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Notes -
The UK Home Office just published a guide for asylum seekers on... how not to rape women.
Some extracts from this 9-page document:
What could happen if you do not follow those rules?
Prime Minister Andy Burnham defended the booklet saying the government wanted to make UK law "explicitly clear".
Finland has also been offering classes on "how to behave towards women" since... 2016. The fact that a government department, under UK Labour, produced a 9-page guide on these points, in this register, suggests that those migrant crime statistics are not so trivial after all. Incredible.
In a time where even legal immigration has become THE hot button topic for the right and even parts of the left, shouldn't it logically follow that people who treat the law and age of consent as optional are not blending in with the doctors and engineers if you DON'T want to harden public opinion against immigration? It's like they're not even trying.
Fundamentally this just an Anglo belief and a an assumption that assimilation is possible. The English write down rules and assume reasonable people follow the rules if you tell them what the rules are.
The asylum seekers are starting from a distant culture place. So you need to mitigate their culture by being reasonable and giving them a clear statement of the rule which they will all follow because you told them the rule.
This is entirely culturally within how an Anglo believes the world functions. Problem is I think it’s mistake theory to believe asylum seekers will accept your laws if you just tell them the rule to follow.
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Suggestion: DEI but for people who couldn't sit still in class let alone thrive.
Problem with stacking your government full of talented Hermiones is that they don't seem to get that schooling just doesn't work for everything and everyone. Not everyone is terrified of disappointing teacher.
I've seen some people suggest that what makes a lot of Third World men abuse Western women who're seen as too loose is because of terminal pornbrain. But, honestly, I think they're just contemptuous and/or revert to habit. I don't know how you have access to the Western internet enough to watch porn but not get Western attitudes on this. Seems like quokka cope.
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In principle, I don't see a problem here. If the concept of "asylum" is coherent at all, then we shouldn't be looking to vet asylum seekers for whether they're good additions to the country, the way would ordinary immigrants - any more than hospitals ask for patients to send in resumes in triplicate. Of course some of the refugees you're temporarily taking in out of humanitarian concerns will be ill-suited to coexisting with the locals; by all rights your standards for Jews you are willing to hide in your basement when the Gestapo are on the prowl should be lower than your standards for peacetime houseguests. A booklet like this only looks off if you take it for granted that "asylum seeker" is nothing but a fancy word for "immigrant". Which is understandable in the current status quo, but it's not the booklet that's at fault.
No they shouldn't. I have no obligation towards Jews. I may help people because I like them. If they don't clear my likeability bar they should raise complaint with the Gestapo.
And no one in Europe aside from Ukrainians and Russians is real asylum seeker.
A phrase I’ve always detested whenever I would hear it goes something like, “First they came for me for I X, then they came for him because I Y, lastly they came for me and there was no one else to defend me,” or some idiotic diatribe like that. There are far too many examples in society of pathologically altruistic people who spend way too much time advocating for the interests of groups who in turn, quickly turn right around and dispose of them at a moment’s notice and never saw them for anything more than a useful idiot to be discarded after all the value had been extracted out of them. I’ve seen it with every group out there including my own family. People who will come to you with a sob story so you’ll take them in and then they proceed eat you out of house and home and after you’ve been consumed and spent, they say to themselves “The well’s all dried up here,” and then they move onto the next victim. They’ll quickly forget you ever existed and stop taking your phone calls when you need them. I had this discussion with a peer a long time ago who did a prison stint for activity he was part of when he was still in a gang. Got out and found he was PNG’d. He said to me, “All that work put in and this is how they’ll treat you. Damn. The hood forgets you really fast.”
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That's rather my point (I mean, I'd say there are a few others e.g. Uyghurs, but same difference). As someone who does believe in the moral duty to aid genuine asylum seekers, I dislike the fact that the "asylum seeker" category has been turned into "immigrant 2.0" and massively overstrained. I would like it to get its old meaning back. Therefore, I approve of official documents which acknowledge that coexisting with asylum seekers is not necessarily comfortable; that when and if we choose to grant that status, we do it out of ethical duty, not because we are mistaking the asylum seekers for swell, prosocial immigrants whom we'd love to see put down roots once the crisis is over. Asking if asylum-seekers are a good fit for Western values is a category error, and pretending that they must be before we can let them in is precisely the overreach that lets asylum-seekers trade on public goodwill to turn into permanent residents.
Just to add a little on this point. The other day I briefly caught the first half of a Piers Morgan episode while at work that was pretty hilarious. Shmuley is a guy who has zero self-awareness of how bad of a job he does for his own cause (he’s a 100 on the neurotic scale) and never once in his life learned to simply shut his damn mouth (along with Dershowitz incidentally).
Anyway, at about the 49th red herring he pulls out of his ass, he accused a fellow Nordic of being an immoral guy for refusing to take in Palestinian refugees or advocating for them to seek asylum in Iceland. Shmuley would’ve had a valid point to make, only to the extent that Iceland played an active role in the ongoing destruction in Gaza. The US is responsible solely for its contribution to the problem, of which it’s a co-belligerent and one of the primary enablers if not an outright instigator itself. I will also acknowledge a moral requirement to make good for the harm you’ve caused or participated in and wouldn’t object on those moral grounds that one should be obligated to take in select asylum seekers.
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I think this is a profoundly tasteless context in which to invoke the Holocaust. Are any of these so-called "asylum seekers" fleeing literal genocide? Most of the headlines I've seen boil down to "we can't send this man who raped a British woman back to his home country, because he'd be put to death for having committed the same crime over there (which was, in fact, the very thing that prompted him to flee in the first place)".
My point is that they should be - that this is what the legal category "asylum seeker" is supposed to be for - and the booklet makes sense in that context. To the extent that the category has been artificially expanded in a way that makes the booklet look weird, it's the expansion that is to blame, not the booklet.
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I think the revealed preference of a lot of people is that they don't actually want a coherent asylum system, they want a practical one. The moral sentiment of a right to asylum is nice, so people are for it so long as the technological and political situations are such that its full implications are never seen.
That is the mismatch between the populace and the people who have to implement the rules as written.
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You see the same kind of rules in discord servers and bars. "Inappropriate conduct should be reported will not be tolerated. Offenses will resort in a ban. Inappropriate conduct includes, but is not limited to, initiating unwanted interactions, sexual interactions (ESPECIALLY with minors), soliciting drugs..."
If anything this kind of list is way more appropriate in the context of immigrants who come from different cultures and may be used to very different norms. My only complaint is that the "could"s in the list should be replaced with "will"s. If your interactions conflict with these core values of our society which we consider both reasonable and important, then your claim to asylum is going to be rejected. You will be arrested, sentenced, and subsequently deported never to return here again.
This kind of list does not on its own reflect poorly on the average immigrant or suggests that the statistics actually do show a worrying trend which the government is trying to keep from us (such a trend may exist, but this is not evidence). Like the list of discord rules, it is simply a way to inform everyone about the basic rules, and give something to point to in case someone breaks them. The rule breakers could be rare, immigration could still be an overall good thing, but given enough people you can be certain some bad ones exist.
Here's your evidence.
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Charitably, this could be an attempt to acknowledge the reality of imperfect enforcement from the word go so as not to come across as all bark and no bite later. i.e. a way to head off reasoning of the form "Hur hur, the fancy booklet said that if anyone has sex with a sleeping woman he will go to jail, but my cousin Ahmed did that last month and totally got away with it, can't fool me with empty threats" by saying upfront that it's a risk you incur, not an infallible process.
The risk of doing it this way is that it indicates the law might be lenient or not taken seriously. Like, in some countries bribing public officials could result in jail time, but actually it is the main way to get anything done. "Hur hur, I know this game. As long as I don't do it too loudly, I am going to be fine."
That's also true. You can probably play infinite recursion with this, and plausibly you're right that it would be better to leave it at "You will" than start playing the triple-bluff game. I just sort of got the impression that you were accusing the authors of the booklet of wanting to soften the threat - that interpreted them as saying "well, if you're naughty, we might have to expel you, although don't worry, we might choose to be lenient" - and I wanted to make the point that this was not necessarily the intention behind the "could"s.
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Symptoms of a failed state the way I see it. The only realistic solution I can think of that doesn’t involve executing these people is repatriation. But one thing I’ve always wondered is, what if their home country refuses to take them back? If I was a cynical and opportunistic statesman, I’d see it more in my interest to see them there so that future endeavors ensure I have a foothold or entryway into influencing the politics of another country because let’s face it, “immigration” may be the name of the game but it’s “integration” that really matters. Populations that just truck along side by side in the same territory isn’t a way for either one to live life meaningfully.
For most of these countries - think like West Africa, not Afghanistan - their wealthy elites all want to be able to visit the West, buy property, open bank accounts. And they're the ones who have the power at home.
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Third country deportation. Just dump them in a poor African country.
"But this guy isn't African." No worries, he'll learn to fit in.
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The typical right wing response is "stop aid and remittances, refuse to issue visas to anyone else from those countries"
I think that might work for removing illegal migrants, but wholesale uprooting of the community that sends remittances in the first place is basically threatening to shoot the hostage unless you get what you want.
It's already a political problem sending some of these people back home in places like West Africa. People would dig in their heels
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Gunboat diplomacy to take them.
And if they’ve already been living in your country? I don’t thinking rounding them all up in a Kristallnacht is going to make great international news.
You punish their source country until they decide to take them. And if Kristallnacht is needed to keep Europe safe, then so be it. Although I think that there are some milder approaches to culturally assimilate the better lot of them if we are hard enough. And only deport the culturally incompatible ones.
Anyway chemical castration for border trespassing is a suitable punishment I think that will do wonders both for reducing immigration/refugees and sexual assaults committed by them.
If the local community got a direct vote on which migrants got to stay, you'd see a level of civility that would rival major tourist centers.
I don't know if that's assimilation but it'd certainly be different.
Anecdotally, many places with lots of tourism have locals that really dislike tourists. Even when tourism indirectly pays the bills.
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On the contrary. The first state to round up illegal immigrants and asylum fraudsters to airdrop them over their country of origin may receive all the tut-tuts in the world, but it will also demonstrate that it is in fact a functioning state that is not to be trifled with and the laws of which are actually binding.
Lmao. Did you mean this literally?
I meant it ambiguously.
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