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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.
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.
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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