Dude. He totally just judo-flipped your calling him out as a troll.
I bow down before Kurdel. He truly is a Master.
Minarets, are in fact, cleverly-disguised missile silos.
I would rather hear a call to prayer than church bells. Those bells are loud as shit. Also minarets are prettier than steeples.
Drop your bombs between the minarets
Down casbah way
I just banned vacations in switzerland
mutually assured bannage
I’m not even allowed to change the material I use for my window frames, and here are people moaning that they can’t build minarets?
Boo fucking hoo.
I work for the Swiss now (one of their big companies took over mine this year). I’ve been laying out Illuminati cards trying to nail down the exact number of links between myself and the Gnomes of Zurich, which of course determines the Servants of Cthulhu’s chances of destroying me.
Standing at the Church of the Sepulcher in Jerusalem, you can hear dueling church bells AND muezzins at certain hours. The churches around there compete to drown each other and the Muslims out–the Lutherans I think are the current leaders in noisy ringing. And yeah, while the call to prayer in the evenings is often rather atmospheric and even beautiful, bells are all too often loud and harshly jarring. Not always–some carillons are really nice, for instance–but usually the incessant tolling at noon for instance is just awful.
Democratic process is a bitch, but you have to go with this majority vote in a sovereign state. The Swiss are entitled to ban minarets, and even cows, if they wish to do so.
Of course they’re entitled to it. But we’re also entitled to calling the majority racists morons and buy our cuckoo clocks and art deco chocloates somewhere else.
Doing so is a case of religious discrimination, the way I see it, so no, they shouldn’t be entitled to do that. If they want to ban tall buildings that regularly make sounds, they are free to do so.
That is why the Bill of Rights is awesome.
The right against religious discrimination is again, something that a sufficient majority can decide to remove.
I don’t agree with banning minarets but then again I’m not Swiss so maybe their feelings about this are something I can’t understand so I won’t rush to judge.
They can, but it won’t change the fact that doing so is racist and intolerant.
Are Swiss politics kinda like Bayern/Bavaria in Germany?
Anyway, this is pretty sad. It’s like all of Switzerland voted in some law that you’d expect would have come from small hick town in the rural US and then would get national/international scorn.
Religious/racial intolerance in Europe is really interesting to me because it’s one of the few real lows in a set of cultures I otherwise really respect. I definitely experienced a lot of it even when I lived in Germany and the UK. Intolerance never seemed to be quite the same as in the US though. Rather, it seemed less malicious but more pervasive. I.e. it never seemed like people really hated each other (well outside of a few obvious exceptions like Northern Ireland) but it did seem like there were cultural divides all over the place and that Europeans had a lot more problems overcoming them (and at times the effects could be just as bad as actual hateful intolerance). In many ways it made me have a lot more respect for how tolerant the US actually is when you get down to it.
Does that sound fair or am I talking out of my ass?
I think the USA’s race politics is benefitting from the GOP’s very broad right wing church. In most of Europe the Sarah Palin type fringe has broken off from the rightwing mainstream into its own selection of stupid racist parties. It seems that there is a sort of feedback loop of racism where the more racist the extreme right wing goes the better they do in elections so they then get more confident and get more racist still and the rest of the parties struggle to catch up by getting a little more racist until the middle has moved far to the right on immigration and race.
If the GOP ever does buckle under internal pressure I imagine you would find a similar pattern in the states with the new ‘Sarah Palin-ites for Freedom Party’ making some strong local showings and eventually enacting some extreme racist laws to disntinguish themselves from the more moderate remains of the GOP.
As to the good people of the USA in general I think there is always a case that perhaps a wider racial diversity than you traditionally see in some areas of Europe helps diminish racial hatred over time.
It’s not racist, though, is it? Whether or not opposing the building of minarets is based on concern about the spread/influence of Islam in Switzerland is of no consequence to the issue, given that Islam is a religion incorporating a wide variety of races.
So, since Saudi Arabia bans churches (or any expression of religion at all which isn’t Islam) can we not buy their oil now?
Please?
On the one hand, whenever I see these stories of intolerance coming out of Europe, I feel like the CEO of Coca-Cola reading those stories about syringes being found in cans of Pepsi. “Good,” I say to myself, “Maybe now those sons of bitches will know that there’s a place to go for quality carbonated sugarwater, and a place to go for saccharine catpiss that will give AIDS to your face.”
On the other hand, I guess, if social freedom is not a competition, and the winner doesn’t get to lord it over all the lesser countries, well then, I would say that Switzerland should stop what they are doing.