How many Syrian refugees should Australia take?

[HAL]

Can we get back to business?

[pietillidie]

Did I also read somewhere, Mugwump, that you listed Australian migrant groups from "more similar cultures", and proceeded to not list those from Vietnam, the Balkans, China, India, and so on? Plenty of " dissimilar" migrants have been very successful.

[Wokko]

They all have cultures of fitting in, assimilating and succeeding rather than violently taking over.

[David]

Is there any culture that doesn't have a history of trying to aggressively take other places over?

Of course that's quite a different matter to the behaviour of individuals, most of whom have no interest in doing anything of the sort (including the small minority involved in delinquent or criminal behaviour).

[Mugwump]

Agreed, Wokko. And they did not come at anything like the rate that Germany sees now. Migration brings many benefits but things are lost in the process, especially when the rate and pace is high.

I don't think cultural distance is the main issue - the main issue is rate and pace and the impact on the host society. Islam, however, is a unique problem because of its political /ideological nature, universalist claims, expansionist history, and the backwardness of most of the societies that host it.

[pietillidie]

[Mugwump]

[think positive]

[David]

[Mugwump]

I think the history of the major oil-producing countries in the Middle East is widely misunderstood. Those countries inherited a vast wealth which was prospected, developed and in some sense purchased by Western powers using
Western technology across 1910-1950. In many cases the commercial terms were unduly advantageous to Western governments, amd the Arabs rightly came to resent the terms that had been signed by their forebears and agitated strongly for renegotiation. Tense negotiations followed, but a deal might have been struck had it not been for the vogue for nationalisation which caused populist leaders (Nasser, Mossadeq, and the Iraqi poltters of 1958) to expropriate these assets -technically owned by foreign companies and nations - for local political purposes. There was an understandable backlash in the form of sanctions and political manoueverings (including coup support for pro-Western plotters in Iran) by Western powers. The coup in Iran was probably the least efficacious of these excursions, at least in terms of its long-term effects.

Iraq's nightmare is really largely of its own making, and it stems from the vicious and bloody murder of King Faisal III and his court in 1958 by a military coup. Today's Iraq is worse than under Saddam (for many but not all), but Saddam was a monster fuelled by a corrupt and militarised state built on oil. He was the West's ally for a time, of course, because economies built on oil had to do deals with oil-producing nations, and Iran made Iraq even more important. It was when Saddam invaded Kuwait (but was really threatening Saudi Arabia) that the US acted against him.

In truth, there are few black and white rights and wrongs in this story, but a history of many parties trying to access the blood of the world's economy, and doing what was necessary to maintain their interests - personal, party and national. Violence, deals, coups, cartels and power. That's how history works when critical resources are at stake. It always has, and always will. When oil wealth declines the ME will probably implode on a scale that makes today's crisis a summer picnic.

[pietillidie]

No, David, that's the simpleton and predictable and way-too-easy response. It's the Facebook response.

Of freaking course the region has its own madmen. Does anyone expect a Nobel prize for repeating the bleeding obvious. Christ, you're slipping into the realm of the irredeemably socially-influenced there. What next, lions are carnivores? Fish swim?

It's about taking responsibility for the things within the sphere of your control. You do know that, right?

Using other people's chaos as cowardly cover for US$3T, not even US$3B, US$3T worth of interferences in a region, which at the proximate time created 1.5M refugees, is a bleeding joke. I couldn't give a flying %$^�$%^&%% how many deranged bloodthirsty ISIS loons exist out there except as to stop the insane nuts. But, well beside the evils which exist out there in the freaking universe, first and foremost take responsibility for your own actions.

Have you even begun to wrap your mind around how much intervention has locked those economies into oil? Have you tallied up the billions since the 1940s spent in systematically locking down those economies under tyrants and criminals? It would be be tens of trillions of dollars over seven or whatever decades. I couldn't care less how many Facebook idiots can't compute the extent of the interference. Plenty of the same can't imagine the implications of millions of years for evolution, for Pete's sake.

Fred and Mary's mental and environmental issues don't justify one's own murder and destruction. Nope; Fred and Mary's culpability has not a single freaking thing to do with the expenditures I make to blindly f&^$%ck up an entire region for my own benefit or otherwise.

You think you're being rational by dividing up culpability; 10% here to that factor; 12% to the other; 26% to another. Again, a completely pretentious effort to be "objective". Morality, doesn't give a f%^#ck about the others. It gives a f^%$ck about my slice of the pie.

Curiously, you and Mugwump never ever get around enumerating our slice of the pie. You obsess over stating the existence of factor X and Y, but never the size of your slice of the responsibility pie. It's as if, after listing six other causes, you've run out of breath and just can't bring yourself to quantify your freaking slice.

What size of the Pie of Destruction belongs to those you and Mugwump identify with? Do you have a silent agreement that you'll only pay up morally if ISIS and some other deranged terrorist group pays up? Is that the moral arrangement you have? Our derangement is less than <some other twit's derangement>, so we wash our hands of it?

Again, I don't give a flying f^$ck about the other factors in the game; I've studied those for years now; sane people predicted this sort of chaos following Iraq; geographers worried about the exploding demographics of unemployed males decades ago; mainstream textbook economics and development economics has always said the Middle East economies are locked out of development and locked into tyranny because of the resource curse, made worse by said curse being a monopoly resource curse.

I doubt that you'll find a single textbook written ever which says otherwise about those economies.

Can you or Mugwump list for me the UK's slice of the pie of destructive interventions in that whole region? Oh, sure, I know you can tell me about Putin's role off the top of your head, but i doubt either of you have a clue about the extent of the UK's role, let alone its role going back in time. You wouldn't know the sums and outcomes and agreements and contracts and lobbying efforts and tyrants courted over time, and so on.

But you're satisfied to tuck it away at the end of those factors you never finish enumerating, hoping by the time you get to the end moral responsibility has miraculously evaporated.

It's exactly, I repeat exactly, the same BS arguments as put forward prior to Afghanistan and Iraq. Where the hell did you think those US$3T on the US side alone went to, in that decade alone? Do you think it sunk innocuously into the sands?

Go on, have a crack at giving me a combined percentage of bastardisation of that region; a political stasis and economic stability culpability sum.

Or, instead of talking about the polity and polities in which you and Mugwump and I are involved or identify with, do you want me to go and negotiate with ISIS on behalf of these millions of poor sods?

"Hello, Lead Psycho. Mugwump and David told me you're responsible for 11.62% of present suffering, and that I should seek damages from you on people's behalf."

Because that's the level of nonsense this PR stunt dressed up as a serious moral argument is trapping you in.

Does any sane person on the planet think, say, the f^%$ckup of the region by Western intervention over decades doesn't warrant taking on responsibility for a few million refugees? Or at least warrant the knackers to share the burden with Germany? Or to pool resources to create an alternative arrangement somewhere, somehow? Or at the very least make sure the region can develop real, non-monopoly, non-tyrannical economies going forward by pissing off oil?

Let's say we wanted to be even more moral by going beyond correcting our own damages. Let's say we also try to stop ISIS. Whoops, we can't, because some effwit spent all the money needed on two failed wars already.

Of course, there isn't a legal process on the planet which would give you your 7.23% culpability; like the contributors at Nuremberg you'd get 100% of the noose for your fraction of the total chaos.

And on Germany's economy, exactly! The money flowed their way under the single currency, and they corrected their Greece error by taking responsibility for refugees. You've got a problem with that? Is it too complicated for you to consider that a country might make one bad decision and then one good decision? You'd prefer Germany make two errors in a row, instead? You'd prefer Merkel lose two political battles against immoral arseholes instead of one?

Compare that to big mouth UK, which puffs its chest out arrogantly and mocks Germany, even as its own economy performs worse than Germany's, under its own currency and economic arrangement, without taking any moral responsibility for its actions in the world.

(And, note, I couldn't even be bothered talking about the US).

[Mugwump]

The Arabs (and the Iranians) were gifted a pathway to prosperity by geography and they blew it. That pathway was to sell the oil and reinvest the proceeds to build a strong, diversified and well-educated economy, while renegotiating terms with oil-consuming governments that reflected a reasonable return on the capital that those countries had invested. In truth, noone in the oil-consuming nations stopped them from doing that.

Instead, Arab and Iranian politicians used oil as the prize for populist expropriations, vote-buying socialism, military coups, politically-driven cartels, cross-border wars, dictatorships, and theocracy. It's very sad, but it seems encoded in the reaction of conservative religion Vs modernity that characterises the region, plus fractious internal politics born of Sykes-Picot and the Cairo conference.

In truth, I think the oil- consuming world has made many ill-judged steps along the way in its dealings with the oil-producing nations ; but wise nations are responsible for their own destinies. A few (Haiti is probably the prime example) are seriously abused and permanently damaged by colonial violence and extortion. The Arabs, on the other hand, had a hand full of aces and turned then into twos and threes.

[HAL]

Is it the only one?

[Morrigu]

pietillidie wrote:

Why do you think Germany took that many people so quickly? Have you even spent two minutes pondering it? Because racist filth across Europe refused to help them, and Germany refused to burn people on the trash heap of human history [i]for a second time.

Bullshite!!

Migrants stopped at Budapest continue standoff, demand passage to Germany

There have been more scenes of desperation and protest in Hungary as a train load of migrants who thought they were heading for Germany refused to disembark.

Police tried to force them into a registration camp just a few kilometres into their journey from Budapest.

That standoff continues and there are continuing demonstrations outside the main Budapest train station as many more people demand onward passage to the preferred destination, Germany.

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2015/s4305891.htm

Tell me did the racist filth across Europe not feed them, clothe them, arrange shelter and bedding for them, provide health care and try and assist them to register so their claims could be processed???

There's a very practical reason why Germany is taking in so many refugees

While many European countries say asylum seekers could damage their economies if they let in too many, Germany is counting on the record numbers pouring across its borders to save its own.

Berlin estimates its working age population will shrink by 6 million people by 2030 as the number of deaths outstrips births, making it hard to keep the economy growing.

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-in-ageing-germany-refugees-seen-as-tomorrows-skilled-workers-2015-9/?r=AU&IR=T

Germany is currently the preferred destination for tens of thousands of migrants in central Europe.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131911[/i]
_________________
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

[pietillidie]

^Obviously, der, *hand clap* - the other countries were too cowardly to state their policies with clarity. You reckon these poor souls just can't wait to get their fill of greasy bratwurst and pretzels? They had no confidence in other countries for very, very public reasons. I take it you haven't read European newspapers lately

Merkel led and qaushed racism publicly and did the right thing; many other countries had openly racist and vile public debates - Hungary being the most grotesque of all from memory. Did you hear their leaders override the creepy racism like Merkel? Where would you try to go?

And of course Germany is greying making it a good long-term move. Double der. And, what? No one else is greying? France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the UK and others aren't? The others are doing so much better than Germany they don't need future workers