The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:
What caused the global financial crisis which has seen the UK mired in recession for the last seven years?
The global land price and credit bubble, mortgage backed securities etc. - 81%
UK government deficits of a few percent of GDP in the years before the crisis - 5%
People under 25 claiming benefits rather than looking for a job - 4%
Other, please specify - 10%8
Correct. So treat the cause, not the symptoms.
Which is the opposite of what UK governments (of whatever party) have been doing for the last seven years.
* Taking away benefits from the under-25s is something the Tories are doing quite ruthlessly (aka 'bayonetting the survivors). Despite the fact that most of them were still at school back in 2007-08 and thus can be absolved of any blame.
* If government deficits were a minor or secondary cause, then why have they run a cumulative total deficit of over fifty per cent of GDP over the last seven years? (considerably higher than what Labour was doing until 2008).
* Seeing as the land price/credit bubble was the actual cause, why have UK governments done their level best to prop up house prices and prop up speculation and banks by depressing interest rates?
Strikes me, they are making things worse and just delaying the inevitable. Perhaps until 2025-26?
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Muslim migrants have been in the news a lot recently. History shows that they are not very good at fitting in Western/non-Muslim countries and tend to stay "within their own communities", so we can assume that Muslims prefer to live among other Muslims.
So fair enough, people are fleeing the war zones (I know that I would), but that's only part of Syria/Iraq. Surely your easiest option is to move to a more peaceful area in Syria/Iraq; your next option is move to a neighbouring Muslim country; your next option is the easy overland route to a Muslim country further afield (from the Atlantic to Pakistan, if you gloss over Malaysia/Indonesia).
From Wiki:
So why are so many of them taking the most difficult journey across continents and oceans to north-west Europe, where they will never fit in anyway? And yes, that is more or less a rhetorical question.
So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.
Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.
Nope - it was ridicule
2 hours ago
9 comments:
Any reason you are giving the land speculation misery another 10 years? You wrote "perhaps until 2025-26"... No matter how much I wish it ends tomorrow, my wish is not a good predictor, but your spreadsheet may be.
Pw, it goes in eighteen year cycles, end of.
Some nice desert in north-western Australia they can have.
John Tee,
Your remarks are politically incorrect, which is good evidence that your remarks are true.
@ JT & RM
Only that wasn't always the case was it. Look back in history and you could argue the reverse was true.
Suggest you read The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam the 10th century poet, mathematician and philosopher.
I think a more interesting comparison would be poor muslims in North Africa and poor christians in South America.
Both of which live in highly unstable, violent and poverty stricken circumstances.
Indeed, when it comes to crime and violence, South America has everywhere else licked.
I think you'll find the Americans have been bitching about immigration from South America even longer and more vocally than our own recent problems in Europe.
Last I heard they were building a billion dollar fence or something.
JH, the Aussies certainly don't want them.
JT, RM, that's wacist.
BJ, hang on here.
According to Niaill Ferguson (no left winger he), this sort of poverty was entrenched in most central and south American countries from the very start because a few families in each country declared themselves landowners and everybody else was effectively a slave. At least the USA and Canada started off with a relatively egalitarian land distribution system, and that is sort of embedded in their psyche. As land ownership becomes more concentrated, poverty is becoming more widespread there as well, of course.
And of the few south Americans I've met, they seem like perfectly normal people to me, little different to other Europeans. I'm not aware that there are whole areas in Europe with high concentrations of south Americans in their "own communities" who refuse to adapt to our way of life or (re)adopt normal European customs, values and lifestyles etc.
And Mexico etc violence is down to Americans buying their drugs while declaring them illegal and selling them weapons at the same time. The stereotype Mexican in the USA is not a welfare claimant or jihadist, he or she just does a low paid job and watches Spanish language telly at home and causes little further bother. They are like Eastern Europeans are to Western Europeans.
MW,
I think everyone should watch this,
http://putlocker.is/watch-south-park-tvshow-season-8-episode-7-online-free-putlocker.html
and this
http://putlocker.is/watch-south-park-tvshow-season-13-episode-14-online-free-putlocker.html
enjoy.
Bayard,
Wot's wong with wacism? Wacism is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as (amongst other things) the belief that some races are superior to others. Now psychologists have confirmed that some waycis do in fact have higher IQs than others. Ergo there's nothing wong with wacism. (Guardianists will be crying their eyes out)
Re the damage done to Muslim countries by the West, that's very hard to quantify. Certainly the Sunni versus Shia carry on has been going on for 1,500 years, so the West is not to blame for that. Plus the Muslim extremist versus moderate arguments would be taking place anyway. Plus other countries try to interfere in the West. For example Russia backed Western communist parties before the collapse of communism. And Saudis push their extremist Wahabi ideology in Mosques base in the West. It's complicated.
"Wot's wong with wacism?"
I never said anything was wrong with it. I said that being anti-Muslim is not racism.
"Certainly the Sunni versus Shia carry on has been going on for 1,500 years, so the West is not to blame for that. "
However, very few of those years have been years of actual war, probably much fewer than Catholic v non-Catholic.
"Plus other countries try to interfere in the West."
That doesn't really excuse the almost continual interference up to and including direct military invasion that the countries of the Middle East have suffered since the end of the First World War.
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