Oh please. According to your own link, "The study "Antisemitic images and attitudes in Sweden", conducted by Henrik Bachner and Jonas Ring, revealed that 1.4 per cent of the population disagrees with the assertion that "Most Jews are probably decent folks"." I never said you'd get 100% agreement on anything, but 1.4% of a population being anti-Jewish is statistically insignificant, and certainly not an indicator of a major problem or disagreement in the society.

Actually, my solution so far is just to arm the Kurds and support them, to at least create one decent nation there which isn't a theocracy or a dictatorship. Then take a wait-and-see approach with the rest.

Exactly, other countries don't like the idea of giving different ethnic groups their own states because this interferes with their power.

It's not just them, though: liberals here in the west hate the idea of different ethnic groups having their own countries, because they think we should all be mashed together and be forced to get along somehow. Just look at some of the other comments to my posts here in this thread.

The idea of a region where people largely agree about social / moral / economic systems has never been realized and never will be no matter what scale you look at.

I'm sorry, that's hogwash. Small countries like Iceland or Andorra do not have any huge rifts in thinking between different groups of people. There's lots of small European countries where people get along just fine because the population is small and homogenous. Infighting becomes more and more of a problem as countries grow larger and more diverse.

Every region will have misogynists, creationists, etc.

The Scandinavian countries don't seem to have too many problems with misogyny, and creationism is something that's almost completely confined to the USA and some third-world countries. There's no significant number of creationists in western Europe, except perhaps among some immigrants (and even that's doubtful).

If one isn't happy because others don't conform to their ideal systems of thought, I suggest that they will never be happy.

It's not about others conforming to your thoughts, it's about whether those people have the ability to force their systems of thought on you through the law. Here in the US, even if you think Creationism is crap, if you live in certain areas, you might find Creationism forced on you because the voting public in those areas demands it to be taught in school to your children. In countries where no one believes in Creationism, this isn't a problem, so no one has to waste time with it just like they don't have to waste time debating whether the world is held up on Atlas's shoulders and whether the Titans created it, or any other such nonsense. When you live in a country where most people are like you and share your culture, you don't have to argue about silly crap like this all the time, like we do in America where we've been arguing whether this idiocy should be taught in schools for well over a century now.

Trade has existed long before mathematics were formally codified.

Not really. The whole 60 seconds to a minute & minutes to hours is because the Babalonians used a base 60 counting system for trade - that's pushing math in trade back 5K years to when they BUILT THE WHOLE NUMBER SYSTEM AROUND IT.

Individual barter goes back earlier, but pretty much as soon as you get into "Trade", you need math to handle it.

You are a little out of date, Odin was downgraded during the pantheonic reorganization. Unfortunately due to a clerical error the one true God is now a central park squirrel named Skippy.

Foamy - his name is Foamy the Squirel

You think infighting is a good idea? To waste time and energy constantly debating whether Creationism is real or not, or whether women should have equal rights?

Cultural diversity isn't a problem. People in different regions can maintain their own, separate cultures and be happy on their own, instead of having to constantly fight with other people in neighboring regions about whose culture is better and should be dominant. What you're advocating is not cultural diversity at all, but either cultural imperialism or a morass where no one is happy because no one gets to actually have their own distinct culture.

Sounds like they need to start their own, competing union.... Maybe some other EU countries will abandon the EU and join their union instead, since this new union wouldn't be all about supporting existing powerful players.

You *do* know IOS has a search, right? Makes it kind of difficult to fail to find an app you're actually looking for.

As for the rest, different strokes, etc. I have no objection if you choose not to use such a feature (for that matter, perhaps the OS could contain a switch to turn it off for those who are unable to manage more than a single level of folders.

As for not being useful, you're not qualified to say what's useful to me.

What's the alternative? Invade with guns blazing? That didn't work so well for Iraq; it led directly to ISIL. It hasn't worked out well for Afghanistan either. We already tried deposing an Iraqi government we didn't like and setting up a friendly government, and it got us here. How is doing the exact same thing going to work this time?

As for DeBeers, that didn't work because we (western nations) haven't actually done anything to DeBeers to stop the diamond trade. There's a DeBeers store not far from me in Manhattan NYC, even though they should be banned since they violate lots of anti-trust statutes. If we aren't actually going to hold corporations accountable to our laws, then we deserve whatever happens to us as a result.

If we would get off our asses and build SkyTran so we didn't need cars, we wouldn't be very worried about oil, but we're too stupid and shortsighted to free ourselves from our oil dependency, so as far as I'm concerned, we deserve whatever happens to us as a result.

Would you care to explain how, or point the way to a howto?

Thanks.

Missed this, sorry:

Perhaps they have never even thought about the topic at all (no thoughts == no knowledge). Nor do they form their identity through comparison with others.

These are not the issue, though. If they hold a belief in a god or gods, they are theist. If they don't, they are atheist. You can change from one to the other, in fact many times, but at any point in time, you *are* one or the other.

That's all the theism / atheism issue addresses. Belief in a god or gods -- or not. Has nothing to do with why, how, which or one's idea of identity. It's a state of being, like being alive, or not, or being able to hear, or not.

So what? North Korea has been around quite a bit longer than I have, and doesn't show any signs that it'll disappear anytime soon. It's been happily subjugating people since the 1950s, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. You don't need a proper civil government that runs smoothly to have a successful country.

Not the same. We only armed the locals after invading and destroying their infrastructure and military, disbanding the army, and then trying to create a puppet government that didn't have any popular support, and didn't have a competent army because all the experienced people were sent packing after we defeated Saddam. Of course they dropped everything and ran: they didn't have anything to fight for or believe in.

The Kurds aren't like this at all: they're well organized and motivated, despite all our efforts to the contrary.

I submit that current trade agreements such as TIPP only work to lower wages and shift jobs overseas. In which case a vote for independence would be very beneficial to the Scottish people.