Binladen was a bagman delivering Saudi money to the muj. He didn’t fight. And the muj (mostly) weren’t the same as later jihadis. More often, local warlords and their private armies, not primarily religious nutters.

Naw bruv, one is the loneliest number, even if it’s an absolute unit.

You believe people have a choice to be gay or trans?

From a policy and human rights point of view, it’s irrelevant whether it’s a choice or predetermined.

Anecdotally, I have friends whose sexuality sure looks like it was arrived at by a process that included an element of choice. And if that’s the case, it’s still just as legitimate an identity as if it were inborn.

This might cause discomfort because it could send fascists the message that they could bully queer people into being straight. But they’re going to bully queer people regardless of whether it’s a choice.

this leads to a culture shift in the country, where islam is getting a foothold.

The experience in the UK is that Muslim immigrants’ level of religious observance (e.g., mosque attendance) and degree of religious conservatism both decline based on how many generations the immigrant’s family has been in the country. Out-marriage (with respect to both religion and ethnicity) also increases with each successive generation. There’s an issue with a small minority of second-generation youth becoming extremists in reaction to difficulty in assimilating, but the overall trend goes the other way.

And the right’s solution is to add more barriers to assimilation. That makes it look to me like their goal is not to solve the problem, but to be sure they have a steady supply of marginalized scapegoats.

you clearly think any bad opinions about immigration is xenophobia.

That’s very likely, far more so than the chance that you know what a stranger on the internet “clearly thinks.”

In Sweden its definently the case.

Is it? The statistics you see are probably unsound. Here’s why.

What’s actually happening is a pipeline: P(crime_occurring) * P(crime_being_reported) * P(crime_being_investigated) * P(charges brought) * P(verdict_being_reached) * P(sentencing).

There’s inherent bias in the reporting, in the likelihood of a crime of a given severity being investigated, the severity of charges being brought for a given crime, the likehilood of conviction based on a particular set of facts, and the severity of sentencing once a conviction has been made. All of this has been conclusively shown in a large number of different countries. There’s no reason to believe Sweden would be different. Based on some of the ignorant shit I’ve personally heard Swedes say, at least anecdotally, it is not a country free of prejudice.

And the statistics that are actually easy to accurately measure are not at the first step in that long pipeline.

Even worse, tthe data served up to the public via the media is often manipulated to support a given political point of view. And sometimes it’s more than manipulation, it’s outright lying. Coincidentally, some of those lies are identical to the lies being told by the far-right parties.

You dont want to think immigration can be a problem because what about the feelings of immigrants.

No, it’s just that suppressing immigration creates even worse problems that effectively managing it. Not least because it empowers sister-molesting mouthbreathing racists who should be caged.

I prefer calling them Goebbels or Himmler.

Vegan dildo.

We’re not done yet. There’ll be a lot, but it might take a while.

The range of invective is far richer than that. American terms of abuse are far more limited.

“You leotard!”

In England, twat (pronounced to rhyme with “hat”) is barely considered rude.

People in the small-town South don’t take it well when you call them sister-fuckers, either, as I quickly learned.

Didn’t stop me, though.

Cancer sufferer works in the Netherlands

Kankerlijer. You can replace cancer with any of a number of other nasty diseases.

It’s also customary to tell someone “get cancer!” (krijg de kanker), “get tuberculosis!” (krijg de pleuris) or “get leprosy!” (krijg het lazarus). All map to English-language sentiments such as “eat shit and die” or “fuck off.”

You can also just use “cancer” as a prefix to anything that happens to piss you off: cancer-influencers, cancer-sandwich, whatever. And the same goes for other diseases.

I personally prefer “klootzak,” which means ball bag. The word rolls off the tongue so nicely. But then, everything said in Dutch sounds aggressively pejorative, even sweet talk.

You fucking spanner.

Chile Verdius (cum cervino).