into it. (it doesn't)

As mentioned earlier, she lived in the American South for several years, so that's a more likely origin of her accent than living in suburban Sydney.

Cultural appropriation if I've ever seen it. So yes, Iggy Azalea has tons of race issues

Culture and race aren't the same thing.

(not to mention the sadisticmonkey that constantly comes out of her mouth).

Erm, what in particular are you referring to?

At 12/23/14 05:21 PM, BlueReality wrote: He believed there was no problem with having an Irish/British Identity and being from a Wealthy background probably didn't understand the struggle for Whites at the time.

I'm confused. I thought that, politically, Northern Ireland was made up of Greens and Orangemen? What are "Whites" in this context?

At 12/23/14 11:17 AM, AxTekk wrote: So it'd be less like Ukranian folk lovers saying "no blackies" and closer to them saying "no non-Ukrainian, urbanised folk" or whatever. Hopefully you get the idea.

Just to be clear (I think we're largely in agreement anyway): my Ukrainian analogy was supposed to represent the wrong way to respond to appropriation. Ukrainians attacking non-Ukrainian, urbanised folk capitalising on their culture would be the right way of going about things, attacking black people wouldn't be. Similarly, I'd have no problems with the points raised by Banks if she had focused on non-street Americans rather than "Igloo Australia" just being "down to ride Black Dick".

Banks has responded inappropriately though - & it's worth viewing her tweets in the context of an emotional twitter argument between two young divas rather than in the context of an objective, serious political discussion.

True, but that also holds for John Terry calling Anton Ferdinand a "fucking black cunt" on the football pitch, yet he was still stripped of his captaincy in the English national side (then again, he was cleared in court). I mean, regardless of any wider point about appropriation, the overarching principle should be that you don't call attention to someone's race in a negative way, and this was violated in both cases. Again, this isn't really aimed at you in particular, just at the media response to both issues.

In general, I think at least three different types of racism can be identified, and that this incident falls into the third category:

1- Racial supremacism: the idea that your race is better than (some) other races or at least better off when it's kept free from foreign influences. This is largely what informed things like Jim Crow in the US, Apartheid in South Africa or the White Australia policy. Something similar (religious supremacism) is what fuels discrimination of non-Muslims in most Islamic countries. Historically, it would seem that the best way to fight a supremacist system would be to fight it, like what happened with the boycott of South Africa and the civil rights struggle in the US.

2- Negative stereotyping: treating people of different races differently based on preconceptions. I think the best way to describe this is to give an example. There was a story last year about a crackdown in Sweden on illegal immigrants through ID checks carried out on the Stockholm subway. Protests erupted when it was alleged that there was racial profiling going on and that people who didn't look European were targeted much more frequently than those who did. Now the crux here is that racial profiling is not unfathomable to work: if the proportion of illegal immigrants among people who look non-European is much higher than among those who do, then you'll be able to catch more illegal immigrants with the same number of police hours. Also, when you're doing random searches, you don't have a lot of other factors to use to discriminate other than race, gender and clothing.

Whether subway checks are a good method for catching illegal immigrants at all is another question, but the main point is that the Swedish police may be racist and not supremacist. Whereas in supremacism racism is a goal in and of itself, the Stockholm police just want to get results for as little cost as possible, and racism is the means to achieving an end that by itself is perfectly reasonable.

If racism was involved in the shooting of Michael Brown, then it was probably racism of this type: I doubt that the cop wanted to shoot a black person, but he may have felt more threatened and was more likely to shoot when confronted by a black man because of preconceptions about the correlation between race and violence and/or predictable behaviour.

I feel that it makes sense to distniguish between supremacism and stereotyping because whereas it makes sense to fight the former through struggle, what you get if you react miltantly or even violently to negative stereotyping, you don't actually make the stereotypes go away, you just force people to be more careful about what they say and when.

3- Being a twat. When you want to insult someone, it's sometimes easy to focus on a person's superficial characteristics, like being bald, fat, ginger or having glasses. Someone's race can also be part of such an insult. This is what John Terry and Azaelia Banks are guilty of; they're not really guilty of racism of either of the two previous categories. I've seen people in articles on racism refer to being bullied in elementary school for being black, but in those cases it isn't racism that is the problem but schoolyard bullying in general. Children pick on classmates that are different and there isn't really a difference between bullying gingers or black kids.

At 12/23/14 04:31 AM, Boredy-Mcbored wrote: It's not worse, just different. More of a passive aggressive, more hidden racism.

Thanks. I don't have a lot to say about it (I also need to leave soon), but I feel that what seems to be a current trend among commentators on race - namely latch onto minor incidents of racism and try to unleash a barrage of criticism onto the offender using social media - has exactly this effect: people don't actually change their views, but just become more conscious of when and how they express it.

At 12/23/14 03:42 AM, lapis wrote:

At 12/22/14 06:56 PM, AxTekk wrote: ...

I hate it when a person or medium (in this case The Guardian, on which this article appeared) that is so insistent on a certain standard of behaviour fails so spectacularly to uphold this standard consistently themselves.

Here, this is currently on the frontpage of http://www.theguardian.com/uk twice (I shit you not, I wish I could cache this version of the page, although I'm sure it's just a mistake that they'll fix it when they notice it). Synopsis of the article: the author was adopted, was raised by a loving white family, but "as race became more and more central" to her identity, she got annoyed that, when having Christmas with her adopted family, "the conversation falls to an awkward hush" when she starts sermonising about race. Now she celebrates Christmas alone with her husband and son so that they can chat about Ferguson all evening in comfort. Literal quote from the article: "then my son started to get bigger, and the whiteness of the town where I grew up began to feel like an assault every time".

I am really struggling to decide whether I think the editorial board is just clickbaiting or if they really want to elicit sympathy.

At 12/23/14 03:42 AM, lapis wrote: the main issue with Iggy Azalea seems to be that she's a sell-out

Hmm, maybe in retrospect 'imposter' would have been more appropriate. Still no reason to bring race into it, though.

At 12/22/14 06:56 PM, AxTekk wrote: The issue here is much more complicated than it just being about Iggy Azalea's whiteness (hence, why Action Bronson jumped into the conversation very quickly).

Thanks, I didn't know most of that. Still, even though I'm sure there are many mitigating factors, the main issue with Iggy Azalea seems to be that she's a sell-out, and I still see no reason to criticise her for anything but that. Even if Banks wants to be offensive to emphasise her point, she could go for 'commercial whore' or something, but the only sentiment that she's appealing to is that black culture is 'her' culture that an "Igloo" has no business appropriating. I mean, if John Terry or Luis Suárez says something racist in the heat of the moment on a football pitch then they're derided for it by the media, but Banks is allowed to go on a protracted (as in: over the course of several tweets and interviews) racist diatribe, and as a result the writer of this newspaper article will even do her a favour by polishing her argument to pass her off as more of a social commentator than just an awful person.

I mean, if an African-American artist decided to imitate or at least appropriate some form of Ukrainian folk music and became a hit that actual Ukrainian artists would never be able to be achieve because they aren't American, then I don't think there would be any problem with real Ukrainian artists being critical of sell-outs, but if one of them goes on about how a 'blackie' or something similar should stay away from 'white culture', then I doubt that they would receive much sympathy.

A lot of work has been done, at least in a football context, of stamping out racism in the form of so much as drawing negative attention to someone else's race - see Terry, Suárez, even Mario fucking Balotelli for what was obviously a joke. I hate it when a person or medium (in this case The Guardian, on which this article appeared) that is so insistent on a certain standard of behaviour fails so spectacularly to uphold this standard consistently themselves.

Her vocal style, lyrical approach and even her accent are clear imitations of standard Dirty South rap - even the beat on her hit "Fancy" is a (poor) imitation of a particular successful black southern producer's style.

In her defence (and I don't claim to know much more about it than what I just read about it on her Wikipedia page), she did live in he American south for several years when she was trying to get her hiphop career off the ground and shaping her style, and collaborated with an Atlanta-based for her debut album. Not to mention that she moved there at age 16 with the specific purpose of getting into hiphop. You're making her act sound more nefarious than it really it.

At 12/22/14 03:48 PM, AapoJoki wrote:

At 12/21/14 07:15 AM, Musician wrote: Um... not letting racism pass unchallenged?

If your entire counter-argument consists of "you're a racist", ...

Wow, AapoJoki, Musician, even ViolentAJ. It's 2008 all over again.

I've been posting way more about race-related issues than I really want to recently, but this is just jaw-dropping.

Hackers threaten to issue alleged Iggy Azalea 'sex tape' images

A branch of the hacker group Anonymous has threatened Iggy Azalea following her recent criticism of rapper Azealia Banks. Accusing Azalea of “misappropriating black culture” and “making light of Eric Garner’s death”, an Anonymous spokesperson claimed that if the rapper does not issue an apology, they will release photo stills from her alleged “sex tape”.

“Fuck you, @IGGYAZZALEA. #ICantBreathe,” tweeted the popular Anonymous account @TheAnonMessage on Saturday. “We have so much shit on you, your scandal would be bigger than Bill Cosby’s ... You are guilty of misappropriating black culture, insulting peaceful protesters, and making light of Eric Garner’s death ... You have exactly 48 hours ... to release a statement apologizing to @AzealiaBanks and the protesters in NYC.”

(...)

Although Azalea and Banks are long-time adversaries, their feud has intensified amid the outcry over the recent killings of Mike Brown and Eric Warner. After Banks decried Azalea’s silence on the matter,
---
[Where the article subtly refers to Banks 'decrying Azalea’s silence on the matter', the literal wording of her criticism is thus:

Its funny to see people Like Igloo Australia silent when these things happen...,

Black Culture is cool, but black issues sure aren't huh?... If you're down to ride with us bitch you gotta RIDE ALL THE WAY... Don't just be down to ride Black Dick..... If you with us you WITH US!!!!...LOL... IM PETTY, but its so true, ugh, that wannabe black girl shit makes me wanna throw a jar of my piss at her LMFAOOOO.]
---
the Australian MC said that people shouldn’t “judge another’s support or ‘lack thereof’ solely on if they have ranted on twitter about it”. Banks, she wrote, is using “world issues ... to promote fan battles”.

Furious, Banks singled Azalea out in a subsequent interview regarding race and the music industry. “Here’s the thing with Iggy Azalea,” Banks told Hot 97. “I feel, in this country, whenever it comes to our things, like black issues or black politics or black music or whatever, there’s always this undercurrent of a ‘fuck you.’ Like, ‘Fuck y’all [n*ggas], y’all don’t really own shit.’ ... That Iggy Azalea shit is not better than any fucking black girl that’s rapping today ... I have a problem when you’re trying to say that it’s hip-hop and you’re trying to put it up against black culture.”

Azalea denied that race is a problem in contemporary hip-hop. “Special msg for [Azealia] Banks,” she tweeted. “There are many black artists succeeding in all genres. The reason you haven’t is because of your piss poor attitude ... [You are] a bigot and don’t have the mental capacity to realize it ... You are a MISERABLE, angry human being.” (...)

----------

I can seriously not imagine someone reading this exchange and not feeling that Banks comes across as a petulant, imbecilic little racist. Why the living fuck is Anonymous taking her side, and why is the writer of the article trying to make her look better by paraphrasing her but quoting Iggy Azalea?

At 12/21/14 04:32 PM, Light wrote: Those theories weren't rational, but what matters is whether the person(s) in question has reason.

I'm still not satisfied with the notion of 'having reason'. The psychotic in the example I mentioned may be capable of logical thought, i.e., he/she may be able to tell whether a line of moral reasoning is valid or invalid in the sense that the conclusion follows from the premises, it's just that some of his premises are delusional. I'm not sure if the causes for the psychosis are relevant, e.g., genetics, substance abuse, or just something like anxiety imposed on him by the environment.

I'm not trying to nitpick or be pedantic for the sake of trolling you, but I feel your argument has a touch of circular reasoning, where mental illness is defined as the incapacity for rational thought, but where rational thought is implicitly defined as the kind of thought of which only sane people are capable.

At 12/21/14 03:31 PM, Light wrote: You're not getting it. Moral agency isn't contingent on making the right moral judgments, it's about being able to make moral judgments.

Consider someone suffering from a severe paranoid psychosis who needs to make a moral judgement on killing his neighbour. He would say it's the right thing to do, because he has no other options seeing as his neighbour is part of a government conspiracy that intends to kill him first and steal his organs. Clearly this person is capable of making a moral judgement, but the variables that he feeds into the decision making process are completely delusional. Surely you'll say that this person isn't capable of making reasoned judgements, and that the condition of rationality isn't satisfied, but then again, how rational (vs. delusional) are the Dolchstoss myth or Nazi race theory in which Jews and Russians are degenerate on the basis of mixture with other races but Arabs and Mongols are okay? So on this basis, would you say that the Nazis (or at least their followers) were rational agents or not?

At 12/20/14 09:59 PM, Korriken wrote: The main difference between someone who is mentally ill, as opposed to evil is the state of their mind.

You talk about people being 'evil' or 'mentally ill', but I'd like to argue that neither of these two are binary qualities. You can be a a little evil, or really, really evil. The same goes for many types of mental illness; I remember discussing this with a pyschology student some time ago, who (if I remember correctly) argued that within the field of psychology there had been a movement away from considering things like depression and psychosis as binary qualities, and that it's becoming more common to measure someone's depression as how he scores on several axes. You could then compare someone's depression or psychosis on a single axis (e.g., how often do you feel like not getting out of bed in the morning, or how often do you hear voices), but it's sometimes hard to compare people who score differently on several axes. You may still need to draw a line between 'depressed' and 'not depressed' somewhere for tax or insurance purposes, but I don't think that this would make sense for this particular thread.

I mean, it's the same with evil. Sometimes you can easily compare the evilness of acts; i.e., killing your wife because she wrongly accused you of abuse to get full custody of the kids after a divorce is probably less 'evil' than killing your wife because you want to marry your lover instead. In other cases, it's less clear. Is someone who raped a single incapacitated drunk woman more evil than a banker who reduced 10,000 retiree families to poverty by duping them into a high-risk investment scheme?

If you allow this kind of continuity, it's less likely that you get bogged down in intermediate cases where someone is really on the edge of being evil.

At 12/21/14 01:39 AM, Light wrote: The definition of a moral agent, to quote Wikipedia, is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong."

What does that mean in this context, though? It would make sense to focus on the case of the guy in New York, because that's how this discussion started in the other thread. Let's try to determine whether he is a moral agent. I imagine a test for his decision making capability would be to put him in a laboratory at some point (right before he committed the act or a month in advance?) and ask him to determine whether the act "shooting two police officers in revenge for the death of Eric Garner" is right or wrong, and if he chooses 'wrong' he would be a moral agent and if he chooses 'right' he would not be. Is that reasonable? Could you also apply this to Hitler, and ask him to determine whether the act "definitely solving the Jewish question in Europe through industrial-scale genocide" is right or wrong, and if he chose 'wrong' he would be a moral agent and if he chose 'right' he would not be?

I mean, I can imagine this criterion of moral agency being enough to determine whether a lion or a hurricane is evil, but for humans I find it less clear.

At 12/19/14 10:05 AM, Camarohusky wrote:

At 12/19/14 03:29 AM, lapis wrote: I was making a observation about the BBC, and to a lesser extent about The Guardian.

OK, makes sense now. I missed that whole part of it (and I clearly shouldn't have).

Alright, no problem. I realise that my remark about 'white privilege' made it look like regular trolling, although in my defence I probably had a few recent insipid BBC articles on US race relations in the back of my head when I wrote that.

I'll give a few example of articles that appeared on the frontpage of the BBC website in the past two weeks; they don't prove or disprove or anything, but I'm doing this just to try to get across what I'm talking about.

An article titled What Native Americans think of the word 'redskin', which describes a BBC reporter visiting a reservation in North Dakota and which features the views on the word 'redskin' of exactly zero Native Americans.

This article on victim-blaming in recent cases involving US police officers and unarmed black men; the authors apparently find accusing people of racism mundane and old-fashioned, so they go for the accusation of full-blown "white supremacy".

An article about natural hair among African-American women, which features the sentence "Nothing more beautiful than a black woman with natural hair"; if that doesn't look weird, replace 'black' by 'white' and imagine such a sentence being run by a major newspaper.

These articles, and the ones like them, are all written with the idea in mind that oppression of ethnic minorities (in this case particularly blacks) by whites is some sort of natural constant; I think this entire mentality is ultimately unhelpful, particularly in Europe where race relations haven't historically been as troubled as in the US.

At 12/18/14 05:24 PM, Camarohusky wrote: Meaning?

Meaning that your point is invalid. Like LazyDrunk pointed out, and as a I said in my reply to Warforger, I was making a observation about the BBC, and to a lesser extent about The Guardian. The NBC isn't the BBC, so a retort involving an NBC article is like trying to disprove a statement about the Swedish government by mentioning a Canadian government minister.

My point is tat support for victims of such acts ALWAYS exists. It will come.

That is utterly irrelevant. Support for Australian Muslims also existed and came, as exemplified by the very Twitter hashtag that the BBC and The Guardian were reporting on. What matters is the decision of these news organisations to prominently feature articles about that hashtag on the frontpages of their websites, at a time when the siege was still ongoing. I found it demonstrated nicely demonstrated the attitude that SM described as "generally being more upset over the "racism" is reponse to the incident than over the incident itself".

Like I also said to Warforger, me making a remark about this isn't motivated by just this news item, but by broader trend in the coverage of the BBC and he The Guardian that's probably hard to substantiate to people who don't regularly visit the websites.

Just one example from The Guardian: this article, from the frontpage yesterday, about the Rotherham child abuse scandal. To provide some context: Rotherham is a medium-sized town in the north of England, where Pakistani sex grooming gangs targeting white teenage girls in care homes managed to accumulate about 1400 (!) victims over about a decade in the late 90s and early 00s. It is one of many cases of Muslim rape gangs targeting white girls in England, with similar cases in Oxford, Rochdale, Derby, Telford and Bristol, and also reports (from memory) about potential similar cases in Manchester, Birmingham and Southern Scotland. Note that Muslims represent about 5% of the population of the UK, making their predominance in these rape gangs particularly stark.

Two things in the article stand out for me.

- Some instances of racism are described in detail, but details from the testimonies of the rape victims are omitted.

- The "signs of a fightback" are the emergence of a group focussing on community relations. Whether the grooming gangs have stopped being active or not is completely ignored in the article, in fact it is mentioned that seven new victims still step forward each week.

The general attitude oozing through the lines in the article is that the rape gangs are some sort of force of nature, while racism is actually a form of behaviour for which the perpetrators bear responsibility and which can be stopped.

Again, this has been a constant throughout their reporting on this issue. This is also true for the BBC to some extent, although they tend to have just ignored the issue after the initial storm subsided, whereas The Guardian still publishes sometimes aticles about the impact of the affair on race relations while callously ignoring the plight of the actual victims.

At 12/17/14 12:40 AM, Ranger2 wrote: The sanctions will not make the people of Russia any friendlier towards the West, and if anything shrink back further from real democratic reform.

It should be noted that stimulating democratic reform in Russia was never really a priority for the West. As mentioned here by a Western economist who advised both the Polish and Russian governments in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, the US government was keen to rebuild Poland, while Russia was allowed to collapse in on itself, its economy taken over by the mafia and Chechen gangsters and its former subsidiaries made part of the NATO despite verbal assurances that this would not happen. Honestly, I think the US figured that a rebuilt Russia would be too powerful to be a member of its sphere of influence anyway, and that if it was going to be a long-term rival anyway it may as well be weakened.

Even today, I'm baffled by the fact that NATO membership of the Ukraine as a whole in still on the agenda. If there's really any desire to avoid bloodshed, steps should be taken to start a longterm process of federalisation or at least pluralism in Ukraine. This would be a minor victory for the West, considering that Ukraine at least won't join Putin's union. It should be possible to convince the Ukrainian government of this, since I doubt that they'd be able to keep their economy afloat without external help. As it is, Putin is going to just keep doing enough to keep the Ukrainian government in trouble, and to play divide and conquer within the EU and EU hopefuls by courting Hungary, Serbia, Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria, although he recently lost a diplomatic struggle with the EU over a pipeline to Bulgaria that would bypass Ukraine. I don't see any realistic prospect of rapproachment or democracy in Russia.

At 12/15/14 12:26 PM, Warforger wrote: I don't see why you can't support both.

Me neither. What I wrote was aimed at the BBC and The Guardian, and isn't even solely based on this specific news event. I was mostly interested in the fact that the BBC decided to heap so much attention onto one particular facet of this case; also because SadisticMonkey was alluding to the same thing. If you've been following either of these two news sources, or something similar, it would probably be easier for me to get the point across. If not, it's hard to explain without resorting to somewhat of a rant.

At 12/15/14 02:44 PM, ImperialTeaCup wrote: he was just a two-bit conman/attempted rapist who knew he'd shortly be going down for the aforementioned sexual assaults and for being an accessory to the murder of his own wife and chose to go out with a bang.

I agree.

Since the perpetrator is obviously a lunatic, an Iranian (political) asylum seeker suspected (in Australia) of murdering his ex-wife and over a dozen sex crimes, who apparently demanded an ISIS flag from the Ausralian government because he had only been able to bring a generic white-on-black shahada flag to the crime scene and wanted to do it properly (*coughs*), there doesn't really seem to be a political dimension to this. Unless someone wants to discuss Australia's asylum policies.

At 12/14/14 09:34 PM, SadisticMonkey wrote: - [generally being more upset over the "racism" is reponse to the incident than over the incident itself]

Lol, here's a screenshot of the frontpage of the BBC website at the moment. Here's a link to the article that appears twice, both in the 'features' part and as part of the ongoing siege coverage. No need for a hashtag to support the families of the captives of course, they're totally fine and most of them probably are or should be busy checking their white privilege anyway. It's also on the frontpage of The Guardian.

At 12/13/14 07:54 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote: why would their core demographic change

They're traditionally a party of right-wing libertarians, even their two new MPs are definitely part of that school. They used to support policies on taxation and NHS privatisation that weren't in the interest of working class voters, many of whom rely on in-work benefits that come from taxes paid by the middle and upper classes, but they've watered down these policies because they have found out that they can compete with Labour for working class votes if they focus mainly on immigration. Maybe if Labour party were burned down and rebuilt from the ground up, or if there were a split within the party such that one part would be able to appeal to working class voters again, then this could inspire UKIP to readjust their focus towards the conservative middle classes.

At 12/13/14 07:01 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote: Farage's take: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/nigel-farage-me-vs-russell-brand-on-question-time--hes-got-the-chest-hair-but-where-are-his-ideas-9919668.html

"I was more interested in the audience’s contributions: which included sensible thinking on immigration, grammar schools, and the National Health Service. Though I assure you we weren’t distributing Ukip manifestos at the entrance!"

A shame, that; those manifestos might become vintage three years from now when the entire thing gets publicly disowned by UKIP's leader because the proposed policies don't appeal to the core voter demographic du jour.

At 12/12/14 11:54 PM, aviewaskewed wrote: Is there anything actually political to discuss here? Or are we just going to discuss Russell Brand and why he does/or doesn't, suck ass an actor/human being?

This probably isn't very well-known outside the UK, but Russell Brand has been wading into politics recently. He wrote a book called Revolution; I haven't read it, but from what I've gathered, his central thesis is that the modern-day state of politics in the West is shit, and that something needs to be done about it. Quoting Wikipedia: the author advocates a social revolution wherein, "corporate tyranny, ecological irresponsibility and economic inequality" come to an end. [The book] proposes the eradication of the "nation state", the demise of multinational corporations and the injection of spiritual thought into the structure of society. The book also proposes a "global revolution involving radical wealth redistribution and spiritualism."

Brand is less clear about how to achieve this. His most concrete call to action has been to encourage people to stop voting, because all politicians suck anyway so why bother. He was asked on Question Time about why he didn't run as an MP, but he replied that he had no such intention because that would turn him into "one of them".

His social activism is often derided as being vain and vacuous. I'm personally not really sure what to think of him and his activism; I do agree that politics needs a shaking up (and preferably not one delivered by Farage or Boris Johnson), and I don't want to focus on the messenger.

Anyway, while I'm doing this anyway: Farage is the sort-of charismatic leader of a Nationalist party, UKIP. The party used to focus largely on taking the UK out of the EU, and one EU-related issue that UKIP addressed was the influx of Eastern European labourers coming to the UK using the EU's freedom of movement laws. This in turn struck a chord with people unhappy with mass immigration in general, who felt they couldn't trust any of the other parties. Since they discovered this, UKIP has been making up policies along the ride, with their entire 2010 party manifesto being thrown out the window in January of this year, with Farage dismissing the entire document as drivel. They had a libertarian platform a few years ago, supporting a flat tax and NHS (public health care) privatisation, but since they realised that their new core constituency was made up of white working class voters, they've shifted to blaming all the problems caused by poor investment in public services over the past decades on immigrants; in particular on EU immigrants because otherwise they'd be racist (although they're still being accused of that anyway, in particular during this installment of Question Time).

Also, Enoch Powell is a conservative politician who is mostly famous for a speech given in 1968 in which he warned that the high levels of Commonwealth immigration meant that the UK was voluntarily importing the same sort of racial troubles that had been plaguing the US. It is called the 'Rivers of Blood' speech after its most famous bit. "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic [i.e., racial tensions and conflict] but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal." A lot of people in the UK still associate his name with racism. By calling Farage a " poundstore" Enoch Powell, he's calling him a cheap rip-off of the original.

Question to the Americans on this board:

Do you think that race relations in the US in 2014 are better or worse than in 1994? Sure, Obama has been elected, but I'm also thinking about income gaps and crime gaps.

I'm asking because many in Europe (UK, Netherlands, Sweden) seem to want to import the American model of racial militancy (at least on the part of minorities), probably hoping that it's naturally a good thing that can only move things forward, but I'm wondering if it really works.