European Politics

2 days ago, anniversary


"Blew himself with IED"

4908jujd7ig71.jpg
 
^And hopefully, so will the uniformed Bashi-bazouk calling themselves "police", and, more importantly, all their superiors who've been covering up the whole thing for more than a year:

I mentioned it briefly last year

... and this one is for the Bulgarian government,
for the so-called "policemen" who believe kicking arrested people in the head, spitting on them and taking selfies is ok,
for all those in charge turning a blind eye to that disgrace, and, last but not least,
for the so-called "prosecutor general", according to whom separation of powers is a right extremists idea:


#OCTABKA
but then things in Belarus escalated and I dropped the subject, feeling that pressing it further would be disrespectful to the people there.
Time to see that scum sentenced now.
 

Merkel gearing up to retire after 16 years..... feels weird.

I am by no means a Conservative, but I wish we could have Conservatives like her in the UK rather than Boris Johnson and his ilk.
 
I am by no means a Conservative, but I wish we could have Conservatives like her in the UK rather than Boris Johnson and his ilk.

She had a rather nasty conservative angle early on that got kind of softened/obscured over the years. I was absolutely not a fan of hers for at least the first eight years, but I admit she was the best chancellor we could have in the last decade or so.
 
She had a rather nasty conservative angle early on that got kind of softened/obscured over the years. I was absolutely not a fan of hers for at least the first eight years, ...
This is hilarious to me. That's like.... a full two term U.S presidency, here in Mexico they're only in power for 6. The rest of Latin America is a mixuture of that. I just can't imagine myself saying, "Bush was an IDIOT for the first 8 years, but the next decade or so he mellowed out." LOL
 
Saw the thing about the Belarussian athlete asking for refugee status at the Olympics, but didn't know about the rest. Even so, I have the feeling this is barely scratching the surface as to what is going on:

 
39-6650995e985bb2b138c.jpg
This guy is stepping down.


Easy to ridicule, but managed to hold his position through really turbulent political times since 2014, avoiding serious backlash through an insane wave of mass-immigration and almost 15,000 covid deaths while our neighbours Norway and Finland have managed to keep theirs to slightly north of 800 and just above a thousand, as a comparison.
 
Last edited:
View attachment 17257
This guy is stepping down.


Easy to ridicule, but managed to hold his position through really turbulent political times since 2014, avoiding serious backlash through an insane wave of mass-immigration and almost 15,000 covid deaths while our neighbours Norway and Finland have managed to keep theirs to slightly north of 800 and just above a thousand, as a comparison.

Define mass-immigration please.
 
Yeah, that sentence really jumped out. "Insane wave of mass-immigration", sounded like rightwing bigot talk.
It's rather accurate though. Over ten percent of the total immigration wave to reach the EU in 2015 settled in Sweden, with initial chaos all around because of unavailable housing - There were already a large shortage of rental apartments. Sweden has a population of roughly ten million and saw an increase of over 160k in refugees in a year. We all remember how many countries were bitching and moaning about taking anybody in at all. I am pro immigration, which shows in how I cast my vote as well, but I am not naive to the reality of it. It comes with issues that need handling and it does add to an initial financial burden. Is it the right thing though? I think it is, a duty to the best of our abilities, to take refugees in and we should damn well do so, but not be naive about the challenges it presents.
 
Last edited:
I see. Well, this is a lot more subtle and clear. And hard to disagree with imo.

Sweden has a lot of space though. And it is one the richest nations in the EU. I'm thinking of Canada now. I wonder how they deal with lots of immigration, huge quantity of land, and not such a huge amount of citizens.

But in essence, I'd say the EU (and some specific countries in particular) are shamelessly handling the immigration.
The push backs at sea, the terrible housing near the borders. It's inhuman and while some countries are doing very well, as a whole, this topic is one of the worst aspects of the EU.
 
Last edited:
Empty space is a fallacy in this topic because immigrants don't want to go to empty spaces. Alike 'native' Europeans they mostly want to be clustered somewhere around opportunities. Half of EU is empty for a reason.

That's not even considering networking, e.g. being near people of your origin or similar. Good luck with spreading people over Swedish expanses because they'll use first opportunity to get to the big city. And cluster.

The issue is that no one can plan anything with arbitrary immigration incoming whenever some shit happens in Middle East or elsewhere. We don't control bombs that Americans or Russians drop on those areas and we have uncooperative Turkey whose government is exploiting immigrants.

How can Sweden know where and how much housing to build and how to implement programs for assimilation? They plan 50K, 150K gets in.

Other "powers" who are in this mess with us, US, UK, even Australians to an extent are involved in ME, they get to pick them selectively the old fashion way and let in the profiles they find desirable for their society, while EU is left with waves of immigrants we must take in bulk?

I'm for open policy, but this situation is complex and economically unsolvable until we know how much people are we talking about in the first place.
 
How can Sweden know where and how much housing to build and how to implement programs for assimilation? They plan 50K, 150K gets in.

Well, you could always expand housing capacities, there can never be too much of that!
 
Sure.

If you can make a goverment investment in that area, that's great.
 
Define mass-immigration please.

I think Yax summed up what I was referring to pretty well. The situation has been quite insane. I voted for the guy pictured afterwards, but no one on the political spectrum would say it was handled well. Oppurtunists made fortunes on living spaces, there's an insane shortage on rentals due to something like 25% of the public housing available for rent having been seized for that purpose, lots of the immigrants ended up in the middle of nowhere small towns (I think this is what @Forostar is referring to with "space") where no one wants to live and the schools can't recruit teachers which is turning out quite badly (who would have guessed).

So you end up with a new lower class without education or with poor language skills in a country which has no jobs for them and a school system with no way of handling already severely dropping results gets smacked with another 5-10 kids in every class (reality in some places) who have to learn a new culture, language, school language and make up for years of already lost education to compete with their peers. Some make it, most will not.

I guess it's better than a war torn region, but you can't stand and invite people in and then stick your head in the sand when it comes to handling the issues that present themselves afterwards. It has fed racism, nationalism and gang violence. Add covid to that pot, and you have areas which government information didn't reach.

The question you really need to think of here - how do you most effectively collapse a welfare state?
 
Last edited:
Sweden has a lot of space though. And it is one the richest nations in the EU. I'm thinking of Canada now. I wonder how they deal with lots of immigration, huge quantity of land, and not such a huge amount of citizens.
The difference is that Canada recruits most of our immigrants to work in specific areas of the country. IE, we might find a doctor from Serbia and ask them to work in Newfoundland for 5-10 years, as there is a shortage there. My dentist came over from Syria at age 22, and worked for five years in rural Ontario before moving to Ottawa.

We handle refugees differently as well, primarily by relying on established social networks to distribute them to cities where there are already support structures and people of the same groups. That's why Canada has a strong Vietnamese culture spread around most major cities, and why we are growing a strong Syrian culture as well. We have that advantage because we have a big ocean.

Sweden, like Canada, is very big, but the broadest amount of land is frankly uninhabitable, much like in Sweden. Most Canadians live within 100km of the US border, just like most Swedish people live on the Baltic and Skagerrak/Kattegat coast.

21% of people who live in Canada were not born in Canada. This year we will welcome around 300,000 people to Canada. About 1/10th of those will be refugees/asylum seekers. It's a vastly different situation than in Sweden.

The information on Wikipedia for asylum/refugee/immigrants is not up to date for 2020, but I have dug up the following: in 2016, the biggest year for immigration to Sweden, the peak was around 150,000 people coming to the country. This coincided with the largest migration from Sweden peak, over 50,000, so a net swing of 100k.

However, asylum seekers are in general very low, but there was a huge spike in 2015:

image


Still, none of this precludes the same pressures Maturin describes - immigrants and asylum seekers are younger and have more children (one of the reasons Canada seeks out so many immigrants) and put pressure on city centres where housing is already at a premium.

Pretty much, this looks like a lot of pressure from a large spike that exacerbated the challenges in the system. Whereas Canada's system is very much established and works quite well for what it is - but we have a far larger ability to choose who comes over. Notice this chart:

Strong-tradition-of-welcoming-refugees.png.webp


You will see that Canada accepted 60,000 refugees in the same timeframe Sweden had 150,000 people who showed up.

A big difference though is we send very, very few refugees back, whereas Sweden has the ability to send more (though many did stay, probably 2/3).

On a personal front, I regularly agitate with my elected officials to expand our refugee programs to accept closer to double what we normally do, with a stress ability of more than double that for situations like the Syrian Civil War.

So in the end, that while Sweden and Canada have comparable situations in many fronts, Canada's percentage of refugees is lower, at least for now. That may change if the USA overturns Obergefell - I know some people in Foreign Affairs and they project upwards of 500k refugees (from the fucking USA) if that occurs. And of course, even that would be different.
 
Back
Top