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Notes -
UK, are you OK?
Labour councillor calls for people to 'cut the throats' of 'Nazis and fascists'
Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’
Probably anyone reading this is familiar with the story so far: three gradeschool children in Southport were knifed to death, and ten others injured, on July 29th at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club. The alleged perpetrator, Axel Rudakubana, is reportedly the son of Rwandan immigrants and was 17 years old at the time of the incident, but has apparently since passed his 18th birthday. The events, allegedly in part as the result of some false reporting concerning Axel's identity, led to a number of protests, which led to a number of counterprotests.
Why would you counterprotest a protest against the knifing of schoolgirls? Well, apparently the original protests were racist. It's pretty important to not be racist. Sufficiently important, I suppose, that people would rather talk about that, than about the dead schoolchildren who, but for recent immigration from Africa, would likely still be alive. Not that Axel is an immigrant, of course. He was born on the magic soil of the UK, so it's apparently racist to notice that his parents weren't. I saw one article suggesting he might be autistic? Good sources are hard to find.
That brings us to the current events! Labour councillor Ricky Jones apparently found some inspiration in Axel's extracurricular activities, as he is very clearly articulating additional knife violence as the proper response to people protesting the murder of little girls. I actually had a surprisingly difficult time finding the original video; most of the articles throwing around the word "alleged" did not judge me fit to judge for myself. I assume Ricky was born tone deaf because throat cutting seems like an especially poor choice of words given the circumstances--though I guess I don't know for certain that Axel managed any literal throat cutting in the process of (EDIT: ALLEGEDLY) butchering schoolchildren. The UK does not have any particularly meaningful or toothy Free Speech legislation, either, though in this particular case I can imagine Mr. Jones facing consequences even here in the United States. Remind me, is it still okay to call for the punching of U.S. Nazis? Was it ever? I seem to have lost track.
Axel's knifework is not being treated as a terrorist attack (yet?), but here's where things get weird.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT:
Taylor Swift shows in Vienna canceled over alleged planned terrorist attack
Suspects in foiled attack on Taylor Swift shows were inspired by Islamic State group, officials say
Will we hear more about Axel's motivations? I suppose Taylor Swift is just so famous that at this point any plot to kill large numbers of people would, statistically, run into Taylor Swift events eventually. But now I'm wondering if Axel was just, you know, reading the same weird terrorist handbook as the Austrian terrorists. They were even the same age--the two arrested in Vienna are 19 years old and 17 years old. If I had a nickel for every time a 17 year old boy tried to murder Swifties en masse, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice!
I'm sure much smarter and well-connected analysts out there are way ahead of me on this one. And probably it's nothing! And it wouldn't really matter if it was something, beyond maybe bankrupting a handful of Taylor Swift event ticket scalpers in the near future. But it's all very weird.
Especially the part where counterprotesters started literally calling for and cheering on more knifings.
The anti-immigration argument expressed in this post seems too strong. It seems to be along the lines of if there is any kind of downside from immigration then immigration is bad. But I don't think this is a realistic benchmark for any government policy. The positives have to be weighed against the negatives. Maybe certain classes of immigrants are net-negative and a better immigration policy would be able to discriminate against these people but I don't think the UK is at the point where all immigration is net-negative.
I think we'd need to see a counter-factual of a Western European country that hasn't allowed mass immigration.
Does Hungary count?
It's not Western.
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The better parts of Eastern Europe are shaping up to be this counterfactual. For what it's worth, places like Poland and the Czech Republic have little crime and no ethnic tensions, and maintain their culture.
Those are good examples and Poland and Czechia have also seen high economic growth. The one caveat is that much of this growth is simply catching up with more developed neighbors in the EU.
My theory is that a fully developed country like say, Germany, would not suffer lower economic growth if immigration was reduced by 90%. I just don't see how importing low human capital workers from dysfunctional societies can be a positive.
At this point though, the damage is done. Even if Germany and France cut immigration to zero, they now have a sizeable racial underclass much like the U.S. does. They are finding out how thorny of a problem that can be.
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Note: it remains to be seen how Ukrainian migrants/refugees will work out long term in for example Poland. Now we are up a bit from "literally zero ethnic tensions", but still relatively low on overall scale.
Haven’t Ukrainians who managed to convince much wealthier countries they’re refugees been largely a net positive in those countries? I’d think more culturally-similar Poland would benefit even more.
"net positive" does not eliminate ethnic tensions, especially in country that used to be monolingual and monoethic.
For start, there are some people who lost on the changes or at least perceive themselves as losing or just hate that someone else benefitted more than them.
And there are some conflicts but more of "call with speaker enabled in train" rather than "create organised rape gang and blackmail police for years". Still, induces nonzero ethnic tensions what is noticeable when we used to have basically none.
For example https://konfederacja.pl/ (party on right, with most significant enti-EU, for free market, pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine, with bunch of clowns but has enough support to be elected) has constant anti-Ukrainian content, including attacking people in Poland.
That’s fair, but Ukrainian refugees are pretty much all women and children and the languages are pretty close to mutually intelligible, right? Like if holland got invaded and all the Dutch women and children moved to England I predict they’d assimilate pretty well, and that’s about my mental model of the difference here.
close to but not mutually intelligible
And among Polish women (who are more likely to compete with new people) acceptance of Ukrainians is markedly lower
so far it goes relatively well
note that "some ethnic tensions" is from perspective of place that had none of them, where violence/racial/ethnic tension are far, far, far below USA ones and so on
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Switzerland maybe?
Switzerland has very high rates of EU and non-EU immigration.
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Switzerland literally has the highest percentage of foreign-born population out of all Western European non-microstate countries.
Yes, but 85% migrants are from Europe, and 44% are specifically from other first-world countries like France, Spain, Germany, Austria, the UK and Italy. Also, there is no low-skilled foreign helot class being imported as in the US and UK. "The admission of people from non-EU/EFTA countries is regulated by the Foreign Nationals Act, and is limited to skilled workers who are urgently required and are likely to integrate successfully in the long term. There are quotas established yearly: in 2012 it was 3,500 residency permits and 5,000 short-term permits." Further, the Swiss don't appear to have nearly the problem of islamic radicalization that France and the UK do, and aren't shy about tackling it when it looks like it might become an issue.
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