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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.
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.
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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