Concentration camps and migrants

So the Hungarian government has decided to set up guarded camps for asylum seekers until their application is processed, housing them in containers. This, obviously, set off a hysterical outburst from a lot of western newspapers, and the comment section of the NYT's facebook page filled up with Americans drawing parallels to cattle wagons and containers, and also brought up extermination camps.

Well, putting aside the lack of historical knowledge, and the fact that these containers are the very same ones workers use as temporary housing at building sites (and nobody complains about exterminating them, or keeping them in inhumane conditions), and the fact that the present clusterfuck in the Middle East is principally the US' fault (Americans don't like to clean up their own mess, but are quite judgemental of people who are left with it), let's look at this issue, shall we?

First issue. A large portion of these migrants are not war refugees; this has been established over and over and over. Bangladesh, Morocco, Pakistan, and Tunis (among others) are NOT war-torn countries.

Second issue (which ties in with the whole "closing the borders" thing): Hungary is on the Schengen border. (Well, Greece is too, but nobody expects them to be able to close it.) Hence it is duty bound to protect the border. Even Merkel is talking about protecting the borders, and stopping the influx of undesirable elements, even though she also screamed murder when this protection actually was taking place. Just to recap: the borders are not closed. Anyone can go through the border control points, and apply for asylum. The illegal border crossing was stopped by erecting a fence. You come in, you apply for asylum, you wait. Whereas the 1.5 million people ending up in Germany came through the fields, and did not stop until Germany to apply for asylum. Which is not according to the rules. In fact, it's highly illegal.

Third issue: terrorism and other shenanigans. The Germans lost about 130 000 people. They don't know where they are. They can't be reached after they submitted their paperwork. A lot of rejected asylum seekers -no surprise- also disappeared. A sexual predator or two, a couple of terrorists also have known to disappear until they surfaced with their dicks in some poor kid, or behind the wheels of a high-jacked truck. So, with the knowledge that there is free movement within the Schengen zone I really, really would like to ask anyone who's complaining how they envision trying to keep the undesirables under control. Ahmed the terrorist can come in, claim asylum, and then disappear if you don't keep him in one place. During the process you might find out that he was sucking some ISIS boss' dick, or cutting heads off in his free time, it's too late; he is already in Germany or wherever, planning to do what terrorists do.

So I would genuinely be curious how you guys expect to screen hundreds of thousands of people and how you think you can deport them in case their application is rejected, if they are free to bum around the whole of EU.

Conflicting ideologies on the Left

You could ask me (not that anyone bothers :) ) why I focus on the Left so much.

Well, the answer is simple: I expect more of them than the usual tribalism, and ideology-driven thinking I kind of taken granted from the Right. (In which I myself display my own set of biases and bigotry.)

Anyhow. The import of "Taharrush gamea" (the mass sexual assaults on women by young men) into Europe with the recent migrant crisis points to a very interesting contradiction on the Left.

I associate the Left with human rights, women's rights, equality, feminism. Usually left-wing thinkers campaign for these things, and usually people on the left fought for them. Most feminist writers I know identify as someone being on the left. And yet, when it comes to these sexual assaults, both the political establishment, and the media is strangely silent; it's mostly the right-center right that is vocal about them. It seems like things flip upside down when it comes to migrants and sexual assaults: the Left is content blaming the victim ("keep them at arm's length" as the mayor of Cologne suggested; blaming drinking culture, as some people in Sweden suggested), while the Right wants to defend women against these men from a very different culture.

It is mind-boggling. Jessica Valenti is silent on the matter, even though she was quite vocal during even the Shirt Gate crisis. No prominent feminist writer in left-wing papers talk about these issues. It seems like the different ideologies (multiculturalism, Wilcommenculture, feminism, human rights) have this rock-paper-scissors dynamics. Apparently multiculturalism beats feminism when it comes to migrants. And this is sad, because it points to one thing: not even the Left has a coherent world-philosophy. (Well, very few on the Left does, let's just put it like this. Chomsky would probably have no problems processing these issues.) It shows that the Left is merely a collection of activists with very little intellectual power (or just simply too lazy). People who cannot or will not comprehend that things don't have to be mutually exclusive, so when one ideology (feminism) clashes with another (open borders, multiculturalism), one will lose out. I just had a conversation with someone who said the whole issue was blown out of proportion due to "some improper touching in Cologne that happened once". The mind blows. Suddenly I have a leftie who blames women, and trivialises sexual assault -something that is usually thought to be the privilege of the Right.

This leads to this weird reversal of roles between the Left and Right. I never thought one day I'd see Farage to be more of a feminist than Merkel.

Little Maurice and the realities of the EU

I almost spit out my coffee last week when I heard on the radio that Juncker has a black book, which he named Little Maurice. He has been in the possession of this book for thirty years now, and uses it to diligently record the names of the people who "betrayed him".

Let this sink in for a second. The most powerful person in Europe is a petty, egocentric person with serious psychological problems. If the sole existence shows an incredible amount of vindictiveness it should automatically bar him from any position of power or responsibility... We are controlled by people who are more childish than the contestants in the Real World. This puts everything into a new perspective, doesn't it? Apparently there is a good chance that our great leaders are unable to objectively and dispassionately decide on important issues; instead they behave like a bunch of teenage highschoolers tearing each other's hair out. This interpretation suddenly explains the stupidity of what the EU has done to Greece, for example, much better than any other explanation I've read so far.

We are governed by the Mean girls. If this does not scare the crap out of you, nothing will.

What difference a year makes...

So the Daily Mail (a delightful paper aimed at well-informed, affluent readers  disgusting tabloid) has published a cartoon last year.

Just to be clear: the cartoon does NOT say the refugees are rats. It says that rats -terrorists- enter with refugees undetected. Yes, the Daily Mail is not a very respectable newspaper. No, even they can have a valid point now and then.

That did not stop the outrage machine starting up. From the Huffington Post to the Guardian people were up in arms comparing this to the Nazi cartoons depicting Jewish people as rats. The comparison is very much flawed (as I said: the refugees are not depicted as rats; the ISIS terrorists are, which, frankly, is not very nice to the rodents.) Some people were claiming it was racist because "Syrians don't dress like that", but that really is scraping the bottom of the barrel... it's a cartoon about migrants from the Middle East. It has to make a point in one frame.

Orban got a lot of flak for linking terrorism to uncontrolled migration; he has been called a xenophobe and worse by the Hungarian opposition, and by the foreign press.

Fast forward 2016. In July Merkel said the following: 

  
terrorists entered into Europe last year with the migrants.  

She did not draw a picture, true.
So... saying it in 2015 made you a Nazi (when you could have done something about it), saying it today (when it's too late) is fine. I have not read anything about Merkel being a Nazi. Why do you have to jump off a cliff first, and then say it was a bad idea, to be politically correct? Why are people who say it is a bad idea to jump off to begin with are labelled Nazis? I'd think they'd be called smart to foresee problems -with uncontrolled migration in this case. The people who warned about the dangers were proven right in every single issue so far- even with the rapes... which frankly I thought was just demagogic populism appealing for the xenophobes. It turns out I was wrong. Apparently a lot of the newcomers have issues with not assaulting women sexually.

But no, the Huffington -and Der Spiegel, the NYT, and all the rest (Mama Merkel included)- were huffing and puffing about Nazis and xenophobes when people asked these questions, or warned about this. Now, a year later it's all forgotten, and the very same people who huffed and puffed are talking about the same things for which they labelled others Nazis. Orban and others -who, let's make it clear, who are corrupt cleptocrats and populist asswipes- in this case actually had a point: before you let in millions upon millions from a different culture, let's take a look at how similar groups fared in Europe (Paris, Belgium, even the UK). For this they -and the entirety of their countries- were labelled xenophobes. (Instead of asking them about untold millions of EUROs disappearing... it seems like corruption is encouraged.) For once, Orban actually had Europe's best interest in mind, and papers derisively quoted "experts" saying that he was trying to present himself as visionary. Guess what. He WAS one. And not because he is so smart. These things were clear for anyone with an iota of brains. He was a visionary, because all the others were blinded by dogma.

Today all that's forgotten. Today those enlightened Western countries are talking about strengthening border controls, talking about terrorists sneaking in, and all the rest; as if they had no memories from last year. (One thing you do have to give them: they still insist on letting millions more in as a solution to a problem that can only be solved where it comes from.)

Incredible.

Cologne and the press

There were a series of mass attacks on women during New Year's Eve; attacks which were coordinated, committed by people who "look African and Middle Eastern", and attacks which did not really get a lot of attention from the media for a long time. Even the police reported initially that all was well... The very first thing that came to my mind was the fact that the far right was actually using this as a warning cry to whip up the fear: they are coming to rape your daughters... we came to an age when closet Nazis are more dependable source of information than the mainstream media. The second thing actually reinforced this notion: it took an awful lot of time and misinformation for the facts to come out: it was not committed by Germans, or by people who have been living in Germany for decades. These attacks were prominently committed by newcomers, who were arriving as refugees.

The media outlets took up this story very slowly. The Guardian specifically was silent for five full days; even though they were really fast to comment on the Shirtgate, or on Mattelgate (the missing female figurine), and were really eager to jump to conclusions on refugee matters as well previously. But now they were taking their time. Suddenly everyone is surprised, as if this was not predicted before. Well, guess what. It has. Cairo and Sweden had experienced similar attacks (which was promptly covered up by the police); it was not really difficult to imagine something like this can happen in areas where refugees/economic migrants were present en masse. Suddenly people are surprised about the skewed sex ratio- oh, my, there's a lot of men in the crowd! Too bad, though they called everyone a Nazi who said the very same thing before; and interestingly this fact did not register for the photographers, either, who spent a year trying to pick up the odd little girl from the crowds of young men for emotional photos about the plight of the refugees.

The Guardian's rich and very excitable feminist writers are also silent; as if actual attacks of women's basic rights were not worth the effort. Even the victim-blaming from the Major of Cologne was left unmentioned... This cartoon sums up everything nicely.

But the Guardian was not silent on other matters. It was running a really long feature on the Two Tailed Dog party, in which they equated Orban with the Far Right (which he is not), and that idiot who charged a police station in France and got shot was featured prominently on the front page, too. It took five days for articles on Cologne to appear. One even called for asking for tough questions, but then avoided to do so.
One genius piece managed to have the following two quotes in the same article:

Abroad, Merkel will work for burden sharing, tougher measures to patrol Europe’s borders and seek solutions to stop the refugees at source

Already the venomous Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán is calling for tougher border controls,

Really?

It seems like the media by propagating the idea of uncontrolled migration boxed itself into a corner it cannot come out of without looking foolish or criminally negligent. And what they are doing now is just as bad.

The main problem is: this sort of behaviour completely surrenders the issue to the far right. It only gets stronger when the media does not report, lies, when the media and the police covers these things up, when you label everyone with concerns racist... you are responsible for turning away from the victims (the women who were assaulted), and you are responsible for the strengthening of the far right, and the gangs who mete out their own justice, and beat up Middle Eastern people on the street.