Cory1848

Wait, by "the cleanest man in politics," you're referring to Trump? This is high satire, right?

Oh, so there are plenty of Anglo-Brits happy to do janitorial work and other forms of unskilled labor at minimum wage or less? Maybe so; I don’t know; but that’s certainly not the case in the US. If it weren’t for labor from Guatemala and El Salvador working in the chicken processing plants in my home state of Delaware -- and whether they’re documented or not is of no relevance -- there would be no packaged chicken in local grocery stores, or it would cost $30 for a pair of chicken drumsticks. As for your characterizing people from North Africa as “dross”: so many people who are anti-immigration start sobbing when they’re called racist. But your language pretty much speaks for itself.

Well, at least in a US context, most all immigrants -- whether documented or undocumented -- work, pay taxes, and purchase items in their local economy. The benefits they receive are commensurate with their contribution. The same as with US citizens. As for the downfall of (US) society, I expect there would be only a very few immigrants in the US advocating for that, and they would be handled by law enforcement. I don’t know enough to comment about the situation in European countries that have accepted refugees; one friend of mine who spends time in Sweden says that Somali refugees there are overcompensated by the Swedish government, and I have no reason to doubt him. Those immigrants who use their relative freedom to commit acts of terror should of course be arrested and deported, but again, I would think that’s a very small minority. I’m a dual US/Estonian citizen but have lived most of my adult life in neither of those places. However, I have the luxury of choice. Remember, the great majority of migrants leave their homes for an uncertain future elsewhere not by choice, but because they can no longer provide for their families in their home countries -- whether because of war, environmental destruction, or the collapse of their society. You might say, <That’s not my concern>; I would say, we are all responsible for each other regardless of “states” and “borders” -- which in the end are purely political structures and as such are temporary. That’s probably where we differ.

Well, for one thing, human migration has been occurring for millennia, unabated, with varying effects. Cultures as a result are forever evolving, and usually not in a bad way. If a million Syrian and Iraqi migrants, whose homes have been destroyed, are given refuge in Germany, most, at least those who stay, will learn German and assimilate culturally and in other ways even if they retain their Muslim faith. Plus, they will add in their own ways to an evolving German culture: thanks to earlier migrations of Turks, you can now get some of the world’s best doner kebobs in Berlin. That’s a plus! To think that these refugees will suddenly create a state based on sharia law, for instance, is ludicrous. There are 85 million Germans. And second, while the belief that mass immigration is a “threat” to some notion of a “local culture” may not provoke violence on *your* part, the simple characterization of immigration as a “threat” may indeed lead to violence by those who in fact do lean toward xenophobia and racism and fascism -- violence for the sake of some glossed-over, idealized notion of “local culture.” Demagogues throughout history have invented such “threats” for their own political advantage, as is happening right now in the US.

If you’re going to measure a culture’s worth by its GDP, that’s a pretty short-sighted criterion. How much of the West’s wealth did it steal from non-Western civilizations, during the centuries of colonialism for instance (Africa and Asia), or the conquest of Indigenous territories (the Americas)? And in the present day, how much of that wealth is hoarded by the uppermost tier as the wealth gap only continues to grow, at least in those Western countries that follow the neoliberal economic model, which is linked indelibly with your “Judeo-Christian values”? Western culture has indeed produced much of value -- in innovation that benefits humanity, in the arts, sometimes even in philanthropy. However, that has gone hand in hand with violence, destruction, and abject greed. I think the same can be said of most all cultures.

Not sure exactly how Western culture “works” any better than non-Western cultures. All cultures are prone to cycles of barbarism, present-day Islamic extremism being one example. And don’t forget that, with regard to the “Judeo-Christian values” you hold up as the standard, over the past two millennia the “Christian” part has turned on the “Judeo” part with sickening regularity.

No, it's not dying. It's just passed you by.

I would never talk to my wife that way!😆

The cruelty on both sides is unimaginable. My parents (Estonians) lived through the first Soviet occupation in 1940, then three years under the Germans, then fled when the Red Army returned in 1944. According to them, life under German occupation was not so bad (German soldiers were polite enough not to rape local women, and they even listened to classical music!), but Estonia had only a minimal Jewish population; those few whom my parents knew disappeared.

Oh for heaven's sake it's all over the news. But of course, how would you know?

Kubizek’s memoir might indeed be an interesting read, but what are you saying, that Hitler professed some curiosity about socialism during their chats, when they shared lodgings in Vienna in 1908? So what? They were teenagers! By the 1930s, Hitler knew in which direction his political fortunes lay. “Another one bites the dust”? Really? That’s so cute!

Well, a certain present-day US megalomaniac just a few days ago posted that the US did “more than any other Country [sic], by far,” in beating the Germans in the war, and 35 percent of US Americans will fall in line and unquestioningly believe the statement, so there’s that. Said megalomaniac I'm sure has never heard of the Eastern Front.

Who is denying this? More than 3 million Soviet POWs died in Nazi custody. This figure from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's website.

Pure socialism (collective ownership of the means of production) perhaps comes close to communism, and this has been shown to be antithetical to human nature -- or at least, we haven’t sufficiently evolved as a species to make it work. Social democracy, however, can work beautifully -- whereby the profit motive is removed from major societal sectors that provide services needed by everyone (health care, basic housing, basic transportation and the like) while regulated capitalism can be applied to consumer industries. Something approaching this seems to work in Scandinavia for instance, always at the top in various “happiness” indexes.

Maybe driven by present-day politics; calling a liberal administration in whatever Western democracy “socialist” or “communist” and then equating that with Nazis because, well, everyone knows that Nazis are bad. But that’s way off topic for this thread.