How many Syrian refugees should Australia take?

[HAL]

Oops. Too much data.

[stui magpie]

[David]

And Zoroastrianism apparently predates all three! Still a minority religion in Iran to this day.

[Pi]

^
dont be surprised if it makes a comeback, especially in parts of Iran.

http://ekurd.net/iraqi-kurds-revive-ancient-kurdish-zoroastrianism-religion-2015-05-29#.VWfta608vNI.facebook

As you are no doubt aware the Iranian regime is Islamic in name only and Iranians have a long history of scholarship and independent thought that predates Islam. there are a lot of empty mosques in Iran

http://www.gatha.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=388&Itemid=69&lang=en

[stui magpie]

[pietillidie]

^Not to mention that grand piece of Classical Hebrew aetiology (origins tale) which yours truly studied in depth at uni, the Conquest.

The best book on the complexities of the topic back in the day was this gem:



Warning: Once you start reading stuff like that your current notion of "history" as a concept will likely end up in a bin somewhere.

[Mugwump]

[pietillidie]

The German rape epidemic is spreading, apparently...


http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/06/europe/cologne-reporter-groped

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not downplaying any serious incidents which have occurred, nor justifying non-consensual public contact such as that in the photo invading people's personal selves and causing fear to some people, nor offering a view on what happened in the city square on NYE beyond the given facts.

But I'm just still baffled as to why there is zero, zero concrete footage of what happened in the open, public Cologne city square on NYE, with thousands of phones handy, and public security cameras all over the place, and cops who decided things were fine and left, and apparently hundreds of complaints.

Nope; not a bloke in sight defending anyone (I attacked a scum bag inside the Vatican for rudely pushing my partner!); not a cop in sight breaking up anyone or coordinating the city square crowd; not a photo or a video in sight - in an open public city square; not a retaliating mob of hooligans in one of Germany's notorious hooligan cities; and barely a mention of non-brown "gropings" of the sort in the image above.

You don't have to be Miss Marples to wonder if the media emphasis on the words "coordinated attack" that night, dutifully recorded verbatim in media article after media article, was part of an opportunistic stunt to take advantage of the well-known fact that foreigners and immigrants often gathered in that location prior, as bemoaned by many people interviewed in the aftermath.

Rightly or wrongly, plenty of people are "groped" on NYE in public places. I was personally "groped" countless times in Germany during the World Cup by non-brown people, some enjoyable, some not so much; some sudden enough at night to scare the shite out of me, too.

Just show us some video footage so we can determine who "groped" who, and how they "groped" them, so we can separate the issue of "public groping during public festivals" from refugee and brown people hysteria, and discuss them in turn.

[Pi]

^
try looking up the word Taharrush jamai apparently its just a fun 'game' that dem bad white peoples dont understand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taharrush_jamai

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pHnQ6W2KkM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xxDhSj6W6Y

reinforced knickers look like a growth business, get em now before the rush

[pietillidie]

^Apparently, it also involves all cameras and phones being switched off, and all males of other cultures and police being evacuated in foreign countries in public centre squares on NYE! That's quite a cultural trick you're onto! You could hold a chair in Middle East Studies somewhere..the moon, perhaps?

[HAL]

I would like to go to the moon.

[Pi]

yes, lots of women telling lies

security camera footage belongs to the government authorities and since crimes have been reported they dont release it, some crap about fair trials.

try taking outdoor phone footage at night with a camera phone in chaotic crowd , yep you get a crap result because its a crap camera with no white balance setting

the moon, sounds like fun

[pietillidie]

^I agree the reports are there; I've read the translations of some of them and even posted them above. But have you seen the recent prosecutions arising from those reports? They don't even match the reports from what I can tell; the vast majority were for petty theft, some for "groping", and a couple of serious ones; quite different from the original interpretation of "mass sexual assault".

You're a smart bloke; no camera footage in the main square of town; no retaliating men; no police; no mobile phones; a new form of mass Egyptian rape invented in 2005?

And that sounds rational to you as has been described? Mob craziness doesn't surprise, and neither does petty theft through contact, and some isolated sexual assault by scum bags. But that's very different from saying a supposed novel form of uniquely Egyptian crowd rape took place; why no camera or police officer happened to see it; and why every male in the centre square of Cologne on NYE apparently stood idly by while it happened.

No image or footage leaks, even; no report of German men deciding to stay home for the evening so women could walk the Egyptian rape gauntlet; no explanation why police decided the very centre of town didn't warrant monitoring.

Of course, there might be a simple explanation - I'd just like to know WTF it is. Has the geography of town been misexplained? Are we talking dark alleys rather than the actual city square?

[David]

I believe men were attacked as well, PTID – the method was to surround small groups of people, take their phones and wallets and grope the women. I appreciate the need to question media narratives, but the reports seem pretty clear that the attacks were at least loosely co-ordinated; perhaps not so different to the way groups of Roma people will sometimes assail tourists in some European cities.

Amnesty International refers to this phenomenon in its overall analysis of sexual assault in Egypt:

https://www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/mde_120042015.pdf

I'm guessing the German police didn't make this connection frivolously.

Do you think it's possible you're holding these reports to a higher standard of evidence than you usually would? The fact that video (presumably) hasn't been released is hardly a compelling fact in its own right, unless of course you think the victims' testimony is fabricated. There still isn't video of Osama Bin Laden's death in the public sphere, for instance, but only conspiracy theorists believe that it didn't occur.

References to police inability to deal with the attacks below:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/cologne-sexual-assaults-leaked-police-report-reveals-chaos-beyond-description-as-women-attacked-and-a6802026.html

[pietillidie]

^No, you're being naive in a dangerously charged context and fear being wrong, which is being far more PC than rational. FFS, a report on some new, vague phenomenon in Egypt? It is cringe tabloid stuff to even connect the two without very clear definitions of what happened in both cases. The fact you've just duplicated what could easily be an absurdly spurious connection - and face it, we currently have no serious evidence otherwise - shows you've bought into the pop meme way too early.

It smells a lot like a *they're all the same* joke:

"Meh, Egyptians, Syrians, brownish whoevers; they all do that now! It's like the yo-yo craze in the 80s!"

On Cologne, I'm still not clear *what exactly was being reported* in a normal, everyday legal and policing context. And the subsequent prosecutions confirm my suspicions, if anything.

Any unwanted grabbing in a chaotic, drunk crowd can get very close to sexual assault, especially in poorly-controlled contexts; by certain definitions most of us would have been sexually assaulted at some festivals, while in many other contexts, fear of crowd chaos or crush will have gripped us, and in many cases, fear of theft of valuables.

And if men were also assaulted, that would only emphasise the point, wouldn't it? If this is peculiar, *show it to be so*. We're talking about a public square of thousands of people, both male and female; not vulnerable parties behind closed doors subject to powerful others with all the sensitivities of that sort of sexual assault.

And the reason I want more evidence in this case *is not my issue*, either. It is because this is being used as evidence of "mass sexual assault" and part of "a rape epidemic". If people want to politicise something like that, to use it as a Trojan horse in public policy, it is extremely dangerous *not* to subject it to due evidence and analysis.

Are you really saying you don't want the number one media Trojan horse so far in the *entire debate and discourse* to be properly evidenced and argued? You do understand that historically, and critically, and morally, submitting this to due analysis *is* doing the responsible thing? Opting out for fear of social reprisal looks a hell of a lot like the cowardly path to me, and could easily be falling prey to the very mischievous, very purposeful, very conscious PR tactic of conflating racism and gender issues.

I just want to determine whether the acts were undesirable but also unfortunately common acts. We're they deemed peculiarly threatening because they were especially novel, or because *who did them* was novel, under the known aggravating and bizarre factor of *zero police* and *zero video or photographic evidence*. Ever heard of things going wrong in crowded public places due to insufficient security and policing in your life?

Critically, the vast bulk of prosecutions arising from the reports were *not* for sexual assault; that's not my conclusion; it's the conclusion of the prosecution, apparently. Is it not also your conclusion?

A peasant underclass harrassing people and thieving, if in fact true, is one thing; a "rape epidemic" and a "wave of sexual assault", if in fact true, are quite different. And if there is some sort of conspiracy to cover up poor policing, or understate a real problem, or overstate a problem, or whatever, let's take a look at it.