Making the news today....

[forestboy1978]

3 minutes ago, breffni said:

Why not coffee? 

Though I love coffee and it has had an effect on society I don't compare it to the xray or the internet or photography etcetera. The same as I don't compare cocaine alkaloid to them. 

[onetruth]

6 minutes ago, forestboy1978 said:

Well I had a look through.

 

Accounting for the fact that there are billions of people in the middle east I was decidedly unimpressed.

I gave up looking for any credibility at this point.

[stihlmadasever]

If we get back to the original point made by matelot which was no inventions have came out of the middle east in the last century.

Weve put that too bed..

Its irrelevant that some think those inventions are crap,they are still inventions.

[forestboy1978]

6 minutes ago, stihlmadasever said:

If we get back to the original point made by matelot which was no inventions have came out of the middle east in the last century.

Weve put that too bed..

Its irrelevant that some think those inventions are crap,they are still inventions.

I think the point he was trying to make was not that they didn't invent a single thing. That would be absurd! It was that the number of influences were disproportionately low over the last several centuries.

 

We can dress this up however we like, it's the reality. The question is why! And that question is important IMO, and its answer is important. Its answer is the reason why it is illegal to burn a Quran but perfectly legal to burn a bible in the UK.  It's the exact same reason that a 20 year old kid was imprisoned for 2 years, as I recall, for putting a bacon sandwich on a mosque door handle, also in the UK. That turned out to be a death sentence for him btw. People need to stop dressing up Islam and call it for what it is. That being a inculcating, subjugating, totalitarian doctrine. It has no place in a free thinking, free speaking modern democracy.

 

As progressive as we all like to think we are in our openness to other cultures, we will be walking backwards 100+ years if it flourishes! Having that perception is not racist, it's reality, and it is certainly not preferential or self serving thinking. It wasn't racist when Winston Churchill declared it and it's not racist now!

[stihlmadasever]

18 hours ago, matelot said:

How many Middle East universities are any good? Honestly, until 50 years ago the main industries in the Middle East were pearl harvesting and goat herding.... Name one invention discovered in the Middle East....

Read the last line...

Its doesnt say of note

Edited March 2, 2018 by stihlmadasever

[Mark J]

23 minutes ago, forestboy1978 said:

I think the point he was trying to make was not that they didn't invent a single thing. That would be absurd! It was that the number of influences were disproportionately low over the last several centuries.

 

We can dress this up however we like, it's the reality. The question is why! And that question is important IMO, and its answer is important. Its answer is the reason why it is illegal to burn a Quran but perfectly legal to burn a bible in the UK.  It's the exact same reason that a 20 year old kid was imprisoned for 2 years, as I recall, for putting a bacon sandwich on a mosque door handle, also in the UK. That turned out to be a death sentence for him btw. People need to stop dressing up Islam and call it for what it is. That being a inculcating, subjugating, totalitarian doctrine. It has no place in a free thinking, free speaking modern democracy.

 

As progressive as we all like to think we are in our openness to other cultures, we will be walking backwards 100+ years if it flourishes! Having that perception is not racist, it's reality, and it is certainly not preferential or self serving thinking. It wasn't racist when Winston Churchill declared it and it's not racist now!

Churchill was a bit of a racist though.  You were making a fair point till you mentioned that.

[forestboy1978]

3 minutes ago, stihlmadasever said:

Read the last line...

Its doesnt say of note

OK you are correct. It was a cavalier paragraph and you were pedantically accurate where as he was not. I would still infer his meaning to be what I alluded to before about the disproportionally less world changing inventions from the middle east compared to the secular and Christian west.  

[forestboy1978]

1 minute ago, Mark J said:

Churchill was a bit of a racist though.  You were making a fair point till you mentioned that.

Kind of! Churchill was indeed racist and so were 90% of Europeans in the 1940s I would bet and that takes weight away from my point indeed. However, his statement still wasn't racist, his predispositions are neither here nor there.

[matelot]

9 minutes ago, stihlmadasever said:

Read the last line...

Its doesnt say of note

I'd think it would have went without saying that I was talking about "important" inventions....

 

We could all go into our garden sheds and invent something. It doesn't mean our inventions are any good...

 

Heres someone that attached a chainsaw to a shotgun. Yeah, you could describe it as an "invention". However it's not much good....

 

 

[WesD]

6 minutes ago, stihlmadasever said:

Read the last line

Having also done a bit of research the top 100 universities in the Middle East are all ranked within the top 20% of universities globally. Not bad eh!