DimitriRascalov
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User ID: 450
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
Why are gypsies so very hard to integrate in to societies yet their ethnic brethren from North India much easier?
The ethnic brethren from North India that make it to the West are the ones with a job offer and university education. You'd expect such people to have an easier time fitting in regardless of ethnic origin. Also, the Wiki article about Roma people states in its section about genetic inquiries into their origins that the original population that migrated westwards was quite small, as evidenced by founder effects like several heritable diseases being quite frequent in modern European Roma. Given this, it's very plausible that there are also other genetic oddities in Roma compared to the broader population of their ancestral homeland.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
Let's go best case scenario. Even if these immigrants do end up integrating into Western society and adopting their values - I'd say that's definitely still something one should be worried about. Western culture itself seems absolutely intent on stirring up racial animosity between the groups, as well as creating and maintaining a threat narrative that paints whites as being deserving of contempt regardless of whether they actually did anything or not.
Another point here is that even if the ideal version of integrating into Western society works out instead of the one where the different ethnic groups are living in strife, that still leaves such a society on the very same long term path OP is complaining about, unless a lot of other things radically change as well. Migrants who are productive, who attain academic degrees, who don't make constant tribalistic or ethnocentric comments have birthrates very similar to the ones of Western white majorities. The problem of demographic replacement applies to "good" minorities just as well as to whites!
I brought it up on the old place a while ago and it's an illustrative example: probably the most famous and accomplished migrants (of Turkish heritage at least) here in Germany, BioNTech (known through the Pfizer vaccine) founders and married couple Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, have just one child, despite their fabulous wealth. Meanwhile, the Arab crime families of major German cities like the Abou-Chacker- or Remmo-clan are expanding demographically at a fast pace.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
Maybe you think that the EU is less united than it appears, and winter will be harder than Europeans are prepared for.
This is definitely a side note to all the other things going in this thread, but I can't help but wonder how this will play out. I just received a notice from my German gas provider and the price per cubic meter has gone up x5, that's on top of a 60% increase in electricity price. Fortunately my wife works at a place where they're legally obligated to keep the heating on, I do WFH and am unusually cold-resistant and whatever else we'll actually consume fits comfortably in our budget, but not everyone has that privilege.
Across Europe, there will be a large number of people that will be unable to pay for some of the basics of life this winter. Assuming that they'll not just be content to lay down and die, this might have serious consequences starting from cascading economic consequences of non-payment of absurd utility bills to populist parties surging in support. Another thing to consider is that this winter we're still able to largely run off of Russian gas which filled our storage tanks over the summer. That won't be the case next winter.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
Maybe whites overall have been told more over childhood an later life that being a good person requires not having racial biases and when filling out surveys people may (perhaps subconsciously) not describe themselves but instead their good-person-ideal, or what they know they should be.
But this still constitutes a real signal, doesn't it? The guidelines imparted by society generally do not have explicit racial clauses in them. While open racial camaraderie or preferences are often tolerated if done by non-whites the general societal script still prescribes universal tolerance, politeness and equality of opportunity, and this is taught to children of all backgrounds. That whites are the only ones to publicly commit to that (even if they don't live up to the ideal) is still something.
I'd be more convinced by studies that somehow measure people's behavior in the real world (I don't know, hiring stats or something, as an example) instead of just asking questions on paper.
In the context of outgroup-ingroup bias that raises the question of how to account for society-wide behavior. While it might be the case that white business owners hire people with the surname "Zapata" (or "Abadi" if we're talking about Europe) less often than people named "Anderson", how would such a study account for the fact that it's rather uniquely societies like the ones that brought forth these white business owners that allow a situation such that there are millions of Zapatas, many of them equipped with citizenship, available to be hired in the first place.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
First off, if my posts come across as confrontational or angry I apologize and will try to tone it down. My thought process wasn't "ha, I'm gonna nail him down on a potential minor mistake in a huge effortpost" but more like "huh, this sounds interesting but conflicts with my background knowledge (i.e. Muslim calendar vs Western ones), let's do a quick search to see if it checks out". FWIW, I upvoted and appreciated the original post.
Second, I think you need to go back and reread the OP. I never claimed the the numbers 9/11 held special significance to Muslims. I claimed that the date, that is the anniversary of the siege, was significant.
But the Muslim anniversary would have been on December 5, 2001, because that's Ramadan 19, 1422 and the battle at the end of the Siege of Vienna was on September 11/12, 1683 Gregorian or Ramadan 19/20, 1094 Hijri, unless my date conversion is mistaken (see below). That's where I got skeptical: I understand that it's not about the numbers but about the anniversary, but using the calendar religious Muslims follow there is no anniversary to speak of on 9/11, 2001. If Muslims care about the anniversary (and I can buy that there are Muslims who do), I'd expect them to do so on wherever Ramadan 19 happens to fall on in a given Gregorian year.
You did already mention that it might be about sending a mutually understandable message and that does make sense. However, I'd still like to see more direct proof that this is a thing in these circles. The conversations you had with people on the ground are no doubt illustrative, but not accessible by me. I had simply hoped that there would be more material evidence out there to support that statement, something like a famous cleric writing a fatwa specifically referencing the Gregorian anniversary or something like that.
The date would not have been announced as Ramadan 19, it would have been the 22nd or 23rd of Jumada depending on your time zone.
I'm using this website for conversion and it spits out the dates I mentioned above. I double-checked by typing "september 11 1683 in hijri" into Google and it concurs. 22nd and 23rd of Jumada[al-Thani/al-Akhirah probably] seem to be 9/11 2001. It's probably because the way I worded it was bad writing, but in that paragraph I was always talking about the date of the siege, not the terrorist attacks. Accordingly, the news I mentioned would be that of the defeat at Vienna, not of the Twin Towers.
You ask me why I think a Wahhabi or some other flavor of Sunni Revivalist would care about the Seige of Vienna and that's how I can tell that you've never actually talked to one and that your alleged "web search" must have been half-assed or non-existant because when given the opportunity to talk about this stuff it seems like half of them wont shut up.
That's a bit of a misread of what I meant, most likely due to clumsy writing on my part. It's not the idea that such people would care about the siege that I'm skeptical about, in fact I find such obsessions rather likely given other things we know about e.g. al-Qaeda in particular, it's the notion that they would do so under the label 9/11 instead of thinking about the date in their own native tradition, which given the above should be Ramadan 19 or 9/19 (unless I'm mistaken).
I did search for about 20 minutes and found several forum/stackoverflow-clone-for-history threads talking about the same idea, which is how I found the contributions by Lawrence and Hitchens as well as the CNN article. I don't speak Arabic and accordingly don't have unfiltered access to the ideas from that part of the world. If you have a link to some kind of source, Western or Middle Eastern, to share I'd genuinely appreciate it, I'm a sucker for these kind of minor historical anecdotes and connections.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
For instance, where the fuck is this idiotic nonsense about "nobody outside of a tiny number of scholars concerned with calendars" knowing the date coming from?
...
but that doesn't mean they were unaware of the Gregorian Calendar or what date a given event happened on.
Let me be precise about what my position is: of course there were lots of people in the Muslim world pre-modernity that understood the Gregorian calendar. However, the great majority of intellectuals and the general population would at most be aware of its existence, but not of how to use it or convert their own dates in the Hijri calendar that everyone of them would be using, just as I or about 99,9% of all westerners can't tell the Julian date of a particular day without consulting an expert or a web app. Because of this, the idea that the numbers or the date 9/11 hold special significance for Muslims is suspect to me. The date would have been announced as Ramadan 19 as heralds spread the news throughout the Middle East. Where would a tradition of assigning 9/11 with special importance have organically come from instead of 10/19, the actual date almost everyone would have been thinking about before the 20th century?
Likewise, you say you didn't find anything on the web. Well no shit. Wahhabis don't exactly maintain much of an online presence, something about the internet being a Satanic construct. What presence they do maintain is typically in Arabic rather than English.
Sure, but people translating and writing about them might. I can't read classic Greek, yet I still have access to a great deal of Greek thinking and commentary on it. For example, the original writings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab survive and are available in English.
You can demand "proof" from me, but your attitude is giving me the distinct impression that there is nothing I can provide that you would accept. So with that in mind, what is your alternative theory?
What exactly gave you that impression? I did directly mention things that would convince me: a statement by bin-Laden or someone else from the group responsible referencing Vienna and the context of the 9/11 date, writing by Muslim historians or scholars about the importance of the Battle of Vienna and particularly the (Gregorian) date it was on, basically anything that provides some evidence for the notion that the Gregorian date itself is really something that people paid attention to in the Islamic world other than hearsay or statements by outsiders like Hitchens or Lawrence.
I don't really have an alternative theory. My best guess would be that it was just random chance. For example, here on the Wiki it says that in a meeting in Spain in July 2001, a middleman expressed that bin-Laden wished for the operation to go ahead ASAP. This old CNN article about an Al-Jazeera documentary that talked with the same middleman before he was captured by US forces recounts the anecdote of how Atta revealed the final date of the attack to him, which has no mention at all of the significance of the date (while it does confirm that the date was in given in the Gregorian calendar). Both of these taken together imply to me that there was no or little group-wide discussion and that the date was chosen for practical reasons.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
You mean aside from assorted Muslims that I've spoken to? No not really, but I could just as readily, ask you the same question.
Searching the web I can find literally no Muslim accounts while the only two sources supporting your interpretation are Lawrence Wright and Christopher Hitchens, who both present no direct evidence (e.g. statements by bin-Laden, Muslim scholars discussing the significance of the date etc.). In fact, your paragraph in the OP comes suspiciously close to simply remixing their claims with a bit of rhetorical flair.
The downhill cavalry charge into the Ottoman flank that inspired both Tolkien and Sabaton is generally agreed by both sides to have happened on the morning of September 12th per the Georgian Calendar. Sure there are other calendars, but if the intent is to send a message you're going to use the one that is mutually intelligible.
That's only part of your original claim. I can buy that a westernized radical Muslim like Atta chose the 9/11 date for its historical significance in the struggle between Christendom and Islam, even if no direct evidence exists. What I take issue with and would like to see concrete proof for is the idea that 9/11 ..
is remembered by many in the Islamic world as a bloody and shameful anniversary
How did 9/11 become a cultural touchstone for historical/geopolitical thinking east of the Bosporus when nobody outside of a tiny number of scholars concerned with calendars would even have a clue what the Gregorian date for it is, pre-1917? Further, we'd expect people who are especially concerned with the fate of Islam to be less likely to use a Western calendar than their traditional one. The main calendar for Saudi-Arabia, where the supermajority of the hijackers came from, is still the Islamic one, they switched to the Gregorian one for matters of paying civil servants only in 2016.
Apparently, the Battle of Vienna happened on the 1st of September 1682/83 in the Julian calendar (both years are possible depending on where the locality in question puts the date border between years). Mistakenly treating this as a Gregorian date and converting it to the Islamic calendar yields either Shaban 29, 1093 (8/29) or Ramadan 10, 1094 (9/10). However, as stated above 9/11 2001 is 6/23 in the calendar that matters for the terrorists and the Islamic world that is supposedly aggrieved about this date, so neither one fits.
The other way around also doesn't work: mistaking September 11, 1683 for a Julian date converts to Shawwal 3, 1094 (10/3) or Shawwal 15, 1095 (10/15) Islamic.
Maybe I'm getting something wrong or there's another way to spin this, but I don't see it.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
The 11th and 12th of September are auspicious dates in political Islam as they represent the Caliphate's "high water mark" and end of the Islamic golden age. While it has largely passed from conscious memory in the West, the day that King Sobieski of Poland broke the Siege of Vienna (September 12th 1683) is remembered by many in the Islamic world as a bloody and shameful anniversary, the day that Islam lost it's way.
Do you have a source for that? Because that sounds very unlikely, given that the battles at the end of the Siege of Vienna happened on the 19th and 20th of Ramadan 1094 (9/19) and 9/11 happened on the 23rd of Jumada al-Thani 1422 (6/23) in the Islamic calendar. The correct date would have been the 5th of December 2001 (19th of Ramadan 1422) if the terrorists were after a symbolic message.
DimitriRascalov
3yr ago
Based on the above data I would posit that feminist societies result in fertility rates declining to below replacement rates, but once a country is wealthy it is far worse for the population to remain conservative than for it to be a feminist nation due to the fact that conservative rich nations do far worse on population growth than feminist nations.
Within those less conservative nations, it's the more conservative subset having more children however. In Germany, refugees, recent migrants and obscure evangelical sects have tons of children, everyone else has mostly one, with sizeable minorities having none or two. How would your model explain this? More conservatism on the national level causes lower birthrates, but at the level of broad social subgroups it causes higher ones? Doesn't make sense IMO.
That depends on how much of a difference AI will make, doesn't it? If advanced AI enables big American corps to churn out absurdly efficient code or highly advanced machine designs in minimal time, what will sclerotic German companies do?
I used to work at Siemens and half the people employed as programmers there thought that automating things in Excel was black magic, let alone doing basic things in Python with libraries like pandas. The difference in productivity compared to its rivals is small enough that coasting on momentum of past strengths might be sufficient to stay relevant in the present, but strong AI could plausibly make a lot of crusty German institutions obsolete in a way that our lawmakers won't be able to compensate for.
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