BF2S Forums Race relations thread

uziq wrote:

could have guessed immediately that dilbert would latch onto this non-story. any chance for the royal navy to puff itself up and look important during a time of national decline. 2 helicopters full of armed SBS commandos having to board a ship all of about 5km from the actual headquarters of the UK’s most elite naval units (my cousin trained there).

They didn't really think this one through.

what drama! i’m sure 10 stowaways from nigeria after 12 days at sea put up a valiant challenge for our boys.

I hope they were able to use up some time-expired flashbangs to good effect.

Yes, there are rules, if people want apply for asylum they need to present themselves at the border with their passport at the first safe country they come to, not pay tens of thousands of dollars to a 'trafficker' to sneak them into the country with the most generous benefits system without one.

This sort of thing does cause the average person to have a 'tantrum'.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/h … 49696.html

Dilbert_X wrote:

Yes, there are rules, if people want apply for asylum they need to present themselves at the border with their passport at the first safe country they come to, not pay tens of thousands of dollars to a 'trafficker' to sneak them into the country with the most generous benefits system without one.

This sort of thing does cause the average person to have a 'tantrum'.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/h … 49696.html

when did you last live in the U.K.? the ‘most generous benefits system’? do you have any idea how hard it is to get benefits in the U.K. now? have you just missed the last 10 years of austerity and shrinking social welfare, or what? even for a U.K. citizen to get jobseekers’ allowance requires an incredible amount of weekly hoop-jumping.

this rhetoric of ‘coming here to sit on benefits and have children’ is literally about 20 years out of date. it’s the peak tabloid conservative rhetoric from the era of high blairism.

benefit fraud and benefit cheating are two apposite issues that are also almost complete non-issues. the levels of benefit cheating are totally negligible and out of all whack with the amount of stoked-up anger ravished on the issue by tabloid media.

At least the French have woken up.

The French government's general crackdown on radical Islamism, in response to the beheading of the history teacher outside Paris this month, has been rapid and tough - a blizzard of inquiries, closures, plans and proposals that have sometimes been hard to keep track of.

"Fear will change sides," President Emmanuel Macron is widely quoted as telling his Defence Council last week.

The government has announced more than 120 searches of individual homes, the dissolution of associations accused of spreading Islamist rhetoric, plans to target terrorist funding, new support for teachers, and fresh pressure on social media companies to police content more efficiently.

Nothing on this scale happened after other attacks on President Macron's watch, despite the violent murder of some 20 people during his tenure, among them police officers, a young woman at a train station and shoppers in a Christmas market.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54692802

Must be racism I guess.

Dilbert_X wrote:

At least the French have woken up.

The French government's general crackdown on radical Islamism, in response to the beheading of the history teacher outside Paris this month, has been rapid and tough - a blizzard of inquiries, closures, plans and proposals that have sometimes been hard to keep track of.

"Fear will change sides," President Emmanuel Macron is widely quoted as telling his Defence Council last week.

The government has announced more than 120 searches of individual homes, the dissolution of associations accused of spreading Islamist rhetoric, plans to target terrorist funding, new support for teachers, and fresh pressure on social media companies to police content more efficiently.

Nothing on this scale happened after other attacks on President Macron's watch, despite the violent murder of some 20 people during his tenure, among them police officers, a young woman at a train station and shoppers in a Christmas market.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54692802

Must be racism I guess.

yes, and now they are being widely boycotted in many of the (would be) moderate, tolerant, western-facing islamic nations. french products have been taken off the shelves in places like turkey, and kuwait and qatar.

good job! let's cause a huge economic self-wounding in order to round up 20 mad mullahs and knock down 100 doors.

i know you're in the business of designing self-locking door handles for submarine toilets or whatever, but you might want to think about all of the 'regular french people' and 'the common man' who are affected by widespread economic boycotts or sanctions. a lot of regular businesses and petite-bourgeoisie sales reps who have to look forward to yet more economic hardship over christmas. i suppose you don't care about that because you're getting your 'culture war' that excites you so much, the 'showdown' between the west and the unbelievers. strange that you claim to have the 'common man's' best interests at heart, though.

Last edited by uziq (2020-10-27 02:16:22)

Nothing of what France is doing should be controversial, and Macron's strategy here is the right one for several reasons.

All that the French government is attempting is to root out extremism as much as it can while still being focused on radicals. They're introducing a domestic training program for Imams, arresting people who are known to disseminate radical violent thinking on the internet, limiting foreign funding/influence in Mosques and putting its foot down on secularism. All in the background of the umpteenth incident in France where a deluded radical attacked someone else.

While much of the measures go (much) farther than what would be necessary to confront specifically this incident, there isn't any public or political patience any more to only address the specifics of each attack. After charlie hebdo, the bataclan attack, this one, some other (minor) incidents, it's overly clear France has a serious problem with Islamic radicalism which needs to be addressed. In a preventive rather than reactive way. In the background of this, Macron knows that it is very likely he'll face Le Pen in the presidential runoff again, so it's absolutely vital he convinces her more 'moderate' base that he's not playing around with violent ideologues and separatists.

Now of course much of the leadership in the middle east has fanatic radicals in their base and like having influence over their diaspora's in the west or religious practice in Europe in general. There's lots of Turkish, Qatari, Saudi financiers and imams who subsidise and frequent western mosques. As you can imagine, there's various degrees of intolerance seeping into these organisations that is absolutely incompatible with social norms and rule of law in our countries. Moreover some of it (like in the case of Turkey) is used to stimulate nationalism among the diaspora.

The prospect of losing this influence is problematic to them. Erdogan comes out to call these measures 'mentally deranged', which is good domestic politics for him, but also precisely the reason western muslim communities need to be separated from 'home country influence'. That guy has been pushing turkish nationalism in Europe for decades now because as I told you before many turks in Europe vote for him in their national elections. If that creates a toxic integration discussion in Europe, of course he doesn't care, instead he'll press on because the more separatist and in conflict with Europe the diaspora is, the more they'll vote for him.

As for the Qataris and Saudis, they've been involved in terrorism everywhere so definitely fuck them.

Larssen wrote:

Nothing of what France is doing should be controversial, and Macron's strategy here is the right one for several reasons.

All that the French government is attempting is to root out extremism as much as it can while still being focused on radicals. They're introducing a domestic training program for Imams, arresting people who are known to disseminate radical violent thinking on the internet, limiting foreign funding/influence in Mosques and putting its foot down on secularism. All in the background of the umpteenth incident in France where a deluded radical attacked someone else.

While much of the measures go (much) farther than what would be necessary to confront specifically this incident, there isn't any public or political patience any more to only address the specifics of each attack. After charlie hebdo, the bataclan attack, this one, some other (minor) incidents, it's overly clear France has a serious problem with Islamic radicalism which needs to be addressed. In a preventive rather than reactive way. In the background of this, Macron knows that it is very likely he'll face Le Pen in the presidential runoff again, so it's absolutely vital he convinces her more 'moderate' base that he's not playing around with violent ideologues and separatists.

Now of course much of the leadership in the middle east has fanatic radicals in their base and like having influence over their diaspora's in the west or religious practice in Europe in general. There's lots of Turkish, Qatari, Saudi financiers and imams who subsidise and frequent western mosques. As you can imagine, there's various degrees of intolerance seeping into these organisations that is absolutely incompatible with social norms and rule of law in our countries. Moreover some of it (like in the case of Turkey) is used to stimulate nationalism among the diaspora.

The prospect of losing this influence is problematic to them. Erdogan comes out to call these measures 'mentally deranged', which is good domestic politics for him, but also precisely the reason western muslim communities need to be separated from 'home country influence'. That guy has been pushing turkish nationalism in Europe for decades now because as I told you before many turks in Europe vote for him in their national elections. If that creates a toxic integration discussion in Europe, of course he doesn't care, instead he'll press on because the more separatist and in conflict with Europe the diaspora is, the more they'll vote for him.

As for the Qataris and Saudis, they've been involved in terrorism everywhere so definitely fuck them.

le pen's moderate base? lmao. macron is already centre-right. so it's officially a good thing that he panders to the far-right?

this is what happened with the conservative party in recent years, trying to stretch to meet the UKIP nationalists. look at the conservative party now.

this is desirable to you? ok.

why does there have to be grandstanding and proclamations from the executive for routine counter-terrorism work? he's electioneering based on the issue. if you can't see the issue with that, or where that might lead, then please don't act confused in 4 years' time when france is full of officially-enabled nationalists.

i think you'll find that the emotive core of UKIP was also immigrants and barely disguised white nationalism, too. interesting thesis that the 'moderate' centre parties can absorb this base without being dragged further to the right. the UK says you are wrong.

Last edited by uziq (2020-10-27 03:09:18)

if multiculturalism has 'failed' what is france supposed to do with its large non-white populations?

i'm sure france's moderate muslims and jews, arabs and africans, etc, love being referred to as 'failures of integration' by a small man in a suit. definitely better than that woman le pen! they'll be positively glad to hear of it spoken in such charming terms by a centre-right party.

you're just playing into the far-right rhetorical playbook when you shift all the blame onto 'the failures of multiculturalism'. that neat little bow-tie isn't going to wish away france's colonial legacy and the fact that it openly invited and promoted citizenship of the republic to all her former imperial subjects. a neat little bit of a blame-shifting but not a meaningful statement.

it's interesting how it's seldom ever phrased as a failure of laïcité, isn't it?

you can't be surprised that other grandstanding morons like erdogan are using this as excellent fuel to claim that france is losing its head.

Last edited by uziq (2020-10-27 03:28:34)

Larssen wrote:

In much of western continental europe the growing consensus is that multiculturalism 'failed'. Better a centre party acknowledges this and implements moderate & targetted policies than a Le Pen being elected down the line who will gleefully provoke real civil conflict on several fronts.

Its all much too late, Europe is fucked whatever happens.

uziq wrote:

how many moderate muslims are there in france? how many cut people's heads off?

please let's not explain the basic distinction between a cultural group and fundamentalist-extremists again.

Seems the supposed 'moderates' "turkey, and kuwait and qatar," aren't so moderate, since they seem to be siding with the beheaders and their supporters and inciters who are being rounded up.

Seems like the fundamentalist-extremists are the cultural group.

uziq wrote:

if multiculturalism has 'failed' what is france supposed to do with its large non-white populations?

i'm sure france's moderate muslims and jews, arabs and africans, etc, love being referred to as 'failures of integration' by a small man in a suit. definitely better than that woman le pen! they'll be positively glad to hear of it spoken in such charming terms by a centre-right party.

you're just playing into the far-right rhetorical playbook when you shift all the blame onto 'the failures of multiculturalism'. that neat little bow-tie isn't going to wish away france's colonial legacy and the fact that it openly invited and promoted citizenship of the republic to all her former imperial subjects. a neat little bit of a blame-shifting but not a meaningful statement.

it's interesting how it's seldom ever phrased as a failure of laïcité, isn't it?

you can't be surprised that other grandstanding morons like erdogan are using this as excellent fuel to claim that france is losing its head.

The quote that multiculturalism failed is Merkel's though, not Macron. But she also said refugees welcome a few years later.

Everywhere in the west it's evident that modern politicians who manage to stay in power for more than a single year are the ones who oscillate in their views and expressions. Seems to be a consequence of the fact that traditional voting blocks in multiparty democracies have eroded and the amount of swing voters increased dramatically. It's somewhat ironic to me that you're now pressing for a strong social liberal stance when in the past you felt committing to a single political ideology was foolish.

I wouldn't go so far to say in response to this attack that multiculturalism has failed, but it is an underlying sentiment that motivates many to vote extreme right. I agree that there's a blame shifting of sorts, as not only did European colonial powers extend citizenship rights, they also invited migrant workers after WW2 to help rebuild our countries. So yes there's an obligation to make multiculture work. But there are softer variants that can be explored; limiting further immigration from outside western countries (which has been done) and preventing enclaves from forming by cutting off foreign diaspora influence, paying attention to social mobility among existing immigrant populations etc.

In terms of policies, there's not a single one announced by the French govt in the past few days that I can disagree with. As long as rhetorically the focus also remains on stamping out radicalism, that's fine. The farthest Macron went was to say that Islam is 'a religion in crisis' and that he'll combat 'Islamist seperatism' which is still a fairly calm expression and kind of an understatement. Additionally the minister of foreign affairs said that 'he wouldn't forget the silence of some countries'.

This is all still pretty tame stuff that should be non controversial.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-10-27 04:19:26)

If you were to plug all of macbeth's personas into a character sheet, I wonder what the result would be.

Larssen wrote:

western muslim communities need to be separated from 'home country influence'

*jotting down notes* round up into ghettos and provide highly blacklisted internet … got it!

/s