Ramadan Riots in Brussels

[jordan179]

You can find the whole story at http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/09/ramadan-riots-in-brussels.html, assembled by Baron Bodissey from a number of Belgian sources, but the gist of it is that, in what is becoming an annual tradition, mobs of

Comments

[jordan179]

Wow, even with my degree of contempt for Muslim Egypt, it didn't occur to me that the Egyptians would be too retarded to handle their own garbage in the absence of the zabaleen-owned pigs.

More evidence that the Muslim Arab regimes are not fit to run their own countries. Is any more really needed?

[jordan179]

The only reason anyone was ever interested in governing was to have soldiers and workers. Soldiers and workers are barely needed anymore.

How is a country lacking both soldiers and workers to fight, or to make?

[selfishgene]

Robot rule. - Even the Japanese are nowhere near that. Given 2 more decades of economic growth it is just feasible to see a robot state ruled by a small elite with ordinary people helpless. However 'elite' policies are actively preventing economic growth.
Not that I think democracy is going to survive. It was built by mass mobilization of soldiers for war. The resulting widespread possession of firearms made it necessary for the elite to rule by elections and propaganda rather than mere force. Since most civilian populations no longer possess any significant weaponry and they are not needed for mass armies, it follows that democracy is doomed.

[superversive]

These would be the robots that were supposed to take over all menial labour by 2000, and utterly supersede human beings due to their incredible mental superiority by 2050? I remember the predictions well.

To coin a phrase, nobody ever went broke underestimating the robots.

[superversive]

Except that that isn’t the process. The heavy-industrial machines called robots today bear no resemblance to the jack-of-all-trades AIs called robots in science fiction, and are not being developed along those lines. And the large human population isn’t going to obediently lie down and die, just because its so-called betters have no use for it anymore.

[superversive]

And your elites who allegedly want to replace all the workers with robots, how are they going to dismiss those workers from existence if the workers are fighting to the death?

Won’t happen. The Eurocrats especially do not have either the physical ability or the psychotic ruthlessness to commit genocide against their own peoples.

[superversive]

Nobody is replacing Africans with robots. When you started in with this fantasy about the ruling classes doing away with the workers and replacing them with highly advanced technology, I naturally thought you were talking about a society that actually, you know, had advanced technology.

So what has this guff about robots got to do with Africa?

[jordan179]

The Eurocrats especially do not have either the physical ability or the psychotic ruthlessness to commit genocide against their own peoples.

Indeed, if they did, I'd be posting about the hideously evil treatment afforded the Muslims in the lands the Europeans had conquered and were ruling with an iron fist, rather than the menace posed to European natives by aggressive Muslim immigrants!

[jordan179]

Interestingly, the Japanese (who have a really big demographic problem) are developing the humaniform robots, and the Germans (who have a much smaller one) the non-humanoid ones. This may not be a pure coincidence.

I do think that android robots will eventually be a reality: we're currently developing the important underlying technologies. Basically, the sf writers of the 1940's and 1950's vastly underestimated the complexity and power of human-style muscles, vision and kinesthetics, so it's taken a lot longer to develop flexible-use robots than they originally envisioned.

I absolutely agree with you that the human population isn't going away. The idea that increased productivity would create mass unemployment first surfaced among the Ancient Romans with the development of the earliest complex cranes and has been repeatedly argues. What actually happens with technological progress is that the population grows per capita richer, not that most of them get poorer and a tiny elite monopolizes the new technologies