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Welcome to Ramallmö

Sweden is run by idiots, cowards, and hypocrites

29.03.2009. Check out the following:

• The Swedish Emirate. The Wall Street Journal.
• Welcome to Ramallmö. The Weekly Standard.
• Malmö, Sweden - Growing muslim influence. A 6 minute news video with riots, fires, rockets, and more; CBN News.

But these poor immigrants have so much grievances and frustration, it's no wonder they turn against the Swedish society.Yeah, right:

But Rosengård lies in the world's most generous welfare state. Those who cannot provide for themselves and their families have a right to social welfare, which according to Swedish law must cover the cost for food, clothes, shoes, leisure activities, health and hygiene, health care and medicines, a daily newspaper, a phone, living expenses, electricity, commuting to work, home insurance, membership in a workers' union and unemployment insurance. The frustrated and angry youngsters in Rosengård get health care at a minimal cost, free dental care, free school, and free college and university education, with the right to student benefits and loans. Social inequality is, therefore, a poor model for explaining not only a rise in crime the neighborhood has seen in the last few years, but also in political radicalization.

Sweden is being destroyed before our very eyes, but the country is run by idiots, cowards, and hypocrites, and the indigenous population is prevented from discussing the mounting problems frankly and openly. Sweden is no longer a true democracy with freedom of speech, and will continue its drift towards anarchy and eventual totalitarian rule unless the Swedes wake up and do something about the corruption, and rid themselves of the utopian ideology that is the foundation of this whole disgrace.

Europe - a riot

The collapse of the economy may presage violence across the continent

27.03.2009. Some time ago, I asked a man in a bar where he was from. “I’m European,” he replied. “Yes,” I said, “but where are you from?” “I’m European,” he insisted. In fact, he was obviously German, and perhaps only a German would have answered in this fashion. There are certain Germans with an excessive sensitivity to their country’s historical crimes for whom it might have seemed like the beginning of the slippery slope to world domination to have replied, “I’m German.” Thus begins Theodore Dalrymple an article in the American Conservative. His article ends as follows:

The combustibility of the situation in France was further shown by the nasty little riot in the Gard du Nord in 2007, when a young man was arrested after exercising his inalienable right to punch two ticket inspectors in the face as they questioned his equally inalienable right to jump over the ticket barrier without paying his fare. This riot was in some respects more worrying than those of 2005, in that young men from ethnic minorities rioted in the center of Paris, which they had not dared to do two years earlier, even at the height of the unrest.

In 2007, young Germans showed in Rostock that they still knew how to be violent. One thousand people were injured during the riots that preceded the meeting of G8 leaders there. The troublemakers did not look as though they would have many qualms about instigating much worse violence. And all this before the economic crisis had even made itself felt, when youth unemployment was only 11.2 percent in Germany and 19.2 percent in France.

But it is in Britain that the potential for violent social unrest is the greatest, for thanks to the corrupt improvidence of prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Britain is not only the hardest hit of any of the major European countries by the crisis, but its social conditions are the worst. If the government had actually wanted social unrest and violence in the event of a severe economic downturn, it could hardly have arranged things better.

During all the years of so-called growth—a mirage, of course, based on easy credit, asset value inflation, and indebtedness both public and private—from 1997 to 2007, both the proportion, and latterly the absolute numbers, of British-born adults in work declined, while the numbers of immigrant workers increased. In the last ten years, almost all new employment, at least 40 percent of it in the public sector, has been taken by immigrants, while the number of native-born unemployed in receipt of permanent social-security benefits of one kind or another has remained constant. They have simply been transferred from the list of unemployed to the list of sick, in order to substantiate the government’s bogus claim to have reduced unemployment. In the process, the government has succeeded, in times of supposedly unprecedented prosperity, in producing 30 percent more invalids in contemporary Britain than the total of men wounded in World War I (many of whom recovered, unlike modern British invalids wounded by the welfare state).

At least 80 percent of the immigrants came from outside the European Union and, having been granted indefinite leave to stay, have created huge obligations upon the government toward them in the event of their unemployment, since they are most unlikely ever to return whence they came. As the tax base declines, so the expenditure obligations increase.

As if this were not enough, the government has done all in its power to ensure that there are no forms of social solidarity that do not pass through a government department—it went to the trouble of de facto nationalizing all the major charities well before it nationalized the banks. Forty-two percent of British children are now born illegitimate, and at least 25 percent can expect to live in a single-parent household, while many others live with serial step-parents, which is perhaps worse still. This is not a form of family life that can exist on a mass scale without state subvention, which if suddenly withdrawn or greatly reduced would plunge large numbers of people into real poverty. It conduces to common criminality, which is now rampant in Britain.

In short, the British government behaved as if there were, and could be, no tomorrow. Brown said there would be no more boom and bust under his management, which in a sense is correct: he has made sure that there won’t be a boom for a long time to come. In the meantime, the stage has been set for social conflict on a wide scale. The government might find itself unable to maintain the living standards of the very large proportion of the population that it has made dependent on it, in which case the already large criminal population will find many willing recruits. Ethnic and cultural strife, and radical xenophobia, will become evident as different “communities” press their claims for support in an increasingly zero-sum game. There have already been strikes protesting the use of foreign labor, even when it comes from the European Union, in oil refineries and power stations, suggesting that European law requiring freedom of movement of labor will either become a dead letter or a cause of strife. Either way, it does not look good for the “European project.”

Not long ago, I had occasion to stay for a few weeks in a once-industrial town in the north of England. The last steel mills had just closed down. I was surprised by the elegance of much of the early 19th-century architecture, now completely overwhelmed by the brutalism of the 1960s and ’70s. The prematurely middle-aged spent their time looking for secondhand clothes in charity shops. Pawnshops had also made a big comeback. Feral young men with an expression of urban predation on their faces stood around on street corners in nylon tracksuits and hoods, muttering f---ing this and f---ing that to one another. About half the people in the street were unemployed young immigrants, mainly of Middle Eastern origin, on the lookout for a bit of small-scale trafficking. Some took advantage of free Internet access in the public library—a concrete building aesthetically suitable as the headquarters of the Stasi—to look at inflammatory political sites or to search for women.

I have seen the future, and it’s riots.

Read the entire article in the American Conservative.

HonestThinking comments: And what do you think the ruling elite in the UK will do when a well-known writer like Dalrymple presents this kind of an analysis in the American Conservative? My guess is nothing. The ruling elites, not just in the UK but in most European countries, have of course far more important concerns than mere riots or economic crises. Such as for example making sure we continue marching towards the Multicultural Utopia.

Inherited intelligence

More evidence that intelligence is largely inherited: Researchers find that genes determine brain's processing speed

A new type of brain imaging scanner shows that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain's axons or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Los Angeles)

24.03.2009. In a study published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience, UCLA neurology professor Paul Thompson and colleagues used a new type of brain-imaging scanner to show that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain's axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. The faster the signaling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain's wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.

Genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin — the fatty sheath of "insulation" that coats our axons and allows for fast signaling bursts in our brains. The thicker the myelin, the faster the nerve impulses. Continue reading in ScienceDaily.

Unintelligent Design

Scientists ridicule climate pseudoscience of UN and EU

23.03.2009. More than six hundred scientists, economists, legislators, and journalists from around the world met in New York on March 8-10 for the second International Conference on Climate Change. Presentation after presentation documented the pseudoscience and dictatorial intentions behind the climate alarmism of the UN, EU, and Obama administration. Continue reading at the Brussels Journal.

Anjem Choudary

Wants to see flag of Allah flying over Downing St

19.03.2009. A Muslim fundamentalist leader today told of his vision of Britain under Sharia law. Anjem Choudary said he wanted the “flag of Allah” flying over Downing Street, all women wearing burkas and caning for drunkenness. He is the leader of Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah, founded as a successor to the banned fundamentalist sect al-Muhajiroun, which was led by now-exiled preacher Omar Bakri Muhammad.

Continue reading in This is London.

Radical islamists

Not hiding their intentions

09.03.2009. The 8 minute video Military Coup In The UK is worth watching. Not only are these kinds of radical islamists a danger to Westerners, they are also putting pressure on moderate Muslims, accusing them of not being proper Muslims.

Detroit

Elect a crazy council, get crazy results

06.03.2009. Excerpts from a commentary by Nolan Finley in The Detroit News (italics in original, boldface added by HT):

Nowhere is Michigan's brain drain on greater display than in the Detroit City Council chambers. My hopes for Detroit's future faded as I watched the tape of last Tuesday's council meeting, the one that considered the Cobo Center expansion deal. It was a tragic circus, a festival of ignorance that confirmed the No. 1 obstacle to Detroit's progress is the bargain basement leaders that city voters elect. The black nationalism that is now the dominant ideology of the council was on proud display, both at the table and in the audience. Speakers advocating for the deal were taunted by the crowd and cut short by Council President Monica Conyers, who presided over the hearing like an angry bulldog; whites were advised by the citizens to, "Go home".

Opponents were allowed to rant and ramble on uninterrupted about "those people" who want to steal Detroit's assets and profit from the city's labors. A pitiful Teamster official who practically crawled to the table on his knees expressing profuse respect for this disrespectful body was battered by both the crowd and the council. When he dared suggest that an improved Cobo Center would create more good-paying jobs for union workers, Conyers reminded him, "Those workers look like you; they don't look like me". Desperate, he invoked President Barack Obama's message of unity and was angrily warned, "Don't you say his name here."

Juxtapose the place and the faces and imagine a white Livonia City Council treating a black union representative with such overt racial hostility. The Justice Department would swoop down like a hawk, and the Rev. Al Sharpton would clog Five Mile Road with protesters. But in Detroit, dealing with the council's bigotry is part of the cost of doing business. As is dealing with its incompetence. [...]

Nobody can help Detroit if voters again elect a City Council composed of separatists, clueless dowagers and the apparently insane.

HonestThinking comments: Unfortunately, that's exactly what we can expect voters in Detroit to do. We all know that. So does Finley, because in his article he touches upon the very mechanisms that will ensure that factors other than competence will, to a large part, determine who gets elected. This is multiculturalism in practice.

Don't say a word

A U.N. resolution seeks to criminalize opinions that differ with the Islamic faith

03.03.2009. The Muslim religion makes unusually large claims for itself. All religions do this, of course, in that they claim to know and to be able to interpret the wishes of a supreme being. But Islam affirms itself as the last and final revelation of God's word, the consummation of all the mere glimpses of the truth vouchsafed to all the foregoing faiths, available by way of the unimprovable, immaculate text of "the recitation," or Quran. If there sometimes seems to be something implicitly absolutist or even totalitarian in such a claim, it may result not from a fundamentalist reading of the holy book but from the religion itself. And it is the so-called mainstream Muslims, grouped in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, who are now demanding through the agency of the United Nations that Islam not only be allowed to make absolutist claims but that it also be officially shielded from any criticism of itself.

Continue reading this article by Christopher Hitchens in Slate.

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HonestThinking is dedicated and committed to the art of thinking honestly. Yet honest thinking is not the same as true thinking, for it is possible to think honestly, but be mistaken. For the same reason, honest thinking is not identical with objective thinking either. Honest thinking is striving to get things right. This involves being truthful about whatever one publishes, but just as importantly, it involves an uncompromising dedication never to suppress relevant data, even when data collides with dearly held prejudices. Such an approach may sometimes cause hurtful revisions in one’s belief system. That’s what HonestThinking is all about! Read the entire manifesto.

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Please send e-mail to postmaster at honestThinking.org (replacing ' at ' with '@') if you would like to tip us about a web resource that we should link to, or if you wish to submit an article for publication here. Quality contributions are welcome from anyone.

The current European immigration and integration policy is profoundly disrespectful of both Muslims and Islam, because it is built on the tacit assumption that the Muslims will become like us. One claims to have respect for Islam and for Muslims, but one also expects Muslims to give up their orthodox faith when they come here. At the same time one is assuming that Islam will be reformed and modernized as soon as the Muslims become integrated and understand and appreciate how superior our Western culture is compared to their own. This is cultural shauvinism and arrogance indeed! The unspoken premise for this scenario is that Western socities are superior to Islam. Read more.

Human rights and democracy are under pressure. One threat comes from the Western world, in the form of lack of or dishonest thinking. There exists a peculiar Western "tolerance" which is so "tolerant" that it even tolerates totalitarian or anti-democratic ideologies. A tacit assumption underlying such an attitude is that all cultures, world views, and religions are really equally good. As a consequence of this assumption one is cut off from the possibility of critically examining the above mentioned ideologies. Read more.