What folly!

I suppose I just made an internet enemy. My life will never be the same! Eheu!

no enemy im just saying that anything written in the mail is usual complete bollocks

That's a logical fallacy. Do you know what a fallacy is?

Umm, how is what he said a fallacy? The Daily Mail is a terrible newspaper.

Damn the middle class!

The article seems pretty reasonable to me. It mostly seems to discuss a loss of national identity and overpopulation that some racist diatribe. Those seem like rather important issues to me.

"It mostly seems to discuss a loss of national identity and overpopulation RATHER THAN BEING some racist diatribe."

"The Daily Mail is a terrible newspaper."

Say that they said that "if either p or p then p." Would their being a terrible newspaper refute that?

I guess YOU don't know what a fallacy is. <_<

I've just read the article and, to my surprise, I don't agree with it. Briefly:

1. To argue that 'Mohammed' 'Muhammed' and 'Muhammad' should all be counted as one name is to fail to realise that, for example, 'Jack', is the diminutive form of the biblical name 'John', and therefore by the same logic, all the Johns and all the Jacks should be added together too. On this basis the ONS's methodology of counting different spellings seperately seems logical.

2. On a deeper level, it does not worry me in the slightest that THREE PERCENT of our popuation is now muslim. So what? As long as they work and pay taxes like the rest of us, why does their religion matter? And don't say "because all muslims are terrorist fanatics", because that's bullshit. The vast majority of them are religious moderates.

nothing that has been said is a fallacy

muslims asbos and speed camaras is what the daily mail is about o yeah and house prices

Different spellings and diminutives are not the same thing. The point was that ALL the different spellings of Muhammad would total to the third most popular name. The article casts a bit of a conspiratorial light on that I don't necessarily think is appropriate, but that doesn't change the fact that a hell of a lot of British babies are named some variant of Muhammad now. I'd venture to guess not too many of those babies are Celtic.

It shouldn't worry you that 3 percent of the population is Muslim, but it should worry you if that 3 percent isn't integrated to the wider culture. That's what the article is about.

I'm more worried about the white, skin-headed tracksuit-wearing, BNP-voting morons, who are not integrated into Britain's wider culture either, and who read the Sun and the Daily Mail. They make up a lot more than 3%.

(I'm also somewhat worried by the apparently positive reference to Jack the Ripper in that article. It seems to say "he might have been a sexually-repressed serial killer, but at least he was a true brit, unlike these bloody muslims")

You should worry about a parallel culture forming. I doubt Britain will turn into Belgium or Muslim Bantustans will pop up, but a large group of people alienated from the wider culture is not good for a nation. This goes for Muslims or BNP voters or anybody.

the BNP is far-left, isn't it?

Ummm. No. The BNP is a far-right party that believes all non-white, non-ethnically British people should be forced to leave the country. If you want to call someone "fascist", go for them.

The fascists were far-left, too, though. Socialists, in fact. Loved Marx.

Socialism is not about murdering people who do not fit your idea of the 'master race'. They were "socialist" in name, but not in many other forms. They did believe in state control of industry, but only to power their evil war machine.

Are you ever going to respond to the feeble questions posed by my pathetic intellect on the gun thread, by the way?

Fascists were never free-market, and Mussolini did try to put a progressivist case on fascism during the Social Republic, but there weren't "far-left." There's this thing called Third Position which better captures fascism that just left-right constraints do.

It wouldn't be a stretch to use the very broadest definition of socialism to apply to fascist ideals, though. You can't have fascism without big government, after all.

Man, it's like Jamie doesn't know who Stalin is. Or Mao.

The left-right spectrum is more of a circle than a straight line, the more extreme you get in either direction, the more authoritarian until extreme-left and extreme-right almost meet.

Don't meta-thread.

Fascists are not cartoonishly evil people any more than communists are. I'm sure there were completely reasonable fascists in the 30s and 40s just like there were reasonable communists. Still wrong in their beliefs, but to say that the whole economic philosophy of fascism as a movement is not a fair argument to make. Spain was fascist into the 70s and stayed neutral during WWII.

Nothing is ever so simple as one side is wholly and sincerely evil.

but to say that the whole economic philosophy of fascism as a movement was just to produce war materiel is not a fair argument to make.

I'm well aware of Mao and Stalin. Stalin was a cunning bugger but to some extent the product of the circumstances of the still-born Russian revolution, which never had the chance to create the kind of communist state envisaged, because (a) Russia was not industrially ready for communism, and (b) the hoped-for wave of successful revolutions across europe largely failed to occur. Soviet communism was a nice idea, but doomed from very early on.

Mao was a complete nutjob.

have you tempered your views slightly invictus?dont mean to hijack its just a question

@ Invictus: "Fascists are not cartoonishly evil people any more than communists are."

In my use of "evil" I was making specific reference to the Nazis, sorry I should have made that clear. I assumed Acosmist's reference to socialists was taken from the Nazi's being "national socialists"

@jamie why are you bothering responding to Acosmist

I'm not sure trim, I guess that, unlike him, I like to back up the points I have made, and defend my viewpoint when I am attacked, rather than just assuming everyone can see that my immense intellectual stature proves my superiority.