Is Economic Superiority Due to Cultural Superiority?

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That's not what you were saying when Hamish's friends attacked Sam though was it?

You've got a double standard. You're happy to bring up the past as justification, but when it backfires ... the past is now irrelevant.

Fine. So let's just look at the present. Big strong Sam is zealously beating the crap out of tiny weak Hamish, kicking his teeth in everytime he tries to throw a feeble punch in defence, and Sam's big jock friends are standing around laughing at Hamish, calling him names, and handing Sam tire irons and baseball bats.

I don't mean to be rude but if one reads the actual content you are making a mountain out of a mole hill and it fits quite nicely with what Ferguson was saying.

The STATE of Israel, not a few random blokes was spraying STATE OWNED land, on which the Bedouin had settled illegally, built illegal settlements and started growing crops.

That is a completely unrelated event to the settlers vs palestinians debate and it's once again worth pointing out that palestinians are not exactly angels when it comes to destroying other people's property.

Fact is the STATE of Israel demolishes illegal settlements, regardless of whether they are Jewish, Bedouin, Arab, Palestinian or Martian.

Why don't you come to Britain and try setting yourself up in an illegal village and growing crops illegally on state owned land, what do you think will happen? The state will demolish it all, destroy your crop, return the land back to the way it was before you turned up and bill you enormous amounts of money. If you can't pay you will be sent to prison.

Which kind of illustrates nicely what Niall Ferguson was saying, the rule of law and respect for private property are important. If you fail to adopt these 'killer apps' you end up living in s**t.

The Bedouin have been living there thousands of years. They never formed a state, never saw a need for property title because they had been nomads for almost their entire history. I don't know how you define the legitimacy of property ownership, but I would say if your family has been living on a piece of land and considered it theirs since before the Romans, the bureaucrats and their little bits of paper have not got a better claim at all. Who's illegitimate? One wonders.



Hardly the same situation. How about the British go to some land where the people have been living about 3000 years without property deeds and start destroying people's crops and waving little bits of paper they wrote themselves to say the land is now theirs so they can do what they want with it? That would be a much closer analogy.

Oh wait. It's not really an analogy. The British DID do that! And nobody in their right mind today thinks there was anything legitimate about it, at least, not by present day standards.

So you are arguing from a position that claims of ancient ancestry trump state enforced legal rights?

In that case do you support the Serbians taking back their own land from the Albanians?
Do you support people with American Indian ancestry occupying the legally owned house of an African American on the same basis?
My paternal ancestry in Britain goes back a thousand years, does that therefore give me the right to build a house in a British Muslim's back garden on the basis that my ancestors had common law rights on the land his house now occupies?

I'm pretty sure you are going to say no to all 3 counts, so why is the argument so different when the country is Israel?

I think in this case, the analogy with the American Indians is more like: "Do you think it was wrong in the first place to push them accross the country and put them in small packed areas to occupy there lands, for which they obviously had no property title?"

Yes. Yes, it was wrong.

Thats rediculous no culture is superior over the other! Econimic superiority is usually the result in smart investment and working your ass off!!

There's a delicate difference between using the situation as it was in the nineteenth century in order to state that a modern country should be destroyed, and saying something that happened in the 1970s and still forms much of the Middle East's foreign policies and popular opinion in the Arab world is somehow irrelevant. It's a matter of knowing what will happen because it happened before. It's an absurd thing, furthermore, for Palestinians to base their legal right on the distant past. Israel now controls that land, and has done so for over sixty years. If those rights exist long after the deaths of the last unofficial holders, I'll be contacting the governments of most European countries to demand my land back, which is basically everything from Denmark to Italy and from France to at least western Poland. I'd like feudal rights with that.



As long as Hamish keeps aiming a firearm at Sam and keeps yelling openly that he'll fire the moment Sam stops, which makes that a rather absurd analogy, there's nothing to do about it.

And what's that a result of? Work ethic is very much part of culture, and use of the system is also part of culture. Somehow, a Chinese invention was used, at first, solely by Europeans to subdue most of the world. Imagine what would have happened if the Chinese didn't feel satisfied with what they had, or if the Japanese hadn't been so isolationist their first firearms were sold to them by Europeans. There's something in culture that largely changes the situation in one group's advantage. The current system is based mainly on the axis of North America, Asia and Europe. It works for them because it's their system - their culture works well.

I think there are cultures that are superior in achieving some goals. If you set the goal of economic prosperity, African culture generally means failure and European, North American or East Asian culture generally means success. If you set the goal of religious homogenity, islamic countries take the cake precisely because their culture doesn't allow for many other religions, while countries near the Islam-Christianity divide in Africa and countries in the Balkans and Russia lose out. If you set the goal of large military investments as a percentage of your total income, North Korea is ideal, and South Korea isn't far behind.

Republicans specialise in victim-blaming. They're really not far off from rooting for the Nazis at Auschwitz.

Godwin's Law. I'll set a condition for your return: you need to display some form of common sense and not ever mention that again. I hope you're trolling. For the sake of your own sanity.

Godwin is a damn Nazi.
Republicans are still a few mile from nazi-hood but a lot of them are weak flangist-style fascists in my opinion. WND breitbart -rest his cokey soul- and that side of things.

The bombing of the King David Hotel and Irgun's terror campaigns was most certainly not in the 19th century. It was in 1946, only two decades before 1967. The lines you're drawing are arbitrary and biased and evidence a double standard, clearly. You are not applying principles universally and your position is not principled, it's tribal, you're just scoring points for the "team" that you like.

Aren't we all? Thing is, as much as Israel's initial claims were nonsensical and purely historic, Palestine's current claims are nonsensical and purely historic. Most Palestinians currently residing in the Palestine territories have never lived in what is now Israel. It's decades ago that a lot of Palestinians last set foot there. Most of them were born in Palestinian territories, raised in Palestinian territories, and currently live in Palestinian territories or abroad. What isn't purely historic, though, but still a problem, is the Arab hatred towards Israel. They don't want a peaceful solution - they want Israel annihilated.

That presupposes one has property rights and they are secure. It also presupposes that contracts are binding.

Look at Niall Furgeson's 6 killer apps again

ruveyn

No.

The American Indian signed treaties (although some of these were violated - but that is why we are all doing land claims settlements now, to compensate natives for the losses, because they are recognized as having been illegal by modern, civilized states that abide by the rule of law)

The Serbians were the primary force behind the formation of Yugoslavia, and in Yugoslavia, ethnic enclaves were erased and people could buy property in any part of the country.

In Britain, the "British Muslim" is presumably a naturalized citizen with all the rights of any other British person to buy property wherever he likes. Even if he's not, Britain allows its citizens to sell land to foreigners, and one way or another, the Muslim bought it from a willing owner.

Notice what is common to all three of these cases? The land was purchased or otherwise ceded by the owners.

The occupied territories, where the Bedoiun live, are not even part of Israel - Israel refuses to annex them, because then they would have to extend constitutional rights to the citizens. What right do they have to destroy farmland there? The Bedouins never sold it, never ceded it (not even under the terms of a peace treaty), and their crops aren't a security threat. Such destruction is expressly illegal under the article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory:

Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.

As with most modern states, under Israeli law, international treaties are binding law of the state. So in terms of your state-enforced legal rights, Israel is violating its own law, not the Bedouin. And why are they doing so? Ethnic cleansing, plain and simple.