Thing is, I don’t have a problem with welfare. It’s annoying at times, but unless you’ve got a “kill the lazy” program, or give them something to do, it’s a regretful necessity. You can spoil the milk a bit by adding some shame to it or putting in limitations, but I can’t see a functioning society without some sort of social welfare program.
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What’s the Military? It’s govt funded welfare with guns. Gives people something to do.
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Who pays them? Feeds them? Houses them? Clothes them? Gives them something to do?
I’m not saying it’s without purpose. It’s a more useful Welfare, just as the Roosevelt CCC program was a more useful Welfare program that built some roads and things in the 1930s.
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Welfare queen is a government job, yes. They have to show up every 3 months to social security or whatever, show proof of lack of income, deal with social workers who’d like brownie points for finding excuses to take away their kids and basically can’t do anything with their lives or else they lose their govt job.
Their job is to do nothing, like many areas of govt.
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What do people in the military spend more of their time doing?
After basic training and they’re deployed?
Sitting. Sleeping. Playing on the ‘net. Waiting. Collecting checks.
I’m not criticizing it: It’s a necessity. I also can’t see a functional society that doesn’t have welfare.
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Perhaps, in some planet far far away from here that doesn’t have human rights watch.
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If I know what century you wish to emulate, it might be possible to figure out what steps have been taken SINCE that century that attempts to ensure that it isn’t repeated with the same results.
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If you want a stable “status quo” civilization that lasts a long time, you can try Byzantium or Ottoman empire. They were long lasting.
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t’s not ending. We’re entering a period of economic stagnation a few fantasy decades beyond where we SHOULD’VE already stagnated.
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We’ve been leveraging on debt for a very long time now in the west, and it’s catching up to us.
Meanwhile, Sharia law is superior economically. It’s loan system is fair and just and their banks do not suffer the same ills as the banks in the West. This has helped them become an economic powerhouse that has been growing in strength.
This of course has little to do with ISIS but rather the greater internal economic stability in Sharia law countries.
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Nationhood is a strange worldwide agreement process. There are something like 193 recognized countries on the planet. There’s other countries that might be locally recognized but not worldwide. It’s a strangely cooperative effort.
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And yes, there’s more to a country than economics. But if you want to understand another nation, you can’t just focus on what’s wrong with them. You have to see what they’re doing right.
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It happens in towns. The town I grew up in was 1/2 Italian American and 1/2 Irish American. Mostly Mafia families or cop families. I was in neither, but they were the majorities.
The town is 1 sq smile, holds between 10,000-15,000 residents total.
I haven’t been there in 15 years, but I’ve heard from those who are still there that it’s become significantly Mexican and Indian (India indian). Yet, I peeked on the website: the mayor is Italian, the police names are all Irish, so despite some residential changes, there’s been no power change.
and yes, the Mayor of London: that’s an interesting case. I don’t know much about him, but I know it’s stirring some people up.
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But here’s the thing: Think of diplomats. Diplomats come from all different countries and cultures and yet: they are a culture of their own.
Such is also true with politicians – most politicians anyway. They’re all very similar to each other as politics operates similarly in most places, unless their political system is totalitarian or something.
If you look at Khan’s biography, he’s an Englishman who had Pakistani parents. His schooling. His education. His prior careers. All Englishman stuff. Americans are freaking out but my question is: Are Londoners?
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It’s too slanted for my taste. Excessively leftist or rightist talks are things I can’t bear to listen to. Neither could I listen to Rush Limbaugh nor Kurzweil on his singularity (for a leftist idealism): Too far from reasonable.
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I don’t have a problem with bias if it’s a subject that truly interests me. But a Muslim mayor of London isn’t something that interests me enough to study.
If it was a talk saying how wonderful this is for the future of London and how marvelous everything will be now, I equally couldn’t listen to it. Neither doom-and-gloom nor head-in-the-clouds idealism can I stand.
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Well, for news stories, and this one is only 6 days old, I have three sources for news that do their best to be as unbiased as possible or whose biases are quite clear but easy to extract:
1 Christian Science Monitor
2 Al-Jazeera
3 RussianTimes (RT)
1+2 have continually ranked very high in least biased reporting and 3 is my backup because while they do have a pro-Russian bias, their pretty good at telling it like it is for everywhere else.
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This, which I’m reading now, seems to be showing the mud-slinging campaign between both candidates during the campaigning process.
and yes, I do trust Al-Jazeera’s reporting. Not so much their opinion pages, but their reporting I do.
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and here’s RT’s more juicy reading: I like their style the best: they love when bad stuff is happening outside of Russia and they’re more than happy to make everybody look equally horrible.
https://www.rt.com/uk/342296-khan-london-cameron-trump/
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