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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.
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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