Quote:


Stupid woman!

Lord Herbert wrote on Feb 15^th, 2016 at 8:06am:


Herb, are you suggesting a new round of war trials?
Is Nuremburg still available ?

aquascoot wrote on Feb 15^th, 2016 at 6:56pm:


I had Abu Ghraib in mind, where abattoir hooks are set into the ceilings of rooms where there are no windows. Or perhaps Guantanamo Bay where certain ... er ... facilities are available in the basements where the walls and oak doors are so thick that the sounds of screams can't be heard in the corridors ... 

Precisely, Aquascoot.

So what we'll do is what the North Vietnamese did after they won the war against the South :- They placed thousands of key players who fought for the South into 'Education Camps' in the countrysides where their screams could only be heard by the water buffaloes and the geese.

It worked a treat.

With a little pressure here, and a little pressure there -  (something like 'chiropractic manipulation' on certain sensitive parts of the body) - a whole new attitude was encouraged to become the new mindset of these one-time anti-communist dissidents.

For their own good, of course. Nothing personal. 

aquascoot wrote on Feb 16^th, 2016 at 7:23am:


Precisely.

That's why every Muslim living in the West has the potential to develop into a violent jihadist ... or if not themselves, then their children, or their children's children, and so on and so forth - precisely because generation after generation they subscribe to the Islamic religion .. and generation after generation it's a toss of the dice how the next generation will turn out to be: a Muslim of The House of Peace, or a Muslim of the House of War.

The Western-based parents of every throat-cutting jihadist nutter has gone on record as lamenting ... "Oooohhhh No! ... We brought him up correctly ... We don't know how he/she turned out to be like this .... Oh Me! Oh My!" 

These lamentations don't help the victims of Islamic violence.

BERLIN — THE next few weeks will most likely determine the future of Germany’s approach to the refugee crisis — and perhaps the future of the country itself.
There are two important dates coming up: a European Union summit meeting on Feb. 18 and 19, which represents Chancellor Angela Merkel’s last chance to win over the rest of Europe to her open-door refugee policy, followed by elections in three federal states in Germany on March 13, which will offer an implicit referendum on Ms. Merkel’s political course.

Future generations might remember the past months as the final days of the age of convergence. On a continental level, “convergence” means the postwar political development toward an “ever closer union” among the European nation-states, in the words of the German historian Andreas Wirsching. Until recently, convergence seemed almost like a law of nature, an inevitability that could be slowed but never reversed.
For the last decade — the Merkel era — “convergence” has been applied to developments within Germany as well. The cultural and economic differences between East and West Germany, though still significant, appeared to be shrinking. Society seemed to become ever more tolerant, for example toward gays and career moms. The children and grandchildren of Turkish immigrants made it to important positions, rooting them in mainstream society. The grand coalition between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats seemed to erase what remained of left and right. As a woman, an East German and a moderate in every respect, Ms. Merkel was at once the result of and the leading figure in this development.

Those were the days, and those days are gone.

Powerful centrifugal forces are now at work. The German party system is being rearranged. Those who feel they were the losers in this age of increased diversity — easterners, older white men — are taking their anger to the Internet and the polls, voting for the far-right Alternative for Germany party that promises to fight “political correctness” and shut the border.

Forecast to get 7 percent to 15 percent of the votes in the coming state elections, Alternative for Germany is winning voters away from the once-grand Social Democrats, which is polling as low as 13.5 percent in the state of Baden-Württemberg, and outpolling the Greens. In Germany, where governments are typically composed of coalitions of the leading parties, having the far right in the mix is unsettling, to say the least.

It’s not just about politics. On the streets, even among families, there is anger and unrest. Violence against homes for asylum seekers is on the rise. The debate online is a heated blur of biased presumptions, where citizens accuse the government and German news outlets of lying to their face and turn to Russian state media for information.

The most evident symptom of disintegration is maybe Angela Merkel herself. For years, her high approval ratings made her unassailable. Now, suddenly, 81 percent of Germans disagree with the government’s management of the migration crisis, and a poll last week found her personal approval rating had dropped by 12 percentage points, to 46 percent. Ms. Merkel, once the center of Germany’s centrism, is marginalized, too.
The narrative of convergence is a teleological one. The “ever closer union” is not just a term in a treaty, or a sober description of what we have witnessed in the past decades. It’s what we thought was naturally meant to be, what Europe was supposed to do.
The same applies to the ever closer union of German society. For sort-of-leftish urbanites like myself, the notion that we might be slipping into a phase of disintegration — not to say regression — is particularly painful, because it shows we had bought into a lie, the lie that history is a one-way street, always moving toward a free, liberal, multicultural society. The anxieties caused by the influx of migrants show that many Germans no longer share this vision, if they ever did.

Perhaps Ms. Merkel herself got caught in the same trap. Her wholehearted embrace of refugees last summer, and her assertion that welcoming them was a communal European effort, seemed predicated on the belief that every development was a step forward.

It’s hard to say what’s going to happen next. Ms. Merkel probably won’t pivot completely, not this time, but in her usual, cautious way, she has already started to shed the image of “Mother Merkel.” At a regional party convention on Jan. 30, she directly addressed the refugees: “When there is peace again in Syria, when ISIS is defeated in Iraq, we expect you to return.”

Meanwhile, one of Ms. Merkel’s closest allies and a leading candidate in the March elections, Julia Klöckner, has offered a proposal on refugees that would essentially place a cap on the number of people admitted to the country — something Ms. Merkel has herself refused to do. Ms. Klöckner’s plan is widely seen as a Merkel trial balloon. But given the severity of the tremors shaking Germany, even quotas  are unlikely to settle things. . . . . . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/opinion/the-end-of-the-merkel-era.html?WT.mc_i...

aquascoot wrote on Feb 16^th, 2016 at 7:23am:



But what if they say that the vast majority of embers are law abiding, peaceful little smoulderings and you must not judge diverse varieties of smouldering from a fire prevention perspective - that's simply fire prevention privilege. There is a diversity of smoulderings that has benefitted all the countries where the smouldering occurs and you are an irrational smouldering-phobe if you say otherwise. Smouldering is done for a diverse range of smouldering purposes and thinking of fire all the time is simply outrageous and unacceptable prejudice against embers.

And who are you to say that fire per se is bad, insh'allah??