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So the EU has renewed the general refugee status of Ukrainians in Europe. Obviously this is reasonable on humanitarian grounds, war is terrible and if we can shelter people safely away from it it is the decent thing to do. (Just try not to apply similar standards to Gaza, a conflict which has a far higher casualty rate among the civilian population.)
However, there is a new provision:
Personally I am a bit of two minds about the Ukraine war. On the one hand, I am all for my taxes paying for Ukrainian weapons for as long as Ukraine cares to fight Russia. Punishing a defector against the rule based international order while also weakening the main NATO adversary seems an excellent investment.
On the other hand, Ukraine seems like the kind of meat-grinder conflict like WW1 where the best option is not to fight it, and the second best option is to stop fighting sooner rather than condemning another few hundred thousands to death in a likely futile attempt to change the strategic picture. In WW1, among millions of volunteers butchering each other in the trenches, the wisest were probably the few who decided that they did not give a fuck about any dead archduke and would try to reach a neutral country rather than being compelled to murder and get murdered by the crazies who had taken over their countries.
My understanding is that Ukraine (unlike the German basic law) does not recognize conscious objectors to military service. Yet we only extend the right to refuse military service to the Ukrainian men who had already fled from the draft, but not the ones coming now.
Most of the risk of death is actually to military personnel. Numbers are contested, but it seems that being in the armed forces probably increases one's risk of death by more than 10x compared to civilians. If anyone has a claim that they are in physical danger from the war, it is military-age men.
I am also wondering what the long term plan of the EU is. In two years, will Merz and vdL tell the Ukrainian boys who fled to Germany at age 12 that they are now old enough to die for their country and ship them back?
I think we need to continue giving Ukraine money in the long run. For the sole fact that saving the innocent people in the country is a good for its own sake.
I agree that this is an excellent reason, but is contingent on the outcome of the war.
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Well they should. Germany should just summarily execute the draft dodgers- shipping them back to their country is a light sentence.
Should we also execute Russian draft dodgers?
Also, should we generally enforce other countries laws? Send back the North Korean defector, or the girl who fled an abusive marriage in Afghanistan?
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Amusingly understated way to say Tinder dates and nightclub carousel riding will continue for Ukrainian women while any Ukrainian men should get sent to the trenches to be shot at and bombed.
gordon_ramsay.jpg:
EU to black and brown migrants: “Oh dear, oh dear, gorgeous”EU to Ukrainian men fleeing conscription: “You fucking donkey”You repost that meme over and over, but Arun Pudur's citations are "per media reports." Yes, I'm sure if you search Tinder for "Ukrainian women" you will find a lot.
Are there any actual numbers indicating just how many Ukrainian women have left Ukraine and joined Tinder? Do you know what percentage of Ukrainian women have fled compared to the percentage of Ukrainian men who have fled?
I'm assuming his larger point is that Ukrainian women, unlike men, are not being drafted, either for military service or labour (I guess) and are generally not prevented from leaving the country.
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Happy to share awareness among those who are less initiated and to remind those who may have forgotten.
Playing along with the (rhetorical) question, over 30% of Ukrainian women aged 20-29 were already gone as of May 2023 (at the latest, since that was when the report was published) vs. pre-war, as opposed to 4-5% of Ukrainian men (a minority but material fraction of whom may had literally died in war). As of or before May 2023 this would already have been quite dispiriting for a young Ukrainian man getting shot at and/or bombed in the trenches (if he hadn't already died), much less facing a 2:3 girl:guy ratio in those age groups if/when he returns to civilian life (assuming he survives). Competition from 30-39 year old men for 20-29 women would also be more intense than usual given the even greater relative outmigration of 30-39 year-old women.
The ratio from the May 2023 report would have only deteriorated given any Ukrainian outmigration that has occurred since the time the figures were originally gathered (the ratio declines linearly for any proportional outmigration, for example, another 4-5% decrease from prewar in young Ukrainian men and 32-33% decrease from prewar in young Ukrainian women would mean about a remaining 1:3 girl:guy ratio).
Women, especially young attractive women, are generally present on Tinder and/or other online dating sites, if not Instagram, TikTok, SnapChat, etc. No marginal joining needed to continue thotting about, just maintaining or augmenting one's presence would be more than enough.
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I strongly suspect that most people with "FREE PALESTINE" in their Instagram bios don't want to let Palestinian refugees into Europe (or anywhere outside of Gaza), because that would constitute "ethnic cleansing".
My guess would be that most westerners on the Free Palestine side would be pretty cool with Gazans coming to Europe, given their broad support of third world immigration generally.
Now Israel's Arab neighbours, they are the ones who don't want the Palestinians.
It isn't difficult to find examples of Westerners who explicitly argue that allowing Palestinian civilians to leave Gaza would amount to ethnic cleansing.
Yeah but a lot of that'd depend on framing.
They're largely against sending them en-masse to neighboring countries. If either an individual family wanted to come to America, or somehow the entire population was going to be airlifted to an affluent Western country I think that most of those types would be for it.
The article I linked to in the Journal was specifically about countries like Spain, Ireland and Norway taking in refugees.
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I do not think that this is a common objection.
Providing a better alternative to anyone living in shitty conditions is generally not considered ethnic cleansing, especially not on part of the party providing the alternative (unless it is also responsible for creating the shitty conditions).
"We can't take you, because then we would be complicit in ethnic cleansing" is a reasoning on par with "I can't unlock your shackles, because then you might resist and I would be responsible for a violent rape". I do not recall seeing either in the wild.
From AP News, Why Egypt and other Arab countries are unwilling to take in Palestinian refugees from Gaza:
Obviously I don't believe these people. The reason Egypt doesn't want to accept refugees from Gaza is the same reason they built a massive wall along the border which extends several feet below ground level: they know that if Gazans come into Egypt, they will cause trouble. But the stated position of the Egyptian government is that accepting Gazan refugees into Egypt is tantamount to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and plenty of Western people seem to accept this reasoning at face value.
See also this article in The Journal (kind of like the Irish equivalent of the Guardian):
Palestinians in Gaza: do they have a right to seek asylum elsewhere?:
This was just a cursory Google on my phone, and it wasn't difficult to find three completely separate sources making the same basic argument: that allowing Palestinian civilians to flee Gaza amounts to ethnically cleansing it, and that it is only just to sacrifice said civilians on the altar of an independent Palestinian state, even if they would prefer not to be so sacrificed.
Eh. The fundamental argument that if you respond to "Country X occupies the land and immiserates the people" by taking in all the people and giving them a better life, you make country X's job very easy and hasten the opportunity for them to do it to you next, is sound enough, both for X=Israel and X=Russia. The fundamental difference here is that the Eurocrat lobby assert their mandate over anyone who would stand against them, within or without their dominion, by claiming moral superiority as the defenders of universal individual human rights, and to my best knowledge Egypt does no such thing. By doing this, but then still turning around and making their military convenience trump those same notions they just declared universal (e.g. when browbeating the internal opposition that takes issue with their importing of Muslim refugees), they are guilty of hypocrisy. In my eyes, official hypocrisy, being a meta-level crime against the very concept of principles, is a worse crime than any object-level violation of principles can be.
(Those who build moral frameworks to protect hypocrisy, like the concept of "whataboutism", get close to being yet another level of abstraction up, thus deserving their own deeper circle of hell.)
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When Arab countries say this, they are not sincere. They don't care for the Palestinians specifically to any degree, they just care about using the Palestinians as a weapon against Israel. Actually caring about the Palestinians is limited to the Palestinians themselves and to left-wing Westerners, and I don't think left-wing Westerners mind them immigrating any more than other immigrants (though they may be inconsistent about immigration in general).
Maybe we should ship them to Madagascar or something.
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This is perfectly compatible with Westerners absorbing their position uncritically.
Yeah. This is the perfect rhetorical situation for those countries since it lets them not take the refugees whilst ultimately being able to push associated blame onto Israel.
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I know the Arabs don't give a shit about the Palestinians, but The Journal is a left-leaning Irish outlet quite forcefully arguing that it would be wrong for Ireland to accept Palestinian refugees (and I'm pretty confident I could find plenty of articles in which they argue the opposite about those coming from Ukraine). E.g.:
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I think you're almost exactly wrong.
https://old.reddit.com/r/uknews/comments/1uxxd2g/family_of_18_from_gaza_wins_human_rights/
This news is being widely celebrated by the Free Palpatine lot. It's about being anti-West and more specifically anti-Right Wing, not any greater principle. Right Wingers don't want the Gazans in their countries, that's all the justification the far left need to import as many of them as possible, by any means, by hook or by crook.
The Emperor did nothing wrong! Him being a fascist Sith Lord is just propaganda by the invidious terrorists of the Rebellion. The so called "Death Star" is just a mining platform!
Meanwhile, in the Emperor's own words, "Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station"
The only person who left that room alive was a despicable Jedi dragging a body, and we already know they were traitors to humanity. My cousin told me he saw Jedi gambling for slaves so the whole order was a corrupt organ of the Deep Galactic State. Clearly we can't take his word for it.
There is no evidence our beloved Emperor ever said those words. And if he did he was probably being ironic. When he somehow returns he will have a great explanation I am sure.
I mean, it's nothing new: they let slaves fight their war...No peep from the vaunted moral authorities of the Republic as thousands* of beings were made to wage war and die for them
The one point Karen Traviss made in her Jedi rants that couldn't be denied .
* The scale is all fucked up.
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Jedi? Space me! Say what you like about the tenets of Galactic Imperialism, dude, at least it's an ethos.
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"Somehow, Palpatine has
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What proportion of Gaza's civilian population has left Gaza for another country since the war began vs. what proportion of Ukraine's?
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Palestinians not being ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland is good for everyone including Europe. The only exception is Israel.
European governments going hard against Israel and trying to support palestinians "where they are" instead of allowing more MENA refugees into Europe, would be a great policy that would appease alot of the bleeding heart left, but alas they prefer to do the opposite.
Except, presumably, the Palestinian civilians getting caught in the crossfire of the conflict in Gaza.
They should be given free passage to the West Bank until Gaza is rebuilt.
I'm pretty sure an Israeli government with an empty Gaza would fill it with Jewish settlements, just like they are with the West Bank.
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I see various commenters repeating this claim. Have they considered the high probability that the causality is the other way around?
I think it’s implied that the conditional is “Ukraine cares to fight Russia assuming it has the means to do so”
Or, rephrased, “if Ukraine cares to fight Russia but lacks weapons, then I’m fine giving it weapons.”
Again, have you considered the possibility that to the extent Ukrainian soldiers keep defending their positions – which in itself is not sufficient to win the war, to be sure –, they are largely doing so under the assumption that not only will NATO keep supporting them but will in fact escalate the war should the defense positions collapse?
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Yes. Whether or not Ukraine fights is entirely their decision. But if they're willing to take up arms, I'm willing to have my tax money go towards making sure they have those arms to take up.
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I have considered it, and rejected it. When Russia was not engaged in a genocidal* war against Ukraine, Ukrainians did not wish to fight Russia. Now Russia is engaged in a genocidal war against Ukraine, Ukrainians do wish to fight Russia. So Occam's razor says that Ukrainian belligerence is caused by Russian policy, which is not consistent with it being caused by European aid. (Which was not particularly significant at the time the key decision to fight was taken in Kyiv).
* Genocidal both in the technical sense that abolishing Ukrainian nationhood and forcibly Russifying Ukrainians is a stated Russian war aim, and in the colloquial sense that Russia is killing large numbers of Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied Ukraine.
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Fear for your life because you're gay and people in your country hate you? Fine we'll help you out. Fear for your life because your government wants to blow you up? Sorry we prefer you dead actually.
All those great speeches about liberalism and the banality of evil just to end up here again.
It reminds me of the time around 2017 I think when the EU was pointedly ignoring the Spanish government arresting pensioners in Barcelona for wanting the chance to vote for Catalan independence while screeching about how the UK was acting like some colonial overlord in Scotland for not allowing them independence, even though they explicitly chose not to in 2014.
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This sort of BS was already on display when the EU banned Russian tourists from its territory. Some Baltic or Finnish girlboss politician declared that visiting Europe is a privilege, not a right - and this was coming from the same ruling clique that engineered the refugee crisis in 2015.
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Come on now, do you really think that the 'Ukrainian Government wants to blow up Ukrainian soliders' is a reasonable take?
They would much rather put drones in the line of danger than soldiers. Unlike Vladimir's meat grinder tactics.
Conscientious objectors are people too. You don't get to force people who swore no oath to kill because you want to win a war.
Moreover, conscription is slavery and morally reprehensible as such. Press gangs likely occupy the lowest circles of hell, along with pirates and other enemies of humanity.
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I think it's as reasonable a take as the claims of the asylum seekers about being gay etc. usually are.
How are they even remotely similar? Individual asylum seekers lying about being gay to get asylum vs a Ukrainian government which is, in reality, doing as much as it can to minimise casualties of its own soldiers getting accused of deliberately blowing them up.
Even if we assume that asylum applicants claiming to be in fatal danger at home in the Third World due to being gay are actually gay, we can safely assume that the level of discrimination they do suffer as a result is usually not fatal or even significant. Severe persecution of homosexuality is more of an exception than the norm even in these areas, as far as I know. And yet the EU authorities generally accept these claims or at least do not expel such applicants.
When applying the same loose standards to Ukrainian male refugees who would be conscripted at home were they repatriated, then yes, we can safely assume that, in the circumstances the government will be putting them in, they will not be leaving the army until they die or get crippled. They will be, in effect, sent to be blown up in some futile operation. This NAFO notion that meat grinder tactics are totally alien from noble Westernized Ukrainians who share zero cultural similarities with the Moskal is frankly laughable and cringe.
My understanding was that although very few countries bother to do much persecution of homosexuals, there’s plenty of countries where informal lynchings of sodomites are common and ignored by the police.
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I think this is the key part of our disagreement. You think that Ukraine defending itself is pointless or illegitimate, and should therefore just surrender so Russia can do whatever it wants.
I think that a country defending itself from an expansionist dictatorship with genocidal aspirations is not only legitimate and noble, but also something that the west should support, in order to reinforce the post-war norm that big countries can't just annex small countries if they feel like it. And what the Ukrainians are doing seems far from futile.
'some', not 'same'; it was a typo. Yes, it's plain observable fact that the Ukrainian army has engaged in futile operations like the Kursk incursion, plus counterattacks and defensive operations with no chance of success (trying to establish a Dniepr bridgehead etc). And yes, nameless conscripts get sacrificed. All of this then gets conveniently forgotten in Western mainstream media.
(Also I find it curious that you responded to just one half-sentence.)
Who actually believes unironically in the universality of such norms anyway? Do the same people oppose Israel as well, as an expansionist regime with genocidal aspirations? Or Azerbaijan? I doubt.
I quoted that part because it's the fundamental crux of our disagreement. You believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that the Ukrainian state should just surrender because fighting is, in your words, futile. I don't think it should, unless the people wish it (which they don't).
It's also worth pointing out that IGI-111 was claiming that Ukrainian soldiers were being blown up by the Ukrainian government.
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Regardless of what anyone here thinks, this is aimed at locking up Ukranian refugees from the press gangs and delivering them back to their government like escaped slaves.
We can take it as read that they think dying for their country isn't legitimate or noble, or they would have done it voluntarily.
Some people are just wrong- Dulce et decorum est. They’re committing treason and that’s it.
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It is funny when the amount of African refugees who they apparently cannot ship back due to asylum claims, meanwhile Ukraine obligations might past muster as something that is 'dangerous but needs to be done'. Also what happens if Ukraine hypothetically passes some law allowing for female conscription? Do all European residing Ukrainian women get sent back?
It is generally easier to send people back to their country of origin when said country actually wants to take the people back. The issue with arab (pretty sure most of them are not African) refugees and illegal immigrants is that their country is unwilling to accept their citizens back at the airport. They are more than happy to get rid of them.
A lot of that is due to the diaspora being worth more as a remittance check and overseas political pressure arm than as a domestic citizen, though.
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It seems that it's harder as a Ukrainian than an African to take refuge in Europe and it's harder for a European than an Indian to take refuge in America, when ideally it should be the other way round. Why do we not incentivize the best and most culturally similar minds to come to our countries?
The first part is entirely wrong. Ukrainians got collective protection immediately in 2022, and soon many will be eligable for permanent residency. The only talk now is about men who could serve in the military, and even then my guess is it would be a small minority who would actually be "deported" and the countries most likely to do it would be neighbouring ones like Poland.
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