[geeks] Socialized medicine [was Re: nVidia 8800GT for Apple Mac Pro]

[Mike Meredith]

On Mon, 26 May 2008 23:08:48 -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Now if you want to talk about other religious reasons, yes, a lot
> did come here to avoid the English theocracy and European religions  
> issues, but those were not the pilgrims, that was a benefit for
> nearly everyone.

English theocracy ? If you don't want to appear to be on the lunatic
fringe of the anglophobes (the ones over there: chained up, twitching,
frothing at the mouth and howling at the moon), you might want to avoid
that phrase.

Whilst arguably true in theory[0], it does look a little ridiculous
when you look at history. Indeed the monarch was head of both church and
state, but both were kept very separate and the monarch was unlikely
to have much to do with the day to day running of the church. If
anything, the monarchy as head of the church moderated the excesses of
the more extreme protestents. One of them said she had no wish to 'make
windows into men's souls ... there is only one Jesus Christ and all the
rest is a dispute over trifles'. Does that _really_ sound like a
theocrat to you ?

If you were prepared to be a little subtle about it, most of the time
you could get away with almost any variation of christianity in
Britain. The exception (to a certain extent) was catholicism; and that
was chiefly a political issue rather than a religious one. Most of
Europe had considerably less religious freedom.

> I think it might tear Europe and the UK apart.  At the least, it's  
> already causing a lot of problems and it will only get worse.  I
> think you have to be a fool to not see at least some of them doing
> it deliberately.

I don't doubt that there are problems ahead. I merely doubt the scale
of the problem. Assuming that there were a 10% growth in the number of
muslims in the UK since the 2001 census (wildly over optimistic even
assuming every last illegal immigrant were islamic) we would have
2.66 million muslims in the UK (about 4.4%) today. 

Now if every single one of those muslims were to become as annoyed
with the general English population as Palestinians are with Israel,
we'd have a pretty big problem. But in comparison to Israel (pop 7.2m,
3.7m Palestinians; 34%[1] rather than 4.4%) we'd have it pretty easy.

It's vastly more likely that only a relatively small minority of those
muslims is going to be an extremist. Take that muslim demonstration
against the Danish embassy last year ... 3,000 was it ? That's 0.07%. 

[0]:
	Actually English monarchs would have been extremely reluctant
	to share their rule with "god" which under a theocracy is the
	supreme civil ruler. In fact the English system is specifically
	excluded from the definition of "theocracy".
[1]:
	I'm calculating that percentage based on the total of the
        Israeli population added to the Palestinian population.

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
 "Microsoft couldn't get a clue if it were soaked in clue pheromone in
  clue bondage gear on the clue mating grounds during clue mating season
  surrounded by horny clues." -- corrupted from a SDM sig