Are these sad happenings that make me think that we lack some "ancient Romans" approach.

man....if only France stopped bombing and attacking the Muslims in Libya and Iraq then Muslims would feel no need to take revenge on France like this.

But I guess France likes those Libyan and Iraqi oil resources too much to let it go.

Some of the things you ask have their answer in the same post you replied to so I recommend that you read through it again, here I'll try to keep it short and simple.

1. People are crossing the mediterranean because their living conditions are bad enough that they are willing to risk their lives getting to Europe. I'd assume it's not safe where they are if they are willing to gamble with death, and those who choose to make this journey know what they are getting into.

2. Fighting on the side of Assad would probably not have made Europe safer from terrorist attacks. Instead, the population of Syria might have turned to extremist groups for support of their cause. Europe would become their enemy and oppressor, while at the same time being the hypocrite preaching the wonders of freedom and democracy.

3. Refugees get money for the journey by selling what few personal belongings they have left and by putting themselves in debt with the smugglers.

4. We know that refugees contribute to economical growth and employment rates out of experience, these people get less in welfare than they return in taxes and social contributions, such as competition in the labour market and spending in general. Lebanon has registered over a 1.000.000 refugees, and their economy has been growing and is expected to keep doing so. I wrote more on birthrates and why we need refugees from an economical viewpoint on page 14.

5. I don't see anything in that video that contradicts my statement, a few young men are behind this, they are condemned by their religious leaders and police are looking into it. As the expert said, people like these do not pose a threat to the UK.

6. No, you are not removing the blame from them by defining them as radicals, radical does not mean "to relieve from responsibility". Quoting myself: "Extreme ideas about society are central when talking about radicalization, without these a person can’t be defined as radical." If the people and organizations you mentioned wanted the societies they lived in to change in it's roots, then yes, they were radical and had gone through a radicalization process, if they didn't want society to change in major ways, then no, they weren't radical and had not gone through a radicalization process. Who is a radical depends on what society they live in and how they want to change it, a radical in one society do not have to be a radical in another. Those who proposed equal voting rights for all males were radicals during the 19th century in Europe, but can't be considered radicals today because equal voting rights are now a central part of european democracies. A person can fall for radical ideas during any part of his life.

Agency detection (=presuming purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent in situations that may or may not involve one) and radicalism are not connected, as explained above, radical ideas take on many forms and shapes but are united in the desire to change society in it's roots, not in the belief of sentient or intelligent agents.

7. Marx did fully believe in his ideas, any historian can confirm this.

8. If you tenfold the the total number of syrian refugees they'll be less than 1% of the european population, but many of these do not even aim for Europe. If you tenfold the total number of asylym applicants in europe since April 2011 they'll be less than 0,01% of the european population. Europe have some of the richest countries and most well developed economies in the world, we can afford to take these people in, especially if we share the burden.

And it's very basic math actually. Divide something by two and you'll have two smaller sums instead of a big one. You don't have to be very radical to figure that out.

9. To stop thinking would most likely not fix the problem, and neither would thinking, since many people fail the first step: understanding.

This debate is taking up too much of my spare time though so this will be the last post for me in this thread, enjoy yourselves.

A small detail that some people need to be reminded of...

Those "justified for their actions" terrorists, were invading their own countries' museums and destroyed everything that was not of Muslim culture. Look it up...they even uploaded videos to celebrate.

So spare me the bullshit that it's just retaliation for the attacks on Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. They have sworn a holy war to destroy everything that's not Muslim.

Oh, but of course let me state that "Not all Muslims are like that". Of course i need to be politically correct to avoid any potential posts :)

EDIT: how did this end up here?? Wrong thread.

I would strongly oppose to saying that Afghanistan showed us clearly that we are not capable of erradicating a terrorist group. Or at least maybe this is not the goal anyway. You might be setting the bars just too high. We don't know how much terrorism there would have been, would we not seized/freed Afghanistan of the Taliban. All hell may have broke loose. The terrorists surely got weakened a lot. It was better than doing nothing and seeing the world go to pieces (especially for the Afghans themselves and especially, especially for the Afghan women - but according to our logic this would only be a nice side effect). If you ask me we went out much to early and left the Afghans without good protection. It should have been clear that this is a project for the next 100 years, not for the next 5 years only.

Syria talks? Do you think ISIS will agree to any outcome of any talks? In the end someone will have to destroy/weaken them by force and the only question is who is doing the job? Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Europe, the US, someone else, nobody...

So if I learned something this weekend then that ignoring ISIS is dangerous and if anything the outcome of the talks must include a plan for getting rid of ISIS or it is not worth the paper it is written on. Assad "only" murdered his own people which by itself is worse enough. ISIS is murdering others as well. They both have to go but maybe ISIS first. But better both as soon as possible.

Several things are misleading with this post, I think.

Muslims? Clearly Muslims everywhere in the world are hurrying these days to declare that they (ISIS) are not Muslims, even cannot be Muslims the way they act. Of course they would themselves object (and kill anyone saying otherwise). So their Muslimic status is somewhat doubtful and not fully agreed upon. But at least one thing is for sure: Almost all Muslims in the world do not feel any need to take revenge on France like this. So you are wrong here.

Muslims are fleeing to Europe these days, not because France bombed ISIS but because ISIS made war on them and drove them to exile. So again: Muslims feel the need to take refugee in France, not to attack it.

Finally, I just doubt they would stop. They want to kill everyone who is not following their strange ideology. And they use terrorism as medium. It's not like they are sending diplomatic messages...
I fully understand why they flee and come here. I had the hope for some time that they simply might stay and fight for their land instead. They could have fought ISIS but obviously they are not fighters and if we would have supported them and send them weapons everyone would have accused us, while others supporting ISIS secretly was fully okay.

What do you learn from it? Violence trumps everything? You don't stay free by only defending yourself? The arabian world is a source of terror these days? The 21st century will be a bloody one? I don't know.

My feeling is a bit that this is here is quite an average over the whole population. Gamers are probably neither especially smart nor especially dumb. So this is as good as it gets in a democracy where everyone can have a say in what is done. And that's what I like about it. Dedicated discussions of hand picked competent friends are nice, but if you want to know how the common man is thinking, nothing beats reading the public available comments sections of newspapers or this here. Trolling, cynicism and quite often disrespect and hate are all inclusive and partly encouraged by the anonymity but that is where everyone has to decide if it is worth it.

That's an easy and wrong way to put it. Why I agree, you have to take into account that all those resources are not owned by one entity that wants to help everyone. Remember that leaders that were put there in place due to election were so based upon how they managed to get the people to say "we will use X resources for Y reasons.." and that's excluding the private resources that you simply can't add up simply because it's connected to the economy unless you believe "the people" have the right to confiscate private property to help others. I don't believe that is right for a number of reasons. For one this would cause chaos as private property is a cornerstone of even primitive civilizations.

Not everyone agrees with that it's their problems to take care of others, I think this is a very important point because many seem to assume that people are more generous than they actually are. Just look at how much is actually given to charities versus of how much is possible to give and you see the reality of it. Granted, once crisis hits some are probably kicked out of their apathy and then acts accordingly.

It's like when people like to generalize of how easy we could solve the worlds problem with proper resource management. Yes, in theory it's likely true but good luck taking that into realizations considering human history, cultures, behaviour, current resource management etc..

No need for belief here. It's actually true. One possible keyword is taxation.

Here the government can confiscate private property if it is in the public interest although they have to kind of compensate you financially and there are some rules for it.

So if there is an unused building they could in principle seize it and use it for housing refugees. Or if there is some unused land, they could use it and build houses for refugees.

They aren't doing it yet, but they could and one would probably see this as essential building block of civilization (otherwise probably they could never build another highway, ...) that the individual has some rights but in the end the community has certain rights too. Of course this means that everyone who yields something must be compensated accordingly.

So in the end if a government pays for too much for whatever (weapons, refugees, you name it) they either have to increase taxes or print more money.

Both (higher taxes or higher inflation) devalue private property across the board. And still, there is no chaos.

In summary: our advanced civilizations knows many ways to let private property participate for the good of all, one way or another, without creating any chaos at all.

So I don't think this is a crucial point. The crucial point is the acceptance and there you are probably totally right but Sockerkaka probably also has a point setting the costs into perspective.

My guess is that in the long run the refugees can work and pay for their own emigration. So financially this can be quite neutral. If someone doesn't believe it I would put forward the notion of a special tax only on immigrants whose height is calculated so that within a certain time period (say 20 years) all costs of the emigration are totally neutralized.

My heart goes out to France...

Stay strong...

Taxation already exist, I meant something new. Sure, the countries that want or are planning to take in more refugees could always increase their taxation to help cover the cost but that will likely have other (probably negative) effects.

Fingerprints matched between the dead body and the ones registered when he arrived in Greece (saved by the coast guards BTW) and registered as refugee in Serbia. French-only article(source is the official French TV channel):

http://www.francetvinfo.fr/faits-divers/terrorisme/attaques-du-13-novembre-a-paris/enquete-sur-les-attentats-de-paris/info-france-2-l-un-des-kamikazes-a-bien-emprunte-la-route-des-refugies-pour-arriver-en-france_1178061.html

Here come the Hipster apologists for the terrorists....

Taxation is always kind of redistribution. You take something away from one guy and give it to another or back to the same guy. The net effect is a redistribution.

In this way refugees are effectively a big upfront payment. But in the long run I would calculate with kind of vanishing financial effects, at least from the second generation onwards, because they would pay taxes too.

All I want to say is that we are talking mostly about one time effects, which compared to what you can earn over a life time is not very much. My impression is that dealing with the refugee crisis so far has been a political problem, not an economic one because many nationalists in Europe see it as a them against us thing much less because they lose jobs or cannot afford to buy things .... If the refugee number however would increase by one or two orders of magnitude however I could imagine it indeed becomes an economic problem.

This probably would mean we should help improve the situation in Africa and the Arabian World even if they are for a good part responsible for the mess they are in themselves - just out of our own interest. So far we are doing much, much less than we could there. It's a bit shortsighted but that is the human way.