Nobody said you should have demand-side instead, that's a false dichotomy.
Sane economists are BOTH - not either. Because without demand, anything you produce is a waste. And the track record of supply-side ideology has been utterly dismal. Everytime it's tried there's a massive recession followed by mass unemployment and all the sufffering that leads to. And not to mention - the great depression itself was absolutely caused by supply-side economics. If a more sane theory like Keynesian economics had been followed at any time between 1929 and 1941 the depression would have ended right away. Ten years of global suffering, a world war and the holocaust- all caused by supply-side ideology (I refuse to call it a theory). Ironically it's worst outcome, was also it's cure, the war forced the government to start spending money -which is what they should have done all along because nothing else could undo the deflationary effect of the depression. When the government spent lots of money, the depression was ended for good. That's not to say the war was good for the economy - it's just that all the things which would have been better were never done.
>So what would be a "severe" increase in wages? $20/hr? $40/hr? What if we increase it slowly, e.g. by 20% a year every year? Is there a point at which a "moderate" increase is no longer beneficial or is it always beneficial, no matter what the current minimum wage is? It's not about the number - it's about the percentage. As long as it's within a percentage point or two of inflation, it should have no impact. The 15 dollar proposal is, in fact, exactly what the number would have been if it had been allowed to track inflation all along.
>You also make the argument that increasing the wage would drive up demand, but the real question is how much, and for whom And all the evidence of decades of research says - by almost exactly the right number to offset any jobs that are lost with expansion elsewhere in the economy. There is no evidence that minimum wage raises increase employment (or if it does, by miniscule numbers) - but it also doesn't reduce it.
>Gas stations for example, probably won't see any demand increase, because people don't drive more just because they can afford it. Except of course that if more people can buy cars (even old junkers) that's more demand for gas right there.
Its been in print since the early 20th century. Ever heard of John Maynard Keynes ? Heck if the US government had listened to Keynes in 1929 instead of that idiot Von Mises black Friday would have been a minor recession, not the great depression. Hitler would never have been elected. The holocaust never happens. The evil that Laizes-Faire versions of capitalist theory has unleashed upon the world is literally without end.
Mankiw is a rightwing Chicago school economist still clinging to an economic theory that has been disproven literally every time it has been tried. It's the most wrong theory since phlogiston.
Easy - they had access to vast swaths of land, filled with natural resources, which they didn't have to buy - just settle on.
So your solution is that people struggling to make ends meet on minimum wage in a city like New York should just grab a gun and go hunting in Central Park Zoo ?
Because that's not actually legal anymore.
It's simply, and flagrantly, idiotic to suggest that a solution which worked when vast swaths of virgin territory was available would still work when there is no such thing anymore.
But since nobody is actually proposing that- it's meaningless to study it. What DOES make sense is to study what effects small and moderate minimum wage increases have on employment - since those are what actually happens.
Nobody would set such a high minimum wage because everybody knows it's insane and would have terrible effects. But it does not logically follow that a small increase would have the same bad effects. Your bathtub is at 25C. Increasing the temperature of your bathwater by 100C would kill you, increasing it by 3C just makes for a nicer, more comfortable bath. Small interventions do not always have the same effects as a large version of the same would have.
The overwhelming evidence is that moderate minimum wage increases have little to no impact on overall employment rates. It makes sense too - what business would choose to LOSE money by firing people it needs and losing out on sales because it couldn't produce enough goods ? A business would only start looking at layoffs if the increase is so big that they would lose MORE money paying those people than they will lose turning away customers (and that's BEFORE we even consider the possibility of having more customers when wages go up).
You realize that what you just wrote is a recipe for legalized slavery right ? All you need is the employer to constantly add new "training days" to the end of the contract, and keep dropping the wage until it reaches zero (since there is no minimum wage anymore) - while the employee isn't even allowed to quit by law.
Except that it doesn't make sense in economic theory. Supply-side, Chicago School and Austrian School are not economic theory - they have both been utterly debunked.
For higher wages to drive inflation: the potential profit from new customers (higher-earning workers at other businesses) must be less than the cost of the higher wages. This cannot happen with moderate wage increases -in fact mathematically it only becomes likely at truly insane raises. Otherwise the businesses will make more money by absorbing the cost and selling more goods at lower margins.
For higher wages to drive job-loss -they must be so severe that it's no longer possible to operate the business at all. Contrary to what you think economic theory is - hiring rates are relatively independent from the cost of labour because companies need to meet demand in order to stay in business. The amount of work that needs to be done is therefore the primary driver of hiring. Assuming the company is meeting current demand if the cost of labor goes down the company won't hire more people, so why would they fire people if it goes up ? Both decisions would cost them money ! A company will expand if it can credibly determine that there is unmet demand. Not because workers are cheaper. There's no point in having workers make goods you can't sell, anymore than there is any sense in having to turn customers away because you don't have enough workers to make the goods for all the customers. The impact of labour cost on hiring levels then is miniscule. In theory the wage increases should, actually, increase demand and make expansion more likely - more people with more money means more of them can potentially be your customers.
All in all - study after study after study has consistently found that moderate increases in minimum wage have a nett-zero effect on employment rates, and this is also born out by historical data.
Yes, and I already said I made a mistake in that explanation. Why do you keep hammering on about an error after I conceded it ?
Obviously the study should take precedence over my mistake.
And no, it was by no means clear the Orlando shooting was Islamic terrorism - because there are serious reasons to doubt his statements about that. First of all there is the absolute fact that he was not in contact with ISIS at any time - he was lone wolf entirely and his claims of acting on their behalf are further doubtful due to other known facts - like that he was active on grindr and was a regular of the club for many years. This strongly suggests the real reason was shame about his own homophobia - and the ISIS claim was merely his inabillity to admit the truth about why he did it. Is this conclusive ? Absolutely not. Does it mean it wasn't Islamic terror ? No. But it certainly means there is reason to doubt that.
You call the study biassed - but it agrees with FBI studies galore, with the official position of the FBI and 238 other police organisations in the USA and with global patterns. Even if it was biased as you claim - it was still right in it's conclusions. This is not a new, unexpected or even controversial result -it's exactly in line with every other data source out there on terrorism.
So I don't think you are calling it biased because you think it's wrong - but because 'bias' is yet another standard rightwing tool for shutting down any information they don't want to hear. You see it whenever you mention a news source to them - and indeed you yourself showed that behaviour when you described newsweek (one of the most respected publications in the entire field of journalism) of being 'leftwing agitprop'. Sorry, but no matter WHAT bias you think something has - it can still be correct. And the proper media - faulted as it may at times be - is the only source you should trust AT ALL because everything else is worse. The mainstream media may be biassed at the times but the non-mainstream media is pure, unadulterated bullshit they just pull straight out of their asses without a single shred of truth to any word they write.
Funny, at the time I made a joke (in certain circles) about him not being an islamic terrorist so much as fanatical about good music (a bit like Cartman in the conclusion to the Coon and Friends trilogy).
But sadly, your version doesn't work - because they knowledge police had beforehand did not include his chosen target.
Everything I said it said was in the study. The phrases in brackets were my own explanations and assumptions - I never claimed that was in the study. You still haven't presented a single shred of evidence that the study was 'biased'.
No, because you're asking me for a study to confirm that most people perceive the sky at noon on a clear day as blue.
Fine, so it looks red to you.
That's a problem with your eyes, not a grand conspiracy by society to lie to you.
There is so much absolutely overwhelming proof of everything I've said - that there is absolutely no sane reason to doubt it. The only possible reason to think otherwise is prejudice, which is as irrational as religion and as impossible to convince.
So no, I'm not going to link or defend - because nothing I say will convince you. One cannot argue with irrational beliefs.
You're the one making the extraordinary claim (that the largest religion on earth does not also have the largest number of fanatics) - which is mathematically impossible - so the burden of proof is on you to show extraordinary evidence.
Rightwingers always dismiss anything they don't agree with as 'leftwing' as if that makes it false, and thus remain idiots. The article DID in fact give you the full details on the study it reports from, and a mere few minutes of googling would confirm that the FBI does consider rightwing christian militias the biggest terror threat in the USA from multiple sources - including the FBI's own website.
None of which will convince you since your beliefs are based on personal prejudice rather than any concern for correlation with reality.
>Uh. Citation needed. Did you not see the citation earlier on in the post- showing how Christian terrorists outdo Islamic ones in the USA ? Then you acknowledge the lack of reporting on the LRA but don't realise they ALONE outkill Islamic terrorists. They do in a year what all Islamic groups manage per decade ! That alone makes Christianity the obvious worst globally. The rest was just more examples.
>Every time there's a terrorist incident in the west, we all politely wait to find out the ideology behind it, and it almost invariably turns out to be jihadism Nope. Not even slightly true. What IS true is that, almost every time a terrorist incident in the west is actually REPORTED as one it's jihadism. I, personally, have zero qualms about saying that German pilot who flew his plane full of people into a mountain on purpose was a terrorist in the exact same vein as those on 9/11 - but it wasn't reported that way because he was white, male and Christian. But even so - study after study keeps confirming, the vast majority of terror attacks are not Islamic jihadists.
>The closest we've seen is a Muslim-hating nutter [theguardian.com], but as far as we know he wasn't motivated by his own religion (if he even had one) Firstly, you're forgetting the IRA existed, how short our memories are - that peace deal was so recent the ink was still wet when 9/11 happened. Their terror attacks on London killed far more people over decades than Islamic terrorists ever have. The blew up more than a few buildings in London - the last one in 1996 I believe. But jihadists are not motivated by their religion either. Indeed I don't think any terrorists are motivated BY their religion - mostly they are motivated by other factors and religion becomes an excuse to rationalize what they do about those factors. There's significant evidence to back this up - including that most of the people who have launched attacks in Europe were either new converts to Islam or had a long history of apostocy before suddenly becoming radicals. Two of the Charley Hebdo shooters had only become Muslims less than 2 years earlier. The other one had a long history of drug use and other prohibited activities and were known as "not religious" for most of his life. France's top terror expert has said "It's not the radicalization of Islam that's the problem, it's the Islamification of radicalism that we should worry about".
It actually makes sense - 1.6 Billion odd Muslims are convinced their religion absolutely prohibits killing people except in self defense. I live in a 30% Muslim city and I regularly see Bumper Stickers that read "I Shall Love All Mankind" (by the way - we've not had a terrorist attack in 3 decades now and the ones we HAVE had in the past didn't include a single one from the Muslim population). The evidence suggests that the real problem is culture-clash - which is common in second-generation immigrants. Expected to live according to their old culture at home, but live in a different one - they often feel isolated and out of touch with society. In a few - this can be twisted into radical violence (it's almost unheard of in first or third generation immigrants - the former haven't attempted to fit in, the latter fits in too well to feel isolated). We just happen to live at a time when, the majority of second generation immigrants in Europe happen to be of the same religous heritage. But it's not their religion that motivates them - if anything it's a feeling of not being able to connect with that religion. Rootlessness is hard for all people - and in a few it can be exploited. But so can a lot of things- many a rightwing christian militia terrorist have been military veterans, and it wasn't just their military training (that only makes the valuable to recruit - not easy to recruit), what made them recruitable was PTSD and, again, the resulting isolation.
Finally - there is a very clear pattern where terrorism attacks show strong upticks around elections - and the strongest upticks happen in elections
Except that the majority of people who have this religion are (generally believed to be) of a common race so those with that race is usually assumed to be of that religion and often discriminated against. Some of the worst acts of anti-Islamic discrimination and violence recently have been targetting Sikhs for example, even though Sikhs are not Islamic - but they look like stereotypical Muslims are expected to look.
It's actually quite hard to discriminate against a religion - you can't really tell what somebody believes by looking at them. Their thoughts aren't printed on their faces. So such discrimination is usually done via proxies - in the case of Islamophobia that proxy is almost always race. No Muslim screening system yet invented would have have screen Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali if he had chosen to keep his conversion secret. No screening system known to man yet would have consistently held Cat Stephens for extra checks. Because these folks don't look Muslim. Because they aren't Arabs.
The proxy is terrible, not all Arabs are Muslims, not all Muslims are Arab (in fact a very, very large number of them aren't - many are Indian for example) and there is no actual correlation between being a Muslim and being a threat.
In the USA - in the past 9 years, Islamic groups have launched 63 attempted attacks of which 76% were prevented by law enforcement. 13% of successful attacks had fatalities. Overall death toll: 90 (mostly because of the high deathtoll in the Orlando nightclub shooting - which it is not certain was, in fact, an Islamic terror attack)
Rightwing Christian terror groups planned 135 attacks of which only 35% were prevented. 33% had fatalities. Overall death toll: 79 (pretty close considering they haven't had a nightclub shooting outlier in there - and of course if the Kansas Mosque/Appartment bombing hadn't been prevented - it would have been in the hundreds, and since they get prevented far more rarely, the odds are in their favour).
The FBI, and 238 police organisations in the USA all consider rightwing militias the greatest terror threat to US citizens.
Globally the Christian Lords Resistance Army alone has killed more people every year of it's 20 year existence than all the Islamic terror groups combined in total, ever - even 9/11 is a blip on the radar next to the LRA (a group also known for using child soldiers and engaging in cannibalism).
When you add other terror groups however the Islamic numbers turn into a rounding error. They just make better news in the West.
That said there is no religion with clean hands. In 2003 over 3000 Muslims in Southern India were killed by Hindu extremists in an act of attempted genocide, the main ringleader of that attack is now the prime minister of India. Meanwhile in Myanmar as we speak thousands of Muslims have been killed in an ongoing genocide attempt by Buddhists (yes, Budhists - their pacifism apparently does not extend to their Muslim fellow citizens).
But there is no doubt the overwhelming majority of terrorists are Christian - it is only logical, as the largest religion on earth by far, they must also have the largest number of radicals.
Interestingly the concert bomber was a known threat, and here comes the problem with painting all Muslims with the same brush: he was a known threat because the Muslim community had reported him as a threat ! His own Imam had banned him from his mosque over his violent rhetoric and reported him to the authorities over his bragging that he was planning a violent attack. His family had made similar reports, wanting him watched - because they'd rather see him in jail for conspiracy to commit terror than dead from doing it.
Why was he not being watched ? Because the Tories have cut the police force's budget by over 25% in recent years leaving Britain (and London in particular) with a massive shortage of cops. Thousands had to be let go due to this insane policy.
Ironically - while the government keeps trying to use terror to get further reductions in citizen privacy and surveilance power (things that do not help to prevent terror attacks) they gutted the one thing that DOES have the power to stop terror attacks: good old fashioned police work.
No, because fossil fuels don't come from plants that were recently alive, and thus the carbon from them was not recently removed from the atmosphere. In fact, fossil fuels mostly date from the carboniferous period - when the first woody plants evolved, but nothing had yet evolved that could digest wood - so they never rotted, never decomposed and ended up becoming oil and coal instead. At the time, these plants all turning CO2 into oxygen but never decomposing raised the atmospheric oxygen level to around 40% (almost twice what it is now), and created a world where insects and arachnids could grow much bigger than before or since. There was a dragonfly with a 1m wingspan ! It was a very different world. Burning those things now, is inverting that process - from over 300 million years ago.
Though my personal pet theory is that Fred Drumpf had his name legally changed in Germany before emigrating. You know, like all the Hitler family members did.
Trouble is - there are so many issues and people have different priorities. Those 24-million odd people about to lose their healthcare, they may be unwilling to vote for a representative who supported that abomination. If those representatives were in favour of a right-to-repair law (I can't say what the overlap is - but assume it's non-zero and if there's a partisan split and the democrats take teh wrong side on this one it will be all of them), then do you really think they are going to value 'fixing an iphone' over 'getting the insulin that keeps me alive' ? Because I can't blame them if they don't.
One problem with representative democracy is that every vote requires compromises. You'll never have a representative who agrees with you on everything, so you have to vote for the one who agrees with you on the things you consider most important.
Things like this, unfortunately, though very important - are simply less important to people than life-and-death things like healthcare. Now in a saner system (as is found most places outside America) these life and death things aren't really political questions - it's just done, universal healthcare is just plain how it is - you'll be hard pressed to find a politician who does NOT support that. But in the USA - your vote usually involves quite a lot of policies that will determine your very ability to survive, as a result - you vote on those issues, everyone of hte policies that OUGHT to be what determines elections (like this) end up lower priority for the voters. And that leaves it up to the group who don't have to worry about survival to sway politicians on these issues -corporations and lobbyists. On these issues, they basically act unopposed.
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Nobody said you should have demand-side instead, that's a false dichotomy.
Sane economists are BOTH - not either. Because without demand, anything you produce is a waste.
And the track record of supply-side ideology has been utterly dismal. Everytime it's tried there's a massive recession followed by mass unemployment and all the sufffering that leads to.
And not to mention - the great depression itself was absolutely caused by supply-side economics. If a more sane theory like Keynesian economics had been followed at any time between 1929 and 1941 the depression would have ended right away. Ten years of global suffering, a world war and the holocaust- all caused by supply-side ideology (I refuse to call it a theory). Ironically it's worst outcome, was also it's cure, the war forced the government to start spending money -which is what they should have done all along because nothing else could undo the deflationary effect of the depression. When the government spent lots of money, the depression was ended for good.
That's not to say the war was good for the economy - it's just that all the things which would have been better were never done.
>So what would be a "severe" increase in wages? $20/hr? $40/hr? What if we increase it slowly, e.g. by 20% a year every year? Is there a point at which a "moderate" increase is no longer beneficial or is it always beneficial, no matter what the current minimum wage is?
It's not about the number - it's about the percentage. As long as it's within a percentage point or two of inflation, it should have no impact. The 15 dollar proposal is, in fact, exactly what the number would have been if it had been allowed to track inflation all along.
>You also make the argument that increasing the wage would drive up demand, but the real question is how much, and for whom
And all the evidence of decades of research says - by almost exactly the right number to offset any jobs that are lost with expansion elsewhere in the economy. There is no evidence that minimum wage raises increase employment (or if it does, by miniscule numbers) - but it also doesn't reduce it.
>Gas stations for example, probably won't see any demand increase, because people don't drive more just because they can afford it.
Except of course that if more people can buy cars (even old junkers) that's more demand for gas right there.
Its been in print since the early 20th century. Ever heard of John Maynard Keynes ? Heck if the US government had listened to Keynes in 1929 instead of that idiot Von Mises black Friday would have been a minor recession, not the great depression. Hitler would never have been elected. The holocaust never happens. The evil that Laizes-Faire versions of capitalist theory has unleashed upon the world is literally without end.
Mankiw is a rightwing Chicago school economist still clinging to an economic theory that has been disproven literally every time it has been tried. It's the most wrong theory since phlogiston.
Easy - they had access to vast swaths of land, filled with natural resources, which they didn't have to buy - just settle on.
So your solution is that people struggling to make ends meet on minimum wage in a city like New York should just grab a gun and go hunting in Central Park Zoo ?
Because that's not actually legal anymore.
It's simply, and flagrantly, idiotic to suggest that a solution which worked when vast swaths of virgin territory was available would still work when there is no such thing anymore.
But since nobody is actually proposing that- it's meaningless to study it.
What DOES make sense is to study what effects small and moderate minimum wage increases have on employment - since those are what actually happens.
Nobody would set such a high minimum wage because everybody knows it's insane and would have terrible effects. But it does not logically follow that a small increase would have the same bad effects.
Your bathtub is at 25C. Increasing the temperature of your bathwater by 100C would kill you, increasing it by 3C just makes for a nicer, more comfortable bath. Small interventions do not always have the same effects as a large version of the same would have.
The overwhelming evidence is that moderate minimum wage increases have little to no impact on overall employment rates. It makes sense too - what business would choose to LOSE money by firing people it needs and losing out on sales because it couldn't produce enough goods ?
A business would only start looking at layoffs if the increase is so big that they would lose MORE money paying those people than they will lose turning away customers (and that's BEFORE we even consider the possibility of having more customers when wages go up).
You realize that what you just wrote is a recipe for legalized slavery right ?
All you need is the employer to constantly add new "training days" to the end of the contract, and keep dropping the wage until it reaches zero (since there is no minimum wage anymore) - while the employee isn't even allowed to quit by law.
And then another business will open up to the supply the demand from consumers - and hire people.
Except that it doesn't make sense in economic theory.
Supply-side, Chicago School and Austrian School are not economic theory - they have both been utterly debunked.
For higher wages to drive inflation: the potential profit from new customers (higher-earning workers at other businesses) must be less than the cost of the higher wages. This cannot happen with moderate wage increases -in fact mathematically it only becomes likely at truly insane raises. Otherwise the businesses will make more money by absorbing the cost and selling more goods at lower margins.
For higher wages to drive job-loss -they must be so severe that it's no longer possible to operate the business at all. Contrary to what you think economic theory is - hiring rates are relatively independent from the cost of labour because companies need to meet demand in order to stay in business. The amount of work that needs to be done is therefore the primary driver of hiring. Assuming the company is meeting current demand if the cost of labor goes down the company won't hire more people, so why would they fire people if it goes up ? Both decisions would cost them money ! A company will expand if it can credibly determine that there is unmet demand. Not because workers are cheaper. There's no point in having workers make goods you can't sell, anymore than there is any sense in having to turn customers away because you don't have enough workers to make the goods for all the customers. The impact of labour cost on hiring levels then is miniscule.
In theory the wage increases should, actually, increase demand and make expansion more likely - more people with more money means more of them can potentially be your customers.
All in all - study after study after study has consistently found that moderate increases in minimum wage have a nett-zero effect on employment rates, and this is also born out by historical data.
Right... because the Imam of the local church is so likely to be Islamophobic. Damn could you be any stupider ?
The police themselves said outright: they weren't watching him since they simply do not have the manpower to watch every credible report.
Yes, and I already said I made a mistake in that explanation. Why do you keep hammering on about an error after I conceded it ?
Obviously the study should take precedence over my mistake.
And no, it was by no means clear the Orlando shooting was Islamic terrorism - because there are serious reasons to doubt his statements about that. First of all there is the absolute fact that he was not in contact with ISIS at any time - he was lone wolf entirely and his claims of acting on their behalf are further doubtful due to other known facts - like that he was active on grindr and was a regular of the club for many years. This strongly suggests the real reason was shame about his own homophobia - and the ISIS claim was merely his inabillity to admit the truth about why he did it. Is this conclusive ? Absolutely not. Does it mean it wasn't Islamic terror ? No. But it certainly means there is reason to doubt that.
You call the study biassed - but it agrees with FBI studies galore, with the official position of the FBI and 238 other police organisations in the USA and with global patterns. Even if it was biased as you claim - it was still right in it's conclusions.
This is not a new, unexpected or even controversial result -it's exactly in line with every other data source out there on terrorism.
So I don't think you are calling it biased because you think it's wrong - but because 'bias' is yet another standard rightwing tool for shutting down any information they don't want to hear. You see it whenever you mention a news source to them - and indeed you yourself showed that behaviour when you described newsweek (one of the most respected publications in the entire field of journalism) of being 'leftwing agitprop'.
Sorry, but no matter WHAT bias you think something has - it can still be correct. And the proper media - faulted as it may at times be - is the only source you should trust AT ALL because everything else is worse. The mainstream media may be biassed at the times but the non-mainstream media is pure, unadulterated bullshit they just pull straight out of their asses without a single shred of truth to any word they write.
Funny, at the time I made a joke (in certain circles) about him not being an islamic terrorist so much as fanatical about good music (a bit like Cartman in the conclusion to the Coon and Friends trilogy).
But sadly, your version doesn't work - because they knowledge police had beforehand did not include his chosen target.
Everything I said it said was in the study. The phrases in brackets were my own explanations and assumptions - I never claimed that was in the study.
You still haven't presented a single shred of evidence that the study was 'biased'.
So somehow you come to the conclusion that from a (minor) mistake by me- the study is 'dishonest' ?
On what basis do you conclude that other than "does not agree with my prejudices" ?
No, because you're asking me for a study to confirm that most people perceive the sky at noon on a clear day as blue.
Fine, so it looks red to you.
That's a problem with your eyes, not a grand conspiracy by society to lie to you.
There is so much absolutely overwhelming proof of everything I've said - that there is absolutely no sane reason to doubt it. The only possible reason to think otherwise is prejudice, which is as irrational as religion and as impossible to convince.
So no, I'm not going to link or defend - because nothing I say will convince you. One cannot argue with irrational beliefs.
You're the one making the extraordinary claim (that the largest religion on earth does not also have the largest number of fanatics) - which is mathematically impossible - so the burden of proof is on you to show extraordinary evidence.
Rightwingers always dismiss anything they don't agree with as 'leftwing' as if that makes it false, and thus remain idiots. The article DID in fact give you the full details on the study it reports from, and a mere few minutes of googling would confirm that the FBI does consider rightwing christian militias the biggest terror threat in the USA from multiple sources - including the FBI's own website.
None of which will convince you since your beliefs are based on personal prejudice rather than any concern for correlation with reality.
>Uh. Citation needed.
Did you not see the citation earlier on in the post- showing how Christian terrorists outdo Islamic ones in the USA ? Then you acknowledge the lack of reporting on the LRA but don't realise they ALONE outkill Islamic terrorists. They do in a year what all Islamic groups manage per decade ! That alone makes Christianity the obvious worst globally. The rest was just more examples.
>Every time there's a terrorist incident in the west, we all politely wait to find out the ideology behind it, and it almost invariably turns out to be jihadism
Nope. Not even slightly true. What IS true is that, almost every time a terrorist incident in the west is actually REPORTED as one it's jihadism. I, personally, have zero qualms about saying that German pilot who flew his plane full of people into a mountain on purpose was a terrorist in the exact same vein as those on 9/11 - but it wasn't reported that way because he was white, male and Christian. But even so - study after study keeps confirming, the vast majority of terror attacks are not Islamic jihadists.
>The closest we've seen is a Muslim-hating nutter [theguardian.com], but as far as we know he wasn't motivated by his own religion (if he even had one)
Firstly, you're forgetting the IRA existed, how short our memories are - that peace deal was so recent the ink was still wet when 9/11 happened. Their terror attacks on London killed far more people over decades than Islamic terrorists ever have. The blew up more than a few buildings in London - the last one in 1996 I believe.
But jihadists are not motivated by their religion either. Indeed I don't think any terrorists are motivated BY their religion - mostly they are motivated by other factors and religion becomes an excuse to rationalize what they do about those factors. There's significant evidence to back this up - including that most of the people who have launched attacks in Europe were either new converts to Islam or had a long history of apostocy before suddenly becoming radicals. Two of the Charley Hebdo shooters had only become Muslims less than 2 years earlier. The other one had a long history of drug use and other prohibited activities and were known as "not religious" for most of his life.
France's top terror expert has said "It's not the radicalization of Islam that's the problem, it's the Islamification of radicalism that we should worry about".
It actually makes sense - 1.6 Billion odd Muslims are convinced their religion absolutely prohibits killing people except in self defense. I live in a 30% Muslim city and I regularly see Bumper Stickers that read "I Shall Love All Mankind" (by the way - we've not had a terrorist attack in 3 decades now and the ones we HAVE had in the past didn't include a single one from the Muslim population).
The evidence suggests that the real problem is culture-clash - which is common in second-generation immigrants. Expected to live according to their old culture at home, but live in a different one - they often feel isolated and out of touch with society. In a few - this can be twisted into radical violence (it's almost unheard of in first or third generation immigrants - the former haven't attempted to fit in, the latter fits in too well to feel isolated). We just happen to live at a time when, the majority of second generation immigrants in Europe happen to be of the same religous heritage. But it's not their religion that motivates them - if anything it's a feeling of not being able to connect with that religion.
Rootlessness is hard for all people - and in a few it can be exploited. But so can a lot of things- many a rightwing christian militia terrorist have been military veterans, and it wasn't just their military training (that only makes the valuable to recruit - not easy to recruit), what made them recruitable was PTSD and, again, the resulting isolation.
Finally - there is a very clear pattern where terrorism attacks show strong upticks around elections - and the strongest upticks happen in elections
Except that the majority of people who have this religion are (generally believed to be) of a common race so those with that race is usually assumed to be of that religion and often discriminated against.
Some of the worst acts of anti-Islamic discrimination and violence recently have been targetting Sikhs for example, even though Sikhs are not Islamic - but they look like stereotypical Muslims are expected to look.
It's actually quite hard to discriminate against a religion - you can't really tell what somebody believes by looking at them. Their thoughts aren't printed on their faces. So such discrimination is usually done via proxies - in the case of Islamophobia that proxy is almost always race. No Muslim screening system yet invented would have have screen Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali if he had chosen to keep his conversion secret. No screening system known to man yet would have consistently held Cat Stephens for extra checks. Because these folks don't look Muslim. Because they aren't Arabs.
The proxy is terrible, not all Arabs are Muslims, not all Muslims are Arab (in fact a very, very large number of them aren't - many are Indian for example) and there is no actual correlation between being a Muslim and being a threat.
In the USA - in the past 9 years, Islamic groups have launched 63 attempted attacks of which 76% were prevented by law enforcement. 13% of successful attacks had fatalities. Overall death toll: 90 (mostly because of the high deathtoll in the Orlando nightclub shooting - which it is not certain was, in fact, an Islamic terror attack)
Rightwing Christian terror groups planned 135 attacks of which only 35% were prevented. 33% had fatalities. Overall death toll: 79 (pretty close considering they haven't had a nightclub shooting outlier in there - and of course if the Kansas Mosque/Appartment bombing hadn't been prevented - it would have been in the hundreds, and since they get prevented far more rarely, the odds are in their favour).
http://www.newsweek.com/right-...
The FBI, and 238 police organisations in the USA all consider rightwing militias the greatest terror threat to US citizens.
Globally the Christian Lords Resistance Army alone has killed more people every year of it's 20 year existence than all the Islamic terror groups combined in total, ever - even 9/11 is a blip on the radar next to the LRA (a group also known for using child soldiers and engaging in cannibalism).
When you add other terror groups however the Islamic numbers turn into a rounding error. They just make better news in the West.
That said there is no religion with clean hands. In 2003 over 3000 Muslims in Southern India were killed by Hindu extremists in an act of attempted genocide, the main ringleader of that attack is now the prime minister of India. Meanwhile in Myanmar as we speak thousands of Muslims have been killed in an ongoing genocide attempt by Buddhists (yes, Budhists - their pacifism apparently does not extend to their Muslim fellow citizens).
But there is no doubt the overwhelming majority of terrorists are Christian - it is only logical, as the largest religion on earth by far, they must also have the largest number of radicals.
Interestingly the concert bomber was a known threat, and here comes the problem with painting all Muslims with the same brush: he was a known threat because the Muslim community had reported him as a threat !
His own Imam had banned him from his mosque over his violent rhetoric and reported him to the authorities over his bragging that he was planning a violent attack.
His family had made similar reports, wanting him watched - because they'd rather see him in jail for conspiracy to commit terror than dead from doing it.
Why was he not being watched ? Because the Tories have cut the police force's budget by over 25% in recent years leaving Britain (and London in particular) with a massive shortage of cops. Thousands had to be let go due to this insane policy.
Ironically - while the government keeps trying to use terror to get further reductions in citizen privacy and surveilance power (things that do not help to prevent terror attacks) they gutted the one thing that DOES have the power to stop terror attacks: good old fashioned police work.
No, because fossil fuels don't come from plants that were recently alive, and thus the carbon from them was not recently removed from the atmosphere.
In fact, fossil fuels mostly date from the carboniferous period - when the first woody plants evolved, but nothing had yet evolved that could digest wood - so they never rotted, never decomposed and ended up becoming oil and coal instead. At the time, these plants all turning CO2 into oxygen but never decomposing raised the atmospheric oxygen level to around 40% (almost twice what it is now), and created a world where insects and arachnids could grow much bigger than before or since. There was a dragonfly with a 1m wingspan !
It was a very different world. Burning those things now, is inverting that process - from over 300 million years ago.
Dude lay off the infowars, that shit will rot your brain.
On the other hand, perhaps the damage is done and you personally have nothing left to lose...
Erm. Drumpf IS his actual family name.
Though my personal pet theory is that Fred Drumpf had his name legally changed in Germany before emigrating. You know, like all the Hitler family members did.
Trouble is - there are so many issues and people have different priorities. Those 24-million odd people about to lose their healthcare, they may be unwilling to vote for a representative who supported that abomination. If those representatives were in favour of a right-to-repair law (I can't say what the overlap is - but assume it's non-zero and if there's a partisan split and the democrats take teh wrong side on this one it will be all of them), then do you really think they are going to value 'fixing an iphone' over 'getting the insulin that keeps me alive' ?
Because I can't blame them if they don't.
One problem with representative democracy is that every vote requires compromises. You'll never have a representative who agrees with you on everything, so you have to vote for the one who agrees with you on the things you consider most important.
Things like this, unfortunately, though very important - are simply less important to people than life-and-death things like healthcare.
Now in a saner system (as is found most places outside America) these life and death things aren't really political questions - it's just done, universal healthcare is just plain how it is - you'll be hard pressed to find a politician who does NOT support that.
But in the USA - your vote usually involves quite a lot of policies that will determine your very ability to survive, as a result - you vote on those issues, everyone of hte policies that OUGHT to be what determines elections (like this) end up lower priority for the voters.
And that leaves it up to the group who don't have to worry about survival to sway politicians on these issues -corporations and lobbyists. On these issues, they basically act unopposed.
You may well have a solid point there. This could all too easily end up with all the downsides of TV over videogames - and none of the upsides.