Woman in swimming pool magically transforms into Winnie the Pooh beach ball

All right. What solution or compromise do you offer to this thing you find wrong in some fashion?

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I’m figuring it’s the religious police who have the subscriptions.

You didn’t follow the link I left, then?

Until yesterday, I didn’t know women weren’t allowed to swim in public. Publicizing the treatment of women can also be useful to us as outsiders and our ability to support the people there who would like to see change.

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They see me rollin!

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See, it’s funny because they hate women!

Ha ha… ha?

(“They” meaning “the people running the show in Saudi Arabia and everyone who thinks they’re doing a bang-up job of it.”)

That isn’t a bad question, but how do you police thoughts? Which thoughts are the “right thoughts”?

Furthermore, is coming from an area where certain thoughts are prominent enough to label them guilty by association? What if the whole reason you want to leave is because you don’t agree with it or want to live where you don’t have to adhere to all the stifling cultural norms (and adopt new ones! You thought covering your face was a hassle, wait until you try going out with out putting on your face, or not shave your pits!)

Does this mean I might be blocked in the future of even visiting the UK because they might assume I want to either shoot up the place, enslave their brown people, or drive a large truck with all the smog reducing parts removed?

I think ultimately, if one supports freedom one has to have the net loose enough, it means some undesirables will slip in. (Though to be clear there is, and should be, a net.) But lets be honest, there are even more undesirables living here that were born here. There is fear form people on the out side wanting to harm or change America, the fact is there are many more born here that want that - a wide spectrum too, not just people waiting for Jesus to come back and end it all.

The fact is, most people come here for the basic hope of having a better life for them and their kids than where they were. To have a better amount of opportunity. My Grandma I am sure fits the stereotype of a “non-English speaker who still practices some other culture instead of assimilating” for some part of her life. Though she was born in Texas and everything worked out ok in the end.

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Well, considering the rules there, and what people used to do to the underwear section of the Sears catalog in the US, I can see why.

Well, you do have to know what it is that you’re looking for, and exactly what corruption you’re fighting…

Maybe that’s why so many publicly anti-gay rethuglican politicians get caught with rent boys, or having a “wide stance” in airport bathrooms, or… They’re not self loathing closet cases! They’re martyrs smoking the pole so that their constituents don’t have to!

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Look at it. Just look at it.

The last two decades of meddling in the region, helping create and sustaining global terrorism can not be excused with “stopping socialism” but greed and ignorance.

Filthy … I can see her ankle.

To which ‘they’ does your ‘their’ refer? Saudi’s in general? The House of Saud? Saudi men? Saudi women? I suspect that all of these groups have different opinions from each other.

Another problem is that membership of a ‘culture’ or nation is rarely remotely similar to voluntary membership of a club. The point is not that it is wrong to alter an ad when you show it in another country but that the kinds of alterations that have to be made in this case are symptoms of oppression. IKEA do the same in the catalogue that they deliver to Saudi Arabia, all the women are removed.

Saying that ‘so and so has a right to their own cultural appropriations’ in this cae sounds perilously close to saying that you should neither intervene nor speak up if you see a man beat his wife or children on the grounds that this is allowed in their culture. Or to give a less physical example a man denying his wife the ability to vote (this is suspected to happen in the UK).

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Yes. Because I asked if we should have a prime directive mentality regarding certain cultural appropriations means I would be ok with someone beating their wife and kids. Awesome train of thought on that. Because that’s exactly where I was going with it. Spot on logic and reasoning there Captain Slippery Slope.

Not necessarily. The examples of theocratic rule being replaced by secular rule throughout the ME are outnumbered by those which go the other way. Even when it happens at the ballot box.

Then there’s this:

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Yes, sucks big time, doesn’t it, that the West (especially the U.S.) keeps obliterating democratically elected governments, leaving vacuums that get filled in by Islamic extremists.

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which democratically elected government did the west destroy to allow the saudi’s to take over? the west didn’t invent Islamic extremists, there have been Islamic extremists as long as there have been muslims.

Not enough covfefe yet this morning?

I wrote nothing about Saudi takeovers.

As for the West inventing Islamic extremists, can you spell Al Qaeda? How about ISIS?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/19/how-the-us-helped-create-al-qaeda-and-isis/

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This thread is about the Saudis in case you missed that.

The west didn’t invent the ideology of Islamic extremists, nor their organisations, it has at times formed alliances of convenience with some of them (though not recently) but cannot be said to have invented them in the slightest, their ideology (and I mean their current ideology, not some precursor) predates the fall of the Ottoman empire (and thus western colonialism).

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In recent years the US has implemented regime change in Iraq and in Libya, and as you observe left the way open for the likes of ISIS.

I don’t think I would characterize the previous regimes as democratically elected though.

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