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Can anybody explain the Polish perspective on the Ukraine war?
I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.
My understanding is that most of the tsunami of African or Middle-Eastern immigrants of the 2000s would rather go to Western Europe or Scandinavia for better welfare or economic prospects.
Still, Poland used to get in trouble with the EU for not wanting to take in a certain amount of them.
Moreover, Poland has also faced reprimand from the same union for their policies toward non-heterosexuals.
Why did Poland even join the EU? Did they really need the money so badly at the time?
Now it seems that Poland is going toward ever more alignment with the EU and US.
Are they really so scared of Russia that they would drink the corn syrup and give up on whatever is left of their culture/sovereignty/demographics?
Is anybody of relevance in Poland even attempting to contradict the pro-Western turn?
This assumes as axiomatic that we all agree with white nationalism, which is consensus building.
Not necessarily. I understand that many Western Euros don't actually like clean and safe cities that much. Otherwise they wouldn't be so tolerant of all these immigrants...
Clearly there is something, perhaps 'Prussian' in Poland, that makes them enjoy their cleanliness, and their peace.
Why then get ever tighter with the aforementioned Western Euros + Americans who do not?
White nationalism seems foolish at this point as there are so many internal divisions within the species. Indeed most of the enemies of the continued survival of a certain type of European are European themselves.
As I see it, the future of that species is with an unification across borders. While TikTok and other online propaganda apparatuses are rapidly conquering masses across the planet, the resistance is becoming more and more diverse itself. Anybody with an ounce of interest in traditional culture and living can join, with regional differences fading as the enemy is global and common. The biggest obstacle being language, but this should resolve itself soon enough.
Do you think western European cities are particularly dirty of unsafe? I live in a western European city and I've been to central European cities, albeit not specifically in Poland, and I didn't really notice a difference in cleanliness nor did I feel more or less safe to be honest. To test my impression from my own travels, I've looked at google street view at a couple of random places in Warsaw and Berlin and I can't really tell a difference between the cleanliness to be honest.
If you look at e.g. homicide rates there also isn't an obvious difference between Poland and western EU countries. Almost all of Europe has a very low homicide rate and whatever fluctuations there are within Europe do not line up with immigration. So I'm also very doubtful that western EU is significantly less safe compared to Poland.
The biggest difference is probably between more Mediterranean countries vs Germanic ones.
Here's some people discussing it
Which country is cleaner than which is not central to my argument, I simply noticed that Poland seemed unsoiled by the dirtiness brought by the most recent waves of boatpeople.
Migrant camps have sprung up over the last decades in French, Italian, UK cities etc. I think Germany simply spent a lot of money to house them instead.
Regarding safety, I'm mostly talking about petty crime. Street vendors selling counterfeit products, pickpockets, muggers, and then more violent stuff, rape gangs UK, mass molestation events Cologne.
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Come on now, this is well into the territory of suspicion. Poland isn’t that clean and orderly. Poles visiting Germany, always remark about the famous Ordnung muss sein, and I too agree with them.
I think it depends of the areas of Germany. I was in the formerly Prussian part of Poland and their commie blocks looked safe and clean.
Then I went to Western Germany (Hesse) and while Germany is quite ordered compared to some other Weuro counterpart, I could still tell that the commie blocks looked more sinister, degraded, with graffiti. It could just be that I saw the good part of one country vs the bad part of another. I do recall Bavaria being very neat a decade ago, but I also understand that importing millions of impoverished people from alien cultures has a cost.
I would not be surprised if Germany was neglecting some of its people while accommodating the foreigners.
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This is assuming a lot without presenting any evidence beyond your assumptions. How many Western Euros do you think would agree with you that they "don't actually like clean and safe cities that much"? You may make the argument that "tolerance of immigrants results in unclean, unsafe cities," but you may not weakman your outgroup by asserting that "tolerance of immigration means they do not like clean, safe cities" unless you have some evidence as to this glimpse into their true motivations.
If you want to agenda-post, speak plainly without the dark hinting.
In very slight defense of the claim, though not of how it was made, I remember at least one instance of a very normie Western Euro telling me (in the context of them preferring dirty, unsafe, hip Berlin to clean, safe and obnoxiously square Munich) almost in those words back in 2009 or so that they don't actually like clean and safe cities that much. As a Western Euro myself, I can actually empathise with the sentiment, though I did like Munich more (because I didn't actually find it that square, and I found Berlin's hipness to be a bit shallow when it came down to it).
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There is a trade-off to these EU policies that most Western European countries apply.
If they are on the receiving end of the migrants from Subsaharian Africa or the Middle-East whose countries were ravaged by their dearest allied CIA-controlled MIC, due to their generous social systems, then they incur significant cost in cleaning and peacekeeping in the areas where they are most concentrated.
I'm thinking of UK, France, Germany, Scandinavia.
While a large amount of Western Europeans despise the effects of these immigrants on their immediate living conditions, they still somehow end up voting 'in majority' for their causes.
'Voting wrong' seems to be worse than uncleanliness and relative lower safety.
Similarly in the US, a lot of people seemingly just let their own neighborhood get burned down by arsonists around 2020. Not much of a fire-preventing spirit them city-folks!
In general, if your views could be proven wrong by a five-minute conversation with a normal person or three, you should wonder first if it's true in the first place. Have you talked to anyone about this, or are these assumptions made of what you've been told by fellow extremely online nerds?
I haven't really held any conversation with Poles but my views on Western Europeans come from personal experience with them.
In terms of evidence, one can look at the mountains of litter left behind by hip and wealthy Western Euros after music festivals or spring breakers in Spain, or the valuation of so-called 'street art' (for example Banksy).
Anti-police movements also have their supporters in Western Europe, while police forces in the UK have been found to protect sex traffickers for fear of racism (racism is worse than sex trafficking for a certain subset of Weuros).
I haven't been to any music festivals in Poland, but I've been to the ones in Serbia. Whiter crowd than Western Europe, no different behavior. You're genuinely barking up the wrong tree.
Serbia, for that matter, has an amount of graffiti penned down I've not seen in any city where I live(the Netherlands). It's not even close. Not the very tiniest bit.
Certainly policing isn't something that makes the Eastern Europeans look good, either. Eastern European police officers take the job to wear a uniform, look cool, harass epople they don't like, and draw a salary from bribes as much as they do payment depending on where you're at.
I'll say it again: you're barking up the wrong tree. Any of the flaws you attribute to us Weuros - I don't mind the term - could be applied to Easterners, aside from the general charge of being vaguely anti-immigration.
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I don't think so. OP is expressing his opinion on what Western Europe should look like, not saying "we all agree Western Europe should be like this".
The stated purpose of this community is for defending ideas. That is to say, users are expected to present earnestly held views, along with a reasoned case explaining why they believe them to be true. The OP has instead chosen to reel off a sequence of searingly controversial opinions—an explicit defense of white nationalism, as well as an implied condemnation of homosexuality—with markedly little effort to avoid polemical and ideologically weighted language ('tsunami of ... immigrants', 'drink the corn syrup'). To the extent that they prompt discussion, they do so by posing questions which invite only those respondents who agree with their stances on race and sexuality.
As a result of this framing, the implied terrain for debate is not 'is it important that Poland be a white ethnostate?' or 'is it right for Poles to oppose homosexuality', but rather 'given that Poland is relatively successfully defending itself against non-whites and gay rights, why would they undermine this by allying with America and the EU?'. It's frustrating and dull to unpick this sort of pre-discursive stage-setting, which is why most people who disagree with white nationalism or anti-homosexuality will simply roll their eyes and pass over comments like OP's. Thus, the entire thread is doomed to become an ideologically homogeneous round-table discussion that may raise some interesting points about the realpolitik of national alliances, but that—ironically for a culture war thread—will scarcely tackle the contentious underlying issues.
This is why consenus-building is disallowed. I'm happy to lay my cards on the table: it won't come as a surprise that I don't personally like white nationalism. Yet I value the fact that the Motte does not censor such viewpoints. It is critical, though, that when one presents controversial ideas, one does so according to the principles of the community, since laxity in this regard will induce an echo-chamber before you can say 'globohomo'.
See, if you had said "this is a weak argument" and asked OP to justify their position that'd be one thing. I can respect that. But you're grasping at the straw of "consensus building" when there's nothing in OP's post that is actual consensus building. Dropping a hot take without argument isn't consensus building, it's just... a hot take without argument. Which is actually against the rules! But come on man, if you're going to accuse someone of breaking the rules then at least cite the appropriate rule.
Laying out an array of controversial opinions and then inviting other people to discuss questions which are only coherent if one a priori regards those opinions as true is absolutely a form of consensus-building. It's not as explicit as saying 'we all agree that...', but it's equivalently powerful, because it still essentially obliges the subsequent discussion thread to conform ideologically to the root comment, lest the whole debate lose its consistency. The question 'Did Poland really need money so badly that it had to join the EU?', and any responses to it, are trivially incoherent unless you assume that the EU is an inherently malignant entity.
In fact, this form of consensus building is more potent than the syntactically explicit form ('we all agree that...'), since though it is equally able to enforce conformity among respondents, one cannot as easily demonstrate with a quotation the manner in which debate is being ring-fenced.
I think you're reading a whole lot of things that just aren't there in the text. For example, this:
This isn't remotely true. What the discussion presupposes is not that the EU is inherently malignant, but that joining the EU is undesirable for Poland. There is an implicit claim, but you've (wittingly or unwittingly) rephrased the claim in a much stronger way and set it up as a strawman.
And further, even if one disagrees with the premise (which is fair), that doesn't render subsequent discussion incoherent. One can respond to such a question by saying "you seem to believe that joining the EU would be bad for Poland, but I don't think it is in fact bad for them", and go from there. That's a perfectly coherent discussion to have. So no, it isn't really trivially incoherent to have such a discussion if you don't agree the EU is evil.
I disagree. The clear subtext of the original comment is that the EU is inherently malignant.
Yes, just as one can say: 'actually, we don't all agree that xyz' in response to explicit-style consensus building. The problem is that to do so cuts against the grain of the discourse, requires sticking a shovel into the ground instead of simply building constructively, and so is more arduous and less likely to be well received even if done in good faith.
See, now you're moving the goalposts. Before you said "it isn't coherent to have the discussion if you don't agree". Now you're saying it's harder to have that discussion. Those are two very different things, and the latter doesn't support your original argument for why the OP counts as consensus building.
And to be honest, your claim here is pretty silly. Yes, of course it's harder to have a discussion where you don't agree about the premises. But it's still worthwhile, and indeed is kind of the point of this board. If you personally don't want to, that's definitely your right. But it's not a problem for most of the people here in general.
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Well I was always perplexed by Poland joining the EU because they are consistently among the black sheep with Hungary who oppose a lot of what the EU members collectively stand for.
I'm legitimately asking what was the original idea behind Poland joining the EU which implicitly and formally comes with a certain set of requirements, among which giving up some of your sovereignty, when in the 2000s Poland has been rejecting a lot of these requirements
So, rephrasing, did Poland really need money that badly that they had to join the EU, despite knowing that they would down the line not want to fulfill some of the requirements, like not going against EU rules created by countries that are much more pro-immigration and anti-Christian-family than them?
The short answer is yes. Poland was dirt poor and no longer wanted to be a European backwater. Twenty years ago European progressivism was a tiny unimportant worry compared to what it is today, and to this day even Polish Varsovians are regularly surprised by how different the West is to their expectations.
Sad. I can see how this is yet another consequence of the industrial revolution, a disaster for the human race.
The EU's advanced bureaucracy can be seen as a more advanced version of the technology used to manage the USSR and before that the Russian Empire/Polish-LithuaniaC/HRE etc...
Technology just doesn't go away. Can't put the dating apps back in the hat.
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But that’s not the point of his post. If he had to establish white nationalism was desirable first he would never be able to get to the questions he wanted to ask. I do agree that he could have probably gotten to his questions without revealing his personal preferences to such an extent though
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I can see how it might read as consensus building, but if it is, surely so is suggesting that thinking the European country of Poland should look like the memetic concept of Europe as depicted in the media (clean, safe and full of Europeans) - is white nationalism.
The trick isn’t saying a European country should look like one, the trick is implying the cleanness of the country is due to the whiteness of its residents.
Arguments on The Motte shouldn’t be bundled to the point where coherent discussion of the OP of a thread requires agreement with smuggled premises. That way lies the chaos and LARPing of 4chan/pol/.
While I may not be able to produce clean data to establish my hunch, the dramatic increase in immigration of the 2010s in Western Europe came with a lot of unsanitary conditions and street violence.
I'm not implying that white = clean, as it's Western Europeans who welcomed that uncleanliness, and there are many varied people that are very much capable of cleanliness, for example Singaporeans.
Based on the observation on the ground that (the surveyed areas of) Poland is a very clean country, I'm guessing that the Polish people generally enjoys keeping their environment clean.
The cleanliness is a result of a lack of a certain type of population, which is abundant in Western Europe due to EU policies.
This has me questioning why the Polish government is suddenly so strongly supportive of EU policies, despite what seems like a natural, intrinsic cleanliness of its people.
No, but you are saying that certain groups are unclean ("The cleanliness is a result of a lack of a certain type of population"). Which in itself is fine with me -- I am pretty close to a free speech absolutist, and am on record as advocating that social media entities be barred from engaging in censorship that would not be permitted were it done by the govt in the US -- but I have no idea what group you are talking about. Turks in Germany? Africans in France? South Asians in Great Britain? All of the above? Immigrants in general? Why don't you just come out and say what you mean?
And, btw, when those same supposedly clean Eastern Europeans came to the US in the early 20th Century, people complained about how dirty their neighborhoods were. So, perhaps you are simply confusing the effects of high population density with the effects of the presence of whatever group you are talking about? I don't know, because, again, you don't give enough information for others to assess your claim.
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But Russia is very dirty, much dirtier than most EU countries. That explains why Poland is so much against Russia and prefer to be aligned with the EU :)
Hasn't Paris been infamous for it's unique odeur d'urine for something like a century?
I had visited Paris several times and didn't notice it. Probably true but the importance of many things are often exaggerated. While driving through Europe overall France seemed clean and orderly. Belgium was the worse and Poland indeed was clean and nice. But the climate and geography can also play certain role. Possibly that many immigrants coming from the countries without forests, have different aesthetic preferences that they don't care so much about beautiful things like Polish people do.
Funny that in Latvia since we got independence from the Soviet Union, when people rejuvenate their flats, they often call it euro repair (eiroremonts). It annoys me because what it has to do with Europe? But somehow people there associate nice things with Europe and old and ugly things with the Soviet culture.
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