Europe, Boring Until it's Not

[Speaker to Animals]

Make Europeans great again.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

In the interest of preserving our superior Western values, we may all want to join Bjorn in acknowledging the light between supporting border security and restricted immigration, and fleering 'womp womp' memes.

[Montegriffo]

Think about it like your house. Is it beneath the Danes to rudely eject home invaders from their domicile? Is that too "triumphalistic" for you Euros? Or are the home invaders the actual assholes in this scenario?

To continue your metaphor, it depends whether those knocking on your door are doing so because their house has been burnt down and members of their household killed or imprisoned by a brutal landlord. Who would be the arsehole if you slammed the door in their faces in that scenario?

This is why you have an asylum system, you judge each applicant on their merits and evaluate whether they are knocking on your door to steal your possessions or because they are fellow human beings pleading for help.
How you treat those applicants while you evaluate their motives reflects on your country and Bjorn may not want to his to appear callous and uncaring like yours seems to be.

[DBTrek]

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/program ... l-migrants

How you treat those applicants while you evaluate their motives reflects on your country and Bjorn may not want to his to appear callous and uncaring like yours seems to be.

And the Clueless Narcissist of the Year Award goes to . . .

There is not one European country on planet Earth that has the record, reputation, or gravitas to talk to us about accepting immigrants.
You aren't in our league.
You're not in the league three leagues below our league.

[BjornP]

It does reveal their character and state of mind though, which indicate whether or not they're rational actors based upon what they're so angry about. In this case you're angry as hell because I directly quoted your own words to you. Does that make you wrong? It's not a right/wrong thing. It makes you irrational.

I disagree. Anger can make you irrational, but getting angry at say immigrants raping women at a higher rate than natives, is anger, too, right? Yet would you think that anger particularly "irrational"? You do not seem to understand what it is about Støjberg's behavior that makes me angry. I consider a society based upon shared rules for what constitutes respect, to be a rational ambition for a society to have. It is rational to become upset when someone threatens that social fabric, no matter if they come from another country or they're natives who lost their way.

Sorry, I merely scanned your reply once it became apparent that it wasn't written to convey anything beyond rage. Looks like you said "triumphalism" - which makes no sense to me given the context. Are all territorial members of the animal kingdom "triumphalistic" when guarding their territory, or only Caucasian members of the human species? If it's just us, how did we manage to distinguish ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom? If not, then it's rather silly to label a common expression of natural animal kingdom territorialism as "triumphalistic". "Look at all those triumphalistic lions rudely chasing interlopers from their hunting grounds. What assholes."

That's not what I am referring to when I speak of triumphalism. It is not the turning away of immigrants itself that is triumphalist. It's how one talks about it, about lack of respect, about the how one does it. You can be both restrictive about immigration AND treat those people being turned away with a little respect. The island proposal is another (of many) examples of political theater from the integration minister that has very little actual substance, it's merely an expensive way to compete about who can be the biggest asshole. Being triumphalist about people being turned back to their shitty countries - it's neccesary, but making theater out of it - like the integration minister baking a cake with the number of rejected asylum seekers and posting the image of you with a big smile on your face - you might think that's hilarious and cool. I think it goes beyond decency. We are turning them away, we should turn them away, and we have the upper hand so there is no need to insult them as they leave. That is what I get upset about.

We can easily, and have done for decades, restrict immigration without needing to pull ridiculous (and economically wasteful) media stunts like this.

Imagine that you worked in a bank, and some guy wanted to borrow money because he's going broke and can't get a job due to disability or sickness or something. You can't borrow him any money, because his economy is unstable and you're unlikely to see a return, so he's forced to leave without getting a loan... Do you take pictures of his failure with your phone, shout at him how pathetic he is as he leaves, make jokes about his misery to your colleagues? I hope not. Doesn't mean you should lend him money, doesn't mean I want you to lend him money, but I think you don't need to come up with ways to add insult to injury. It's that I object to.

Are the Danes assholes for putting uninvited interlopers on an island and making it clear they are not welcome? Or are the people crashing through the borders of Denmark and simply expecting you all to allow them to co-habitate on your land the assholes? Think about it like your house. Is it beneath the Danes to rudely eject home invaders from their domicile? Is that too "triumphalistic" for you Euros? Or are the home invaders the actual assholes in this scenario?

May want to reexamine your perceptions on this issue instead of allowing your social conditioning to trigger you. Anger inhibits logic, and makes people easy to control. It might not be a random accident that this topic makes you so damn angry.

Again, it's not the restriction of unwanted immigrants I oppose.They are about as much assholes as anyone else who want more opportunities in life, who want work, prosperity, etc. Doesn't mean they should get in unless we invite them to. A Syrian family who fled during their civil war aren't "assholes" simply for fleeing and landing up here. They aren't "invaders". Treating them as more than they are... that's you being too emotional, on my behalf, no less. You don't know anything my society, yet you think you are the one making a "rational" assesment of our immigration situation?

And thanks for the suggestion, but you're wrong. Since you mischaracterize my perceptions, and since you even more obviously have no idea what "social conditioning" I have, your suggestion is neither very rational or useful.

[Montegriffo]

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/program ... l-migrants

How you treat those applicants while you evaluate their motives reflects on your country and Bjorn may not want to his to appear callous and uncaring like yours seems to be.

And the Clueless Narcissist of the Year Award goes to . . .

There is not one European country on planet Earth that has the record, reputation, or gravitas to talk to us about accepting immigrants.
You aren't in our league.
You're not in the league three leagues below our league.

The point was not about how many but how well you treat them when they arrive.
Compared to separating children from their parents and tear gas at the border even the Danish prison island shows a vastly superior treatment of asylum seekers.

If you want to talk about the numbers of refugees, as a percentage of the population Lebanon leads the world by a massive margin without the advantage of the great wealth of the USA.
1.5 million in a country of only 4 million natives.

[DBTrek]

Banks exist to lend money, nations don’t exist to absorb the human fallout from failures of other nations. Your analogy is deeply flawed.

Sending a strong message is not synonymous with mockery. Making it blatantly clear that immigrants are not wanted is not a disservice. It is, in fact, a service to the many refugees who might expend their time and treasure attempting to reach a place where they will be turned away.

You think you have no obvious conditioning that is apparent to even a stranger sitting half a world away, but you do. It is apparent in the way that you accept that being poverty-stricken or desperate does not exempt criminals from committing crimes domestically. Yet if the crimes being committed are at the hands of foreigners who wish to violate your national sovereignty, suddenly poverty and desperation are an acceptable excuse.

You weren’t born believing in that ridiculous double standard, you were conditioned to accept it.

[DBTrek]

The point was not about how many but how well you treat them when they arrive.
Compared to separating children from their parents and tear gas at the border even the Danish prison island shows a vastly superior treatment of asylum seekers.

If you want to talk about the numbers of refugees, as a percentage of the population Lebanon leads the world by a massive margin without the advantage of the great wealth of the USA.
1.5 million in a country of only 4 million natives.

You’re still talking and you still don’t rate a seat at the table. When it comes to immigration and generosity towards immigrants you and the rest of Europe are unworthy to address the USA. It is presumptuous for you to even open your mouths in our direction on the subject.

Stick to FaceBook, where all the other do-nothing people to congregate to criticize the actual performers.

[Speaker to Animals]

You weren’t born believing in that ridiculous double standard, you were conditioned to accept it.

The irony here being that he did not even pay the television license for the propaganda that conditioned him to think as he does.

[BjornP]

Banks exist to lend money, nations don’t exist to absorb the human fallout from failures of other nations. Your analogy is deeply flawed.

The analogy isn't about immigration. It's an analogy about respect. The analogy is about there being a decent and respectful way to turn someone away, and one that is less so or neither of those things.

Sending a strong message is not synonymous with mockery. Making it blatantly clear that immigrants are not wanted is not a disservice. It is, in fact, a service to the many refugees who might expend their time and treasure attempting to reach a place where they will be turned away.

On that we agree, and there are other Danish politicians even among the nationalist DPP, who also support strict immigration that I'd be happy to see taking over the task of making the Danish immigration laws clear to prospective economic migrants.

You think you have no obvious conditioning that is apparent to even a stranger sitting half a world away, but you do. It is apparent in the way that you accept that being poverty-stricken or desperate does not exempt criminals from committing crimes domestically. Yet if the crimes being committed are at the hands of foreigners who wish to violate your national sovereignty, suddenly poverty and desperation are an acceptable excuse.

You weren’t born believing in that ridiculous double standard, you were conditioned to accept it.

Of course I have a social conditioning, everyone does, you, me, everybody. It's a natural consequence of being raised by a family and existing in any given society. However, you clearly have no idea what my social conditioning is, so don't bother playing the mindreader. For example, you're presenting an imaginary position that I am ready to "excuse" immigrant criminals out of some misguided sense of solidarity with the poor. I don't even remotely excuse or defend criminal immigrants, nor pretend that the problem doesn't exist. Even if that characterization is "apparant" to you, given your historical track record of geographical ignorance, you should consider the possibility that maybe you're not the best judge of character, motive, and that what you think you know is really nothing more than ignorant assumptions. You have no idea what Danes generally are conditioned to accept or not accept.