Oops, I was trying to link to http://www.ruqaiyyah.karoo.net/articles/forcedmarr.htm -- does XHTML markup not work here any more?

Forced marriage in British Asian households (Hindus and Sikhs have been doing it too, not just Muslims) is itself a kind of immigration racket, designed to secure British citizenship for the spouse back in the mother country.

"A" clearly doesn't understand the Reformation -- Martin Luther was of course a vicious Jew-hater, and Calvinist Geneva was almost as repressive as Taliban Afghanistan. What the Muslim world hasn't had is Enlightenment and secularization -- something which perhaps only happened in the West because Western rulers (sickened by the carnage of the 30 Years' War, which dwarfed that of any Sunni/Shi'a conflict) secularized their regimes to prevent a repeat. "Modernity: the nuclear winter of the Reformation." -- Abdal-Hakim Murad (aka Timothy Winter)

Wasn't there a very simple and cynical motivation behind Thatcher's Right to Buy programme? "Once they have mortgages, they'll never strike again!

I'd argue that one of the main drawbacks of religion is that it can freeze in place anachronistic values. Some examples: * The harsh hudud punishments in Islamic law make sense in a time when it was very difficult to actually catch criminals in the first place. * The Judeo-Islamic pork prohibition made sense in the ancient Middle East because pigs competed with humans for grain crops * The natalist bent of Catholicism made sense in a time of high infant mortality, a heavy demand for manual labourers, and an impoverished zero-sum economy which incentivized aggressive war.

Why do so many people view regulatory capture as an insoluble problem? If we can track down and prosecute bent cops, why not captured regulators?

Keith, since you are making the comparison between today's Eurozone and interwar Europe, what do you consider to be the equivalent of World War I itself (ie the massive expense that destabilized the European economy in the first place)? Would the cost of rebuilding Eastern Europe after 40 years of Soviet misrule count?

Switzerland's direct democracy isn't always reasonable (minaret ban anyone)?

Those hotels are probably staffed with Eastern Europeans who are happy to live fifteen to a room for a few years in order to save up for a house (back in their own country, where it is much cheaper than in London). In other words, it is Home-Owner-Ism has destroyed the British work ethic. Why work at all when you'll never be able to earn enough to buy a house?

"Yet Sweden is an EU country and hamstrung by all the EU regulations just as much as the UK." Unless Britain is different from Continental countries in such a way that magnifies the harmful effects of Brussels's edicts. (One could compare with the French "Loi de la laïcité" which though it claims to be religiously neutral, in practice hits Muslims harder than Christians, because Islam is orthopraxic while Christianity is orthodoxic.)

Isn't the economy being choked by a combination of Home-Owner-Ism and expensive energy? Land Value Tax would do something about the first issue, while smashing the anti-nuclear movement (which would include jailing politicians who oppose nuclear due to being in the pocket of fossil fuel profiteers) would do something about the second.

Ralph, doesn't falling domestic productivity just mean though that you get outcompeted by more productive foreigners?

Isn't modern Greece (since its independence from the Ottoman Turks) virtually a third world country that has been unusually generously aided by the West because it was viewed as the "cradle of Western civilization"?

I think the curvy road layouts of many suburban areas were intended to improve sight lines for drivers in the interests of safety.