Slashdot Mirror
Right-Wing German Extremists Tricked By Trojan Shirts
gzipped_tar writes "Fans at a recent right-wing extremist rock festival in Germany thought they were getting free T-shirts that reflected their nationalistic worldview. But after the garment's first wash they discovered otherwise. The original image rinsed away to reveal a hidden message from an activist group. It reads: 'If your T-shirt can do it, so can you. We'll help to free you from right-wing extremism.'"
how many neo nazis are there in Germany, about?
This isn't going to work.
Too bad they didn't have cameras to record the nazi-rage reaction face.
Actually, since they're probably children, it would end up being their mom's reaction face when she is doing the laundry. Ah well.
Sent from my PDP-11
I prefer right-wing extremists over people who attack others because of their political views.
That is one of the most awesome ideas I've read about. I especially liked the part where they acknowledged that it probably won't do any good now, but it plants the name in their heads for when they're ready to get out of their extremist organization.
Say, anyone want to chip in for some t-shirts to give away at the next Tea Party convention?
it was not one of those gathering that simulates rain. Imagine their reaction if the artificial rain washes away the external print exposing the message hidden beneath. That would not be a party, would it..
So what? Are they trying to white wash the issues?
I prefer political assailants over people who exaggerate to enforce a weak point. Let's be straight though. This isn't an attack. A sneaky(also clever) campaign, for sure, and I'm sure it caused some emotional distress. But there was no physical harm, no substantial mental scarring or emotional hurt. If this ingenious and devious advertisement is to be called an attack, it was a harmless one.
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
I give you free stuff and it turns out to be unsuitable for its apparent purpose. Wow, I really tricked you there.
Still, it's kind of amusing.
everyone knows that if you're hardcore enough your clothes never get dirty.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
These idiots spent a bunch of their own money to give away something that their opponents enjoyed for a little while then were forced to throw out. The only people they tricked were themselves.
I want to become a Neo-Nazi now. You get all cool free T-Shirts and stuff.
Neo-nazis was to long for the title so they had to type out Right-wing and extremists instead
Why is it so f**king hard to find the name of the festival instead of just vague references?
For the record for anyone else interested: "Rock für Deutschland".
Brilliant, just brilliant. Where can I buy them, I know a few people who could benefit from this.
The definition of Right and Left is obviously blurred in the U.S., and I'm sure it is elsewhere, especially when statist/socialist type movements like Hitlers and Mussolini's are branded as Right Wing in places like Wikipedia, but statist/socialist movements like FDR's and Obama's (the former of which got fan mail from Mussolini who is branded Right Wing) are labeled Left Wing.
I can't stand when people talk politics and bust out left vs. right wing, when the definitions are blurred, especially when the guardians of Wikipedia use selective reference approval, brand anything negative Right and anything positive Left, and guard the articles with the iron fist of tenure.
If they're Neo-Nazi's please call them Neo-Nazi's. If they're something else, please call them something else, Left and Right labels are misused on such a frequent basis they're almost useless anymore. From what I've seen in Germany recently the "real" Neo-Nazi's are people who in power under other labels, and one of they ways they act like Nazi's is by quashing all reference to Nazi's and outlawing every video game they can. From what I can tell modern Neo-Nazi's are mostly punk anarchist in Germany, and in the U.S. they're usually ignorant racist rednecks. In any case they're the equivalent to every other racist extremist groups akin to MS-13, Triads, Black Panthers, etc..... Since when does a crime syndicate/gangster group really deserve a Left Vs. Right label?
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I am an American that has lived in Germany for some time. Most of these people are not "children" and the definition of a "child" is quite different here than back home. Also to wear, own or display anything from the Nazi era will land you in jail unlike back home in America where you are free to where Nazi uniforms, fly their flags (I can think of one instance lately where a guy in Michigan flew a Nazi flag to celebrate his grandmothers birthday as he put it). Don't get me wrong there are still extremist here that want all Auslanders OUT. For Germans this is in the news for the humor of it, not like OMG the Nazi's are rallying.
Since when are fascist views right-wing? Nationalization of industry, forced labor, ousting of religion -- all are extremist left-wing views.
They'll win in the end anyway. You lost this war the moment you lost the war on miscegeny. You can't win. It's better if you just kill yourself. Come on, Nazi scum. Do it. It's the one way you can finally escape the horrors of multiculturalism. Go out like a man and eat one of the dozens of barrels that adorn the walls of your squalid little shack.
There is a distinction between "hating people for being different" and claiming superiority for your culture (and enacting immigration policies reflecting that).
It's true that this distinction is lost on many people, whether through stupidity, or willful blindness -- because when your birthrates are going down, the only way to keep the productive population at levels to support the Ponzi-scheme that is a modern state is through wide-scale immigration, and it's much harder to get that scale of immigration from compatible cultures (who mostly share the same problems of birthrate decline and burgeoning deadweight) or with effective assimilation of immigrants from incompatible cultures than to simply ignore the culture problem and hope it blows up after you're gone.
So the message is "We don't like your right wing views, let us brain wash you and change you like this shirt was changed when it was washed". Doesn't seem likely that someone who wants to favor the right politically is going to see that and decide "neat, I'll have them brain wash me so that I can be a liberal." Maybe some of the left should have avoided their own brain washings. You have to wonder when a political group equates their belief with being brain washed. Freudian slip?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
...since I don't think they wash their clothes ;-)
Hilarious - how pathetic. Why don't the Left start with some rational arguments for a change, like why white people shouldn't be allowed to have their own countries any more, you know, to freely associate only with those they wish to?
Nobody on the Left can debate me. None of you morons have a clue what's really going on in the world - just look at the U.K. riots - majority black looters, destroying white society.
What you are essentially saying is that YOU should be able to decide and dictate the lives of millions of white people.
It's rather like approving of forced marriages - one party gets what they want (the man) and the other is the victim (the woman), and idiots like you approve of denying people the ability to simply GET AWAY from people we don't want to associate with.
If you can't choose who you associate with, then you are either a slave, or in a giant concentration camp, or both. And you 'holier than thou' idiots approve of this.
Mod parent up please
- Invent body-heat activated T-shirts that reveal their hidden message 90 minutes after being put on & distribute them on the gate.
- Loads of dickheads walk into the event wearing free "burn the foreigners" t-shirts
- Half way through the gig, a significant portion of the audience find themselves inadvertently wearing "My gay lover is a black man on benefits".
- Hundreds of repulsive nazis kick the shit out of each other
- (Society) profits!
And based on the smell, I'm guessing they're unlikely to trigger the shirts' hidden payload anytime soon.
#DeleteChrome
Mod this A/C up!
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
So the 'execution' of the exploit took place within the home of the victims. Assuming that's where their washing machine is. And information was destroyed. Lets get in the lawyers.
Jen from the IT Crowd, "Ich bin ein nerd!"
Sorry, but quite a few wacko Democrats are in Congress, the difference is that the PRESS chooses to ignore them whereas they relish in finding the wacko conservatives. The Tea Party is anything but a bunch of wackos. Oh I am quite sure there are some daffy duck types in there, all groups get them, but their core belief around smaller government is anything but wacko. It would probably only take a few minutes to get a list using google of the lefts wackos who are in Congress, or consistently on TV.
The real wackos are the ones who want to spend us into a ditch and attempt to tax their way out of it. There simply is not sufficient money to be taxed to pay for all the promises made.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
While Liberals today like to pretend otherwise, the Nazi's were the National Socialist Party and were, therefore, leftist by definition.
No. What really defines whether you're left or right, is where you want to sit in parliament. And Hitler sat with the conservatives. He hated socialists and communists, yet didn't mind the conservatives, aristocrats and industrialists so much.
While the average employee's wage has been stagnant for traditional assets (food, housing, land, etc). Many new products are now much cheaper. Now, sophisticated video game consoles, computer are cheap. Remember when 40 inch flat panel TVs were unheard of? Now, they can be had for less than one thousand. Cable brings hundreds of channels. Phones have computer abilities, and can be used on the go. Cars last much longer, and produce much less pollution. Computer Office software can do most of a secretary's work. Virtual Worlds with thousands of people can be entered on a moments notice, for a few hours worth of work. Many television shows from the last several decades are available on demand.
Yeah. As in: Awesomely dumb. (Hear me out. I'm speaking anonymously because I always do out of principle. Not because I'm interested in acting like a dick.)
Why do people always think, they could change the minds of those who think differently (even when dumbly), by treating them like they are worse people? (Even when they actually act like that.)
That's not how that works. In fact that's quite the opposite of how that works. And to make things even worse, it's exactly the thing the Nazis do to other "races". So it's quite stunningly stupid, to tell someone to lay off the pipe by blowing smoke in his face.
Humans, and I'm speaking from the standpoint of someone who knows his psychology, always have to keep their self-respect. No exceptions.
So the way to go about actually changing their views, requires you to keep that. Period.
Which means you do not say "You bad! Become normal! I know way." ("normal" is a very egocentric word anyway), but you do say "You normal. You know way to become better! You just didn't know you knew." Then you make them imagine how much better life is that way. There is hardly a soul on the planet who, when in a shitty situation and being offered something with huge benefits they can personally relate to, chooses not to take it.
And if you can't... then sorry mate, but GTFO, since you're not helping, other than proving they have good reason not to choose something that even you can't make look better. (Ok, I know I always could make non-racism look better. Because it is better.)
Besides: I had contact to may Nazis from today (as a brown-ish actual Aryan who has lived in Germany's more backwards countrysides), and they just became racist because of the shitty situation/life they were in and the Nazi mindset/people offering them some hope / "way out". Just like many people become religious when they have to live through a war. They drink a lot. And if they are off alcohol and their life becomes better, they nearly all just become normal people who love their family and are often better citizens than many of us. I think if some people would actually try to understand the reasons Nazis become Nazis, instead of being just as ignorant dicks as the Nazis themselves, this whole problem would be long gone by now.
(That's why I found the "Nazis need love too" campaign much better.)
Might be fun to randomly donate some hidden gay messages to military types that reveal themselves when they sweat enough. That might even result in some casualties as people are revealed to be gay. Would this be T-shirt donation terrorism?
"You OK with outsiders moving in and bringing their own culture? Fine, kiss your own culture bye-bye. Soon enough **you** get to be the minority and maybe the newcomers don't have such welcoming views of your ways. With a bit of bad luck, you find yourself living in a Taliban-like world or worse."
Well said. Most of the idiots on Slashdot can't think for themselves, they believe whatever the Jew-owned media tells them. They even believe that the media isn't owned by Jews - because the TV would have told them if it was so!
And most importantly of all - MOST white people disagree with Lefties.
MOST white people want to live in an all white country (as we have done for over 10,000 years).
I can prove it unequivocally, without even asking any of them their opinions, by using scientific facts, otherwise known as 'Revealed Preference'.
In the 1950s, when the first black families came over here to live, they moved into certain areas. Those areas rapidly became 'ghettos' and experienced an increase in non-whites, and a decrease in whites.
As soon as a house went up for sale in one of those areas, in the 1960s and 1970s, there would have been at least twenty times as many potential WHITE buyers as non-white. Yet somehow, those areas became more and more non-white. The ONLY scientific explanation for this is if the vast majority of potential white buyers did not want to live around non-whites. This is a hypothesis which is proved correct by the actions of literally MILLIONS of white house buyers, over the past fifty years. It cannot be refuted, or argued against. It is the ONLY explanation.
So the next time a leftie tries to tell you that 'most' white people just love 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism', ask them about house buying choices...
Part of my niave side thinks it would be hysterical to hide the goatse.cx image for a surprise. :-)
I do not know ... maybe give them out at a Tea Party event. Just saying ...
http://saveie6.com/
Right, and the People's Democratic Republic of North Korea is a democracy. And I'm a fool for deleting all those emails that promise me cheap, high-quality viagra - after all, it'll be cheap and high quality by definition, it's in the name.
[Poe's Law - the right wing has gone so far off the deep end it's impossible to distinguish between those satirizing them and those who actually believe this BS]
I have to wonder about the attitude of these "T-Shirt Partisans", how they dare to interfere with the private life of others. How arrogant and zynic this is, "donating" T-Shirts, but it's not a real donation, it's a "fuck you", disguised as "helping". The people who do such actions seem to view themselfes as morally superior. There could not be a much more dangerous attitude.
>It's still a given in any culture with a hope of long-term survival. Without this, a culture lacks the cohesion required to prevent being overrun by others. (other things are required too of course, like a decent birth rate and the ability to defend land)
This kind of logic is exactly what drives racism and most of the evil bigotry in the world. And it's a shortsightedly stupid way to think about things - that is just plain wrong.
Historically the longest living cultures have consistently been those that embraced change, embraced other cultures and homogenized with them. The greek and roman cultures were both like that.
If you study greek mythology you will find Zeus having dozens of wives one after the other, In fact, if you look a bit closer you learn that each of them is the name of a mothergoddess from some culture the Greeks conquered.
The first thing they did each time: take the local deity and marry her to their OWN chief deity - voila, end of any religious dissagreement with the new subjects. Then take elements of their culture into Greek culture, and they are much more ready to accept elements of Greek culture into their own.
Thus came an empire of almost 2000 years, the Romans really just took over the Greek empire (so much so that 200 years after the fall of the Roman republic in the time of the Apostles Greek was still a lingua franca throughout the empire).
By incorporating Greek culture into Roman culture they could do so, by repeating the methodology of acceptance and homogenization they preserved their world and empire for another 1500 (that's 3500 that's really Greek culture), and even then only the Western Empire failed - the Eastern Empire still lasted another 900 years after that !
No culture since then has been that long-lived, no empire has come close to that longevity - exactly because they didn't homogenized, didn't treat other cultures with tolerance and mutual sharing of ideals and knowledge.
Cultural reservationism is a doomed enterprize. And in our world of global communication it's more doomed than ever before. The simple reality is that a one-world-culture is the only logical outcome. The only choice we have is how much bloodshed we'll have before we get to that inevitable result.
Those cultures that provide the least bloodshed, and the most tolerance are likely to have the biggest influence on the cultural mergers and ultimately the biggest impact on the resulting world human-culture.
That's cultural longevity. It may not be the kind you want, but sorry for you, it's the only kind that can possibly exist in the future. Take it, or leave it -and the only way to leave it is to kill yourself.
The Hitler line of thinking (preserve culture by wiping out all others) doesn't work - you will always lose. You can't kill all the people in your own culture who have empathy and humanity with different people. You can't kill all the different people and you sure can't force them all to be like you without some reciprocity.
In short. Die now, or accept that cultural homogenization is inevitable and dedicate your efforts to achieving it with the least bloodshed and maximum utility possible. Work to show the best of your culture other cultures so they will want to adopt that, and work to adopt the best of theirs so they will respect you for it.
Now THAT is how you build a society worth living in.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Because he's uber cool.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I know this is going to get a bit of hate, and I considered for a moment posting as anon, but meh -- if it's worth saying, it's worth taking the blame for it. I don't like this. I think that subversively trying to inject your opinions into another group gets into that gray area of suppression of free speech. (Yes, I know, I know, they're Nazis -- you can't get a more polarized group than this, and the entire mentality of Godwin's law is in effect here, this is too volatile of a emotional package to make a decent point.) But, if we were to look at it generally (i.e. Replace 'Neo-Nazi' with '$group_name') and just make the same argument -- you'd start to find it a lot less funny, and perhaps even offensive. For example, had Neo-Nazis used the same method to secretly trick a huge number of people into wearing Swasticas ("I swear, it was a picture of a dog before I washed it!") There would be outrage over the "subversive attack" used to "deface" the, arguably, victims. (I only use the quotes to stress those words, clearly if I think we shouldn't do it to Neo-Nazis, I think we shouldn't do it at all.) To paraphrase Billy Gates here; "Let's do this to the Tea Party." -- So the next step is suppression of political ideologies that you find wrong? Is this really funny so long as it's not happening to American Liberals?
When I looked into what the NDP stood for, the only difference I could see between policies that NDP called for and policies that the Democratic Party in the US called for is that the NDP is nationalistic and above board about its segregationism.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
2, 3, 5 and 6 were all highly conditional questions for which there is no single correct answer. It was merely designed to promote the ideological bent of the author.
2) Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (unenlightened answer: disagree). - I can see what he's getting at here (the "market basket" of goods a median household income can buy today is far better than it was 30 years ago) but this is demonstrably untrue by many other measures. (Labor required to attain the median household income, unemployment, retirement age, leisure time, income inequality, poverty, etc.
3) Rent control leads to housing shortages (unenlightened answer: disagree). - Universal rent controls, yes. "spot" mandatory affordable housing, not necessarily.
5) Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree). - I'd call factory conditions that would shame a 1900s factory boss exploitation, no matter that the wage is otherwise "fair."
6) Free trade leads to unemployment (unenlightened answer: agree). - What a joke. Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of late middle age unemployed manufacturing workers that can only find McJobs that that is the case.
Fantastic, all we need to do is marry Muhammed to Jesus and peace and harmony will reign for 4400 years.
1 - Humans are not perfectly logical automatons.
In fact, if we have learned anything from all those math classes it's that most people can't wrap their heads around any logic above the very basic "1+1=2" level.
2 - Other person's subjective point is generally inferior to our own subjective point, us being able to sense our own body and think our own thoughts and not theirs. Unless...
3 - ...We are confusing his/her/its subjective point with our own. Which would be empathy.
We are not logically empathic any more than we are logically hateful, loving or afraid.
We simply can't always tell if it is us or the humans we are observing that is experiencing sensations and emotions.
You can't be rationally emotional, no more than you can solve mathematical problems with love alone.
Sure, you can use logic to figure out empathy, but you can't impose rules or form laws of empathic actions-reactions on the base of rational logic.
Cause emotions are simply not logical.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Bookmarking this comment because it is so fucking hilarious :D
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Because, there is no better way to get your message across to someone than to trick them and waste their time.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
However Hitler and Mussolini weren't free-market, free-trade advocates either.
Wikipedia says:
"The Nazis argued that capitalism damages nations due to international finance, the economic dominance of big business, and Jewish influences within it.[97] Adolf Hitler, both in public and in private, held strong disdain for capitalism; he accused modern capitalism of holding nations ransom in the interests of a parasitic cosmopolitan rentier class.[99] He opposed free-market capitalism's profit-seeking impulses and desired an economy where community interests would be upheld.[100] "
" The Nazis claimed that communism was dangerous to the well-being of nations because of its intention to dissolve private property, its support of class conflict, its aggression against the middle class, its hostility to small businessmen, and its atheism.[97] Nazism rejected class conflict-based socialism and economic egalitarianism, favouring instead a stratified economy with classes based on merit and talent, retaining private property, and the creation of national solidarity that transcends class distinction.[23]"
"Private property rights were conditional upon the economic mode of use; if it did not advance Nazi economic goals, the state could nationalize it.[182] Nazi government corporate takeovers, and threatened takeovers, encouraged compliance with government production plans, even if unprofitable for the firm.
[...]
Agricultural and industrial central planning was a prominent feature of Nazi economics. To tie farmers to the land, selling agricultural land was prohibited; farm ownership was nominally private, but discretion over operations and residual income were proscribed. That was achieved by granting business monopoly rights to marketing boards, to control production and prices with a quota system. Quotas also were established for industrial goods, such as pig iron, steel, aluminium, magnesium, gunpowder, explosives, synthetic rubber, fuels, and electricity.
[...]
In place of ordinary profit-incentive determining the economy, financial investment was regulated per the needs of the state. The profit incentive for businessmen remained, but was greatly modified: “Fixing of profits, not their suppression, was the official policy of the Nazi party”; however, Nazi agencies replaced the profit-motive that automatically allocated investment, and the course of the economy.[189] Nazi government financing eventually dominated private financial investment, which the proportion of private securities issued falling from over half of the total in 1933–34 to approximately 10 per cent in 1935–38. Heavy business-profit taxes limited self-financing of firms. The largest firms were mostly exempt from taxes on profits, however, government control of these were extensive enough to leave “only the shell of private ownership”. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism#Private_property
Also, the Lebensborn camps are like a pimped up social benefits program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn
We spent a lot of time and money, for no real effect, but at least we got to feel smug and superior for getting one over on those evil right-wingers.
Nazi comes from Nationalsozialisten which translates to National Socialist. They held basic capitalist ideals but strongly echoed marxism, had very high expendatures in social programs and encouraged membership in labor unions. By modern definition they would have been labeled as Left-wing and only as extremists due to the holocaust, otherwise their views would coincide 100% with democrats in the US.
Ha, Insightfull. I have more insightful bowel movements than this regurgitated, PC, stereotype laden attack. If "multiculturalism" (it's really all cultures but white/western cultures) ultimately triumphs you and your ilk will be responsible for the backslide of backslide of modern technological civilisation (created and once guarded by the oh so evil white male) into a permanent iron age. Forget your nerd dreams about zipping around space ala star trek and posting on slashuniverse; your racially mixed descendents will be lucky to have fucking electricity and potable water once white countries are drown under a sea of brown from the 3rd world under the guise of "enlightenment" and "progress". I doubt you can honestly name one place in africa (well, south africa was doing alright until they ended apartheid; now it's circling the drain, surprise surprise), or the middle east (alright if your royalty, I guess) where you honestly would want to live more than say any country in north america or europe. After all, if it was so fantastic there they wouldn't be flooding into out countries in the first place!
I cant wait for a PETA shirt to turn into an ad for bacon!!!
-AlPhAbEt
The sensationalist media portrayed the Foxconn employee suicides as a reaction to harsh working conditions. That's a lot of suicides! But a lot of people work at Foxconn. Did you know the suicide rate there is less for that demographic than in the general Chinese society, and much less than for China overall?
Your own quote shows the Dems and Pubs didn't have the spine or will to make real changes that would lead to financial solvency. They didn't even come close to the tea party position of demanding financial solvency.
The belief has nothing to do with the false banner. In the US, left/right debate on issues has been replaced with authoritarian/libertarian debate, and then relabeled as left/right.
What I mean is, nobody gives a flying fuck about whatever Hitler or Stalin said about the role of mystic insight in setting government policies, redistribution of wealth to enforce social equity, etc. The only parts of the Nazi Party's and Soviet Communist Party's platform that really matter are:
and that's it. Whether you think this simplification is stupid or smart (truth: it's both, but leans toward the stupid side), that is all we care about Nazis and Communists, and in terms of those issues, they'rem identical. Therefore, they will occupy exactly the same point on the political spectrum. But the above platform has no left/right component, so judging on authoritarian/libertarian is the only way to categorize it, and it's clearly authoritarian.
Then you translate authoritarian into left. That really does make sense in America, because if you ignore how they vote in Congress and what their presidents sign/veto, and just look at things in terms of speeches and platforms, our right wingers tend to preach for smaller government and our left wingers tend to preach for government having whatever powers are needed to do what is needed in order to realize its agenda.
The reason people compare Bush and Obama to Hitler, therefore, isn't so much the racism itself, as that they're authoritarians. Once you do that, it's just assumed that these kind of people will eventually get around to genocide, because don't they always? ;-)
How do you merge a culture that is tolerant with one that isn't? How do you merge cultures with different religions/world-views where only one is allowed? The only ways to destroy a totalitarian culture is by force or entryism. And those that are for a one-world culture and having power and influence to do something about it seems to favour the former way. I hope total annihilation isn't the outcome.
You either need therapy or a bullet in the head.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Bookmarking this comment because it is so fucking hilarious :D
But GP is just stating FACTS tha every WHITE person knows! You can't argue with SCIENTIFIC PROOF like that.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Like so many political pranks this makes good headlines and entertains the home team but it did nothing to sway anyone who was right wing. All the tittering and giggling by the halfwits who thought it up may have made them feel good about themselves but the 'extreme right wing' are no less as a result.
Next time ask yourself what you are trying to achieve and then take a long look at the plan and be honest about whether you are doing it because it is fun or because it really will help achieve the planned result.
But the really important question: do the Germans know not to use an apostrophe when pluralizing? Because you clearly don't.
The Greeks and later Romans were expanding into existing areas and merging the local cultures. That's feasible, but pretty well invalidates your "Those cultures that provide the least bloodshed" bit. Had they stayed at home instead of invading people with corresponding bloodshed, those cultural mergers would never have happened.
And most Western societies today, far from expanding into regions of different culture, are collapsing under their own weight. The reduction in birthrate associated with all advanced cultures may ultimately save the world from overpopulation, but in the short-term, it means countries with a set of social benefits established 30 years ago are having an increase in non-working old (thanks to enhanced life expectancy and static retirement ages), often an increase in non-working young (more widespread university education), and a yearly decrease in the working middle, corresponding to the difference in birthrates $RETIREMENT_AGE ago and $GRADUATION_AGE ago.
To survive, one option is massive overhaul of their social benefit system (not just cuts, though that's the obvious part, but also setting the new ages and amounts not in absolute terms, but indexed to historical birthrate etc. data so it stays sustainable as the situation evolves.) This is doable, but takes a tremendous amount of political courage. Subsidized babymaking is an option sometimes presented here, but by the time anyone realizes they have a real problem, it's too late to solve without reforms -- could still be viable to reduce the long-term impact of properly indexed reforms.
The more common option is to make up the difference with immigration. There's places on the planet producing babies like there's no tomorrow, those places are usually poor, and it seems obviously a win-win to import some of those people -- you get the labor force you need to maintain your state's equilibrium, they get a better standard of living, and wherever they come from has it's overpopulation issues reduced. And it really works great short-term. However, the scales of immigration required make complete assimilation very difficult to ensure, and you end up with pockets of a foreign culture quite unlike yours; these pockets make the easiest route for newcomers that of living among their own, and they forgo assimilation entirely. Continue this process unabated, and eventually there's more of them than you, and it stops being about your "least bloodshed" and "most tolerance", but about theirs. Since the immigration process naturally selects in favor of sucky cultures, good luck with that.
Is it possible to establish a sound immigration policy that sustains a modern state's social programs as-is while encouraging cultural homogenization? I think, theoretically, it is possible. Diversity is the main tool -- much easier to assimilate 5% each of 5 distinct cultures than 25% of one culture. It's a very hard problem, however, and I don't see anything close to a working example.
IMO, a combination of reduced levels of immigration with regulations targeted to attain sustainable homogenization, and drastic (though not as drastic as required for isolationism) social program reform is the way forward. Subsidized babymaking may help, if you can find a non-discriminatory way that doesn't make your (high-birthrate) immigrant situation worse. But the immigration is too easy to "cheat" on, with repercussions only decades later, and the social program overhaul constitutes, short-term, directly cutting benefits to a massive chunk of society, the sort of action democracies are never kind to, now matter how imperative it may be economically. Plus all Western nations are, to one degree or another, already in this hole; any plan has to be powerful enough to actually get them out, not merely to maintain steady-state in a healthy system.
That is self-censorship of the game manufacturers as they want to sell it to minors, too.
I don't believe you don't have things like that in the US. (It's just that in Germany violence is banned while nudity is not considered that bad, unless it includes non-mainstream sexuality).
I stated that there was NO SINGLE CORRECT ANSWER. If you measure standard of living by "market basket" (or many other measurements) you come up with a better living standard. If you measure standard of living by examining a different set of factors, you get a different answer. He didn't ask about "market basket", he just asked the responder to judge the unacceptably vague "standard of living." How is the survey responder supposed to know which one Prof. Klein had in mind?
Yes, the answer a particular person chooses can demonstrate political leanings and/or information sources. But to decide that one set of perfectly correct answers is "enlightened" and the other "unenlightened" is disingenuous in the extreme.
By the way, I would have answered using the Market Basket measurement, meaning I would have been considered "enlightened" under this test for that question.
And yes, my Macroeconomics class in college covered almost all of these topics and covered them from both sides.
3) The question does not state what degree of rent control it is referring to. There are no U.S. communities with universal rent control. The poster child for rent controls, NYC, has under 2% of the market under rent control, making the effect on the larger housing market quite minimal. (A larger portion is covered under "rent stabilization" which is a different topic. The question is not clear if it refers to rent stabilization also.)
5) "Exploitation" suffers from the same vagueness (actually, much more so) than "standard of living."
6) The employment effects of Free Trade Agreements are hotly debated amongst economists. The classic (somewhat old) view is that they do not cause unemployment in either the country of the net importer or net exporter. However, that view relies on the assumption that displaced workers in each country will be able to find jobs in the industries in which their country is more efficient. In the case of NAFTA and Mexico, much of our textiles manufacturing moved there, while much of their agricultural production moved here. (i.e. we are much better at growing one of the primary Mexican staples, field corn, than they are.) Labor productivity went up, but that does not necessarily correlate with lower unemployment in either nation. As labor specialization increases, the ability to reallocate labor resource towards the industries that each country is comparatively better at reduces. In addition, of the labor required for the various specializations is unequal, net employment decreases in one country. (i.e. Increasing grain production for export by a dollar amount equal to the increase in textile imports requires FAR less U.S. ag labor than the U.S. textile labor that was lost, as grain production is natural resource and land intensive, not labor intensive.)
You might want to review Poll and Survey Construction basics. (Hint: Those questions are not the correct way to create an unbiased survey.) He even admitted in his story that none of the questions were designed to "trick" uninfomred economic conservatives into giving "unenlightened" answers. (Which also vaguely implies that this survey was designed to do so in the other direction.) If the survey had included question such as: "Tax increases lead to net employment decreases" (false or true, depending on the nature of the increase), or "Perpetual defecit spending eventually results in currency deflation" (false or true depending on if annual deficit outpaces growth in GDP.)
Whoops... that last sentence was supposed to read "inflation" not "deflation."
Why are you addicted to the mindset that "white/western" cultures are entirely self-contained and had no contributions from Asia, Africa, and the native Americans? Shouldn't "white/western" culture already be ruined and the world doomed since since there are so many whites drinking coffee and using a base 10 number system?
You can't kill all the different people and you sure can't force them all to be like you without some reciprocity.
This is a weakness of democracy. Suppose that China decided to repopulate Somalia with Chinese people. They could do it, and nobody would stop them. The USA isn't about to go nuclear with such a major trade partner over some resource-free pirates. China could keep things mostly quiet, claiming to help while limiting information, or just boldly use their UN security council veto power. China can probably even convince the US government to help keep things quiet, since denial is the easiest way for the US government to avoid pressure toward a US-China war. Once the true facts leak out, it's too late.
Make a tee with that iconic Stormfront logo - cross and "white pride world wide" inscribed in a circle around it. Make it so that it changes to "black" or "Jew" or whatever when washed. The trick is that it wouldn't be immediately obvious to a cursory glance, and when discovered by others while the shirt is being worn, hilarity ensues.
Damn why doesn't /. have a "Like" button right now ! I love that !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I want to shit in your yogurt. You don't want me to. Let's work with each other and find an acceptable level of shit in your yogurt. I say 1/10th of the initial amount I wanted. Is that acceptable?
All the Democrats wanted to cut was projected increases, to not increase the budget by quite so much. In addition, much of the "decrease" was projected, easily killed by later terms of Congress after this issue fades away. Most Republicans were willing to go along with them. This does not lead to financial solvency, so it was not a negotiable position as far as the tea party was concerned. It was the shit in your yogurt.
Tea party types were demanding actual decreases now, as in we spend less next year than we did this year. They were demanding what is needed for financial solvency, not the usual Washington numbers game.
"they have helped some 400 right-wing extremists to escape the scene." -- Don't they know it's genetic? Right-wing extremists are born that way. This publicizing of their proselytizing ANTI-right-wing extremist views is a clear human rights violation assaulting a right-wing extremist Pride event. We need to celebrate the right-wing extremist community among us and support them in their lifestyle. Obviously the claims of this group of being able to 'help' right-wing extremists must be false...
"Congress and the administration are jointly responsible for the conduct of fiscal policy. So, this is not really about either political party." -- David Beers, head of S&Pâ(TM)s government debt-rating unit
If not for tea party influence, we wouldn't have gotten the pathetic effort at debt control that we did get. Both parties would have gladly continued driving us to insolvency.
The blame game you are playing is one of the reasons for the downgrade -- the desire to put politics above getting things done. Just like when your people called the tea party "terrorists."
Sneaky, sneaky; but ingenious. Fighting fire with water. What a fabulously new concept.