Come One, Come All
Speaking of “diversity” and its wonders, Heather Mac Donald ponders Germany’s ongoing experiment in self-annihilation:
There follows a horror-show catalogue of incompetence, dishonesty, and inassimilable monsters, with criminal records of prodigious length, pious newcomers calling for the murder of “every critic of Islam,” and in which the word machete crops up quite a lot.
A dark surrealism ensues, not least with regard to the convoluted ordeal of deporting uninvited visitors bent on one’s destruction. All set against gushing media coverage of a “Techno Parade für Toleranz,” and cheery posters reminding viewers of the approved attitude:
In terms of ideology, “diversity” seems to be the belief that the less we have in common, and feel we have in common, the happier we will be. An unobvious proposition, to say the least. Yet the word is mouthed as if it were a self-evident good, a “strength,” a moral imperative, a thing of which one could never have enough.
Update, via the comments:
Dicentra adds,
It seems to me we’ve strayed very far from the idea that an attractively developed society should – and must – be discerning about which kinds of newcomers it welcomes, lest it be flooded with incompatible tribes and the trash of the world.
The idea that the locals, the voting citizens, might want a good deal and ask, “What’s in it for us?” seems anathema to Our Betters. Likewise, the notion of a civilised society implying, quite strongly, “You’re lucky to be here. Behave accordingly.”
And so, instead, we get the routine airbrushing of crime news, and instructional videos in which ludicrous progressive women film themselves performing please-don’t-rape-me dances.
It’s a mental world in which everyone is expected to pretend that everything is fine and no grave mistakes were made, despite all available evidence. And in which the only real problem is not the ongoing, quite rapid degradation of German society, and other European societies, but those who dare to notice this unhappy transformation.
Ccscientist notes the please-don’t-rape-me dance, above, and adds,
The unrealism of such people and their peers, Our Betters, created a problem on a vast scale and which is dire in its implications – a problem that they are unwilling to fix or even clearly identify. And so, they retreat further into unrealism and absurdity, while expecting others – those on whom they’ve inflicted the problem – to become unrealistic and absurd too.
It’s the progressive way. In this and so much else.
Update 2:
Regarding the pretence above, Dicentra replies,
There’s also a weird air of displacement, of vehemently resenting those who notice the problem. And so, we get claims like this one here, in which BBC broadcaster Dan Snow denounces as “stunningly racist” even the suggestion that incompatible tribes exist. Because Mr Snow feels they shouldn’t exist, that they somehow ought not to.
And so, magically, they don’t. And only Very Bad People would say they do.
From the linked piece:
Mr Snow, since you ask, is married to the philanthropist Lady Edwina Louise Grosvenor, daughter of the sixth Duke of Westminster, one of the country’s richest landowners, with an estimated fortune north of £7 billion. Needless to say, Mr Snow does not live in, or anywhere near, the kinds of “diverse” neighbourhoods now being trashed and terrorised by competing tribes.
Tribes that apparently shouldn’t exist.
And the above, this farce, is pretty much a standard pattern.
Regarding Mr Snow, his practised obliviousness, and his rush to deploy accusations of racism, Dicentra adds,
Well, this is a pretty good summary of the phenomenon. It does rather capture the recurring dynamic:
Of course, reality is not always congenial, and what one might wish to be the case may be preferable to what actually is. I can see the appeal of a world in which everyone just rubbed along nicely with endless reciprocation and common ground. But pretending that’s the case, when it clearly, vividly, isn’t, isn’t a wise or moral way to behave.
Especially when the consequences of that pretence are imposed on others, who then, in addition, get badmouthed and vilified for daring to object. Say, people not entirely happy about the sudden ubiquity of Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose modes of expression involve machetes, or people who discover their doorsteps literally being shat on.
Update 3:
In the comments, EmC quotes this,
And adds,
Thing is, it’s by no means a trivial point. The fact that some – the Dan Snows of this world – might find the wording scandalous and gaspworthy is very much part of the problem, a measure of the decay in national morale. A nation whose inhabitants are no longer allowed to feel that their home is offering anything of value to newcomers, something for which one might expect appreciation and an eagerness to assimilate, is not on a happy trajectory.
Blog Preservation Fund
Famous last words.
I should add that I know very little about the AfD, so I can’t comment on whether any ugly details are missing from Heather Mac Donald’s piece. (I gather that the AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, is in a civil partnership with a woman from Sri Lanka, which doesn’t exactly scream Hitlerian intent, but again, my knowledge of German politics is fairly slim.)
I’m more interested in the status-quo lunacies that have resulted in the party’s appeal. The crime statistics alone seemed worth repeating. That, and the urge to pretend that everything is fine, despite all available evidence. The weird conceit that the real problem is not the ongoing, quite rapid degradation of German society, but those who dare to notice this unhappy transformation.
Even the Dalai Lama knows better.
Big hitter, the Lama . . .
And lest we forget.
Don’t worry, ladies. The groove will save you.
“Attention, citizens. Against your wishes, we’ve needlessly created a problem on a vast scale, the implications of which are dire, and as a consequence of our terrible decisions, our sheer perversity, which we still deny, we must now insist that you become equally dishonest and absurd. Please await further instructions.”
In a sane world, the Dalai Lama is as much a moral authority about European border policies as the Pope is about Indian border policies, but I’m grateful he said this because I can send the clip to my mother who believes in Eastern Wisdom and open borders. He does know something about small countries having large numbers of uninvited guests, and he’s applying his principles consistently and compassionately to wypipo countries, to the surprise of the Indian-ethnicity BBC interviewer who was expecting brown solidarity.
How quickly this interviewer skimmed from crisis countries and refugee issues to what she sees as the real principle, namely that if Indians want to live in Europe who should be allowed to say no to them? Not Europeans, that’s for sure. Her parents, for example, wanted to live in the UK, now they do and it suits them – this presented as a shining moral parable for the automatic endorsement of the Dalai Lama. And probably none of her BBC colleagues asked her why her boring and self-serving family anecdotes were appropriate for an interview with a global religious leader or in the British public interest.
I wrote about this at the time but can’t find it. The town didn’t use “die Vielfalt” in the way its being used here. The original page on the town’s website, since removed, described how they were having lots of events to celebrate the anniversary and even listed a few. They then referred to the “variety” of events using “Vielfalt” in the sense of variety.
Some journalist used Google Translate on that particular page and Google Translate has many flaws when it comes to context.
Furthermore, if you go and look at pictures of the event there wasn’t a rainbow flag in sight.
This picture is a few hours before the attack:
https://rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/solingen/solingen-anschlag-tote-und-verletzte-bei-attacke-auf-stadtfest-fotos_bid-118175225#11
That’s not to say that the sentiment of the her post is wrong.
Not only is she in a relationship with another woman they have children and live in Switzerland.
There’s some good background on her at this English speaking podcast from DW. They credit her with brining a sense of organisation to the AfD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evh-fCA8Tv4
But diversity is our strength!
[ Puts damp tea towel over WrongThink Klaxon. ]
And for those who missed it, this seems apposite.
Germany should have been broken up into its constituent principalities after The Great War.
He’s being kind
The problem is not immigration per se. It is the refusal to judge immigrants as potentially violent, deranged, or ISIS members. They are never asked if they want to “become German”. It is the “don’t judge” conceit. As if all possible immigrants are like that nice lady next door. The fact that some countries like Venezuela actively empty their jails into the US (or other countries) is simply ignored. Or that some immigrants belong to organizations dedicated to Jihad.
Prior post on apt rentals: Landlords are at the bottom of the Leftist pecking order. It is not even considered that without landlords there would be no rentals at all. The law in question also ignores that some people are renting out a room in their own house. The old lady who needs someone to share the rent cannot rent to a junkie or criminal or crazy.
The refusal to judge immigrants, period.
They’ve been beatified by the same sort that can’t understand why the bear is chewing their face off.
Well, it seems to me we’ve strayed very far from the idea that an attractively developed society should – and must – be discerning about which kinds of newcomers it welcomes, lest it be flooded with incompatible tribes and the trash of the world. The idea that the locals, the voting citizens, might want a good deal and even ask, “What’s in it for us?” seems anathema to Our Betters. Likewise, the notion of a civilised society implying, quite strongly, “You’re lucky to be here. Behave accordingly.”
Thanks for those. Not sure why your comments were snagged in the spam filter. If it happens again, email me, or DM me on X, and I’ll poke it with a stick.
My aunt, married to my abusive uncle, had that attitude: “It’s fine! Everything is fine!” as her daughters were smacked around. She was always cheerful, always upbeat.
Same with my ex-BIL’s mother, a woman who’d had multiple miscarriages and stillbirths before finally birthing live sons, but who was so traumatized that she utterly neglected them and hoarded everything, never having cleaned her house. She still acted really upbeat, tho. “Everything’s fine! My sons are sociopaths but everything’s fine!”
Europe is in an abusive relationship with the worst of the people they’ve invited in. They know there’s no sane way to address the problem without it blowing up in their faces. So they immerse themselves in the big Egyptian river, hoping the third and fourth generations will be gentler.
Here in the UK, the attempt to ignore and even deny the obvious racial component of a mass grooming and gang-raping scandal, spanning several cities, in which thousands of underage girls were targeted precisely because they were white, by immigrant men of overwhelmingly Pakistani origin, some reportedly quoting the Qur’an during their acts of child abuse, is itself rather disgusting.
If one can’t even state the nature of the problem, the odds of any meaningful solution, any way of avoiding similar outrages, recedes even further.
I’d call it ethno-religious. The Pakistanis also went after Sikh girls. Apparently the Muslim tradition in that region is that all unveiled, non-Muslim girls are fair game.
I’d warrant that to the Pakistanis, the religious aspect is more important than the ethnic aspect. They’d happily rape girls in Pakistan who were not Muslims but not white, either. (Though such girls don’t exist; when Pakistan was first formed and they cast out the Hindus, there was rape aplenty.)
Reading Theodore Dalrymple, the religious aspect is a convenient justification and little more.
See:
I wonder about the “little more”, though, since rape of non-Muslims happens in various Muslim-dominated countries. And since sexual slavery is an ancient Muslim tradition.
Finnish safety dance: ahahahaha in the comments there is a cartoon “Reeeeeee Tarded” and I heard it in the RiiiiiiCola ad voice.
But not funny IRL because this means these people are so detached from reality that it is scary.
I hate road-rage ruffians.
The unrealism of such people created the problem – a problem they are unwilling to fix or even clearly identify – and so they retreat further into unrealism and absurdity, while expecting others – those on whom they’ve inflicted the problem – to become unrealistic and absurd too.
Maybe it’s just me…seems that way anyway…but when I see stuff like this, it’s not only the 15-30 seconds of it that I see. I see the effort put into writing the..song. The effort to recruit a half dozen others. To set up the camera. To perform the…choreography. As weak as any of those efforts are, they are far from spontaneous. Then someone decides to make the effort to put it on social media. All of that takes time. And in all that time none of those people was willing or able to say, “Gee, this seems pretty stupid”. None. Zero. In all that time. That’s the real Reeee Tardid.
Most of the people who hear others say “diversity is our strength” don’t realize there’s a good chance the “our” doesn’t include themselves.
[ Slides fluff-covered nicotine lozenge to Nate. ]
On the house.
Kamala? Is that you?
“German” revelers.
Sometimes people are highly motivated by religion. Muslims strike me as such people. Mohammed took sex slaves from among his conquests. Muslims eat and breathe “what Mohammed did” as the standard for behavior.
Sure, there’s lust and evil driving them. But their religion gives permission, express permission, so they figure they’re doing God’s will by punishing non-Muslims for their disbelief.
Kidnapping and raping young Christian girls is not uncommon in the “moderate Muslim nation” of Egypt.
Some of the parents of the Rotherham victims asked local Muslim leaders to help but were rebuffed.
Where is Paul Kersey when you need him?
an aside, Solingen knifemaking center of germany now banning knives. how very droll.
If they really can’t help themselves, perhaps we should all stop helping them.
A trip to North Sentinel island might be appropriate.
https://x.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1876784199706763675
Music to soothe the savages? Don eat me, I’m only the piano player?
I have no idea how that link got there. Didn’t even have that open in a tab. Not even recently.
Let’s try that again:
If they really can’t help themselves, perhaps we should all stop helping them.
A trip to North Sentinel island might be appropriate.
To no one’s surprise, Sowell nails it.
[ Post updated. ]
A moment of leporid levity.
The alternative is to admit that your enemies were right all along, and that their evaluation of some foreigners — at least at certain concentrations — wasn’t bigoted but accurate.
Narcissists and other Cluster Bs honestly cannot do that, unless they’re willing to pull a Zuckerberg and pretend like they’ve seen the light and are now one of the Good Guys.
There’s also a weird air of displacement, of vehemently resenting those who notice the problem. And so, we get absurd and entirely predictable claims like this one here, in which BBC broadcaster Dan Snow denounces as “stunningly racist” even the suggestion that incompatible tribes exist. Because Mr Snow feels they shouldn’t exist, that they somehow ought not to.
And so, magically, they don’t. And only Very Bad People would say they do.
From the linked piece:
And the above, this farce, is pretty much a standard pattern.
What it’s like to die.
The hardest part has been accepting that he came back from it.
It’s hard to comment without having had a similar experience.
You’ll understand my reluctance.
That’s the magical incantation, isn’t it? Declare something as bigoted and presto, it is banished from reality.
If it’s racist you don’t have to look at it. If it’s Islamophobic you needn’t worry about it. If it’s right-wing it’s a wicked phantasm that vanishes when you turn on the lights.
The unreality is mind-boggling. It truly is a Cordyceps fungus controlling their brains.
Well, again, this is a pretty good summary of the phenomenon. It does rather capture the dynamic:
I understand that reality is not always congenial and that what one might wish to be the case may be preferable to what actually is. I can see the appeal of a world in which everyone just rubbed along nicely with endless reciprocation and common ground. But pretending that’s the case, when it clearly, vividly, isn’t, isn’t a wise or moral way to behave.
Especially when the consequences of that pretence are imposed on others, who then, in addition, get badmouthed and vilified for daring to object. Say, people not entirely happy about the sudden ubiquity of Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose modes of expression involve machetes, or people who discover their doorsteps literally being shat on.
[ Post updated again. ]
See, this is why a comments section is a very useful thing.
As an Indian immigrant, I am genuinely annoyed by both her type, and the implication that she is somehow batting for “fellow Indians”.
Her tribe is not Indian or Hindu, it’s Western liberal, like anyone employed at the BBC or similar. She could care little, for instance, for the plight of Hindus and Christians in Pakistan and Bangladesh, but her tears flow for Palestine.
Incidentally, any normal Indian would tell you exactly what the Dalai Lama said – excessive immigration bad, certain immigrant groups especially bad even in moderation.
If you notice, her main concern is not Indians. It’s Africans and Middle East immigrants, as her first question shows.
The reason she brought up her Indian heritage is not what you think. The Dalai Lama would be very grateful for the sanctuary provided to him and his fellow refugees by India – with no ulterior motives, just like we did with Jews, Parsis etc.
She is being viciously manipulative here – as is typical of leftists – by using that against him, to try and guilt trip him into supporting mass immigration.
Again, there’s a signature assumption of imperviousness, an expectation of deference, as if these higher beings were unaccustomed to their pronouncements being challenged in a realistic way.
And so, Mr Snow, our BBC broadcaster, makes the fashionable noises, while safe in the knowledge that he is unlikely to find his own neighbours using their garden as an abattoir. And he, unlike others, is unlikely to discover that his doorstep is once again covered in human excrement.
And Mr Snow wafts through life, among his peers, as if his piety were unassailable.
“Our strength is in our numbers.“
Diversity is our strength <quiet part>against you</quiet part>.
People guilty of treason used to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
The Left believes that everyone in the world is morally entitled to “share” the West’s prosperity. Thus, there must not be any limit to immigration from even the most barbaric cultures.
As for the idea that we Westerners have a legitimate interest in preserving our own cultures, well, that’s raacist.
That – in huge letters at customs and immigration.
Your ridiculous ideology.
Thing is, it’s by no means a trivial point. The fact that some – the Dan Snows of this world – might find the wording scandalous and gaspworthy is very much part of the problem, a measure of the decay in national morale. A nation whose inhabitants are no longer allowed to feel that their home is offering anything of value to newcomers, something for which one might expect appreciation and an eagerness to assimilate, is not on a happy trajectory.
Given the crashing birthrates of the native populations across the Western world, there’s no need for his lot to increase their birthrates.
It reminds me of a discussion I had when Brexit was happening with an EU citizen working in the UK in some IT job. He was acting like he was the one doing us a massive favour by working here, and refused to accept that he should perhaps show some appreciation to the country that is allowing him to do that work and earn much more doing it than he could back home.
Pardon the emendation.
[ Post updated yet again. ]
Wow. What a smug little shit. WTF is that guy? He’s not Piers Morgan. Is he his protégé? Not a fan of Piers per se but I would be curious to know if he agrees with what that little shit (WTF is that guy?) is saying under Pier’s brand label.
OTOH, WTF is with whoever she is? Did she just pop in before going out clubbing? Doesn’t anyone know how to dress appropriately anymore? Even the not-quite-crazy people?
Gunga galunga… gunga, gunga-galunga. Then there’s this.
[ Recalls meme seen at Instapundit and elsewhere ]
Wanye Burkett weighs in again.
I recall arguing about this with fellow students who refused to accept that there could be such a thing as an incompatible culture. “Well, what about Nazi Germany? I asked. They retorted that it wasn’t really a culture since the regime did not last long. “Well, what if the Nazis had won WWII and were still in power today?” Their response was some sort of mumbling evasion.
It worked so well last time.
Kinda like when similarly I have pointed out to such people that Stalin killed double, Mao killed ten times as many, Pol Pot…etc. etc. etc. It’s not about logic and reason. It’s about the emotional hooks driven mostly by a perception that they are in the majority. Which if you go by expressions of public sentiment, they overwhelmingly are. Which is why it is so important to speak up.
He needs to be punched in the face with regularity. I’m not much of a face-puncher, but this guy is begging for it, so I’ll make a lot of exceptions.
Wow indeed.
Also, yes honey, the peek-a-boo neckline doesn’t help your credibility.
For a long time our society has asserted that the worst thing you can be is a bigot. Judging other cultures is hella wrong, because that’s what the invading white colonizers did. If they’d had even a smidgen of respect for the natives, so much damage and death could have been avoided.
Which, there’s some truth to it. A knee-jerk reaction to a foreign culture will deprive you of learning valuable lessons about humanity.
But it turns out that humanity has the capacity to enshrine some pretty awful stuff in our cultures. You’d be hard-pressed to find a culture on earth that didn’t enshrine one or more atrocities at some point. I don’t mean atrocities from the POV of Eurocentric value systems. I mean genuinely awful, because the damage done to people is measurable and visible.
Or are the boys involved in bacha bazi coming out unscathed?
Todays Leftists don’t seem to understand that it’s imperative to judge other cultures sometimes. But to them, cultures differ in costume and cuisine and language, maybe with funny little dances and quaint houses without indoor plumbing, and you don’t judge THAT.
Criminey, such unserious, shallow, immature people. How the hell do they end up in such high places?
Such necklines are only appropriate in those F A Hayek/Salma Hayek memes.
And yet the left endlessly demonizes everyone to their right as Nazis and white supremacists.
You have to admit it does much less damage to their amour propre to be hypocrites than to acknowledge the malevolence that undergirds their ideology.
Los Angeles wildfires:
No water coming out of fire hydrants because LA did not keep the reservoirs filled.
Also: No controlled burns, as a matter of fed and California policy, for many years.
But LA’s fire chief is an DEI hire (LGBTQ and woman) which is what really matters.
Soros and cohort?
“signature assumption of imperviousness, an expectation of deference, as if these higher beings were unaccustomed to their pronouncements being challenged in a realistic way.”
It’s unbelievably aggravating, but even more so here. Not just because how much more life experience the Dalai Lama has, but also because the Dalai Lama knows exactly why you want to impose uncontrolled migration, far more so than any university grad in the West.
Because that’s exactly what China did in Tibet, to swamp and bully the local population. He has seen it happen to his people, and he knows exactly how the process works and the outcome.
For all the diversity etc bs, it’s the same process at work here in the West. It’s intended to suppress the locals, and there is a reason why they are so keen on less educated, often illegal, African and muslim migrants, because they are the ones who are genuinely hostile against western civilization and see it as the enemy.
I know leftists who passionately assert that China did nothing wrong.
The site’s CSS positioning seems to be broken. Or whatever tech thingie it is these days that manages page columns.
“our betters” in the current LA fires, the fires are raging through rather upscale neighborhoods in which no one ever thought a fire would happen. The reporter even said it out loud. Rather symbolic I would say.
That everyone everywhere should have access to western wealth assumes 1) that it was just luck, and not generations of hard work and orderliness that created it and/or 2) the West just stole all the wealth from poor countries.
I’ve got news for them. Most of the empire building countries, GB included, barely made a profit on their colonies or even lost money. The dutch made money but via trade, not theft. It has been argued that the colonies came out ahead due to investments the colonial powers made such as railroads, roads, and ports. Brits in India even established a civil service and schools.
Overplaying your hand. Or something.
Well, I say the reporter is making it up. NO one who lives in SoCal for more than a few years believes that. And the Palisades fire didn’t just take out rich people (James Wood lost his home) but there are a lot of working class people in the area who lost everything, too.
Newsom is screaming “climate change” but this is about criminal-level neglect and mismanagement of water resources, infrastructure, and forestry practices.
Oops.
In Mexico City, the train pulls you.
Love is love, or something.
Not a headline I ever expected to see.