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Going to jump in with what I want to see discussed:
Police and political leaders in Northern Ireland call for calm after Belfast knife attack.
What we know is that a MENA immigrant has attacked a native in the street, gouged out his eyes, and was attempting to behead him when stopped by passers-by.
Details beyond that seem shaky. I've seen the attacker described as Somali, though Sudanese is more consistent. I've seen the victim described as a man in his 40s, though 15-year old boy is also popular. And I've seen that the victim's life was saved, but also that he's perished in the hospital.
What's certain is that the major concern of the people in charge is, of course, that this is liable to upset the native population.
Perhaps that's more understandable than usual because of where it happened. Belfast! A storied town. Across twitter I see various historically-enemy paramilitary sympathizers calling to set aside their differences and unite against the common enemy; that it doesn't matter who controls Northern Ireland unless there's any such place left to save.
Last I heard, all major transport routes into and out of the city have been shut down, businesses are forced to close at 17:30, and curfews have been established. The place seems to be gearing up for major rioting.
Is it just me or have the straws been landing more heavily, lately, on the camel's back?
And, provided that the historically-armed underground belligerent factions of the area haven't withered into insignificance; provided that they do get serious about uniting and using force; might they serve as a template, or at least an inspiration, for other places?
I believe Kulak once predicted that the flashpoint for organized European resistance would happen in Northern Ireland.
I am completely tired of this shit. Europe needs to take its lands back. I’m tired of it in America. If you were ever curious how pogroms happen then this is it, but I have a feeling in the past it was for far smaller infractions. A minority group then probably would have been smart enough to handle this guy first.
It feels to me like this is getting close to Catholic Just War theory. Your government won’t deal with this which would then devolve power down to the common man.
As someone who losts his home and some wealth to white flight I understand the anger.
Europeans democratically vote for politicians who pursue pro-immigration policies. The immigration is, roughly speaking, the expression of Europeans' collective preference. One can make an argument that "they vote against immigration but get immigration anyway" - however, the reality is that if people consistently voted against immigration as one of their absolute upper-echelon top priorities, they would get politicians who actually stop immigration. This is because then it would become clear to politicians that being for immigration or running against immigration and then doing nothing about it means the end of a viable political career. I think that allowing mass unfiltered immigration of people from violent and backwards cultures is a very bad idea for Europe, but Europeans, as a group, do not vote like they see it as being critically important.
I believe that to fundamentally fix Europe's approach to immigration you would have to either change voters' minds or end democracy. I would much prefer the former, since in my view ending democracy to fix immigration would be replacing one major problem with another major problem.
Indeed, to stop immigration effectively would likely require destroying the ECHR, and ultimately completely undoing/redoing the EU.
I think this underestimates the effectiveness of the last 50-75 years of propaganda on what kind of behavior is acceptable and for whom.
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Wrong, they vote for politicians who campaign on reducing or reforming immigration and then pursue pro-immigration policy once in office. There isn't a single EU country that doesn't have a clear majority of voters demanding less immigration.
Edit: whoops totally misread the last line, nvm
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It’s not so clear cut. Yes, voters often vote against mass immigration but not always. The votes for Hollande and Macron in France were for center-left candidates who had at most the mildest dislike (if at all) of mass immigration. In England, the Labour Party destroyed the Conservatives in the election campaigns of 2001 and 2004, in which the top Tory message (in both cases) was about stopping Labour’s mass immigration experiment. Carney won in Canada recently.
The electoral record shows that the public is occasionally betrayed, yes, but it also has not consistently voted against mass immigration for 30+ years as some in the right say. Even since 2015 the most anti immigration candidates haven’t consistently won.
Public polling has generally been against immigration even if they don't always vote singularly on the issue.
The median voter (remembering that the old and rich vote more often than the working-age and poor) likes the consequences of mass immigration, apart from crime. Almost all voters like their noncriminal immigrant friends, neighbours and co-workers and want them to stay. To make mass deportations a winning issue at the ballot box, you need to convince the median voter that the people you are deporting are disproportionally likely to be criminals - which turns out to relatively easy, particularly when they actually are.
Dominic Cummings always said that the idea of competently managed mass immigration (i.e. a Canadian/Australian points system) focus grouped as popular in the UK.
I dunno about Australia, but the main issue with Canada's point system is chain migration and alternative pathways. Coming to Canada saying "I want to immigrate here because I want better opportunities" is appropriately hard, but what often happens is getting accepted by a school that's mostly a facade (it's rarely recognized schools, it's "mall campuses" that are nominally linked with real institutions) then after moving and "studying" (usually working most of the time, then doing whatever the minimum is necessary to keep qualifying as a student; the "school" doesn't care, it's in on the grift) they leverage easier immigration pathways for people who have studied here, because that too polls well (and sending back students polls badly). Because it sounds reasonable to say that since someone was able to study and work part time to support his studies here, they are probably a good fit to stay here if they want. If that's what it was, if it was only people who truly studied and integrated, and worked alongside Canadian nationals, as opposed to moving here under false pretense and working "immigrant jobs" (Uber, delivery, immigrant dominated fast foods like Tim Hortons), then I'd support it.
Then there's chain migration, once one person gets their citizenship, they can start sponsoring family to go through a pathway that also bypasses the points system.
As someone with direct experience of the Canadian immigration system, this is not inherent to a points-based system: it's a product of deliberate choices, mostly by Trudeau.
The fraud problem, for example, became exponentially worse after COVID.
And a lot of this could be easily solved by things like a country cap. It's not that difficult to make it harder to coordinate fraud.
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When voters have only choice between Pepsi Coca and Coca Cola...
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That's really not a fair claim to make about a country with an electoral system that penalises voting for anyone but the two main parties through FPTP. If I'm an anti-immigration voter in 2010, the rational thing for me is to vote Conservative, because if I don't then it increases the chance of Labour winning, and they are likely to increase immigration even more.
Of course, the Tories committed electoral suicide through the Boriswave so now the mantle of the right has finally passed to a truly anti-immigration party, but you can hardly blame previous British voters for refusing to throw away their votes on the BNP or whatever.
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The average Western voting body is increasingly getting pushed to vote for strong populists since those are the only ones they have faith in actually making the requested changes. The center right is dying since they receive a strong popular mandate on immigration then inevitably just let the same unelected bureaucrats who are working on the same assumptions continue the same activities
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Of the major European states I think the UK has the best case that large masses of the public have been voting against mass migration via the Tories and Brexit just for that to...never happen for years, followed by the Boriswave from the same people who campaigned to exploit these feelings.
Now that it's failed with traditional parties, they're seeking alternatives. The Tories have suffered a pretty steep fall after their actions and Farage barely got to enjoy his front-runner status before he was being attacked from his right.
Exactly. Saying the brexiteers said 'We want far less eastern Europeans' and then going 'sure thing, here's infinity Africans' is pretty clearly not what the Brexit enthused had in mind
No, but it is what the Brexiteers said they were going to do. Vote leave campaigned in existing Commonwealth immigrant communities saying that ending EU freedom of movement would create more space for Commonwealth immigrants, told business leaders that ending EU freedom of movement would create more space for work permit immigrants, and told the electorate that the Australian and Canadian points systems were good models for a post-Brexit immigration policy at a time when Australia and Canada had much higher legal immigration than the UK.
While the Boriswave was happening (but before the small boats became the dominant media narrative around immigration), Dominic Cummings said that the British people were not unhappy with the Boriswave because, unlike immigration of EU citizens under freedom of movement, it was under democratic control. Reader, he was wrong.
Boris was always planning to do a Boriswave, and made no effort to conceal this.
I really think Cummings is probably the single best example of a midwit and a midwit magnet there is. Shirking responsibility is one thing, it’s hard to ‘hate’ Boris for the Boriswave because really he’s clearly never thought much about anything and likely signed off on it without thinking. A terrible leader and vacuous jester of a person who cheated on every woman who ever loved him? Sure. But there was no pretense of anything else. Cummings painted himself as an intellectual and then pretends he was bamboozled at the consequences of his actions and words and every bad thing was just someone betraying him or not listening correctly.
Cummings' real-world achievements, including leading the successful Vote Leave campaign, are incompatible with being a midwit. What Cummings does appear to be is a high-IQ quokka who sees himself as a political genius because of his proven success in manipulating the great unwashed with carefully A/B tested and focus grouped nuggets of emotional manipulation. But as soon as he tried to be a political player in his own right rather than Michael Gove's henchman, he had to engage in conventional political intrigue, at which he proved to be about as cunning as Baldrick after eating too many turnips.
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Yeah but even there you had Farage implying that multiple times through the campaign, so calling it a total bait and switch is questionable.
The bigger example is Boris’ 2019 election victory and subsequent Boriswave.
I don't think that's fair. There were noises around "we should be getting in the best from around the world, not literally any rando from Eastern Europe" but going from that to infinity Africans and especially infinity low-paid Africans seems a stretch.
It is a stretch but it’s also a stretch when people like Farage and Cummings claim they have no responsibility for the broad character of the debate, especially in the latter case.
You seem to be reacting to something specific that I'm not aware of. Would you mind going into a bit more detail?
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It seems to me that representative democracy is quite capable of producing outcomes that the populace does not actually want.
The city of Minneapolis held a referendum on whether to abolish its police force. The referendum lost, unequivocally. Not even remotely a possibility of passing.
The same populace that voted overwhelmingly against a referendum to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department, elected a city council that is overwhelmingly in favor of abolishing the Minneapolis Police Department. This same populace also voted, in the same election, to reduce the powers of that city council and vest those powers in the office of the mayor, whose position on police abolition could be described as "are you fucking serious?", instead.
Despite anti-policing sentiment clearly not being a position that can win democratically, the city is nevertheless governed by an anti-police city council, and is still recovering from anti-policing riots that dealt over half a billion dollars in damages to homes and businesses.
I have no trouble believing that Europe could elect politicians who proceed to pass policies that would never win as referendums, or that devastating riots could emerge from a minority sentiment.
Yes, but mass immigration has been a problem for at least a decade now in Europe. By this point, European populations have had plenty of time to hold politicians' feet to the fire electorally and ensure that they actually curb immigration.
No European electorate has ever voted for mass immigration.
European powerbrokers have systematically lied and deceived their populations about the nature and scale of immigration - for example, the wave of post-Soviet states joining the EU in 2003 with "guarantees" that it wouldn't disrupt local labour markets - which it of course did.
All polling, in all EU nations, in every decade going back to the 1950s (Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech polled at around 75% popular agreement when he made it), has consistently shown a clear rejection of more immigration - even Germany in 2015, at the height of pro-refugee mania, had a consistent majority polled saying the country could not handle the influx of people and that it would harm the country in the long-term.
Establishment parties ranging from Macron's centrist LREM/Renaissance all the way to Meloni's "neo-fascist" FdI consistently make reducing the most undesirable forms of immigration a centre-point of their political campaigning, only to drop it the moment they enter elected office.
Even when elected leaders actually decide to push through popular anti-immigration reform, they instantly falter before supra-sovereign EU institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights, which they could of course easily contest or ignore, like Poland and Hungary did without issue, but mysteriously always choose to give up without a fight.
The main thing holding European electorates back from going all-in on anti-immigration politics is our bourgeois chauvinism against the extremely prole-coded far-right, which is loathed and despised less because of their specific politics, but because they represent and proudly adhere to the trashy, unsophisticated, non-college educated Kevins of European working class society. Most bourgeois/college-educated Europeans would probably literally rather have more immigration which they increasingly openly hate than be ruled by a segment of European society they consider irredeemably beneath them.
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Has anyone in the West ever actually voted for mass immigration? It seems instead like no population ever wants mass immigration, but whoever they vote for it happens anyway.
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Which British party would you have voted for in the 2019 general election, in order to achieve this goal?
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Manipulation of procedural outcomes is quite powerful, but it is not infinitely powerful. Because its power is based on exception, it is utterly dependent on the basic reality exception deviates from. Manipulators of procedural outcomes defect against those cooperating with the construction and maintenance of procedure; without sturdy norms to defect against, they would have no leverage with which to generate and wield meaningful power.
People want results. The problem with setting up a system specifically tailored to deny them the results they desire is that no matter how many convolutions you generate between what they want and what you're giving them, sooner or later they figure out that you are, in fact, part of the system, and thus one of the variables subject to modification in pursuit of a better future.
Democracy, like Free Speech, is a spook.
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When the EU was up for a vote, it lost many times across many countries. They kept having votes until it won.
Why did it ever eventually win?
They stopped asking the demos and just held a vote among themselves.
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Why is the moon full?
I don't care how many times someone asks me if I want to eat pieces of shit for breakfast. I'd say no every time.
In that case, why don't we start having regular referendums about abolishing the EU, and reverting every reform they orchestrated. Can't hurt, right?
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UK did vote for Brexxit and got immigration anyway. There is also a huge chunk of the populace that is now foreign born. A hecklers veto type thing would still seem to be possible as in the native Brit’s become ungovernable. I would guess 30% of Europe or close to it are very anti-immigration.
As to No immigration or Democracy I will gladly side with No Immigration. Dictatorship just isn’t that bad and it’s mostly American propaganda that makes you fear it.
A dictatorship is like deciding to dismount the brakes on your car to save weight before a road trip, or sharing a needle with a stranger. There is certainly a possibility that it will not be a big deal and you get Park Chung-Hee. There is also the potential for unlimited disaster.
Us Germans have experiences both with dictators and democratic leaders. If I have to choose, I will pick a democratic leader over the coin toss which is a dictator. The worst leader Germany ever had (by pretty much any metric) is mustache guy, with Wilhelm II having worked hard to earn a well-deserved second place.
You are anti-immigration, so you probably hate what Merkel did in 2015. I have lived through it, and I can assure you that it compares to what happened 1939-45 like a sparrow compares to an A380. I will strongly prefer a candidate from a party whose policies I do not share but who is committed to democracy to a candidate whose policies I favor but who would rule as a dictator.
Completely opposite models of failure play out in different time scales.
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Like I said American propaganda. You immediately jumped to with a dictator and used Hitler. Who I guess I could remind me you would have won Germany the entire world without the American involvement.
Democracy hasn’t worked as well in the third world. Successful Democracies are largely correlated with high hbd qualities. Africans don’t view Democracy the same way. Either form has a ton of corruption but sometimes the dictators are better and law and order. Pinochet set Chile up to be well. House of Saud has been a success.
Basically on an immigration debate and whether a dictator would be better it basically ends up being it’s the same thing. If you import a lot of third world immigrants at best you become Brazil. You will have a dysfunctional Democracy and won’t be able to maintain all the institutions that make a good Democracy.
The American involvement was predictable risk of being at war with the UK. Hitler rejected the UK's ultimatum to cancel the invasion of Poland anyway and after he did that the UK declared war, as did France.
Even if American non-involvement could have somehow been guaranteed, going to war with the UK and France was a very risky move. In the real timeline, most things went well for Germany in the first 3 years of the war. However, the UK and France together with their colonial holdings were economically stronger than the Axis powers and because of the English Channel and the power of the UK's air force and navy, Germany had no way of knocking the UK out of the war. It's possible that if a few things had gone differently, if the French had made some better decisions, Germany would have gotten bogged down when trying to invade France rather than gaining a swift victory. And there was always the Soviet Union looming in the background.
Basically, Hitler's foreign policy failed to honor the "only go to war when success is reasonably likely" maxim and should be evaluated as a massive failure despite Germany's successes in the pre-war period and in the first 3 years of the war. If he had stopped after Czechoslovakia and then managed to attain a durable peace with the other relevant great powers, then one could evaluate his foreign policy as a massive success. But he didn't stop.
As for democracy, I agree that it is not a panacea and that its successes are partly correlated with having good human capital. I prefer living in a democracy, though. I don't want to live in Pinochet's Chile, Saudi Arabia, or Hitler's Germany. I'd prefer not facing the possibility of imprisonment, torture, state murder, and so on for expressing my political ideas, for example.
Pinochet’s Chile is the best LATAM country to be from. Richer than Argentina without all the nicer of Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico and let’s not start on Venezuela….they wish they had a Pinochet now.
Of the options you give America and Europe aren’t talking about living in America and Europe. I will gladly choose the House of Saud over living in Somalia. Which is basically Europe in a generation.
The problem you have is you still think you live in Germany. That’s not what is coming.
As I heard someone on a forum put it many years ago, if I'm forced to choose between fascism and communism (I'd prefer neither) then I choose fascism. Because the secret police will come for me at some point either way, but when the fascist secret police arrest me I'll have a full stomach.
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I think a dictator must by nature either be vastly more competent than most others (because competition) or else at least controlled by someone who is. Little such pressure in a democracy, and especially a two-party democracy.
A self-made dictator, probably has to be competent to seize power. What do you think about monarchies?
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"If you voted harder, you'd get $thing" does not support the argument for "$opppsite_of_thing is the expression of collective preference".
Also, it's not a "reality". A politician promising to deliver you something as the absolute top priority can still do the opposite, as they often do.
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