the Migrant Crisis

[sl1k]

. Cardsfan! You watching? Irony. This is how it works.

Just so we're clear, I meant very well constructed in the context of...

EG is a master of the whataboutery and strawman to death tactics. It's a battle of attrition with him

 

[HertsWolf]

Just so we're clear, I meant very well constructed in the context of...

Yeh. I meant "irony" in the context of

 

[slaphead]

Just been watching the coverage on Sky News showing the columns of migrants walking across Eastern Europe and those getting off what looked like cattle trucks. Thought I was watching colour footage from 1941.

 

[HertsWolf]

Just been watching the coverage on Sky News showing the columns of migrants walking across Eastern Europe and those getting off what looked like cattle trucks. Thought I was watching colour footage from 1941.

In many respects, you were.

 

[Alty]

Ah! The old face palm emoji to indicate moral and intellectual superiority. "I'd wager my facts are more representative of your facts" is a statement of sheer arrogance. Especially as you've been found out numerous times before with your spurious facts. Each time you blather your way around it and change the subject.

Shall I chuck in the ultimate arrogance of the face palm emoji? Nah.


Many would suggest that every single one of those has an ethnonationalist agenda, albeit to differing degrees.

What I truly dislike about you, Ebeneezer Gradgrind, is your sneering attitude towards those who disagree with you or refuse to allow your interpretation of the world to be stamped as authoritative. You're an intellectual bully who simply tries to win arguments by ridiculing others. However, in this forum there's a good selection of people, of different political backgrounds across the spectrum, who are prepared to stand up to you. I don't think I ever see as much domineering, contemptuous responses to the opinions of others as you display on a daily basis.

And yes, I do know exactly what ethnonationalism is.

And laughable? Yes, the concept of you accusing others of rambling is the point at which irony became clear even to Cardsfan.

Tbh this reads like it's been written by an agitated man with an inferiority complex. Which is odd given you're evidently quite an intelligent chap yourself.

EG tends to be very direct in his posts and at times his total focus on the rational at the expense of the emotional/sentimental does make his politics seem a little...lacking in nuance, I suppose. But I don't see why he should change to save your feelings.

 

[HertsWolf]

Tbh this reads like it's been written by an agitated man with an inferiority complex. Which is odd given you're evidently quite an intelligent chap yourself.

EG tends to be very direct in his posts and at times his total focus on the rational at the expense of the emotional/sentimental does make his politics seem a little...lacking in nuance, I suppose. But I don't see why he should change to save your feelings.

Not really agitated at all. I have seen EG post aggressively with 'facts' and position them as incontrovertible. To me, that's just arrogant and patronising. I guess I was irritated by it, more than agitated.

My feelings are of no concern to anyone but me, but just occasionally it's tiresome to have ridicule thrown at you in areas where you have 30 years working experience. Personally, I think the "inferiority complex" comment is rather inflammatory and unnecessary, regardless.

 

[Stevencc]

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT.

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

I think holding perceived condescension as a worse transgression than overt personal attacks is a weird sort of position to take. Any apology for my annoyingness is likely to be insincere, but I can assure you there's no malice involved.

 

[HertsWolf]

I think holding perceived condescension as a worse transgression than overt personal attacks is a weird sort of position to take. Any apology for my annoyingness is likely to be insincere, but I can assure you there's no malice involved.

I think you regularly make overt personal attacks by mocking the views of others, and frequently with no solid basis for doing so.

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

That's handy.

 

[Ian_Wrexham]

We've been conditioned for the last couple of decades to believe that Britishness is the state of having the requisite passport, and at most perhaps the vaguest of traits like 'tolerance' and 'niceness'. We've been taught that British culture isn't really a thing, that we're not really an ethnic group, and to try and safeguard or acknowledge either is tantamount to BNP-thinking. It's easily swallowed when it's your own culture, because it's something that's so difficult to articulate and so unfashionable to value, but when you see the same thing happening in Sweden for example, a country you would never imagine to suggest had no culture, and others especially in Northern Europe, you start to get a sense of what's going on. This is the price of passive multiculturalism, because there's no way you can both celebrate and accept your own cultural and national identity, while paradoxically accepting those with an identity at odds with it as if they were one in the same. It's not so much that immigrants are rejecting British values, it's that they've scarcely been exposed to them or asked to embrace them. We do not assert our culture or values, we leave people to their self-segregating communities because we know that cries of racism and bigotry from the simpletons will await us if we don't.

Worth thinking about why "British culture" or "British values" aren't really considered a thing. It's because Britain exported them, demanded they be universal, asserted that they were right and crushed the values and cultures that contradicted them (both in Britain and outside). Lack of a distinct, English identity is a product of insisting that only one set of values are permissible, not of liberal hippy multicultural nonsense.

We make constant demands on both new migrants and people with identities that aren't British/English to assert their loyalty. British values/culture is something I'm automatically assumed to already support (because I'm white) whereas people of colour have to demonstrate their fealty to those values. Prevent is a good example of this - given that it treats Muslim kids with suspicion for being critical of Britain. That's the self-segregation - of white British policing of who gets to be British - not minority groups wanting to live where they don't run the risk of racist violence/have support networks.

The genocide of the Native Americans happened in large part because they offered such little resistance, especially in the beginning. The same colonial powers that almost wiped them out encountered natives all over the globe, many with greater natural resources, but left them as a people relatively enact. Why? Because they'd have put up more of a fight. With the Native Americans, sadly, it was relatively easy. Columbus himself remarked in his writings about how 'full of love' they were and how utterly unfamiliar they were with warfare. It was their downfall, and it's a lesson repeated throughout history. It's the same reason that none of the forms of Christianity that flourished actually reflected Jesus' liberal hippyness. They wouldn't have lasted ten minutes.

This isn't really an issue with which you can really compare the USA to European nations either. America isn't founded on the representation of a native people, it's founded on the destruction of one. In this sense "American society" and migrant influxes are one in the same. Besides, the USA asserts it's values incredibly strongly (and perhaps as a consequence doesn't suffer radical Islam like we do), while Northern Europe has been largely meek and passive of late in it's approach to cultures that are at odds with their own. It's isn't working though, and the far(ish) right seems to be getting more and more popular as a result.

That's simply not true. Aside from the fact a refugee influx is very different to a military invasion by a hostile, technologically advanced power (something you seem to have difficulty understanding), the problem for the Aztec Empire was that the Mexica were hated hegemonic rulers of Central America, and Cortez was able to incite other regional powers (most famously the Tlaxcala) up against the Mexica.

Even with a 100,000 strong mainly indigenous army, the Aztec Empire may have defeated Cortez had it not been subjected to a massive, devastating smallpox epidemic.

That's a pattern repeated all over the Americas - Spanish colonialists exploiting tribal/national rivalries and imported disease to conquer the entire region. It wasn't to do with a lack of resistance (or the myth that Spanish Conquistadores were viewed as divine) but technological and immunological supremacy.

The argument for borders is not an argument against any and all immigration, it's an argument for controlled migration policy crafted to suit the needs of the nation and it's people. You can't just dismiss Polish undercutting (which I've seen first hand) as an issue just because the banking collapse was a larger one. It's a problem you'd hear about all the time, and I trust the tradesmen to know the difference between undercutting and a simple lack of work.

Undercutting is caused by an oversupply of labour. It's a natural consequence of a shrinking market. Yes, immigration - and immigration driven by a demand for labour - contributed to the problem but it isn't restricted to Polish people. The solution is not to "stop immigration" but to unionise (and once again, even the most aggressively UKIPpy immigration policy would have let skilled Polish tradesmen into the country when the demand for those tradesmen existed). Once again you're making a problem with capitalism into a problem with migrants.

We should help somewhat were we can afford to, but not before British homelessness has been eradicated first, and not to any random economic migrant who has volunteered themselves into their current situation either.

People aren't homeless because aid is going to refugees or because of immigration. People are homeless because successive governments have engineered a housing crisis by pursuing policies that drive up house prices in order to appeal to middle-class home-owning voters.

Actually there is a lot of crossover in campaigns fighting for housing justice - preventing evictions and so on - and groups that promote migrants rights - in part because migrants are at most risk of ending up in overcrowded housing or being made homeless. There's a lot of solidarity between precariously housed/homeless British people and migrants.

I wasn't offering a moral commentary at all, merely observing two sets of self-defeating idiots shouting at each other in the street. I would suggest however that violent opposition to any form of free expression is worse than glorifying Hitler, though I'm sure the National Front are guilty of the former too.

Militant opposition to fascism is good and necessary. I don't buy this idea that if we don't go and chase National Action out of Liverpool they'll do a March on Rome or whatever, but they will murder people if they're allowed to organise or disseminate their ideas.

Was only nine or ten months ago that one of the National Action lot tried to behead someone with a machete in the supermarket I used to work in, so...

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

Worth thinking about why "British culture" or "British values" aren't really considered a thing. It's because Britain exported them, demanded they be universal, asserted that they were right and crushed the values and cultures that contradicted them (both in Britain and outside). Lack of a distinct, English identity is a product of insisting that only one set of values are permissible, not of liberal hippy multicultural nonsense.

If it were that simple then this wouldn't be a phenomena repeated throughout Northern Europe. We did not colonize Sweden. And even if we had done, these values we demanded be universal are things that other cultures share with each other just as much as we do with them, so how they could make our culture less distinct but not theirs I have no idea.

We make constant demands on both new migrants and people with identities that aren't British/English to assert their loyalty. British values/culture is something I'm automatically assumed to already support (because I'm white) whereas people of colour have to demonstrate their fealty to those values. Prevent is a good example of this - given that it treats Muslim kids with suspicion for being critical of Britain. That's the self-segregation - of white British policing of who gets to be British - not minority groups wanting to live where they don't run the risk of racist violence/have support networks.

I would suggest that it's telling that you've had to reach for an example as extreme as counter-terror legislation in order to make this point, because the overwhelming societal pressure in the UK is to accept other cultures no matter how at odds with our own they are or risk being branded a racist. That is the narrative, even from papers and parties some would deem ethnonationalist.

That's simply not true. Aside from the fact a refugee influx is very different to a military invasion by a hostile, technologically advanced power (something you seem to have difficulty understanding), the problem for the Aztec Empire was that the Mexica were hated hegemonic rulers of Central America, and Cortez was able to incite other regional powers (most famously the Tlaxcala) up against the Mexica.

Even with a 100,000 strong mainly indigenous army, the Aztec Empire may have defeated Cortez had it not been subjected to a massive, devastating smallpox epidemic.

That's a pattern repeated all over the Americas - Spanish colonialists exploiting tribal/national rivalries and imported disease to conquer the entire region. It wasn't to do with a lack of resistance (or the myth that Spanish Conquistadores were viewed as divine) but technological and immunological supremacy.

I should have been more specific in that I was thinking more about what happened in the USA and central islands. You're right that it's not analogous to a migrant crisis, but then neither is a Goth invasion really. It was a broader point about passivity and weakness being punished, which makes it noteworthy that the more militant South retained so much more of it's Native peoples and culture than then North did.

Undercutting is caused by an oversupply of labour. It's a natural consequence of a shrinking market. Yes, immigration - and immigration driven by a demand for labour - contributed to the problem but it isn't restricted to Polish people. The solution is not to "stop immigration" but to unionise (and once again, even the most aggressively UKIPpy immigration policy would have let skilled Polish tradesmen into the country when the demand for those tradesmen existed). Once again you're making a problem with capitalism into a problem with migrants.

I'm not sure what "once again" is supposed to mean. I've made pretty clear that mine is not an anti-immigration position, but a pro-immigration control one. There is no one here suggesting we should close the borders, only control them. It's not like the flow of migrants halted when the work started to dry up, but it could have done were we actually in a position to control who comes here.

People aren't homeless because aid is going to refugees or because of immigration. People are homeless because successive governments have engineered a housing crisis by pursuing policies that drive up house prices in order to appeal to middle-class home-owning voters.

Who causes the moral dilemma is a different issue. I still can't conscionably support millions being spent on refugees so long as there are homeless Britons that need help first.

Militant opposition to fascism is good and necessary.

It really isn't. If you look at the continent you won't find any correlation between how militant the left is and how weak fascism is. There just seems to be a few people of a certain political persuasion who like attacking the far right in that way, so will find a way to justify it, and conversely, people who like those sorts of juvenile street antics, so will find a cause they can justify being a part of (much like random hooligans joining the EDL). About the most Antifa counter-demos ever achieve is a) bringing media attention to their opposition, and b) presenting themselves as leftists of the same ilk.

 

[liu]

Tried to read the arguments between you guys but got lost like a million times.
Translate those into Chinese you two rascist bastards!

 

[Red]

Your encyclopaedic factual knowledge leaves the rest of us in awe. You are rather relentless in your mission to educate us all and close down debate or different opinions with incontrovertible facts. I'm not really at all sure why the rest of us bother when really all we need to do is have an 'Ask the Oracle' section when we can pose questions and complex subjects to you for the definitive answer.

I honestly think EG is a bot situated in UKIP head office.

 

[Ebeneezer Goode]

The BBC's Jenny Hill in Berlin reports that the German police union is demanding support from the German army at the country's border with Austria.

 

[smat]

The BBC's Jenny Hill

 

[Dr Mantis Toboggan]

shit be fucked up

 

[Freakyteeth]

Can't wait to welcome these fantastic, friendly, well-integrating new friends to the UK

 

[sl1k]

Can't wait to welcome these fantastic, friendly, well-integrating new friends to the UK

Make sure to give your congratulations

 

[Freakyteeth]

mashallah

 

[Ian_Wrexham]

Can't wait to welcome these fantastic, friendly, well-integrating new friends to the UK

Pretty comfortable with desperate refugees using force (or threats of force) to resist border-violence (+ being stranded on the Macedonian border, in winter, with no food or shelter is violence).

 

[Freakyteeth]

They put themselves in a position by travelling through Europe, and that is violence against them.

 

[Ian_Wrexham]

They put themselves in a position by travelling through Europe, and that is violence against them.

Borders are violence.

 

[Freakyteeth]

Mate. Never go full Marx.

 

[Dr Mantis Toboggan]

his total focus on the rational at the expense of the emotional/sentimental does make his politics seem a little...lacking in nuance, I suppose. But I don't see why he should change to save your feelings.

it's like we're talking to a first gen robot without the later models' empathy emulator. without compassion there's no point in anything, the human experience is meaningless without altruism

 

[HertsWolf]

Can't wait to welcome these fantastic, friendly, well-integrating new friends to the UK

I think they are speaking German. Die what? I think it says "Polizei" on the reverse. "Open or. Die Polizei"

But yeh.... it's a bit grim, I agree.

 

[Dr Mantis Toboggan]

 

[mnb089mnb]

Does anyone have the source for that image above? The only place I could find it online was on some sort of "white power" news site.

 

[Womble98]

Borders are violence.

You are a moron.

 

[Womble98]

I think they are speaking German. Die what? I think it says "Polizei" on the reverse. "Open or. Die Polizei"

But yeh.... it's a bit grim, I agree.

No, that says "Open or Die" not any German stuff....