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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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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.

Putting aside the euphemism of asylum seeker, I think your argument is somewhat flawed.

Yes, true refugees probably should have a lower standard relative to an immigrant. But there comes a point where the damage caused by refugees outweighs the moral benefit of taking them in.

I think “they rape so much we need to explain ‘rape is bad’” is the line.

The funny thing about rape is the west only made rape illegal in around 1865. It’s not even that ancient of a thing that was practiced in Western Society. A civilized advanced society still had rape legal only 80 years ago.

The interesting thing here is that it’s the asylum seekers who think they have a right to rape the British. That says more about who thinks who has power.

The group that has access to another groups women is generally in power. The group politely asking to not rape their women is generally not politically powerful.

What country are you referring to here? As far as I'm aware, rape has been illegal for centuries even in the now third world societies. Do you mean age of consent and/or marital rape?

The funny thing about rape is the west only made rape illegal in around 1865. It’s not even that ancient of a thing that was practiced in Western Society. A civilized advanced society still had rape legal only 80 years ago.

I'm somehow getting the feeling you are referring to something very specific, and not "you could just drag a random European chick into the bushes, and have your way with her, and it was perfectly legal all the way up to 1865".

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.

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.”

I’m an enjoyer of parodies of that poem. One example that has been making the rounds:

First they came for the gypsies—I said nothing for I was not a gypsy.
Then they came for the Somalis—and I said “good, make sure you get all the Somalis.”

And no one in Europe aside from Ukrainians and Russians is real asylum seeker.

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.

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.

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)".

Are any of these so-called "asylum seekers" fleeing literal genocide?

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.

If the concept of "asylum" is coherent at all

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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