Metal Reviews

You are the one that is refusing to give any credence whatsoever to the other side of this argument.

While I can sympathise with the historical plight of travelling people, there is a line that must be drawn and the individual must be responsible for his or her own actions.

As Zad has said, gangs of Jews aren't waylaying people. People in England need not fear for their safety when walking past a crowd of Irishmen despite the desolation caused on the emerald isle by English rule in the past. Blaming society can only be carried so far - people are not robots.

EDIT:
And, yes I'm not going to spend any more time repeating myself either. I've said all I'm going to say (Hell, all I can say) on the matter.

Okay, because I'm an argument junkie, I've decided to carry this on with you.



I posit that people don't have intrinsic senses of morality and merely conform to the morality that the people they grow up around sport. Ergo, gypsies that grow up among thieves will become thieves. You'd do the same.



To elaborate on what I say above... if you never see how something works and aren't a genius, you won't figure it out.

Besides, people deal with things differently. Jews happened to be mostly smart because they were forced to dedicate their lives to study, as a result of not being allowed to carry weapons before the middle ages. See what I mean when I say that society really causes everything? It all stems from the way a group of people adapt to an intial cataclysmic change in the way they're treated.

There's obviously a lot more to it than that - the world simply does not exist in the shades of black and white you seem to think it does.

But, as above, I've said all I can on the matter and I'd like to think you can at least see where I'm coming from.

Of course I can see where you're coming from, but this degree of personal responsibility evaporates when faced with the fact that some of these people never learned why they should abide to society's laws, and therefore can't be expected to suddenly want to stick to them.

I don't think the world is in black and white, I just think it's best to look at it that way while working to change the way the young'uns are taught.

And that's what's wrong with this world folks. personal responsibilty NEVER evaporates. You still make the choice to do the things you do. Environment doesn't always dictate behavior. In the animal kingdom, sure. But in people it's just not true. I don't care if they were "conditioned"(bullshit) to a rogue lifestyle, that does not excuse mugging a 15 year old girl. Blaming society for everything fixes about as much as hatred.

I was raised in an environment were my parents drank themselves to oblivion daily, beat the shit out of one another, and utilized psychological warfare on me and my siblings to great effect. Now, as an adult I could just repeat the cycle and say "It's all I know. That's how I was raised!" But, you think if I beat my lovely fiance she would allow me to say that? I would hope not. I made the choice to break the cycle, and not be that way in life. I saw it was the wrong way to go. One of my brothers, sadly does act in such a manner. Do I blame his upbringing for it? No. He made the choice, and travels the road he chose. So do these bands of thieves, they know it's wrong, but CHOOSE to perpetuate the cycle of wrong-living. That's not society's fault, not in the least.

Environment doesn't cement behavior. It can influence, but in the end, the individual is always solely to blame.

It's different for gypsies because they're never released from their little group of people. As nomads, they travel around TOGETHER without the option of hanging out with law-abiding people.

Sorry, Dead Machine, but that's a crock of shit. My mom was raised in much the same environment as Eternal Idol, and, like him, chose to break the cycle. Her family was practically nomadic, too, as her father would drink his paycheck and constantly get them kicked out of wherever they were living. She could have done the same, but she chose to go to college, work as a lab tech, and make a better life for herself. Then, she could have chosen to take her frustrations out on me, as her mother and father did, but she chose to raise me in a stable home. As Eternal Idol said, personal responsibility never evaporates.

Prejudice is probably just some pattern recognition survival mechanism gone awry. Having said that it does occasionally save my bacon.

I'll concede that it doesn't evaporate totally, but it certainly does evaporate partially.

And you can't compare your mother to gypsies, they move around much more than she ever did. Average set of traveling gypsies moves around roughly once a week. Yeah, let's see someone escape a tightly-knit family unit that packs everything up and moves around every bleeding week. I'm sure your grandfather didn't lose a job every week for 18 years or however long she lived with them.

I won't bore you with the details of my family, but suffice to say, it was every few months on average. Put that together with growing up in rural Iowa, and you've got a comparable situation in terms of the lack of outside influences. No, it's not exactly the same, but it does illustrate my point about personal responsibility.

There is a huge difference between a week and, say, every two months. In two months you can make a solid group of friends; in a week you might find a good dentist.

Also, why are you never on AIM?

Answering that adequately would mean saying more about my family than I'm willing.

What are you talking about? I'm on AIM right now.

No offense, Dead Machine, but I think your type of attidude is of the kind that only further propogates these kinds of problems.

What you're either ignoring or failing to understand is that anyone who steals can only steal as long as there is someone to steal from. Essentially, a world full of nothing but thieves cannot sustain itself (under certain conditions it could theoretically exist for a short amount of time) because there would be nothing to steal. What you seem to be saying is that as long as there are people producing, it is okay for people to steal from them. More startling is that you attempt to justify why they steal, citing environmental factors, historical treatment, etc.

Let me explain something to you. No one who produces needs to accept that someone attempts to steal from him. No one needs to attempt to rationalize a thief's behavior. Doing so would be morally wrong. If you are stolen from, you analyze who did it and why. If you choose to forgive them for it, you have no one to blame but yourself for doing so, particularly when it happens to you again.

Don't think they've "seen the other side"? Wrong. That is exactly what such people base their moral existence on: Take what other people are producing. They have made that decision. If you believe that their environment clouds their judgment so much that they do not know how to make a moral decision, then how do you explain that such people go where they think they are likely to have success? ...Do you really think they (gypsies) only move around because of their historical experiences? You're so busy calling it their "culture" and "nomadic lifestyle", you seem to be failing to realize why it is... According to what you are saying, isn't it reasonable to think that they would simply try to steal from anyone whether they target has anything of value or not, even stealing from each other?

If they do not do that, and instead steal from what they believe to be a good target, then they are making a conscious decision. They're brains are operating within some kind of moral system. They have seen the other side because they know that if it weren't for the other side, they would cease to exist as they do. If you believe they don't even know that, you might as well believe they aren't even human beings. What is a man if he cannot think for himself?

The kind of thinking you seem to exhibit is the kind of thing that has got to stop. It's not gypsies, blacks, jews, or whoever you want to single out that are propogating this behavior. It's you. If that's all such people as yourself wanted to do (allow themselves to be stolen from), I wouldn't have a huge problem with it. Such people can be exploited and end up with nothing too, and you won't see me or anyone who has the same values as I do giving away any sympathy...

But that's not enough is it? No. Such people also want to say that I'm wrong because I do not understand. They want me to have to sacrifice too, even if it's involuntary. They don't care so long as someone out there is still producing so they can continue their "moral cause". So not only do I have to deal with someone who might want to steal from me, I also have to deal with someone who is saying that I don't understand why they want to steal from me. ... No thanks.

Dude, if I've got you pegged wrong, I apologize. But I've read all the posts on this twice, and this is the way I see it. Believe it or not, I've got a lot of respect for you, but not on this issue. You are correct that the environment can be a contributing factor to this issue. You're wrong if you think it justifies organized crime. You're correct if you think that history has a way of repeating itself: if people had success doing something in the past, it is reasonable to assume they will continue to do it until they no longer have success at it. It is wrong to think that I am somehow accountable for something I have not done, and it is wrong to try to argue that I am somehow accountable or am a valid target because of what someone else did.

You are wrong if you think this is justification for a person to choose such behavior. And you are wrong to say that the persons who produce have not the right to judge the thieves when it is a fact that if thieves could not judge the producers they could not survive. Don't make it any easier for them than it already is. Don't decide they're more human than you are.

-Tyrion

You do, in fact, have me pegged wrong.

I'm objecting to people calling gypsies 'thieving sacks-of-shit,' and dismissing the entire race as a bunch of vagrants. It's not that I don't think what they're doing is wrong (because it IS), I think that everyone should just take a look at how they likely got to this position and try to fix their mindsets so as to prevent another six generations of people calling gypsies 'thieveing sacks-of-shit.'

When I talk of 'the other side,' I talk of the parts of society that would attract people that the gypsies never see because they're moving from one place to the next week-to-week and busy camping in the worst parts of town before then because the best parts of town don't want them there.

At no point did I say YOU were accountable; I said that everyone who has ever spit at or on a gypsy is accountable. If you've never spit on a gypsy who hasn't previously robbed you, then you're clean.

The only people I blame are the ones who call ALL gypsies (or MOST gypsies) thieving sacks-of-shit based on their own narrow experiences. It's just like when a white guy gets mugged by some criminals who happen to be black, and then starts hating all the black people. It doesn't. Help. SHIT.

Y'see where I'm coming from?

I agree here 100% with Dead Machine. Not all the gypsies are thieves, as is wrong to acuse a race for what some of them do...
Is like saying "All muslim are fanatic and terrorist". No, that's not true.
That's racism.
Saying all thieves are shit is correct, cause is not less thief a white, black, red or yellow thief than a gypsy one.

But when somebody draws a cartoon of Mohammad as a suicide bomber it pretty much means that Islam = Terror but everybody here thought it was ok because of freedom of speech. But when Azrael says Gypsies are thieves he's racist and an idiot.

Don't tell me there's no difference, it's the same thing. The issue is "prejudice against a group of people". It's hypocrisy.

A gypsy ate my baby.

See ? They're also cannibals.

FOR THE LAST TIME, NOT ALL GYPSIES, JUST A GOOD LOT OF THEM.

and DM, nowadays here most gypsies don't move around that often.

It's the same thing. I think that not all muslim are fanatic, and not all gypsies are thieves.

For the freedom of speech, I think there are limits, and that a cartoon of Mohammad as a suicide bomber is as racist as saying that all jews are "put here your favourite insult", or all gypsies are thieves. It was a stupid cartoon. And very racist.

But "The satanic verses" are not racist.

But a cartoon with mohammad is not racist, by default. I see one very good of a suicide bomber in the gates of Paradise, and Mohammad saying "another one that didn't understand anything".

That's the difference between freedom of speech and being a racist, in my opinion.