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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30675 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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It's all kicking off in Merseyside. Big protest against the UK government's ongoing policy of housing groups of unknown and unvetted asylum claimants who have illegally crossed the channel and are attempting to stay here, in hotels, at the taxpayer's expense. The inciting incident being passed around social media appears to be this. Reports include that a police van has been torched as attendees accuse police of "protecting the nonces".

As you might guess, it is unlikely that these events will be described as "fiery, but mostly peaceful". Several publications such as the Guardian have already gone for calling all in attendance far-right. Accusations are flying that protesters were bussed in from elsewhere because the famously bloc-left voting Merseyside would never do this. Some are remarking that this was organised by people passing out flyers in the days beforehand, and that this should make it a premeditated riot. Opinions are split exactly as you'd expect along culture war lines.

I can only see this sort of thing getting hotter and hotter as time goes on. There's a large contingent of the country who quite simply don't want the migrants here, and reports like the tweet above turn off even more. But the state -- controlled by people calling themselves the Conservative Party -- seems to have no interest in closing the floodgates (they make noise, but no more than that). No solution is in sight, as far as those concerned can see. So I really don't see how this is to be defused at all.

Is there any real way to get rid of the migrants? Does the UK have the capability to deport them to Albania or wherever, or is it a binary choice between ‘shoot them or let them in’?

In theory yes, in practice no, but in reality yes... but also really no.

There are many things we could do, but most of those things would be objected to by the Blairite Supreme Court and shitloads of charities, NGOs and other subversive elements, as well as foreign entities like the ECHR. They'd then be tied up in the legal system for years and years like most deportation attempts are already.

With the massive majority they have, the government could cut right through the Gordian knot by straight up leaving the offending treaties and organisations and just deporting whoever they like. But the gutless, spineless, Conservative-in-name-only Party would never do any such things. They're more concerned with hand-wringing about what their mates at Davos would be saying than whether it's what the public would want or not. Public is a tertiary concern, after making money for themselves and hobnobbing with their trendy peers and keeping up with the latest fashionable policies.

We should be mandating deportation with no appeal for any crime that carries a sentence of jail time. We should be reducing our "refugee" intake to 0 while we re-litigate every claim submitted for the last 15-20 years. We should have harsher punishments for employing illegal migrants (and for not reporting any who apply). But we won't, because the Tories only worship at the altar of Line Go Up.

But we won't, because the Tories only worship at the altar of Line Go Up.

More accurately they have internal models that suggest that reducing immigration (which even before Brexit they could have almost halved with no real legal problems) will mean the economy will not grow and as the party of making the economy grow they are terrified that will lock them out of power, long term. They believe they can largely make immigrants Conservative (see Sunak, Patel et al) over time and that localized issues are less of a problem than widespread economic issues. The Davos set are not particularly part of their thinking here. Avoiding things like the Winter of Discontent which gutted the Labor party for decades is their biggest driver. Talk tough, do nothing has been the Tory position on immigration for a long time.

Source: Worked for the Conservative party.

More accurately they have internal models that suggest that reducing immigration (which even before Brexit they could have almost halved with no real legal problems) will mean the economy will not grow and as the party of making the economy grow they are terrified that will lock them out of power, long term.

We have had both high immigration and Conservative government for many years, but little economic growth to show for it.

And tecent by-elections have not been great for the Tories, even with Labour's somewhat anemic opposition. How quickly they turned on Truss despite her carrying out a fairly basic Tory tax change (cut taxes on high earners) should show how nervous they are.

If Labour were less divided themselves and more willing to re-embrace New Labour they would be under even more pressure.

And GDP per capita, which should be the real measure at play here, has been falling, iirc. Tories only care about total GDP though.

Do they have elections anytime soon to worry about? I was under the impression they didn’t.

Probably not for a couple years unless they're foolish enough to call one early. They could have done everything they wanted by now and it would be old news by the time the election rolls around.

as the party of making the economy grow

They've done a pretty bad job of that! The UK economy is where it was back in 2006 in real terms. I wonder how long they can create technical growth in total gdp or gdp per capita (before inflation). At some point there needs to be real growth, or else the government will lose its legitimacy.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=GB-AU-US

By European standards no growth since 06 is excellent. That's second best record, basically tied with France and behind Germany (And Russia, but their economy is trash anyways) Most of Southern Europe hasn't grown since ~1990.

Edit: I'm only referring to the major economies here. There's still limited growth in the nordics and small eastern euro countries.

No growth since 2006 is a serious indictment on Europe and the EU. Hasn't computing improved in the last 17 years? Don't we have better automation, better machining, mining, medicine and so on? In material, technical terms prosperity should be increasing.

The fertility crisis is a major problem. I suspect increasing the ratio of dependents is sucking out wealth from the real economy. Fewer capable young people means less innovation. The rest of the EU bureaucracy isn't helping either. Singapore shows us that one can have good growth even with minimal fertility.

Most top European talent also immigrates out. Its impossible to start a new industry upending business in Europe because of regulation. Spacex, Uber, and many others could never have started anywhere in Europe because they would have been regulated out of existence.

Hasn't computing improved in the last 17 years?

Not really; the last major revolution in computing was VT-100s that fit in your pocket and networks for them to talk to and everything since has just been minor revisions that allow development of those services to be as fast as possible. The iPhone, combined with the refusal to go full Great Firewall at that time, was the final nail in the coffin for European technological competitiveness- now, not only is all the institutional knowledge gone (to American companies that acquired them) but the Union arguably wouldn't survive Facebook and Twitter disappearing given the now total dependence of the population on those services.

While it's true that much of the modern Internet infrastructure serves European software (web browsers) from European software (Linux) on hardware whose instruction sets are European English-designed (ARM) and fabricated on European machines (ASML), those things don't actually give Europe any strategic leverage in the sector to spread its culture of US-imported moral mediocrity. It's not that they couldn't do it- they actually do have technical chops and China has quite clearly demonstrated they can outdo US companies- but if they try they'll have have to accept the hate fact that the WEF won't invite them to any more dinners.

Well the World Economic Forum is based in Europe, so they ought to be sympathetic to the bureaucratic leviathan that is the EU. Especially if the EU is doing more regulation to make the internet more 'democratic' or whatever abstract noun they're shamelessly skin-suiting to cover up their ambitions. The WEF is all about increasing social-democratic governance, reducing people's freedom and so on.

Also, I was mostly thinking of Moore's Law based improvements. Back in 2006 we were dealing with 65 nm chips as state of the art, now we're down to 3nm. That should have some economic effect. There are surely all kinds of industrial applications that benefit from more processing power, AI first and foremost.

In material, technical terms prosperity should be increasing.

Never underestimate the ability of government to absorb all gains (and then some).

Well then I can only hope for them getting outflanked to the right by a new party as they were with regards to the EU. Why do they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into actually doing anything conservative at all?

They have a deal to send some to Rwanda, but there are questions re whether that is legal.

They can also try to speed up the asylum process, as the Biden Admin is trying to experiment with. But, doing so while not incorrectly denying asylum claims by those who have legitimate claims to asylum might be difficult, since as a practical matter it takes time to assemble evidence re asylum claims.

Unless they are coming from a neighboring country none of them have a leg to stand on. Send them back to their home country and if they refuse to identify where they're from hold them in solitary until they mentally break down and then send them back. While you're at it charge their home country with every expenditure related to expelling and transporting them.

While you're at it charge their home country with every expenditure related to expelling and transporting them.

Let's set aside that many of these countries are already broke. How exactly would the UK extract these funds? I highly doubt any of these countries are going to agree to pay those costs.

Stop foreign aid to such countries?

Someone applying for asylum is not going to refuse to identify his home country, because being granted asylum requires that the asylum seeker show that he has a reasonable fear of persecution if he returns to his home country. Can't do that if you refuse to say which country that is.

Reminds me of the protests in Ireland. I suspect both will fail for a similar reason: street reactions to Twitter videos have clear limits of how far they can change matters. Policy is changed in the halls of power, ultimately. Though, the issue of "street power" is interesting to ponder. I've been following the Israeli debate on trying to enlist Haredi men into the army and every single government has failed because they managed to bring about huge numbers of people to the streets every single time. So perhaps if this was sustained, there could be a way to change policy indirectly. I don't know.

Either way, the government does try to be tough. The Economist has a piece about it. Predictably, The Economist's solution to the boat asylum issue is to speed up offshore processing. That would actually increase the amount of asylum seekers in the UK, the paper acknowledges, but it would also mean fewer boats. (The paper thinks the main issue is one of optics rather than volumes, but that probably speaks to their own delusion).

So what has the government done? It tried to enlist the help of Rwanda to send failed asylum seekers. The problem is that the Rwandan government only wants a few hundreds. There's talk of quitting the EHCR, which is a Europe-wide human rights court that often makes it hard to deport failed asylum seekers without several re-trails, at which many simply go underground and authorities lose touch with them. 800K people in the UK are thought to be living illegally and the number is growing.

Last year, Britain received 45,000 asylum seekers and the current projections is that this figure will rise to 65,000 this year. It's worth pointing out that Sweden received over 100K in 2015, so on a per capita basis, the UK is definitely not in a "crisis" even at this numbers. But the UK has historically had low levels of asylum seekers compared to the Scandinavians and some mainland European countries, so this situation is new.

I'm frankly not sure if there's any real solution (that is democratic and passes the basic threshold for decency). The problem is that the Third World is not doing well. Pakistan is on the verge of bankruptcy yet has 230 million people. It has a TFR well above 3. Egypt is barely doing better. Nigeria is holding on for the moment but the future looks uncertain. In the 1950s, these countries had much smaller populations and air travel was expensive. Today you have large and growing diaspora populations and smartphones are common even in poor countries, so people know how it is possible to live in the West. In short, there are structural reasons for these waves to continue. Not just to Europe but also to the US. Europe's geographic connectivity with MENA, SSA and to some extent South Asia means that pressures will be greater on Europe. I suspect this will lead to increasing political divergence with the US over the long-term as the far-right will gain ground (just look at the latest polls out of Germany or Austria).

Reminds me of the protests in Ireland. I suspect both will fail for a similar reason: street reactions to Twitter videos have clear limits of how far they can change matters. Policy is changed in the halls of power, ultimately.

The Irish government has made some gestures towards taking a tougher approach to asylum seekers, surprisingly.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar recently: "We also need to be firm with people who come to Ireland with a false story or false pretences, we need to be firm with them and say that we are going to make a quick decision on your application and we will return you to your country of origin and people expect that." Currently a final decision on an application for asylum takes years, as people can continually appeal their rejections.

The situation is particularly dire in Ireland at the moment because there is such a shortage of accommodation (for all, not just for refugees) that for a while last month new arrivals were immediately becoming homeless. While the government is happy to dismiss the protesters as far right loons, they're not as eager to be called out on human rights grounds for letting refugees sleep on the street.

Edit: There was some controversy over a recent poll which showed that 56% of Irish people answered Yes to the question 'Has Ireland taken in too many refugees?'. Given the goodwill towards Ukrainian refugees a more specific question on asylum seekers would likely show a much stronger 'Yes'.

Politicians always make gestures towards doing things, but never actually do them.

Yeah nothing much of substance has happened yet besides the shift in tone. The only thing I can think of is that the guarantee of accommodation has been restricted to Ukrainian refugees.

Europe's geographic connectivity with MENA, SSA and to some extent South Asia means that pressures will be greater on Europe.

It should be said that this does not inherently mean a failure to stem immigration. Russia has a huge land border but AFAIK doesn't have a meaningful illegal immigrant problem. Guessing the reasons for that are left as an exercise to the reader.

But Russia does have a large problem with illegal immigration, mostly from the Stans. It’s true that the Syrian refugees mostly didn’t go to Russia, but that’s because Russia is mostly a shithole and you would choose to live in Germany too.

As you might guess, it is unlikely that these events will be described as "fiery, but mostly peaceful".

Merseyside Police said officers had been dealing with what they described as an "initially peaceful protest".

All the difference in the world between those two adages!

Indeed, the BBC hasn't mentioned the pedophilia video in the article you linked. It would be very interesting if the rest of the world just saw the results of the 'fiery, but mostly peaceful' protests in the US but heard nothing about what the origin of those events was. The BBC gave us the opinion of a counter-protestor, Clare Mosley, founder of Care4Calais. I imagine Oswald rolling in his grave at relativistic speeds, though there's probably no relation. We also got calls for calm from the local MP who wants everyone to wait until police investigate the alleged incident. No more detail is given than that. There's no reference to children, sexual harassment or anything, just an alleged incident circulating on social media.

This reminds me of something I wrote earlier about media bias and disinformation in the context of that Hanania article. Disinformation can be anything you want it to be. RT for instance picks out facts that favor Russian interests, finds people with opinions that favor Russian interests, provides interpretations of facts that favor Russian interests. You can do a great deal without lying. In this case, I'm confident that the BBC is not and will not provide 'an appropriately wide range of significant views must be included and given due weight in each programme or in clearly linked and timely programs'. But that's just my opinion. Who defines 'appropriately wide' or 'due weight'?

I also want to thank those who coded the website, my comment was saved even while I left the page to search through my comment history. This is a nice feature!

Clare Mosley founder of Care4Calais

Is she the sus one who keeps sleeping with the migrant men under her care, or something? The name rings familiar but I can't place why I've heard it before.

You're totally right: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3924505/married-calais-jungle-charity-boss-who-romped-with-toyboy-migrant-fears-for-her-life-after-refugee-lover-tried-to-burn-down-her-hq/

A MARRIED charity boss who had a secret fling with a migrant toyboy lover while working at the Calais Jungle has stepped back from her role due to ill-health after the refugee reportedly tried to burn down her organisation's HQ.

Contrary to what I thought, toyboy isn't a misspelled boytoy but has almost identical meaning. This makes me somewhat unhappy etymologically, though I suppose this is far too late to ask for consistency in our language.

The Daily Mail reports he texted a friend with the message: ‘I will just end up killing her and taking her life easy. I’m really ready to do it because I love her more than anything in the world."

She sure knows how to pick 'em!

Bajjar was reportedly thwarted in his attempts to set the building alight and was arrested by French police on June 14.

I can picture this being a perfect scissor statement for extreme rightists. Is this swarthy race-mixing Muslim based for wanting to murder a white refugee-facilitator (after conning her out of money) and trying to burn down their facilities? Alas, I'd imagine they'd default to saying 'kill them both'.

From another article: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2611408/married-calais-jungle-charity-boss-beds-toyboy-migrant-and-sets-up-love-nest-with-refugee-after-boasting-of-zero-tolerance-sex-policy/

At the time Clare said Care4Calais had a zero-tolerance policy toward relationships between volunteers and migrants.

It sure sounds like the makings of a Shakespearean tragedy, I'll say that much.

That is a lot worse than what I vaguely recalled. Christ alive.

Is this swarthy race-mixing Muslim based for wanting to murder a white refugee-facilitator (after conning her out of money) and trying to burn down their facilities? Alas, I'd imagine they'd default to saying 'kill them both'.

My opinion is that she's stupid and misguided and will have learned nothing from all this, a danger to herself and others by advocating for more of these people.

He obviously deserves the harshest punishment conceivable. Crimes committed by people who are here illegally to lean on our charity should be punished more harshly than the same crime committed by a native, IMO.

No solution is in sight, as far as those concerned can see. So I really don't see how this is to be defused at all.

With the big boot of government on the rioters. Who is going to complain, with the government, the opposition, and the media all in favor of this?

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