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Notes -
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.
The flashpoint happens when people who don’t normally riot riot. These people have been rioting for a hundred years. They have huge walls in their city precisely because they’re sectarian conflict enjoyers. There are few non-natives in Northern Ireland, the government will quietly move some of them to England and things will quiet down.
What many Americans fail to understand about most major Western European cities (ie not Belfast) is that the battle has been lost a long time ago. In Paris, London, Brussels and in many tier two cities in these countries (Birmingham, Marseille, Rotterdam), natives are far below 50% of the population, and most of those who remain are old. My personal calculation is that perhaps as little as 20-25% of London’s young male population (unless you stretch to include outer, outer suburbs practically in Essex) is wholly indigenous, maybe the bottom end of that range. Other major cities like Vienna, Malmo, Frankfurt, Berlin, Lyon, even Geneva and Zurich are not too far behind.
You can’t start a revolt with those demographics. In fact other than the sectarian history, the reason these riots are happening in Belfast and didn’t happen in London after eg Lee Rigby is precisely because even then the demographics just didn’t exist to riot. The only riots in the last 20 years in London were the largely immigrant ones in 2011.
Just as in the US, the last realistic chance to alter history with regards to mass immigration was probably in the mid-late 1990s, maybe the early 2000s (before around 2003) in parts of Western Europe at the latest. The choice now will be between a kind of Muslim leftist social democracy and whatever corrupt rightist caudillo strongman regime emerges out of the remnants of the traditional hard right (as it already is in France under Bardella, and will in Britain under whoever replaces Farage, or indeed even him), as per the Latin American and arguably even Putinist example. The former will be vaguely green, red and gaza flavored, and the latter will have some aesthetically christian and anti-islam elements, but neither will be truly nativist. One need only look at how Le Pen, Bardella and Meloni have moderated in recent years to see that.
But remigration? We’re talking about old and rapidly aging countries with fractured populations, right-wing-but-tiny militaries, extensive surveillance, well-funded domestic intelligence agencies, demoralized and diverse police, disarmed populations, low morale and now - thanks to AI - the ability to monitor, disrupt and analyze population-level movements and communications on social media, in CCTV footage etc en masse in a way the Stasi couldn’t have hoped for. These are not ripe conditions for a revolution.
I think you're overestimating how entrenched the new population is and underestimating how reliant they are on gibs to be viable where they are. It won't necessarily be at pitchfork point but it's largely charity keeping these people going and they've demonstrated the ability to keep shifting onwards for potential better deals
Even being homeless with zero ‘gibs’ (and there will never be zero) in Western Europe is better than being an average person in a true hellhole country. This guy was from Sudan. That is one of the worst places in the world to live, either in the desperately poor and violent south or in Sudan proper which is undergoing an extraordinarily brutal civil war in which countless people have been killed.
Even if you rely on handouts and charity, you get more in a rich place than a poor one, that’s why beggars (and trick or treaters) classically go to wealthier and more trafficked neighborhoods. Better to starve on the streets of Belfast than Sudan. At least in the former you are less likely to be gang raped and tortured before dying, and someone will probably take pity on you. These people are never ever ever going home voluntarily.
Yeah but like most of these people came through other European nations to the UK due to the perception of it being the best deal. If UK suddenly becomes a notably worse deal than France they're fully capable of going back. You just need to be less attractive than the median eurozone gibs.
You're also vastly overstating how bad life is in the countries of origin especially for those with sufficient resources to make a multi-year refugee odyssey viable. There's a reason they frequently go back to visit on holiday
They go back because they maintain family links.
I was just talking to my dad and he said it was actually dead during Eid because everyone went back to the provinces. Those are poorer places than even what counts as a metropole in a tiny, sub-$1000 GDP per capita country. But they want to see their people.
Make no mistake though, they'll be back for work on Monday. And if they were told they couldn't come back after they left, they're having Eid right where they work.
And there's some obvious benefits that come with having foreign currency in these countries. But they're gonna have to come back and earn more. My mother is in this cycle of bouncing between Saudi Arabia (for the Hajj/Umrah) and then back home to see people and relax and then back to America for work, depending on what her bank balance looks like.
There's no genteel way out of this. This idea that you're going to cut off a spigot here or there and it'll stop is the sort of bloodless wonkery that people like Starmer are driven by. If there was some solution like that it'd already be found. It's not going to happen.
We don’t need to kick out everyone; we need to stop new people coming and get 30%-50% to self deport.
Cut off gibs but offer exit gibs.
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