"I have some problem with immigrants demanding changes & allowances from their host culture."Yeah, imagine the cheek of native-born French citizens wanting to enjoy equal access to job opportunities and freedom from police harassment! Whatever will these upstarts think of next? It's all those damn micks and greasers going over to the Land of the Free and demanding changes from the natives who must have been givin em ideas - let's deport troublemakers like the Kennedys, the Scalias and the Giulianis before they start demanding changes to their host culture ...
"More like Nigeria in the 2000s"And what the hell do you know about Nigeria, anyway? Ever stepped foot in the place, or did you just feel like reaching for the easiest "Turd World" country that came to mind? You're a fucking moron.
"Lagos, oil work."Wow, so living in Victoria Island or some other foreigner enclave and commuting to your local Shell branch office for a few months somehow makes you an expert on Nigeria? Who knew expertise could be so cheaply acquired?
"Nigerians are very tribal."See, that word "tribe" pins you right there: there are more Yoruba or Hausa people than there are Spaniards or Scandinavians, but in the minds of ignoramuses like you, all Africans belong to "tribes." Spare me your stupid generalizations: I've seen to many loudmouths of your type who think their little flythroughs make them authorities about foreign cultures.
"Welp, looks like Goedel owes Dand an apology."As one of those "tribal" Nigerians of which he speaks, I don't owe him a goddamn thing. He's nothing but an ignorant moron shooting his mouth off about a place he knows nothing about. Ask this Old-Nigeria-Hand to translate the following for you: eni ti o mo nkankan rara, ko ye ko ma shi enure lati je ki gbobgo aye mo kpe olodo lo je. Kani pe o di enure mu, eniyan mi ti le ma ro kpe o ni ogbon diye lori.
"Yeah, I didn't quite get the level of bitterness in Goedel's response to Dand. Do these guys, like, have some history or something?"I resent ignorant ideologues misusing the land of my ancestors as a shorthand for everything they consider messed up in the world. Nigeria has problems aplenty, yes, but that doesn't make it fodder for some "City Journal" quoting, axe-grinding LGF-type looking to score irrelevant points against Islam.
[Anger and resentment] exploded last Thursday night when two teenagers in the northeastern banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois were electrocuted after they climbed into a electric relay station and touched a high-voltage transformer. The youths—one Malian, the other Tunisian—had apparently thought they were being chased by police after fleeing a police identity check. Though a preliminary investigation has found that they weren't being pursued, their senseless deaths were quickly blamed on the police.Two very intelligent kids are running from the police. Except the police aren't chasing them. They proceed to electrocute themselves. Are these riots in celebration of them posthumously receiving matching Darwin awards?
My acquaintance said to the police that he would make a complaint. The senior among them advised him against wasting his time. At that time of night, there would be no one to complain to in the local commissariat. He would have to go the following day and would have to wait on line for three hours. He would have to return several times, with a long wait each time. And in the end, nothing would be done.My Mom was shot with a pellet gun a couple of months ago in St. Catherines (a small Ontario city directly across the late from Toronto). She called the police with a description of the 'gunmen' and their truck at about midnight and by 4am she called back and said 'forget it' because she had to go to bed. Apparently the ongoing fights in the bar downtown ratted higher on the priority list than a 'drive-by shooting' that was already resolved. Not at all unreasonable of course. Police just aren't the 'thin blue line' of mythology.
In historical terms, the rise of the black ghetto—a massive, geographically continuous, isolated place of almost exclusively black residence and institutional life—is a recent phenomenon ... Its emergence occurred in stages; the first occupied the half century between 1880 and 1930, and the second—after a brief respite early in the Great Depression—extended from 1935 to at least 1970 ... The vast expanses of almost exclusively black settlement that exploded on the national scene during the riotous 1960s were twentieth-century northern creations. On the eve of the great migration of southern blacks, northern cities, proportionately, held infinitesimal black populations.posted by meehawl at 8:38 AM on November 6, 2005
What of the charge that Islam is closer to socialism that to capitalism? This claim does not withstand critical examination. Socialism is, after all, defined as state ownership of the means of production. There is nothing in the shariah to justify state ownership of the means of production. The perception of a similarity between Islam and socialism is entirely due to the Islamic institution of zakat (obligatory alms of 2.5% on net worth annually) and prohibition of ribâ. But the purpose of zakat is the "purification" of wealth, not its confiscation. Zakat is fixed at 2 1/2% of accumulated wealth. It is small enough to leave most of the wealth in the hands of the most productive while offering the poorest the means to become productive themselves. It is in no way a limitation of wealth--the assessment does not increase no matter how much total wealth the individual has accumulated. At the same time it is not regressive because those without subsistence are exempt.Paris, you're a smart guy (which is why I'm bothering to discuss this with you, unlike the many who consider you a troll or worse); I wish you wouldn't settle for easy prejudices. You clearly don't know very much about Islam, which is fine—most Americans don't. But then why make pronouncements about it?
Muslim leaders of African and Arab communities have also issued a fatwa, or religious order, against the riots.posted by jb at 5:23 AM on November 7, 2005
"It is strictly forbidden for any Muslim... to take part in any action that strikes blindly at private or public property or that could threaten the lives of others," the fatwa by the Union of Islamic Organisations in France said.
The recent increases in inequality have not been offset by any increase in mobility. 21 Thus, the disparity in economic rewards is increasing, while there has been no positive change in the openness or availability of those rewards to everyone in the population. There is also no evidence that mobility is significantly different in the United States than it is in other countries. This suggests that the United States has not only the highest year-to-year inequality in the industrialized world, but also likely has the highest lifetime inequality among similar countries.
One surprising finding about mobility is that it is not higher in the United States than in Britain or France. It is lower here than in Canada and some Scandinavian countries but not as low as in developing countries like Brazil, where escape from poverty is so difficult that the lower class is all but frozen in place ... The United States differs from Europe in ways that can gum up the mobility machine. Because income inequality is greater here, there is a wider disparity between what rich and poor parents can invest in their children. Perhaps as a result, a child's economic background is a better predictor of school performance in the United States than in Denmark, the Netherlands or France, one recent study found.
A careful comparison reveals that the USA and Britain are at the bottom with the lowest social mobility. Norway has the greatest social mobility, followed by Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Germany is around the middle of the two extremes, and Canada was found to be much more mobile than the UK.
Thus the picture that emerges is that Northern Europe and Canada are particularly mobile and that Britain and the US have the lowest intergenerational mobility across the European and North American countries studied here. The USA is seen by some as a place with particularly high social mobility. In part this is a consequence of using measures of class to estimate mobility (these will be affected by changes in the class structure over time).posted by meehawl at 6:51 PM on November 7, 2005
Monsieur,The Interior Ministry has confirmed that Sarkozy is indeed the author of this comment.
J'ai pris connaissance de vos propos développés sur votre blog relatifs à la crise qui a traversé plusieurs de nos banlieues ...
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On the other hand, part of me is saying, "Why don't you just appease them and give them what they want, so they'll have less reason to engage in acts of terror?"
posted by JParker at 11:00 AM on November 5, 2005