We've always been at war with Eurasia

[Valmy]

After eight years of Languish I just assume everybody who is going to leave has already left.

[garbon]

After eight years of Languish I just assume everybody who is going to leave has already left.

Some people haven't been around for all 8 years.

[Camerus]

FB's recent ragequit was a shocker.

[Tonitrus]

Maybe what we need is a "Ragequit pool" thread, kinda like a Death Pool. 

[alfred russel]

After eight years of Languish I just assume everybody who is going to leave has already left.

It seems as though a lot of people have either quit or greatly reduced posting recently...

[OttoVonBismarck]

I think you are like me. We are both (somewhat highly) intelligent yet we are both emotional. I'm gay, you are probably insane for some other reason. This means we both react to (actual or perceived) injustice with a sort of "kill them all" attitude, and then when emotions cool off and we are somewhat embarrassed, we try to use our intellect to justify such outbursts post factum by some hateful theory we spin on the spot and do not really believe.

Oh well, I love you, Slarg, you are my reflection, pink shirt and all.

You're actually not intelligent, but educated. They are very different. You are educated and you're from a country where not drooling on the floor or rolling around in the garbage black out drunk is a sign of refinement and class. You're what genuinely intelligent people recognize as a pseudo intellectual bitch.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Dude the problem as I see it is a socialist lenient society like in Skandi requires its ethnic cohesion to work well.  Otherwise why not just scam the easily scammable system?  By bringing in non-Swedes they are destroying the thing that makes their systems work.  A Skandi system would fail in the USA in ten seconds because a non-insignificant percentage would do just that (probably...90%).

I appreciate their attempts to be havens for the repressed and blow up their ethnically based identity but um...the whole reason for the state in the first place kind of goes away.  But maybe there is a vision of a post-ethnic Sweden that aspires to be like a socialist USA...like Canada!  Hell they even play hockey.

Essentially Scandinavia and other parts of Europe (Germany is fairly bad now too) have essentially had it good for so long in terms of low violent crime rates and general prosperity that their people have become ridiculously soft. They don't believe people are required to be self sufficient and because of Europe's centuries long view of regular people being wards of powerful seigneurs Europeans are highly collectivist. This expresses itself in the form of very lenient criminal justice systems, which people in these countries will tend to argue is the result of a focus on "genuine rehabilitation" Whereas the focus in America is on "punitive revenge."

Long term there is a two fold problem from all this. Firstly Europeans are reproducing at a startlingly low rate. Just as an aside there was an article I read awhile back in which two English women were vacationing in Sweden and they wanted to go to a club to pick up some local men. A woman from the area suggested a club which they went to...when they got there they were very disappointed to find out it was a gay bar and they mentioned that to their friend the next day. Point of fact it wasn't a gay bar at all, Swedish men just came off as homosexual to the English women. Many Swedish men have essentially been raised to think it is inappropriate to express sexual interest in a woman at all because it turns her into a sex object and is immoral. Thus in a few generations countries like Sweden will have very small populations of their historical majority ethnicity, and with very liberal refugee policies that let Muslim immigrants who pop out 10 babies per couple roll on in you will essentially see large portions of Scandinavia and Central Europe essentially fall to an invasion that will be more successful than any that Europeans fought off in heroic battles during the 14th and 15th centuries.

Crushing levels of poverty amongst these immigrants will lead to very large increases in violent crime and societies that have wrist-slaps as the only punishment will mean society will be barely protected from violent criminals.

In America when we had a serious problem with an increase in violent crime from the 1960s up until 1990 or so our response was extremely strict laws and massive amounts of incarceration. That has its positives and its negatives. I personally think things like Three Strikes laws and extremely punitive laws for various sex crimes and crimes of violence are the right move, the U.S. in the 1930s had the death penalty for crimes like rape. Then by the early 1960s rape wasn't treated very differently than it is over in Scandiland, it was like a slap on the wrist. Now we're back where we should be, crimes like that result in extremely lengthy prison sentences and segregate society from that offender essentially until they are so old and frail they cannot reasonably be expected to have the ability to reoffend. The negatives of the American system is you have a large portion of your society incarcerated and that carries with it massive costs for State governments. I think much of that could be alleviated if we would decriminalize various drugs, because that would cut the prison population in half and thus we'd easily be able to afford housing all the violent criminals.

Note that increasingly sophisticated police tactics and increased incarceration are very likely the largest reasons violent crime in America has consistently gone down since the early 1990s. Further, something I've brought up on this forum in years past is while America's homicide rate still seems high compared to many OECD countries, we actually have lower rates of other violent crimes like sexual assault/rape than say, Canada or Australia [I'm basing my recollection off arguments I had here with Malthus and some really stupid Australian woman who used to post here, so forgive me if my memory is incorrect.]

However America was able to respond to its violent crime problem in part because the "right Americans" dramatically outnumbered the miscreants. Note "right Americans" is not a code word for "white Americans" but rather for "middle class and wealthy Americans." White trash is equally as injurious to society as are poverty-stricken urban blacks. Unfortunately the demographics of many European countries suggest that the "right Europeans" will be out numbered. Further some fifty years from now a lot of the Muslims who have taken over these European countries will be extremely bitter--they will have moved in masses to Scandinavia hoping to live the pampered life in welfare state. Unfortunately if your population is 50% radical Muslims who can't function in Western society the welfare state will have collapsed along with everything else, so the Muslims will just be burning things at that point.

[Jacob]

Note that increasingly sophisticated police tactics and increased incarceration are very likely the largest reasons violent crime in America has consistently gone down since the early 1990s.

I was under the impression that this is very much an open argument. One other theory I've heard is that the proportion of men in the 16-35 (or thereabouts) age bracket has gone down relative to the population as a whole. In other words, the rate of violent crime has gone down more or less in proportion to the segment - young males - of the population that is most likely to commit such crimes.

[alfred russel]

Just as an aside there was an article I read awhile back in which two English women were vacationing in Sweden and they wanted to go to a club to pick up some local men. A woman from the area suggested a club which they went to...when they got there they were very disappointed to find out it was a gay bar and they mentioned that to their friend the next day. Point of fact it wasn't a gay bar at all, Swedish men just came off as homosexual to the English women. Many Swedish men have essentially been raised to think it is inappropriate to express sexual interest in a woman at all because it turns her into a sex object and is immoral.

Do you think it is possible that these women were not picked up because Swedish men had better options? Some English women do not appreciate the significance of the increased competition outside of their island.

[Martinus]

Oh fuck off. I like you at times, but then you grow abrasive and annoying. You know I have a schtick and it's the gay thing. We could be friends if we weren't enemies.

Your gay thing is only a manifestation of your most unpleasant quality:  Your self-centeredness.  This is why you rail against Catholic bigots but seem puzzled when people point out your statements are even more bigoted.  You have nothing against bigotry, you just don't like it when someone passes on judgement on your lifestyle.  You care nothing for justice, or fairness, or equality.  Just your own pleasure.  Anything that stands in the way of your personal pleasure is the target of your vitriolic hatred.

What can I say - this is true too.

I'm a complex human being.

[Martinus]

Also, I like how the thread has been (at least partially) derailed into talking about me.

:attentionwhore: 

[Slargos]

An interesting analysis, Otto. 

[The Brain]

I have always liked Otto.

[Ed Anger]

Maybe what we need is a "Ragequit pool" thread, kinda like a Death Pool.

10 quatloos on Ed Anger.

[grumbler]

An interesting analysis, Otto, but I think the emphasis placed on fertility rate doesn't follow from the facts.  According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate), Canada has a lower fertility rate (1.53 births per woman) than Sweden (1.80), which is the lowest in the Scandi countries.  Yet Canada doesn't seem to suffer the problems you note.

I'd argue the real issue with immigrants there is that they do0n't become Swedes or whatever, not that they expect to live in the lap of welfare-state luxury.  Some who come are refugees, for sure, but these refugees don't identify as potential Swedes (or whatever) and so don't make an effort to fit in - this is just temporary, after all.  I'd want to see the results for the second and third generations before I accepted an argument that this represented a permanent change.