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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   769 thread views

Transnational Thursday for June 4, 2026

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Last night, there was a "stabbing attack" in Belfast.

The reason for the scare quotes is that video footage of the assault is circulating on social media, and "stabbing attack" must be the understatement of the decade. The attacker straddles his victim, stabs him in his eyes and then attempts to saw his entire head off with a blade. Thankfully, some brave good Samaritans intervened and tackled him before he could finish the job.

The attacker is Sudanese. The BBC is reporting that he migrated to Belfast from Dublin and was granted leave to stay in Northern Ireland. Less than twenty-four hours after the attack, politicians in Northern Ireland were already calling for "tensions not to be raised" in response, and insisting that no ethnicity or race has a monopoly on violence. Commenters in /r/ireland seem more concerned about Protestants rioting than they are about the victim of the stabbing, who will probably never be able to see again on top of his various other injuries.

The attack, the diligent but futile attempts to suppress the identity characteristics of the perpetrator, the criticisms of the people drawing entirely reasonable conclusions from the attack, the naked emotional appeals and guilt-tripping – all as tiresomely predictable as the tides. I feel like I'm in Groundhog Day.

I'm genuinely so fucking sick of this.

Damn. That’s horrific.

I’m going to, at risk of looking like said diligent but futile apologists, suggest taking the response a bit less seriously.

Think about the incentives of social media. Ingroup is allowed to do no wrong. Outgroup is not allowed to score points. Also, it’s free to say whatever shit you want, and if you get controversial-yet-brave enough, the algorithm might even reward you. Hence the Reddit hivemind.

Compare lobbying and special interest groups, which are specifically designed to spin anything and everything to their specific issue. I think it’s distasteful and against common decency, but also not particularly unique. Call it the price of free speech.

Then you’ve got the actual politicians, who in theory have skin in the game. Elected officials are incentivized to call for calm, procedural responses no matter what. The killer is in custody, the facts are out there, but Belfast still has some unburned trash cans and they’d like to keep it that way. It is rational to make milquetoast calls for public order. It is their job.

The same goes for mainstream outlets. I’m seeing articles like this which remind people, hey, burning cars is still illegal. Forming mobs is still going to get you in trouble. I think this is what I’d want from a major outlet. I would be a lot more worried if they were calling for volunteers.

I waffled on writing this because I think the crime was awful and I didn’t want to look like an apologist. Think about that dynamic. I’d like to be able to say “don’t burn buses” without also saying “this guy did nothing wrong.” I’d like to say “fuck this guy” without also saying “deport all the foreigners.” It’s hard to make that clear when the very act of calling for restraint is treated as a naked emotional appeal, a criticism of the reasonable people, an attack in the wider culture war.

Then you’ve got the actual politicians, who in theory have skin in the game. Elected officials are incentivized to call for calm, procedural responses no matter what.

This argument worked a lot better before lots and lots and lots of politicians very publicly and very repeatedly failed to do that, and continue to fail to do that, in situations where it really, really mattered.

Then you’ve got the actual politicians, who in theory have skin in the game. Elected officials are incentivized to call for calm, procedural responses no matter what. The killer is in custody, the facts are out there, but Belfast still has some unburned trash cans and they’d like to keep it that way. It is rational to make milquetoast calls for public order. It is their job.

Does that apply to Democrats during the manufactured George Floyd scandal?

I wouldn’t call it manufactured, per se. But yes, of course it applies.

Are you arguing that this is how Democrat politicians were actually behaving back then? I won't say the death itself was manufactured. The scandal, on the other hand, very much was, I think.

More or less.

It’s easy to find examples of officials doing the responsible thing.

It’s also easy to find people who danced around the violence while endorsing the sentiment. Notice how those take @FtttG’s suggested response: “we pledge to do all we can to fix the problem.”

The incentives are to call for reform, insist that you’re working to solve the problem, and downplay any violence. Only the most radical politicians flirted with endorsing the riots.

Amusing typo: "non-violet activism".

Well put.

I think appeals not to set buses on fire would get a better reaction if they were accompanied by an acknowledgement somewhere, anywhere, that at least some of the protesters have grievances which are entirely legitimate. If Keir Starmer gave a public speech in which he sincerely stated "the Henry Nowak case has exposed serious, undeniable deficiencies in British policing which I'm committed to rectifying – but please don't assault police officers", I imagine quite a few protesters in Southampton would take that to heart. Likewise here.

But when the pleas for calm, collected responses are accompanied with no admissions of wrongdoing and barely concealed insinuations that the activists are far-right nutcases who've been manipulated by Elon Musk – I think it really amounts to pouring petrol on the fire. Adults do not like to be treated like naughty children.

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” - Theodore Dalrymple

Of course the senseless violence is all the more senseless since this man shouldn't be there, he never should have reached where he is, and the people responsible for keeping him across seas and borders have instead directly inversed that charge and are instead suppressing the natives and inflicting upon them their own replacement with violent foreigners.

The UK makes it most flagrantly obvious, but it's the same or similar in Germany, in France, in Australia, and yes in the USA, too.

The reason for the scare quotes is that video footage of the assault is circulating on social media, and "stabbing attack" must be the understatement of the decade.

Knife-involved incident.

Thankfully, some brave good Samaritans intervened and tackled him before he could finish the job.

Awfully racist of the “good Samaritans” to assume the African-presenting person was in the wrong without first investigating if the white man may had done something to trigger the poor migrant’s reactivity.

I'm genuinely so fucking sick of this.

The “attack[s], the diligent but futile attempts to suppress the identity characteristics of the perpetrator[s], the criticisms of the people drawing entirely reasonable conclusions from the attack, the naked emotional appeals and guilt-tripping” will continue until morale improves.

Reddit comment from the thread about it on /r/ireland:

The act itself is horrific, and the lad who did it needs to be done for it.

But make no mistake, there are certain members of the community who have been waiting patiently for something like this as an excuse to 'call to arms'. And they are NOT the same people who go out to protests that are calling for an end to violence against women when its done by local fellas.

“Certain members of the community are not planning to protest in good faith! Plus, what about violence against women?!l”

Tiresome status: It’s all so.

But make no mistake, there are certain members of the community who have been waiting patiently for something like this as an excuse to 'call to arms'. And they are NOT the same people who go out to protests that are calling for an end to violence against women when its done by local fellas.

I'd argue that the commenter is right (except for the "excuse" part), and also that there's nothing wrong with that.

HAPPENING NOW: Stinky has fallen! It’s over for the Ukraine! Now the Banderite swine will scatter like the rats they are!

@daguerrean @Dean @Chrisprattalpharaptr

APOLOGIZE!

Apparently we've moved on to the Spit.

What is this stinky stuff?

Stinky is the gateway to Europe. Stalingrad, Thermopylae and the Fulda gap all in one. Russia’s victory is assured now.

This might be weird but I’ve been experimenting with running indoors and outdoors. I found this one singular video of a walk through Rio de Janeiro - you know one of those default “city” videos you can watch on the treadmill. It put me in such a trance state that I ended up running 8 miles just watching this hyper pixelated video on an exercise machine. Finally experienced some sort of post run endorphin. Highly recommend zoning out to the default Rio run video on a treadmill if you can.

Ukraine reburies Nazi collaborator with state honors, drawing Israeli condemnation

Israel criticized Ukraine on Monday after President Volodymyr Zelensky gave full state honors to a Ukrainian nationalist leader who was part of a movement that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

During a reburial ceremony on Sunday, Zelensky described Andriy Melnyk and his wife, Sofia Fedak-Melnyk, as “iconic Ukrainians of the 20th century who are deeply respected,” according to The New York Times.

Melnyk led one of the factions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during its collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II.

[...]

The remains of Melnyk and his wife were exhumed from Luxembourg last week and then transported to Ukraine for reburial at Kyiv’s National Military Memorial, which opened last year for soldiers killed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The reburial was quickly decried by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, which wrote in a post on X that it was “deeply troubled by such national commemorations, which come at the expense of historical truth and the memory of Holocaust victims.”

“Honoring the leader of a movement that supported and collaborated with Nazi Germany during the persecution and murder of millions of Jews undermines the moral integrity essential to Holocaust remembrance,” the post read.

[...]

Israel’s Foreign Ministry wrote on X that there is “no place for ignoring historical truth and the memory of the victims murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.”

You bury TWO Nazis in Mount Zion and Arlington cemetery, and suddenly people think you can just grab a shovel and stick the buggers in anywhere. It needs to be a tasteful, limited number of Nazis, just the good ones. Otherwise people start getting the wrong idea. Once your start building thousand-Nazi necropolis monuments in Canada you’ve crossed the line.

Grafton Street, a bustling pedestrianised street in Dublin's city centre, is one of the biggest shopping streets in the country. It's often one of the first places tourists go to when they arrive in Ireland, and accordingly on weekends will be thronged with buskers looking to make a few bob from Americans who can afford to splash out.

On South Anne Street, just off Grafton Street, there's an establishment called Club 22. I've been in there once, and the clientele was overwhelmingly made up of black men and white women (many of the latter, to my eyes, looked underage). In February of last year, the club was hosting a gig when an argument erupted outside in which a 34-year-old Nigerian asylum seeker, Quaham Babatunde, was stabbed to death. One of the perpetrators fled to Belfast where he was picked up by the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) and returned by them to Dublin. All four perpetrators were eventually charged and convicted:

Bruno Tache with an address at Trimleston, Balbriggan in Co Dublin, Rory Carr from Ard Na Gréine, Seapoint Lane in Balbriggan, David Oloo Omee of The Lawn, St Marnock's Bay, Dublin 13 and Sean Forde from Bath Road in Balbriggan, pleaded guilty to affray and assault charges.

All four men have previous convictions for violent crimes and drug dealing.

Mr Carr has 34 previous convictions, Mr Oloo Omee has 25, Mr Tache has 20 and Mr Forde has 8.

Mr Carr, Mr Tache and Mr Oloo Omee were on bail on other charges at the time of the attack while Mr Carr and Mr Tache were serving suspended sentences for other offences.

Tache and Carr received three years each. Reports from earlier in the year claim that Oloo Omee and Forde were due to be sentenced in April, but I can't find any articles about their sentencing.

(Without wishing to speak ill of the dead, the victim was no angel, having been scheduled for deportation from Italy owing to a rape allegation.)

Last weekend, history repeated itself as tragedy. The Bewley's café on Grafton St was hosting a hip-hop gig when a fight erupted outside. A 21-year-old club promoter, Qayyam Balogun, was chased to nearby Clarendon St (less than 300 metres from Club 22) and stabbed to death. Police have arrested a suspect (whose name they have yet to release), who apparently fled to Northern Ireland and then Scotland immediately after the stabbing. In the immediate aftermath of the stabbing, he apparently bragged about it online, and is well-known to the police, being out on bail for a different stabbing at the time. Police have also arrested his girlfriend.

The whole thing is just a bit eerie. Two Nigerian men stabbed to death in a very affluent part of Dublin, separated in time and space by less than eighteen months and 300 metres, by killers with mile-long rap sheets who subsequently fled to Northern Ireland.

I know progressives tend to be big believers in "rehabilitative justice", but I have to ask the obvious question. Does anyone actually believe that any of these five men will ever go on to be productive, law-abiding members of society? How much of a hardened criminal do you have to be to rack up thirty-four previous convictions by the age of 22? This most recent perpetrator stabbed someone, got arrested and charged, was mercifully granted bail, almost immediately stabbed someone else, then went on social media and bragged about it. This is a lack of forethought and impulse control I'd expect from a prepubescent. It's extremely difficult for me to avoid the conclusion that this man will be in and out of prison for his entire life, every few years getting out only to stab someone else and be back inside within a year. His life will end in one of two ways: either someone will finally stab him before he manages to stab them, or he'll realise he's getting too old for this shit and live out the rest of his miserable life on some combination of social welfare and disability payments for a fictitious medical condition. His entire life will be lived at the taxpayer's largesse.

What the hell does one do with a person like this?

being out on bail for a different stabbing at the time.

This isn't really addressing the core of your post but something I don't understand is why so many legal systems seem to allow clearly dangerous people like this to be allowed out on bail. What's the argument supposed to be?

Frankly, at this point I'd be all in favour of only allowing bail for defendants charged with non-violent offenses.

Unfortunately, knowing the UK, I'm fairly sure "violent-offense" would quickly be redefined to mostly mean "people posting non-governmental approved memes on social media".

It's a combination of resource stewardship and modern day politics, as everything is.

A few things make this vaguely feasible though - the criminal underclass is the criminal underclass, these people are out there "safely" being repeat offenders without causing significant issues, we just notice the fraction that do cause problem and not the 9 others who don't. Likewise a large fraction of people causing trouble are mentally ill or behaving in a way that gets them in front of the healthcare system, if you decarcerate you hope they head over to medicine and get managed that way.

The steelman is that two- or even three-year delays between initial arrest and actual trial are common for any nontrivial crime, especially in Blue Tribe spheres; that restricting bail makes arrests into a serious punishment, sometimes even the full breadth of any plausible punishment, and thus police officers into judges; and turns the jails into psuedo-prisons and final adjudication of charges into advisory opinions.

I'd argue that's more of a reason we should fix the fucking trial system, or, failing that, do a better job of separating dangerous alleged criminals from nondangerous ones than a judge squinting. But it's not a fake argument.

That makes sense. I agree with you though that this seems like a reason to streamline other parts of the process; having violently criminals just wandering around seems like a pretty blatant societal failure mode.

club promoter

Side note, but is this actually a job? Or just a fig leaf for payments? Like, what does a "club promoter" actually do? I can imagine a few legitimate things (put up flyers, social media programs, etc.), but I have a weird and baseless hunch none of what I'm thinking is what this fellow was doing.

Contrary to the other responses, the job can extend to include many of the responsibilities of management of a club. It can be a real, full time job.

The promoter can be the one to book/organize/run logistics for live acts and DJs, control the guest list, be head host, run all of marketing, head of sales, ect.

I think a lot of adults who work professionally in nightclub management and operations (almost all of them, really) start as promoters. Being able to consistently get people to show up is the single central requirement when starting a club, and traditional lenders (even those who are willing to lend to restaurants and bars) balk at clubs because of their compliance issues, almost universal ties to drugs and organized crime, extreme failure rate and high likelihood of being defrauded even if the business is profitable. The investors are therefore almost always other club owners or investors, or dumb rich kids (ie club goers).

Yes, your job is essentially to get hot women into the club so men come in and buy drinks. Clubs work a bit on a network effect. Nobody wants to go to a club that is empty, everyone wants a “popping” club

Yes, your job is essentially to get hot women into the club so men come in and buy drinks.

So I reckon you need to be a hot man for that?

No, not exactly.

I'd guess you need to be some male equivalent of a hot woman, in this case likely charismatic.

Fun little marketing anecdote about this. There's a new-ish bar/club in my city, walked by a few times after it opened and there was originally never more than one or two people waiting to get in on Saturday nights, if any.

A few weeks ago, they put up a big sign on the outside window about how you could use some app to pay extra to skip the long lines, along with some stanchions. Next thing you know, the place is packed and there's always a huge line to get in. Nice piece of social engineering.

In Ireland and the UK it's often a part-time job for university students, they'll go around campus selling tickets for events and earn commission. I haven't seen any suggestion that this wasn't his real job. I'm not ruling out the possibility that he may have been supplementing his income by selling drugs, but many club promoters earn their money entirely legitimately.

Much as the hang em all crowd is obviously correct, polite European society cannot countenance irredeemability. Even white european murderers like Brevik get consideration and comforts that would be considered insane luxuries by shithole dwellers, and the black drug dealers offering cheap drugs to teenage girls to conquer Europe through the womb are the actual victims here so polite Europeans can't do anything bad.

You know what polite Europeans can so? Be good!

Every sob story streetshitter traumatized convert needs the care and love the Polite European demands they be entitled to, and the state is obviously failing its duty to accommodate theae poor traumatized people of colour, so obviously the polite european should take them in. Every refugee must be colocated with any polite european as a sponsor. Sponsors get a special twitter and bluesky handle and invites to MEP functions and an entitlement of supermarket end of day castoffs. Since refugees can't actually commit crimes because their trauma overwhelmed their innocent brains the sponsor will bear all legal responsibility for the actions of the precious migrants and go to jail on behalf of the refugee. Oh, of course this extends to funders too. Soros, Carnegie, MSF.

Put money where ones mouth is. Sponsor a refugee. Let him into your house. Fucking do it.

Much as the hang em all crowd is obviously correct, polite European society cannot countenance irredeemability.

Unless the the 'irredeemability' of 'Nazis' is concerned.

Put money where ones mouth is. Sponsor a refugee. Let him into your house. Fucking do it.

Reminds me of this oldie but a goodie: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JYtbLCa65eA

The same thing, Aboriginal land rights edition: https://youtube.com/watch?v=u5OlBT2OcGg

Idealism is a cancer.

Imo - hanging, drawing, quartering, in public.

What the hell does one do with a person like this?

If I wanted to channel some Dread Jim, I would say public humiliation and then public execution. Make it very clear that they are not a role model and make them look as pathetic as possible, so every would-be gangster can see exactly badass they're going to look as they're publicly shamed before being hanged. The general deterrent value is debatable, but the specific deterrent value is quite high (hard to re-offend after being executed).

rehabilitative justice

Rehabilitative justice mostly doesn't work, it just allows repeat convicts more time and resources to spread their violent genes in your population. Better to do capital punishment after the n+1 conviction and if your society has the stomach for it, take out their useful organs to help law-abiding productive people live longer. Asset seizures of convicts are of course a given if we're already taking their organs.

Does capital punishment sometimes get the wrong person? Surely it does, but the general population is probably satisfied if police forces can blame and catch the right criminal most of the time (90%? 95%?), perfection is unrealistic. Is organ harvesting a crime against humanity? Maybe it is, but it's only used to mitigate the tax burden of dealing with criminals, so it's not necessary. Harvesting organs of repeat criminal offenders is just a way to force convicts to repay their victims, which includes taxpayers, in the event they have no other resources to give.

I further propose that a convicted Nigerian's organs be given to a law-abiding Nigerian as a priority on the organ recipient wait list. Non-nigerians would only have second priority on the convict organ transplant list. In this way we sustain Nigerians with better genes, and avoid the apperance of Nigerians being harvested purely for the benefit of other ethnicities.

Restorative justice was a stupid attempt to reduce black incarceration rates by playing to the in vogue theories about breaking the truama spiral. It presumes blacks didnt have agency and were caught in a spiral of escalation and if you just talk it out you'd avoid further costs. State administrations loved it because it allowed shrinking the bloating prison and school security budgets and the NGOs promised it would help blacks.

Every crime problem is downstream of the inconvenient fact that crime commission rates are disproportionate and blacks especially complain about being arrested more without considering that they commit crimes that fucking much more often. Rehabilitative/restorative justice makes the VICTIM forgive the attacker and thus removes the crime from the official books.

Actually the solution of making good nigerians beneficiaries of policing bad nigerians has precedent in Europe. Algerians in the French security establishment are especially clear eyed about how fucking shitty Africans are and have no qualms recommending extraterritorial action.

Great now all George Soros needs to do is frame a healthy white guy, or jew depending on the current Schrodinger's minority status, in order to get his heart transplant. Way to invent the rich harvesting the organs of the poor.

The rich already harvest the organs of the poor because the rich already game the system to be prioritized.

https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/study-finds-link-between-income-and-organ-transplant-access

If it's going to happen anyway society at large may as well get some benefit from it while eliminating criminality.

I suspect Soros has no problem getting any transplant he needs, no need to frame anyone when he is going to be the top of the waiting list anyway.

What do you mean, "invent"? Canada has had MAiD for years.

But Canada's MAiD agents are too busy targeting soldiers with bodies ruined by war, not exactly prime blood boy donor targets. Maybe they are building Frankensteinian super soldiers from the bodies?

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