Students taught to fight back

[az]

Brian hadn'd had his brain food yet [...]

Eat your grammar food

[KvHagedorn]

I'm not happy at teaching children to meet violence with violence. Whereas crazy people are not unique to the USA (or Russia), you do seem to have more than your fair share. Give or take a little, the population of W. Europe is about the same as the USA but such terrible incidents as happen in the USA all too frequently are happily very rare in Europe (I can think, offhand, of only two in Europe over the last 20 years). Why? What is the difference? I believe it to be the inculcation of violence in the USA (witness: a few of those who post here) and the notion of an eye for an eye, along with, of course, the gross availability of arms. As long as this notion exists, those nations with high proportional rates of gunshot-related deaths will continue to suffer from violence manifested by and against minors, as well as adults.

I'm not trying to be "holier than thou". The Dunblane affair hit the UK just as much as Columbine in the US and was as equally tragic. One can never guard against madmen, but one can reduce the possibility of such events happening, but the surest way of propagating this risk from one generation to the next is to teach children violence and provide them with the means of wreaking it.

IMHO

Alright, you want the real cause of US internal violence rather than a cross-recrimination which you label "non-sequitur"?

Can you even GUESS what I'm going to say? Yeah, the big M. Do you think without the institutionalized alienation we have in this country that there would be nearly as many of these characters? Absolutely not. And Europe is going down the same path, thinking they are all upright and liberal.. well whoop de doo. Welcome to Hell.

[NetSnake]

For some reason I always think about an old tv series called moonlighting with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd when Brian and Dr. Mordid actively participate in a thread

[Wombat]

The War of 1812 was an English invasion.

It was what? We invaded Canada, and then got our ass handed to us.

Also, your little montage there implies that we invaded Iraq after being provoked by 9/11. What? There's NO link between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorists.

[Dr Mordrid]

1. Your scenario ignores the precipitating acts by the British from the time of the Treaty of Paris to the outbreak of fighting.

a. the British violating the Treaty of Paris by refusing to surrender western forts as the treaty demanded.

b. arming the Indians in an effort to sabotage #1 even further.

c. boarding American ships on the high seas looking for 'deserters'.

d. a trade embargo and seizing of hundreds of American ships during the Napoleonic wars.

These resulted in the US declaring war on June 18, 1812...which is where you picked up the story.

2. uhhh...yeah, right

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (AQ planner of 9/11) was the uncle of Ramsey Ahmed Yousef, who was one of two "mission specialists" sent to handle the first WTC bombing.

Yousef entered the U.S. on an Iraqi passport and was known to his associates as "Rashid the Iraqi." He is the one who persuaded the local cell to make their target the World Trade Center. It's also known that he was an Iraqi intelligence officer.

The second mission specialist was Abdul Rahman Yasin, who fled to Baghdad after the WTC bombing. ABC news reported in 1994 that he had been put on the Iraqi government payroll.

If you still believe that Iraq had no hand in 9/11 I have this bridge for sale....

That said; 9/11 begat Afghanistan. Iraq was dessert, and IMO a strategic item putting us on both sides of Iran just in case.

[az]

Oh, a war killing tens of thousands (grammar?) of people is a dessert? What's it taste like? Really sweet, huh? With cream on top.

[KvHagedorn]

I would have stayed out of Iraq for the simple reason that Saddam was killing Iraqis just fine without our help, and without us getting killed too. To paraphrase Bismarck: Iraq is not worth the blood of a single Iowa farmboy.

[Brian Ellis]

Alright, you want the real cause of US internal violence rather than a cross-recrimination which you label "non-sequitur"?

Can you even GUESS what I'm going to say? Yeah, the big M. Do you think without the institutionalized alienation we have in this country that there would be nearly as many of these characters? Absolutely not. And Europe is going down the same path, thinking they are all upright and liberal.. well whoop de doo. Welcome to Hell.

Here we go again with another non sequitur

I lived in a country for 35 years, probably the most M country and one of the most peaceful countries in the world, with very little violence. Internally, it has four national languages, three of which are Latin (French, Italian and Rhaeto-Romansch) and the fourth is polydialectal German. The native people belong to five identified ethnicities or cultures, each quite distinct with relatively little intermingling until the 19th century (the advent of rail). In addition, the foreign population is high, over 20%, bringing in other cultures and languages, often under the worst conditions.
(since this chart was issued, there have been many other Middle East ethnicities introduced, mainly Kurds, Iraqis, Afghanistani etc. because of conflicts)

There are 1.4 millions foreigners living in Switzerland (20% of the total). They are an essential component of the economic and demographic balance of Switzerland’s aging population. In fact, without its foreign residents, Switzerland’s population would decrease by 7,500 every year through death and emigration. However, thanks to the foreigners’ higher birth rate, the total population is actually increasing.

Immigrants are attracted to Switzerland by the quality of life and some of the highest salaries in the world. However, with such a high foreign population, immigration is a constant issue in Swiss politics. Strict federal immigration regulations apply, with annual quotas and a strong bias in favor of European immigrants, who constitute almost 90% of the foreign population.

Now, the average is 20% but these are mainly in the larger agglomerations, so that, Geneva, for example, has

In Switzerland, Geneva comes first with the number of foreign people within its population : around 45% representing nearly 180 nationalities.

Ah! You say, this is mainly because of the International Organisations in that city, with a higher-than-average IQ. This is a half-truth. At least half the foreign population are occupied in low-paying jobs in construction, cleaning, hotellerie, unskilled industry etc. Most of these are housed in subsidised city-dormitories like Le Lignon. However, these are not ghettos of a single ethnicity but mixed. You can find a Turk, an Italian, an ex-Yugoslav, a Nigerian a Portuguese and a Swiss family housed on the same floor of an apartment block.

Yet, there is little conflict in Geneva. The last time there was a riot there was a couple of years ago and this was caused not from within, but from imported foreign protesters against the G8 summit in nearby Evian, in fact your anti-multiculturists, like yourself. All those arrested (several hundred) were of foreign domicile and were exported from the country illico presto as undesirable aliens (except for a few who were caught in flagrans delicto committing serious crimes, now housed in Champs Dollon, the Geneva Pen). So, multiculturism does work.

I now live in another multicultural country (mainly Greek, Turkish, Maronite and Armenian communities). Unfortunately, it worked fine until the mid-1950s, when foreign pressure caused problems, culminating in the 1974 division fomented by the USA, the UK, Greece and Turkey, because of its strategic position in the Middle East, after Nasser closed the Suez Canal and Egypt threw out foreign armies. Cyprus is called the "permanent aircraft carrier of the Mediterranean". Today, in the Republic of Cyprus, the Turkish Cypriots are very few and far between (a couple of thousand) but the other cultures are thriving, plus about 15% of non-Cypriots. There is no cultural conflict and almost no violence (most of what there is emanates from foreign tourists, mostly Brits). Just to illustrate this, a few weeks ago, a man shot his wife with a shotgun and then turned it on himself. The headlines in the Cyprus Weekly were BRUTAL MURDER, it is that rare an event. This is still a country where I often leave the house and car unlocked.

So, don't give me all that guff that all the evils of this world are due to multiculturism. They are due to evil people of whatever culture and I include the majority of politicians of whatever nationality and position within the spectrum within the epithet of "evil". I am aware that you have a very parochial outlook (if I remember right, I think you have said you have never travelled, so you have never seen what other cultures are like). You condemn everyone out of sheer ignorance.