The PC and Perpetually Offended Brigade

[astfgyl]

That's true that the shift is largely contained to the right leaning voters but either side heading to the extremes is a bad thing. Who knows though, maybe a right/left coalition will default to centre? Hopefully so. You're right those riots seem to have been a turning point there but I dunno how reactionary the Swedes are. Perhaps it'll put the shits up enough other governments to the extent they start working for the people there meant to represent but I wouldn't hold my breath. Also probably worth saying that the far right politicians will have their price just like any of the rest in due course, once they get their feet under the table.

[astfgyl]

I see a video doing the rounds of an Irish homeless person ringing up the Sunday World over their 2 page spread about a homeless asylum seeker needing a place to go. Now I don't know the details of how either ended up where they're at but the chap did ask a valid question, which was "where did you get the guy from the story from, did he contact you or did you just go out and find him?" Of course the guy from the paper fobbed him off to the editorial department and to me there was a whiff of something off about the video but how does the asylum seeking guy get an audience with the Sunday World and a 2 page spread when people here are genuinely struggling to get a roof over their heads?

This is the result of unfettered immigration policies which are failing both residents of the state and those who come seeking asylum but most of all what things like this will do is galvanise the nationalist movement as has been seen in Sweden (though I don't know if they suffer from an accommodation crisis or a simple lack of integration) and it might be in the current government's interests here to actually listen to what people have to say around the immigration/asylum situation instead of pissing down their backs and telling them it's raining for a change. Maybe don't just cry "far right!, far right!!" whenever anyone brings this up as an issue or else someday the real wolf will come and nobody will believe them. Those fables are carried over centuries for a reason.

Anyhow just some observations there, I don't know how the African lad got his 2 pages in the paper (though I suspect some help from a kindly NGO or three) or whether the Irish guy is bullshitting about his own situation (or indeed who is highlighting his plight, because he ain't filming himself) but it seems to tie into the discussion we've been having about Swedish people being driven to the fringes because the mainstream doesn't seem to represent them anymore. The likes of that article is a real own goal in terms of fostering any good feeling towards the asylum seekers, whether that was the intention or not.

I think the government here will appear to double down rather than listen, but as Mary Lou said lately (paraphrased) "there can be no cap on asylum seekers coming here", and I reckon it's out of the hands of the national government and appears to me to be the EU taking them in rather than the Irish doing it exactly and I don't think our lads have any control over the situation or can do anything at all about it other than try accommodate more and more of them.

It's not going away anyway.

Edit: now, saying all of that is only highlighting a problem either real or perceived depending on one's viewpoint so has anyone any ideas of what could be done to prevent exacerbating the situation (as telling people to simply suck it up surely will) going forward?

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

The Sunday World is a business. Their business is selling newspapers and/or getting people to click on their website to generate ad revenue. They thought this story would generate some revenue. Everything else above seems to confuse The Sunday World for a wing of the government.

[astfgyl]

Not at all. I would of course accept that they might do it to piss people off as much as entertain or inform them because no clicks are bad clicks but I was using it as an example of how things are presented and how it plays in the sticks so to speak. Now of course you already knew that and used your response to completely avoid any of the issues or questions raised in my post.

As you also realise, because you're not as thick as you're letting on in your response, the newspaper story was more of an introduction to discussing how these things are framed from a nationalist point of view and how these situations lead to things like the rise of extremism due to government policies and also how said government policies seem to be out of the hands of our national government and seem more like they are dictated to us from an EU level, due to things like what Mary Lou has been saying even in opposition.

People talk about dog whistles for nationalism and "far right" politics, but the whistle does indeed call the dog or no-one would be blowing it. I've written there about the proverbial crying wolf over the far right by labelling everything that doesn't agree with the political bent of the day as such. I've mentioned how eventually one day that wolf may come and no-one will believe it but will instead choose to vote for it, because whichever populist presents the solution to the ever growing league of the disenfranchised will seem to come as a saviour when I believe that most people would rather sit in the middle but with governments that actually heed their concerns rather than dismissing them out of hand and treating people like children because they have their own opinions.

Also at the end I've edited the post to ask what anybody has in their thoughts as a solution so it wasn't an entire post of simply presenting a problem but somehow you managed to miss all of that and contributed nothing to it other than a smartarse dismissal which didn't look half as smart to me as it must have looked to you.

Funnily enough though, what you've done there is precisely the sort of thing that the government here does when it comes to discussing anything around immigration and I guess upon reflection it really does tie into the general point I was making about how people become disenfranchised in the first place. Do you think if things here were less bleak for the general population (including all the working foreigners who've taken up residence here since the turn of the century) that the so called far right would gain any traction at all?

No, it's far better to dismiss people's concerns out of hand because that'll definitely bring them onside.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

You're talking about a feature in The Sunday World and you're saying it, an article in a newspaper that upset an Irish homeless person, is the result of unfettered immigration. I'm afraid I don't see the logical connection there. If you want the real hard honest in your face truth of the matter, it's that over decades and decades the press has learnt that, fundamentally, people don't give a fuck about normal homeless people: people do not give a fuck about the homeless. The homeless do not sell newspapers, do not get clicks. This was the case before immigration began, it's the case now. "Oh, he's an asylum seeking homeless person? Hmm, yes, I think that has good traction for clicks among both the superficial left and the seething at the mouth looking for anything to rag on right. Let's print it!"

"Yeah, but wharrabou our own homeless!?"

Irish homeless people don't sell newspapers or get clicks. That is 100% NOT the result of unfettered immigration.

[astfgyl]

Same bullshit answer out of you again after I've already explained to you that it wasn't about the newspaper article and more about how the nationalist, Ireland for the Irish continent are framing something like that for their own ends, calling the dog with the whistle. That was the introduction to discussing about how these concerns can bleed into the consciousness of the general population who would otherwise be in the middle when it comes to immigration policies.

Again, you definitely saw this but wasted two posts distracting yourself about the intentions of the newspaper.

The original post was further to the discussion around the Swedish result which seems to show how the immigration/asylum policies of the EU (and to a lesser extent Ireland because it looks like they aren't banging their own drum on the matter) can drive people to an extreme position when there is no need if only governments would implement sensible policies around this or even discuss it without labelling all dissent as the far right.

So yeah, Sunday World or whatever. We all know how the papers work.

[hellfire]

Same bullshit answer out of you again after I've already explained to you that it wasn't about the newspaper

Ignore him and he might go away. I've retired from answering the clown.

[Ollkiller]

Jesus the sunday world is a tough read. Level of "journalism" is shocking. And the sports section is a bunch of Eamonn Dunphys writing the worst articles ever.

[astfgyl]

Tbf I only buy a paper based on the soccer coverage in it, and the Sunday Times is quite pricey these days

[Mower Liberation Front]

Jesus the sunday world is a tough read. Level of "journalism" is shocking. And the sports section is a bunch of Eamonn Dunphys writing the worst articles ever.

I was kinda hoping that cunt Aldridge would have thrown himself off a roof after his Precious's quadruple went out the window.

[astfgyl]

Same bullshit answer out of you again after I've already explained to you that it wasn't about the newspaper

Ignore him and he might go away. I've retired from answering the clown.

Ah I enjoy him. Tis grand to have a lad to spar with. I can see how it can be frustrating but I'd have given up well before the first couple of hundred posts only for him.

I also completely disagree with his views on immigration.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Again, you definitely saw this but wasted two posts distracting yourself about the intentions of the newspaper.

If I respond to you in a way that seems off from the point you wanted to make, it's genuinely because I was looking for a point and found a very different one to the one you had in mind. Not because I know what point you want to make and have chosen to ignore it. I don't know what point you're trying to make.

Is it just that there are people in the centre who will swing right if they start thinking immigration isn't being handled properly? Grand. They can also petition their local TDs about these things whenever they want, and the whole point of elections is to allow people to vote for parties that "represent" their interests, and then try to vote them out next election if they change their mind, or the party changes their policies, or because they felt like doing something different on the day. Unfortunately (?), outside of direct democracy, you're left with the choice of either pushing your "usual" party towards positions that you've moved to (this is what the Moderates party in Sweden tried, to present themselves harsher on immigration than they had done before), but then can you trust they'll fulfill these campaign promises once they're in? Or, you can switch your vote to a party that already embodies the position you've moved to. Taking Sweden as an example again, usual voters of the Moderates apparently didn't think they could be trusted to enforce their new policies if voted in, so many of them decided instead to vote for the party whose main pillar is immigration, etc., the Swede-Democrats.

With direct democracy, there'd be a lot more referendums on specific issues and a lot less of having to take the "bad" with the "good" when it came to voting for representatives. Personally, I'm all for more democracy, always, so I'd be all down for direct, even if the price was the occasional banning of building new minarets or whatever (one from quite a while ago in Switzerland). But if this is closer to the kind of answer you were looking for, I still don't have a clue what the Sunday World story had to do with any of it, but maybe that doesn't matter. Just yet to meet a vocally anti-immigration individual who had a genuine heart for "their own" homeless, as in, volunteered for a homeless charity or set one up, but by Christ they love to exploit the angle...

Here's the video anyway:
https://twitter.com/iamsaoirse_/status/1569652147548995584

Video could as easily be genuine as faked, but even assuming it is genuine, I hope the poor lad doesn't think he'll get any actual help from the likes of the account above who shared it on Twitter and Gript, who, unsurprisingly, have also covered it (and who are also unsurprisingly championing Enoch Burke). So, yeah; direct democracy as a solution? Pie in the sky though.

[astfgyl]

Nah we're back to the video now and the newspaper. I said in the first post that I found something off about the video and who is filming it but that's only what got me thinking, not a point in itself. I know that the anti immigration crowd don't give a shite about the Irish homeless other than to use them to make a point but they will certainly use them as part of a recruitment effort. Would you not think it'd be smarter of the governments throughout Europe to actually cap numbers of things like refugees or at least make them claim safe haven in the nearest safe country instead of making dole tourists out of them? Or deporting the criminal ones might show people they were ready to meet in the middle. I'll come back to this, the hangover is cutting me too deep at the minute

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Fair enough on deporting criminals, I'm not going to argue that, even though it is clearly ripe for vicious abuse (see, for example, among which communities the highest numbers of false arrest and prosecution already happen in the west), but what about the majority who aren't criminals? Take, say, Turkey as a nearest safe country for many refugees. To what level of over-crowding and degradation should refugee camps in Turkey be allowed get before we suggest, "Maybe we should let some of these people move on?" And if you cap numbers of refugees then, on a human level, what happens to them? Either they get in illegally, leaving them few options other than crime or being criminally exploited (be that human trafficking, illegal factory or agriculture workers, etc.), or... well, they die somewhere else. Yeah, not our problem. Some people do consider it to be our problem though. The global, human "our". That's a political position, but one that can't be just wished away, no more than I can wish away political positions that have no problem playing a white homeless person against a black homeless person all while giving absolutely zero fucks what happens to either of them, and in a different context would be telling the white homeless person they only have themselves to blame.

[Caomhaoin]

My aunt is married to a Swede and lives in Gothenburg. They are both linen trouser and sandal types with whom
I disagree with on almost everything.

Both told me at my sisters wedding in the summer that the multicultural experiment in Sweden is an absolute catastrophe and must be reversed as a matter of urgency.

You can have all your humanity and your globalist fuckin' bullshit, the consequences of such are bringing the DUN DUN 'far right' into power in one of the most liberal societies on the planet.

And how many anti-immigration types have you met and thusly read their minds regarding homelessness? They have to set up a homeless charity before they are allowed to point the issue out in a political discourse? That's outrageous bullshit.

So there's that.