Ironic, isn't it? The same people that will sing "They paved paradise to put up a parking lot", are also against any effective measures to prevent that turn of events.
A few tourists doesn't mean the community itself is transient. Even a great many tourists doesn't mean that, if the locals are mostly static. They form a community, and watch the tourists come and go.
This is like proposing to dig a bigger basement to fit more flood water. No matter how much you dig, there will always be more water in the ocean to flow in.
In the case of New York, it will never have "enough" housing - what will instead happen is, eventually, it will become so overgrown that it will be unattractive for new arrivals.
Yes. A home is not an economic asset like any other. It is the biggest link to one's community and people. Healthy communities cannot form from transient populations.
Should it? Such liability inevitably results in only "verified" content getting "promoted" - an extremely vague term. First it's the home screen, then related videos, then 1st page results for searching "cleanse", etc.
Soon any kind of user content hosting becomes legally impossible without acceding to some kind of government-approved (it will be private, but require "good standing") censorship agency.
> it's beyond the scope of this book to address the history of the Islamic conquest to the extent that you desire
You misunderstand me. If the author simply did not address it at all, and left it as "Saracen influence/legacy", or "influence of Saracen wars/conquest/invasion/conflict/presence..", I would have been content (even with something as neutral as 'presence'). It is perfectly reasonable to focus on architecture, and mostly or even entirely ignore wars.
It is in ascribing guilt to the victims ("stealing", "debt", "Islamophobia"), that changed it from mere focus on a narrow topic, to lying by omission.
According to the founder of the migrant sea rescue NGO Mission Lifeline [1], by importing more immigrants and giving them voting rights, to overwhelm the native population's vote:
If there had been enough immigration from abroad (e.g., by abolishing the visa requirement for Afghans and other persecuted people), and if these people had been given the right to vote immediately, (the German district of) Sonneberg would not be an issue today. Therefore: Open the borders! - https://twitter.com/Axel_Steier/status/1673019802523254785
I see. So the only allowed anti-immigration position is "we want to stop immigration for no reason whatsoever". As soon as a reason is given, like, "there's too much immigration, we want to reduce it to 'normal' levels" or "we don't like the kind of immigrants we're getting", that position oversteps shared values and is grounds for a ban, regardless of what voters want?
> What's the point of having a system of shared values if one member goes "Hey, let's, umm, [stop immigration]!" and your system can't defend itself against such actors?
Corrected to better reflect AfD's position. To address your point, the goal should be to serve the people, not the system. A system that persists against its subjects wishes is, by definition, tyranny.
> Sabotaging people’s private property is a criminal act.
That's what happened here. Refusing to scan without ink is sabotage.
> If it was from a private individual plantiff, then they have a right to privacy you can’t just ignore.
And the public has a right to transparency in the legal system. The rights are in conflict, and given the obvious risks of a black-box legal system, the right to transparency should prevail.
What does that have to do with allowing casual lies about history to go unchallenged? Let's say they do have a place - does that mean we have to whitewash the history of Muslim conquest? In other cases of descendants of invasions, they're made to call themselves 'settlers' and give land acknowledgments. The least we can do here is not tell lies.
On the other hand, there are laws against false advertising and (in this case) sabotage, where the action is illegal regardless of what a plaintiff thinks. If I went around offices and sabotaged their printers, the district attorney could prosecute me regardless of what the office owners thought (assuming they wouldn't lie and claim they authorized my sabotage).
This case is exactly the same. Don't be fooled - despite HP's name on the printers, they're not HP's printers anymore - they sold them, and have no more claim to them than I.
Tangentially, and orthogonal to the issue of if settlements should be allowed, undisclosed settlements should be banned. The public has a right to know what terms are reached through the threat of and with the sanction of the legal system. Because in a democracy, the public is ultimately responsible for reforming or maintaining that system, and how can they do that when they don't know how it's being used?
To elaborate: "nothing to hide" ignores the benefits to society that others, who do have something to hide, bring. Whistleblowers, various lawyers, activists, investigative journalists, labor organizers, etc.
Even if you have nothing to hide, you'll benefit immensely when, e.g., people with something to hide reveal your leaders are trying to goad you into a war under false pretenses.
To say nothing of how much the perspective changes if you live in a place like Russia or China. Historically, times and places where a good, honest person could bare their life to the government were few. How sure are you this period of relative beneficence of our governments towards its citizens will last, that you dare throw away yours and your children's freedom on the bet your future masters won't mean you harm?
> your antipathy toward the Islamic conquests of Europe
While I'm certainly not a fan of them, I'm not particularly outraged about them either. Wars of naked conquest were simply the way back then, and the Islamic world was not exceptionally brutal compared to others, including Europe.
My antipathy is towards those that seek to erase or twist this history. I realize the main point is architectural influences, but that only makes the lie more insidious - a casual statement most won't pay much attention to, and simply assume it accurate, like the presence of kilts in Braveheart.
But they could have, thanks to imprecise usage of "equality". Therefore the difference is not of interest only to pedants.
> I think the point is that in Capitalism, the money flows to the top, the top then has the money, can pay off the government, sway officials, and get 'un-equal' advantages. This then destroys democracy, because the rich can buy the power and votes don't matter.
I don't dispute this part, and apologize if I gave a different impression.