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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.
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.
Rape was not legal in the West before slavery was abolished. Slaves just didn't count as "people" and so you were allowed to do many things to slaves that were crimes if done to non-slaves.
Rape was illegal long before 1865. The abolition of slavery did not (finally) criminalize rape; it just added former slaves to the category of people to whom legal protections (theoretically) apply.
I really dislike this disingenuous form of argumentation.
Do Britains count as people to the asylum seeking groups? Or are they not their people to them?
I think this is where I see the parallel. The asylum seekers don’t view Britains as their tribe and hence the protections from rape don’t apply in their worldview just as Americans didn’t view blacks as people.
You are arguing that Britains were being raped in the modern sense that has been illegal for a long time and I guess I would agree with. My argument is the rape gangs were raping in the far more disrespectful sense that the West even condoned fairly recently of allowing the rape of a rival lesser tribe.
Protections from rape don't apply in their worldview because they are from cultures where rape of their own women is more of a property crime (offense against the woman's father/husband) than a personal violation. Women behaving in their culture the way British women do (i.e., walking around freely not under the obvious protection of a man) are also viewed as fair game.
If they view it as a property crime then me comparing it to raping slaves would seem to be the same thing?
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Although it would also be a contrarian argument, I think it might be fair to say that rape in the modern sense was only made illegal when marital rape was, which was even more recently. That's because it completed a framing shift to ongoing consent; ancient rape was a major crime but a property crime, and the shift to the current understanding was a gradual one.
I'd argue that rape "in the modern sense" has been illegal for centuries. As with abolition, the criminalization of marital rape simply expanded the category of people to whom legal protections against criminal assault applied. (Wives were in a sense considered property of their husbands- much as it used to be legal to beat your children.) You can still read people arguing that marriage implies permanent unconditional consent and therefore marital rape doesn't/shouldn't exist.
Which is why I find @RandomRanger's argument that Africans are not human beings like us unconvincing; low IQ people have problems modeling other people's minds, showing empathy, or thinking about consequences, but it's also downstream of culture. Many Muslim immigrants are not particularly low IQ, but it's their culture that tells them women are property and caring how a woman feels about being raped is like caring how a chicken feels about being eaten. The ancients likewise considered rape a property crime, not because they couldn't understand that women had feelings and didn't like being raped, but because that just wasn't part of their moral framework.
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