Planet Rugby Forum

Sandstorm wrote:

pontifex wrote:

shanky wrote:I go to Germany all the time.

My experience has been very different to Ponti’s. No such issues.

Hope it works out for you, bro.

Yes, the tourist centre of Berlin is generally well-policed, and you may be able to avoid these kinds of problems if you don't actually live here. But don't try, behind a thin layer of 'compassionate' condescension, to pretend your experience, as a tourist, in any way invalidates mine as someone who lives at the coalface of the migration crisis.

So you live in a shitty part of Berlin and your response is to totally check-out and move to a deserted island....why not just move to another part of the city?

Well, partly because I have strong relations to that Island, partly because I want to live in a place where people smile at each other, partly because I want my children to grown up on earth, and partly because the rest of Berlin is not particularly far behind. Germany will have a war, or will become a police state. So it's mostly because I don't want to live in either, and I have no feeling of obligation to Germany that makes me feel guilty about leaving them to their fate (though as I said, I'll be sad).

Sandstorm wrote:

pontifex wrote:

shanky wrote:I go to Germany all the time.

My experience has been very different to Ponti’s. No such issues.

Hope it works out for you, bro.

Yes, the tourist centre of Berlin is generally well-policed, and you may be able to avoid these kinds of problems if you don't actually live here. But don't try, behind a thin layer of 'compassionate' condescension, to pretend your experience, as a tourist, in any way invalidates mine as someone who lives at the coalface of the migration crisis.

So you live in a shitty part of Berlin and your response is to totally check-out and move to a deserted island....why not just move to another part of the city?

By the way, if someone had told me, in 2012, that I'd be reporting what I'm reporting in 2017-18, I wouldn't have believed them. The correct response to radical changes in your social environment is not simply to shrug your shoulders and move on to a neighbouring suburb, though, because you'll fast run out of decent neighbouring suburbs to move on to.

pontifex wrote:

shanky wrote:I go to Germany all the time.

My experience has been very different to Ponti’s. No such issues.

Hope it works out for you, bro.

Yes, the tourist centre of Berlin is generally well-policed, and you may be able to avoid these kinds of problems if you don't actually live here. But don't try, behind a thin layer of 'compassionate' condescension, to pretend your experience, as a tourist, in any way invalidates mine as someone who lives at the coalface of the migration crisis.

What a laughably hysterical post

Perhaps it’s high time you go and live on your island.

shanky wrote:

pontifex wrote:

shanky wrote:I go to Germany all the time.

My experience has been very different to Ponti’s. No such issues.

Hope it works out for you, bro.

Yes, the tourist centre of Berlin is generally well-policed, and you may be able to avoid these kinds of problems if you don't actually live here. But don't try, behind a thin layer of 'compassionate' condescension, to pretend your experience, as a tourist, in any way invalidates mine as someone who lives at the coalface of the migration crisis.

What a laughably hysterical post

Perhaps it’s high time you go and live on your island.

Yes. It was hysterical. Are you suggesting you weren't trying to insinuate that my experience is somehow not normal, and that your experience of Germany, presumably as a tourist, is somehow evidence that my reports are less valid? That you then hid it behind a pretense of compassion? Sorry mate, I saw through it and I said so.

My comment was to say I had a different set of experiences and that it didn’t mean yours weren’t valid

I go all over Germany and I can honestly say I have seen very little of your ghetto-type experiences.

For the major part, Germany just rolls along with all it’s Germanic oompa-loompa-ness

That’s a fact. I apologise if it’s an unfortunate one.

shanky wrote:My comment was to say I had a different set of experiences and that it didn’t mean yours weren’t valid

I go all over Germany and I can honestly say I have seen very little of your ghetto-type experiences.

For the major part, Germany just rolls along with all it’s Germanic oompa-loompa-ness

That’s a fact. I apologise if it’s an unfortunate one.

I go all over Germany too, and the ghettos are in fact worse elsewhere than in Berlin (in the Ruhrgebiet, for instance, where the clans openly told the German police that they would not be able to win a military conflict with them). You may do a bit of tourism here and there. Germany is not all kitsch, Ludwig's castle and Christmas markets. People actually have to live here.

pontifex wrote:

shanky wrote:My comment was to say I had a different set of experiences and that it didn’t mean yours weren’t valid

I go all over Germany and I can honestly say I have seen very little of your ghetto-type experiences.

For the major part, Germany just rolls along with all it’s Germanic oompa-loompa-ness

That’s a fact. I apologise if it’s an unfortunate one.

I go all over Germany too, and the ghettos are in fact worse elsewhere than in Berlin. You may do a bit of tourism here and there. Germany is not all kitsch, Ludwig's castle and Christmas markets. People actually have to live here.

Ghettoes everywhere.

Yup, got it.

Have you met Mog?

shanky wrote:

pontifex wrote:

shanky wrote:My comment was to say I had a different set of experiences and that it didn’t mean yours weren’t valid

I go all over Germany and I can honestly say I have seen very little of your ghetto-type experiences.

For the major part, Germany just rolls along with all it’s Germanic oompa-loompa-ness

That’s a fact. I apologise if it’s an unfortunate one.

I go all over Germany too, and the ghettos are in fact worse elsewhere than in Berlin. You may do a bit of tourism here and there. Germany is not all kitsch, Ludwig's castle and Christmas markets. People actually have to live here.

Ghettoes everywhere.

Yup, got it.

Have you met Mog?

Not in person. But of course, you know better than two people who actually live in Germany and Sweden, the countries which have born the brunt of this crisis. Are you suggesting that you, as a tourist, one who cannot speak or read German, have greater or even comparable insight into the German landscape than I do - someone who reads and speaks German, lives here, and actually knows a bit about what's going on? You can posit your limited experience as a tourist against mine all you want, and try to defend it with pithy ad homs, but pithy remarks won't actually do when you're dealing with people who actually do understand the situation better than you do.

No. But I’m pleased that you got to your point eventually

shanky wrote:I go to Germany all the time.

My experience has been very different to Ponti’s. No such issues.

Hope it works out for you, bro.

I also go to Germany all the time. He's spot on.

Shanky lived in Africa too...once upon a time.

Bokkom wrote:Shanky lived in Africa too...once upon a time.

pontifex wrote:

4071 wrote:

pontifex wrote: How would you, on the other hand, interpret seeing dozens of people per day with knife pendants hanging very ostentatiously from their necks? How would you interpret seeing young children point gun fingers at shopkeepers while telling them to cover their hair, and then watching their mother do absolutely nothing to chide them? How would you 'interpret' watching your wife pinned against a wall between armed gangsters and security guards at a supposedly safe train station? How would you interpret the dozens of other events I witness? In short, how and why do you insist it is not possible that there is a pattern emerging (when it's patently obvious, of course, that there is, not just in my experience, but across Europe at large), and some reasonable steps must be taken to actually start to deal with what is happening, rather than ignoring it?

I would struggle to give a shit about knife pendants, as I think of them as jewellery. Arsehole kids raised by trash parents are something I've also encountered for decades.

But certainly there is more to your experiences than these things, and perhaps you are right to feel concerned.

Interesting. It's very clear that these two phenomena, as I describe them, are in the context of a European wide Intifada not merely 'jewellery' or 'bad parenting', and it's very telling that you simply refuse to recognise that a pattern is emerging, and instead choose to generalise these to much broader phenomena.

I've been in Stuttgart and Cologne this year and didn't see any violence. I did however see a large rally of Palestinian thugs in Stuttgart though on the Saturday afternoon. You get the leftie idiots joining in completely oblivious to the company they are keeping and the fact that the ''cause'' is an excuse for scumbags to gang together and engage in anti social behaviour. They don't actually give a flying fup about Palestine. I've seen similar in Brussels when I live there 3 or 4 years ago and we all know the issues they have had since. They can stick their flags where the sun don't shine and I sincerely hope the police are actively monitoring the gobshites who attend these

Bokkom wrote:Shanky lived in Africa too...once upon a time.

Remember how the apartheid police arrested his best (black) friends, for having the effrontery to address a white boy ? In person, nogal ....

Shanky - a wonderboy.

I have come up with a term to describe my experiences which is very apt in a thread about Haidt: Micro-terrorism. It fits perfectly what's going on here. Alinsky would be proud.

terrorism
noun
1. the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit
of political aims.

Well yes, that is the definition of terrorism. But the term micro-terrorism alliterates with one of the key-terms of the authoritarian left atm: 'microaggressions'. Such instances of turning your opponents' tools against them is a key tactic proposed by Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals, which is an Antifa handbook. If telling someone they speak good English is considered a micro-aggression, then wearing a 6-inch knife pendant openly around your neck is sure as hell micro-terrorism. Not a bad coining even if I do say so myself.

I like it.

ponti may be lying. He may be telling the truth. The reaction from some others on this fred is...interesting? It does feel like an obsession to prove nothing is wrong. Again, those saying there's a war coming blah blah blah may be hysterical ninnies but surely the word of someone actually "on the ground" counts for something. If half of what he says is true, I'm glad the most I have to worry about is the occasional coup.

See, this for me is exactly the problem. The longer people refuse to acknowledge what's in front of their eyes, the more likely people who agree with Seneca here are to end up in power. The window of opportunity for a liberal solution to this mess is fast closing. I am betting that it may be closed already, and if it is not that we will probably miss it because we are really no closer to discussing it rationally than we were two years ago, and you'll end up with a police state in which any and all dissent will be criminalised, or with DAC, Seneca and people like them doing it their way, which will end up with the former plus blood. (That is not meant to be an empty diss, but you know what you've proposed). I am deeply distressed by what I see, it doesn't give me any pleasure because I quite enjoyed living in a pluralist neighbourhood up until it started to take a darker turn, and I don't want what I'm saying to be true either, but the reality is that nobody, anywhere, ever, has been able to inform me of a plan, an idea they had - some mechanism, any mechanism - by which things would get better, rather than worse. If someone has one, please feel free to share it. Because wishing reality away, or that the people reporting it are bad faith actors, aren't solutions.

pontifex wrote:See, this for me is exactly the problem. The longer people refuse to acknowledge what's in front of their eyes, the more likely people who agree with Seneca here are to end up in power. The window of opportunity for a liberal solution to this mess is fast closing. I am betting that it may be closed already, and if it is not that we will probably miss it because we are really no closer to discussing it rationally than we were two years ago, and you'll end up with a police state in which any and all dissent will be criminalised, or with DAC, Seneca and people like them doing it their way, which will end up with the former plus blood. (That is not meant to be an empty diss, but you know what you've proposed). I am deeply distressed by what I see, it doesn't give me any pleasure because I quite enjoyed living in a pluralist neighbourhood up until it started to take a darker turn, and I don't want what I'm saying to be true either, but the reality is that nobody, anywhere, ever, has been able to inform me of a plan, an idea they had - some mechanism, any mechanism - by which things would get better, rather than worse. If someone has one, please feel free to share it. Because wishing reality away, or that the people reporting it are bad faith actors, aren't solutions.

I'm hard pressed to think of any solution that won't require violent defence of the borders and violent suppression of internal opposition to the solution.

Ive been to Germany before and just like most of Europe , I don't feel welcome there as a brown person. White people especially fat white men in their 40 plus ages are racist there.

Not suprised some brown people fought back and pontifex saw what he wanted to see.

acenas of the day wrote:Ive been to Germany before and just like most of Europe , I don't feel welcome there as a brown person. White people especially fat white men in their 40 plus ages are racist there.

Not suprised some brown people fought back and pontifex saw what he wanted to see.

Yes, the current wave of Islamist terrorism (including micro-terrorism (TM)) is a perfectly understandable response to your feeling unwelcome.

Look, I don't have to make Hobson's choice. I have the perfect out - a much better life, close to my family, in a kind of paradise, that I can afford. So far relatively protected from what's going on in the rest of the world, but I may just build a machine-gun turret into my castle yet.

Ponti if I remember right you travelled through Syria? You have a cultural perspective that some of the migrants may find interesting - have you reached out to any of the newcomers in your area and shared your experiences, or voiced your concerns? Something as simple as saying something nice about the hometown of someone from Syria could see them open up to you and crack the "us vs them" facade.

acenas of the day wrote:Ive been to Germany before and just like most of Europe , I don't feel welcome there as a brown person. White people especially fat white men in their 40 plus ages are racist there.

Not suprised some brown people fought back and pontifex saw what he wanted to see.

By "there" do mean Germany or most of Europe?

pontifex wrote:

acenas of the day wrote:Ive been to Germany before and just like most of Europe , I don't feel welcome there as a brown person. White people especially fat white men in their 40 plus ages are racist there.

Not suprised some brown people fought back and pontifex saw what he wanted to see.

Yes, the current wave of Islamist terrorism (including micro-terrorism (TM)) is a perfectly understandable response to your feeling unwelcome.

There is hardly any islamic terrorism going on in the west.
You are far more likely to be killed by a drunk driver. Most likely a white one.

There is far more terrorism going on from americans and other western countries. Sending terrorist soldeirs to kill innocent kids. The fact you support that makes you a terrorist too.

Mick Mannock wrote:

acenas of the day wrote:Ive been to Germany before and just like most of Europe , I don't feel welcome there as a brown person. White people especially fat white men in their 40 plus ages are racist there.

Not suprised some brown people fought back and pontifex saw what he wanted to see.

By "there" do mean Germany or most of Europe?

You're obviously a fat white man in his 40s you pig! wouldn't take acenas too seriously.

acenas of the day wrote:

pontifex wrote:

acenas of the day wrote:Ive been to Germany before and just like most of Europe , I don't feel welcome there as a brown person. White people especially fat white men in their 40 plus ages are racist there.

Not suprised some brown people fought back and pontifex saw what he wanted to see.

Yes, the current wave of Islamist terrorism (including micro-terrorism (TM)) is a perfectly understandable response to your feeling unwelcome.

There is hardly any islamic terrorism going on in the west.
You are far more likely to be killed by a drunk driver. Most likely a white one.

There is far more terrorism going on from americans and other western countries. Sending terrorist soldeirs to kill innocent kids. The fact you support that makes you a terrorist too.

Whose multi are you, then?

There is far more terrorism going on from americans and other western countries. Sending terrorist soldeirs to kill innocent kids. The fact you support that makes you a terrorist too.

Goodbye kid. Go watch MTV or snapchat.

Mick Mannock wrote:

acenas of the day wrote:Ive been to Germany before and just like most of Europe , I don't feel welcome there as a brown person. White people especially fat white men in their 40 plus ages are racist there.

Not suprised some brown people fought back and pontifex saw what he wanted to see.

By "there" do mean Germany or most of Europe?

Most of Europe that ive been to which is all the "major" places.

Bowens wrote:Ponti if I remember right you travelled through Syria? You have a cultural perspective that some of the migrants may find interesting - have you reached out to any of the newcomers in your area and shared your experiences, or voiced your concerns? Something as simple as saying something nice about the hometown of someone from Syria could see them open up to you and crack the "us vs them" facade.

I have. Iran too. I actually started teaching... let's call it Empirical Epistemology for sake of whatever... in the Middle East this year, with maybe a dozen Syrian refugees among them. Lovely kids. Trust me, I work my arse off to spread a bit of friendliness and trust.

Only place I haven't see daily hate crimes against brown people is NZ and actually parts of the USA.

Australia is worse than europe even. My family there got rocks thrown at us because they thought we were aboriginal australians.

Hilarious seeing white people here act like victims.

Bowens wrote:

There is far more terrorism going on from americans and other western countries. Sending terrorist soldeirs to kill innocent kids. The fact you support that makes you a terrorist too.

Goodbye kid. Go watch MTV or snapchat.

Western soldiers don't kill kids. Even if by mistake? That idea has/is used as a recruiting tool in that part of the world no? Not agreeing with acenas btw.

"Terrorist soldiers." I don't think so flaggs.

ponti what's your breaking point? When do you just go fcuk it and take your family off to that island?

Bowens wrote:"Terrorist soldiers." I don't think so flaggs.

Yeah sorry. I meant more that dead kids in those parts of the world are an easy way for arseholes to manipulate and get others to spread even more bloodshed.

shanky wrote:

pontifex wrote:

shanky wrote:My comment was to say I had a different set of experiences and that it didn’t mean yours weren’t valid

I go all over Germany and I can honestly say I have seen very little of your ghetto-type experiences.

For the major part, Germany just rolls along with all it’s Germanic oompa-loompa-ness

That’s a fact. I apologise if it’s an unfortunate one.

I go all over Germany too, and the ghettos are in fact worse elsewhere than in Berlin. You may do a bit of tourism here and there. Germany is not all kitsch, Ludwig's castle and Christmas markets. People actually have to live here.

Ghettoes everywhere.

Yup, got it.

Have you met Mog?

Stop being a twat.

Bowens wrote:"Terrorist soldiers." I don't think so flaggs.

Plenty of terrorist soldiers. No difference killing for oil or killing for god.

flaggETERNAL wrote:ponti what's your breaking point? When do you just go fcuk it and take your family off to that island?

Mate, I'm treading water till I get out of here. I'm done trying to smile at the people around me and having it thrown back in my face because the level of social trust is so low. I couldn't get a light on the street a few weeks ago because nobody would even acknowledge that I had spoken to them (and while I"m shaggy, I'm no threat). Above all, I really want to reconnect with a more physical, down to earth life. That's what I want for my kids (as yet unconceived), too, and I have an opportunity to give it to them.