Penn Jillette getting it right.

Wonderful video by Penn Jillette. He hits the nail on the head, IMO. What do you think?

He's not really saying anything he hasn't said for the last few decades.

I disagree that taking a huge amount of refugees helps anything in the long term. It may even be worse for the long term. The amount of people leaving makes little to no impact on the total people staying, and often the people leaving are the ones with the most money and smarts where their skills would be better off helping the community from which they came from.

Take one refugee, you take away another person from the crappy mid-east countries that wants a better life, those crappy mid-east countries need people who want to make it better.. and you toss him into a culture with little to no language skills or skills in general relevant to that society, incentivizing sheltering oneself from the mainstream culture where they become alienated as clash with the it. And possibly then try to influence that culture to try to become like the crappy one they came from. In the end, life might turn out for the better for that one refugee, but at the expense of millions of others. When the good ones leave, the poor and controlled are left behind in an unending cycle of violence and extremism.
It is not a solution, refugees are not a solution, it only creates more problems. Address the problems, stop making the countries hell, stop starting wars and selling guns to them. Taking refuges is like a dirty band-aid on a wound that needs stitches, Yea your psychology might think you are doing the right thing, but it's actually making it worse and ignoring the real problem.

I like Penn a lot, I just disagree on this part.

Your Star said:

Wonderful video by Penn Jillette. He hits the nail on the head, IMO. What do you think?

Click to expand...

He's assuming he'll make a lot of money if he converted to Christianity!

It would be different if he's someone very high-profile....but he's not! Never even heard of him until now.
There are so many conversions happening everyday, that he'll be just one among so many had he truly converted. There are people more famous than him who'd converted....and not made any money of their conversion. Just check out the thread in Religion about the transformed lives!

http://www.debatepolitics.com/religious-discussions/227379-life-transforming-bible.html


Some of them may've written books, but were they all best sellers? There's so many converting.....


He should milk this "transformation" instead:

Ta-da! Magician Penn Jillette loses 105lbs in just four months thanks to 'extreme low-calorie' diet

Read more: Magician Penn Jillette loses 105lbs in 4 months thanks to 'extreme low-calorie' diet | Daily Mail Online



He's got an overblown ego, I think.

I would like to see his magic show I think it would be cool and I liked some of this show BS.
when it comes to religion he is just another almost just another atheist militant.

He still has some sense about him but I think he is losing that.

Your Star said:

Wonderful video by Penn Jillette. He hits the nail on the head, IMO. What do you think?

Click to expand...

My thoughts? Complex.

He's correctly identified the issue, I think.

But here's my question.

On what occasion in all of history has putting a band-aid over a bullet hole ever resulted in long-term positive change?

All of the Abrahamic religions have been through their rounds of being murderous lunatics. No, this is certainly not a racial issue, or an issue of individual Muslims, or even any unique quality of Islam -- Christianity and Judaism did it too. Islam is the youngest of the three, so of course it's the most recent to go through this.

But with Christianity in our culture, what made it stop? It certainly wasn't one of the other cultures we tried to dominate and oppress, was it. It was when OUR culture puts its boot on their necks, and said "ENOUGH. We are tired of this idea killing our families and our neighbors. We are tired of letting you loot our coffers to go pillage another nation. We are tired of it. Enough. Stop or we will stop you."

And no, it didn't stop it completely. But it it lowered the intensity enough that we can now live relatively peacefully, with the religious ideas dominant on our culture aware of the fact that they are either going to be civilized, or we are going to stop them. We are now in a place where we can afford to attack dogmatism directly, because we have taken away its power to ruin our society.

Here is the reality.

For the Islamic world, this won't stop until they stop it. Just like it didn't stop in the West until the Christian world stopped it.

We have no ability to stop the Islamic world. And the harder we try to stop them, the more rigid their ideas will become. To them, we're coming to kill their culture.

They won't stop until they make an independent decision to stop it within their own culture.

And the same thing is true with these isolated communities, little Islamic worlds, within our countries. The harder we push, the more insulated they will become.

We cannot decide for them. We cannot attack their dogma, because it still has strength because they isolate themselves within it.

Look at what has happened to Iraq in the last 75 years. Women used to work good jobs, wearing the same clothes an American woman might wear. They were economically strong, and relatively peaceful.

But the more we push and shoved them, the more we made this a culture war, the more they doubled down and isolated. And now we have an Iraq full of militant jihad and a level of aggressive sexism not seen in the West for hundreds of years, if ever.

Is us letting them take their culture here and continue to double down as we continue to pressure them going to help them change?

I have my doubts.

Like Penn, I don't know the answer. But I am pretty sure his answer is wrong.

That doesn't mean I don't think we should take any refugees. And I certainly don't disagree we need to take people as we meet them and have compassion for human suffering. But I do think that trying to assimilate them in the way he suggests will only make things worse.

They need to decide as a culture that they have had enough.

And going by history, the most likely way that is going to happen is if we stop putting our fingers where they don't belong, and just let them do it. We have to stop giving them an enemy to be united against. We have to stop pitting our culture against theirs.

Left to their own devises, they will eventually decide they've had enough. They decided that in the 20th century, and it's only our meddling that made them go back on it in the fragile early days of their decision.

How do we deal with refugees? I don't know. Those pretending there aren't huge risks are being wilfully blind. This is Christianity during the Crusades, but with automatic weapons. Of course it's dangerous.

But does that mean innocent people should die?

Of course it doesn't. But I think much of the West is being careless, because they want to see the innocent people, but don't want to see the 21st century equivalent of Christianity during the Crusades. As a culture, we've forgotten what that was like. We made our decision a long time ago, as far as the human lifespan is concerned.

I don't have an answer either. But I'm pretty sure continuing to meddle isn't it.

I wish we had just left the Arab Spring alone. They're trying to make that decision again. They want to make that decision again. And the more we shove them, the more they forget about their desire to change their own culture, and focus on protecting themselves from us instead.

Who the **** knows, man...

Your Star said:

Wonderful video by Penn Jillette. He hits the nail on the head, IMO. What do you think?

Click to expand...

The biggest problem with what he's saying or rather what we're doing, is not helping the right refugees.
Alawites are going to be in serious danger if Assad falls, Yazidis are already being stomped out (even among the Kurds things aren't exactly right), Assyrians are for all intents being completely ignored by Western nations (they are close to extinction as a culture in the ME).

So yea, we should help those before the general Muslim population of these countries.
They are the ones who need it most.