PS: Alarmist, I did write "in the long run". That is, when these countries go through turmoil, many such cases (I like saying that now - kind of quaint), often the Christians get purged or something. I don't know - I have never lived in a Moslem land nor even visited, come to think of it.

I hope your friends stay well.

PS

"The religion of a bandit"

That's a good one, M !

PS

I know a couple Christian expats in Morocco, and they do just fine.

Not that all of its adherents are model human beings, Islam is probably better aligned to Christianity than Judaism. Christ PBUH is one of Islam’s greatest prophets who will return for the final judgment, though they do not accept him as a divinity. Judaism outright rejects Christ. Those nutjob Zionist Christians who are all in on a Greater Israel are reading the wrong Bible.

🕉

PS

Here,
among the market vegetables,
this torpedo
from the ocean
depths,
a missile
that swam,
now
lying in front of me
dead.

Surrounded
by the earth's green froth
—these lettuces,
bunches of carrots—

This is the beginning of “Ode to a large Tuna in the Market” by Pablo Neruda. We are that magnificent tuna, now surrounded by the lettuces and bunches of carrots…the green froth…the invaders. It takes a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature to come-up with a metaphor like this, illustrating the difference and terrible fate; who could do better than this, I don’t know.

PS: For Mr. Hail and also M. There's the writer Kevin Barrett on TUR who became a Moslem in Morocco. Keep in mind that if you ARE going to live in Morocco, it'd be best to be a Moslem in the long run, so perhaps it was all about that.

I just don't like his or most of the ex-pat's takes on the US, because they just WANT things to be terrible and that they have ALWAYS been terrible, so it makes them fell better about their decisions to leave. This Barrett guy is one, IMO.

Mr. Hail, I don't know if you read my review on the book "Submission". If you haven't, it might be good to read the book instead or first - a pretty quick read - because my review spoils the ending. (That's if you're reading it just a an interesting novel rather than as political commentary only.) Anyway, now I can't make my point, because that would spoil it too.

Suffice it to say that single men may find Islam attractive due to its deal with women. If one is highly fed up with entitled lefty Western women, I can see islam's handling of these creatures being a breath of fresh air... not for the women, unless they have cut that slit big enough...

PS: Mr. Hail, thanks for your ideas about Western men and the Orthodox churches. Yes, you are right that most in the US are there for those specific nationalities. Now that, for the last 50 years, only small numbers of White people, Europeans I mean specifically (I suppose a decent number of Canadians ,but then that includes Kameltoe's and Nikki's families. so ..) have immigrated, those churches have mostly older people.

We have a Greek Orthodox church for the Greek/Greek-descended contingent. That's the only one I know about. They do have festivities yearly, probably the only time anyone learns what the weird looking church is.

Funny story here: I had a friend who I think was born in Greece but very long ago. His mother used to come from Greece once a year for a month or so to visit. Her English got worse and worse each year, just because she was getting pretty old.

She'd say "There exists a .... something or other" to explain something, I think because she didn't know for forgot that we have the word "is" (a conjugation of "to be") My other friend and I were greatly amused, because it sounded like she was getting into a math proof. "There exists a real number delta, such that, for any small number epsilon ...." It's all Greek to her, haha. Shades of Issac Newton there, but as Donald Trump or Tony Soprano would say "She don't look like no mathematician."

PS: SafeNow, it's something like that but not exactly. We do have shared values, but that did not involve politics until about 5 years ago. It wasn't the Kung Flu thing either, but my wife, who. had formerly said she had no reason to care about politics (and I was fine with that) started to care.

I'm sure I related this here before but she wasn't registered to vote until '20. Back in '16 she asked me how to do this. I asked her if she was going to vote for Trump or not. "I don't know..." "OK then, I can't help you." By '20 she took care of this and was extremely gung ho.

PS: "Well, technically we don't know what each and every Afghan's status is and maybe some ARE "illegal" in one way or another,..." True. My wife said that maybe you never know. An actual likely-well-publicized visit from ICE to sort this out would have been amazing. However, I don't think they are up for that sort of thing yet, or should I say, Trump is not.

Is it time yet where one could even get them out to check out employees of a roofing company, for example, where we know there is a very good chance of there being illegals working, not to mention Mexican restaurants? I don't think so.. I would hope the program to send them home could be more systematic eventually such that it is widely known who will need to leave, so most can do so with dignity and take care of affairs first. Trump, unfortunately, has far from a systematic mind.

PS
"young White men becoming Muslims for whatever reason"

Why not? It's the religion of a bandit; it gives one permission to do anything, as long as it is done to the infidel. Which is just about everyone in the world.

Of course this means it's not a religion on which you can build any sort of civilization.

The people who point to al-Andalus are deluded by anti-Catholic myths spread by Reformation Protestants. The archeological record actually shows that Spain became gradually poorer under Islam. They looted the place.

PS

RE: The Alarmist on conservative churches and the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Do you refer to those churches in their traditional home-countries? Say, the Orthodox Church of Romania. Or is it a reference to Orthodox churches in "the West." I suppose it's both.

Eastern Orthodox churches outside their traditional home-bases tend to be minor churches, afaict, and often specifically catering to their home-nationality's people abroad.

In the past five to ten years I've heard much talk of a phenomenon some call "Orthobros," in which Western White-Christians (or anyone, I suppose), not finding any satisfactory reception among the legacy Western churches, goes to an Orthodox church and finds some marvel of traditionalism.

__________

Last year, outside the US, I met a White-American who said he was looking for a conservative church. He talked up the Orthodox church in general terms. (This was definitely not in an Orthodox country, so he really went out of his way to do so.) From talking to him a few times, it was clear to me he'd come to his pro-Orthodox view entirely through reading or listening to right-wing political "Orthobro" talk and online meme-culture. He saw it as a form of political salvation.

Needless to say, the guy was not coming at the thing "from a position of strength." I enjoyed talking with him the times I encountered him, but I was wary of his type, having encountered such people quite often in circles I've been in. He viewed me as someone to convert, but not to Eastern Orthodoxy (which he wasn't involved in anyway, just highly interested in).

The guy I knew, in times I talked to him he kept pitching political-talk to me. He was a big Trump supporter. He made a big deal of a one-time meeting with one of the Trump inner-circle. In the specific circumstances of the way by which I knew him, I didn't want to engage in this kind of conversation to deeply, but he kept circling back to it. He was hyper-aware of everything going on in the US despite being abroad for many years (it's the Internet age after all), but he also said he was happy to be out of the US and didn't intend to go back anytime soon.

This guy I knew, he had gotten married to a local woman and had an infant at the time I met him. It's unclear if his wife had any real understanding of what his interest in the Orthodox church was about.

And that's another thing: churches ought not be purely personal choices, as if they're flavors of cereal of choices of paths to take a stroll through a park. They should be filled by families. The base-entity of a church ought to be a family, not an individual.

_________

Even conceding that the Orthodox Church is "conservative" (defining the term is half the argument here but I will bypass it here), among the problems I see are:

(1.) There is no organic connection between the Eastern Orthodox tradition and these Western seekers.

(2.) The Eastern Orthodox tradition has its own problems, despite the conservatism (or maybe in no small part "because" of it!).

To synthesize and rephrase both of these: I don't see how the Western mind and the Eastern church can be compatible.

This all reminds me a little of the phenomenon we've seen, at a low rate but common-enough to make note of, of young White men becoming Muslims for whatever reason. Cat Stevens was a pioneer; John Walker Lindh followed, and ended up in prison and dubbed "the American Taliban" for his trouble. (I understand he's still a Muslim, now in his 40s.) A scattering of others. By around the late 2010s you had Andrew Anglin-like trolls (?) meme-ing something called "White Sharia" into existence.

PS

"as much as this refugee business is a complete racket...(the Afghans) are officially here legally."

Well, technically we don't know what each and every Afghan's status is and maybe some ARE "illegal" in one way or another, but, of course you're right that in principle there are many legal-refugees.

The Biden people brought in, in 2021, what, 100,000+ (plus later chain-migrants, I assume) (and minus those few who fell off the airplanes), after the embarrassingly rapid collapse of the pro-US Afghanistan government. It's also possible the Biden people put a "hold" on any deportations to Afghanistan in light of the rise of the Taliban. So maybe all do have some legal-like status.

How many are there?

Wiki says the US Census calculated 220,000 people "reporting Afghan ancestry," based on survey extrapolations. Wiki attaches a "2023" to this. But it may be based on 2020-survey data, the biggest effort the Census makes (the constitutionally mandated decennial census). If that 220,000 number is based on 2020-daya, then all the 2021 arrivals would have to be added on top, which would take the probable minimum of 350,000 by 2025 given births and possible top-ups with chain migration ("family reunification"?).

If the above is valid, it means Afghans have cleared the 0.1%-threshold of the total US population. Where they're found in especially high concentrations (parts of California and parts of the Washington DC region), it'll easily be a few-tenths of a percent. That's not nothing.

As of ca.1980, before a few early-wave political refugees percolated in, during the Soviet intervention, the number of Afghans in the USA rounded to below 0.001%.

They had zero historical connection and zero reason to have immigration-links to the US. But US foreign policy created those links in coming decades. Out of nowhere.

(It's called "Invade, Invite.")

________

Afghan population in the USA
- 1980: under 0.001%
- 2000?: 0.01% threshold?
- 2021: in one fell swoop, it may have surpassed the 0.1% threshold.
________

It's been pretty strong growth in 40-some years: well over 100x relative growth, from under 0.001% to potentially over 0.1%. In a more useful way to put it: from near-zero across the board, to localized established bridgeheads here and there.

The great bulk of the "zero to something" growth is attributable directly to ("bipartisan") US foreign policy of the 2000s and 2010s (and arguably of the 1980s with the CIA funding of the resistance against the USSR).

Yes: I know a guy whose two-word slogan constitutes an ultra-abbreviated history of Afghan immigration to the USA. The two words are: "Invade, Invite."

PS
A fascinating anecdote, thank you. This one sent me - - no surprise there - - right to Psychology Today. It seems that the root of Mrs. Moderator’s decision comes down to - - I will paraphrase - - “we fell in love because of shared values, and it is important to the relationship to STILL have shared values.” So, I get it…it is superficial to assess her action in terms of its political harshness. Politics is merely the branches and leaves. The trunk and taproot is the “values.” (Especially for a woman?) Ouch…now I am thinking back, trying to figure-out the “values” that Mrs. SafeNow and I shared and didn’t share.

PS: She's understood what I've been saying for a while now, but I still thought she was kidding when she said in the car going home "I'm gonna call ICE." Haha.

Yes, that these people vacation in their war-torn, Talking Heads - Life During Wartime style old countries should make anyone scratch his head when he's told they are refugees. I'm glad Mrs Alarmist learned from seeing this. Yeah, and with her tax money - I hear that collect a lot of tax over there.

Perhaps if you could get her out on the (a BIG) range with some sort of crew-served weapon back in the States, she might envision that, "Yeah, that works too."

PS

Congratulations on winning a new convert to the cause.

Mrs. Alarmist was one of those European waifs who had a soft heart for those poor wretches from the Hindu Kush, but then she learned from a reliable source that many of these “refugees” were using their government-supplied cash to vacation in the countries from which they “fled.” I haven’t quite gotten her to my viewpoint, which would be the sinking of boats and landmines on the borders, but hopefully she’ll come around before Europe goes all “Camp of the Saints” on us.

I wasn’t kidding when I said the most conservative Christian church might be the Eastern Orthodox church; but giving it more thought, it may very well be one of the few actual Christian churches remaining.

🕉