4 ms·

What's happening here is the following phenomenon. Suppose the establishment lies to you about something. But that something keeps growing, and eventually you s

What's happening here is the following phenomenon. Suppose the establishment lies to you about something. But that something keeps growing, and eventually you see through the lie. Now someone comes along and actually tells you you've been lied to, and reveals this truth to you. The general reaction to this situation is to trust this newcomer more than the establishment, since he had the guts to reveal the big lie. (This is a logical fallacy, but emotionally it's awesome.) The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems. Witness the attempts by various politicians to sweep Cologne under the rug, for example, or removing ethnicity from crime statistics in Sweden. It's hard to keep a problem like this completely under wraps; eventually something like Cologne will hit the internets and eventually the media won't be able to ignore it. If you want a left wing solution to the problem of Muslim immigrants failing to assimilate, robbing and raping people, the left will actually need to acknowledge the problem and propose a solution. If the left continues ignoring the issue, then folks will naturally turn to the racist right wing folks who seem to be proposing solutions rather than lying about the problem. (Note: don't interpret my criticism of the European left as support for the racist right. And if you think I'm factually wrong, I'd love to see crime stats demonstrating this. Obviously not from Sweden...)

ThomPete 11y ago
I think both the left wing and the right wing are generally wrong. Left wing for downplaying the effect culture and rightwing for overplaying it. However I agree the biggest problem right now in Europe is the left wing not actually recognizing the problem expect in a few countries (Denmark being one of them) Only then will it be possible to look at the problem and come up with alternatives to what the far right is proposing (which is basically we are just going to send them all home)
gjm11 11y ago
> The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems. Could you quantify how severe you see those problems as being, how they're lied about, and what sort of solution you think might be possible? My impression (as a leftish European, so discount it as you please) is that no one denies that some Muslim immigrants commit crimes, nor indeed that some Muslim immigrants are terrorists, but that the usual lefty view is: 1. This, in itself, no more calls for action against Muslim immigrants (or against Muslim immigration) than the fact that some people with beards commit crimes calls for action against people with beards. 2. Overreaction to fear of Muslim immigrants is a bigger problem than crime committed by Muslim immigrants. (E.g., crimes with Muslim victims are commoner than crimes with Muslim perpetrators, and this sort of fear is one reason why.) 3. Accordingly, asking "what can we do to stop unassimilated Muslim immigrants killing and raping and robbing?" is a bad question in the following senses: (a) if it's the main question you're asking about relations between Muslim immigrants and the rest of the population, that probably means you have an unbalanced view of what's going on, and (b) asking it loudly and publicly is liable to do more harm by encouraging anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry than it does good by promoting measures that reduce crime by Muslim immigrants, and (c) actually taking the measures one might come up with when answering the questions is also liable to do more harm by making Muslims' lives harder than it does good by reducing crime. A few notes. First: I don't know whether the parenthesis in #2 is actually correct. My impression is that it is, but I don't have all the statistics that would be needed to check. Regardless, I would guess that most of the lefty types you have in mind share my impression that it's correct. Second: something can be a bad question as in #3 but still be a question it would be good, in principle and all else being equal, to know a good answer to. Third: appreciating the European-lefty mindset on this may be easier if you try replacing "what can we do about violent crime by Muslim immigrants?" with "what can we do about financial malfeasance by The One Percent?" or "what can we do about computer crime committed by evil hackers?". In all these cases, there are some actual crimes (and not-actually-criminal wrongdoings) that we'd be better without. In all these cases, people unsympathetic to the group being targetted are liable to overestimate the actual magnitude of the threat, and there are unscrupulous journalists and politicians stirring up fear to further their own agendas. In all these cases, trying to prevent those crimes and other wrongdoings runs the risk of messing with people's civil liberties. (But, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that these cases are parallel in every respect.)
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  How large is the issue? I don't know. There don't seem to be much in the way of good crime stats. A quick google search suggests rape has risen 15x in Sweden since they started letting in large numbers of immigrants. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3317978/Torn-apart-open-door-migrants-Sweden-seen-Europe-s-liberal-nation-violent-crime-soaring-Far-Right-march-reports-SUE-REID.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3317978/Torn-apart-o... The issue is being lied about because rather than giving out stats to answer the question of how much of that 15x is due to immigrants, the Swedish authorities decided to stop tracking ethnicity of perpetrators instead. Similarly, witness the attempts by the mayor of Cologne to blame the victims and avoid disclosing the identity of the attackers. (A quick google search suggests similar incidents happened in a Stockholm music festival and other places.) The fact is that left wing Euro politicians control access to the data and are locking it down. They also make claims like "overestimate the actual magnitude of the threat" - but if the data supported that claim, wouldn't they release it rather than hide it? I'm not proposing any solutions. I'm not even claiming to have a solid grasp of the statistics (unlike, say, a similar discussion of US crime). If I'm wrong and Muslim immigrants to Europe actually commit crimes at the base rate, by all means post stats proving me wrong. I'm only saying that it looks like there is a real problem, and it looks like it's being hidden from us. Under such circumstances, people turning to the racist right is a pretty natural thing to do. At least these guys aren't liars, and see our problems, right? (Again, that last sentence is not my view. A quick search of my comment history will suggest that I'm pluralistic to a degree that only an extreme capitalist can be.)
  - gjm11 11y ago
    > dailymail.co.uk If the Daily Mail published an article saying that snow is white, I would check the next winter in case I've been wrong all these years. In the present case, even if it weren't an issue perfectly calibrated to suit the Daily Mail's preferred varieties of shit-stirring, that 15x figure should cause doubt. Those immigrants would have to be impossibly rapey, or else the previous inhabitants (even though some of them were presumably immigrants) would have to be startlingly un-rapey. A more likely hypothesis is that something else changed; perhaps the Swedish authorities changed where they draw the boundaries between rape and other sexual assaults? Or perhaps some procedural change has made Swedes more willing to make accusations of rape? I can think of several other hypotheses, all of them more likely than that immigration made the rate of rapes go up by 15x. So, let's look a bit further. First of all: this comparison is between 1975 and 2014. Forty years is a long time, and many things have happened in Sweden (and everywhere else) since 1975. Why blame it on immigration? Well, because someone wants to blame it on immigration, so far as I can tell. Well. Did Sweden change its definition of rape, or its treatment of people who report rape, or its thoroughness in collecting statistics, or anything of the sort, since 1975? Yes, apparently they did. For instance, near the start of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_Sweden you will find this: "Sweden reformed its sex crime legislation and made the legal definition of rape much wider in 2005, which largely explains a significant increase in the number of reported rapes in the ten-year period of 2004-2013." And, a little further down, this: "Sweden also applies a system of expansive offence counts. Other countries may employ more restrictive methods of counting. The Swedish police registers one offence for each person raped, and if one and the same person has been raped on a number of occasions, one offence is counted for each occasion that can be specified. For example, if a woman says she has been raped by her husband every day during a year, the Swedish police may record more than 300 cases of rape." I know you've got a data-science background. Put on your analyst's hat for a moment and think about that claim of a 15x increase. Do you really find it credible? At all? There may indeed be lies being told about immigrants and crime. I would not advise you to assume that they're all coming from the same side.
rbehrends 11y ago
> And if you think I'm factually wrong, I'd love to see crime stats demonstrating this. Sure. Only recently, the German BKA released numbers [1] on crimes committed by immigrants. As you can see, until September last year, the number of immigrants (the red line in the first graph) increased faster than the number of crimes committed by immigrants (the green line in the same graph). Generally, immigrant criminality is dominated by petty offenses (shoplifting, fare evasion) and immigration-related offenses (such as forged passports). As far as nationality is concerned, immigrants from Balkan countries dominate the lists of suspects (on a per capita basis), while crime among Iraqis and (especially) Syrians appears to be disproportionately low. Note that this does not mean that immigrants do not commit less crimes than residents. Low socio-economic status alone means a higher propensity to commit crimes (and poorly integrated, low-income immigrants have been a concern since forever, whether that was Turkish guest workers [2] or the Russian-German immigrants of the 1990s [3]). But there is no evidence that Muslim immigrants are more likely to commit crime, either. In fact, technically the (predominantly Christian [4]) Balkan countries seem to be far more likely to turn out criminal immigrants. Note further that most of the suspects in Cologne seem to belong to or be affiliated with pre-existing crime groups [5] from Morocco [6] and Algeria, people who were either there illegally or were using the refugee crisis as a cover. While these should be deported, this is difficult, because their countries refuse to take them back. In general, traditional criminogenic factors seem to be plenty sufficient to explain immigrant crime, and that's really not all that surprising. Whereas ethnic and religious factors seem to be either sourced from anecdotes or the result of incidental correlation. Completely separate from that is the challenge of integrating such a huge number of immigrants into German society. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that had been botched twice before; there is the language barrier, widespread skill gaps, and the difficulty of cultural acclimatization to deal with. > The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems. If that hypothesis of yours were correct, then in Germany, this would not just be the establishment left, but also plenty of establishment conservatives. While politicians did botch the response to New Year Eve's events, the simpler explanation is that they were worried about attacks on refugees by the far right (which also promptly happened). While not exactly pogroms, far right violence has also been a persistent concern and many people still remember Solingen [7] and Rostock-Lichtenhagen [8]. I don't see anybody lying or otherwise dissembling about the problems related to integration; it is no secret that previous immigration waves were far from successful in this regard (as noted above), and nobody expects this to be a cakewalk. [1] http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/fluechtlingskrise-bka-stellt-steigende-kriminalitaet-fest-vor-allem-von-rechts-a-1062661.html http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/fluechtlingskrise-bka-... [2] Recommended reading on the situation of Turkish guest workers until the 1980s is "Lowest of the Low" ("Ganz unten") by Günther Wallraff. [3] Poor integration led to a crime wave among young white Russians and probably helped the Russian mafia strengthen their foothold in Germany. [4] Which, of course, has probably nothing to do with religion or nationality, either, but more with organized crime originating in Eastern Europe. [5] http://www1.wdr.de/themen/aktuell/vorfaelle-hauptbahnhof-koeln-fakten-100.html http://www1.wdr.de/themen/aktuell/vorfaelle-hauptbahnhof-koe... [6] Morocco in particular encourages emigration to Europe; it reduces unemployment and results in more cash transfers to Morocco. However, because Morocco is far from a free country, asylum requests still have to be taken seriously. [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solingen_arson_attack_of_1993 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solingen_arson_attack_of_1993 [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostock-Lichtenhagen_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostock-Lichtenhagen_riots

ThomPete 11y ago

I think both the left wing and the right wing are generally wrong. Left wing for downplaying the effect culture and rightwing for overplaying it. However I agree the biggest problem right now in Europe is the left wing not actually recognizing the problem expect in a few countries (Denmark being one of them) Only then will it be possible to look at the problem and come up with alternatives to what the far right is proposing (which is basically we are just going to send them all home)

gjm11 11y ago

> The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems. Could you quantify how severe you see those problems as being, how they're lied about, and what sort of solution you think might be possible? My impression (as a leftish European, so discount it as you please) is that no one denies that some Muslim immigrants commit crimes, nor indeed that some Muslim immigrants are terrorists, but that the usual lefty view is: 1. This, in itself, no more calls for action against Muslim immigrants (or against Muslim immigration) than the fact that some people with beards commit crimes calls for action against people with beards. 2. Overreaction to fear of Muslim immigrants is a bigger problem than crime committed by Muslim immigrants. (E.g., crimes with Muslim victims are commoner than crimes with Muslim perpetrators, and this sort of fear is one reason why.) 3. Accordingly, asking "what can we do to stop unassimilated Muslim immigrants killing and raping and robbing?" is a bad question in the following senses: (a) if it's the main question you're asking about relations between Muslim immigrants and the rest of the population, that probably means you have an unbalanced view of what's going on, and (b) asking it loudly and publicly is liable to do more harm by encouraging anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry than it does good by promoting measures that reduce crime by Muslim immigrants, and (c) actually taking the measures one might come up with when answering the questions is also liable to do more harm by making Muslims' lives harder than it does good by reducing crime. A few notes. First: I don't know whether the parenthesis in #2 is actually correct. My impression is that it is, but I don't have all the statistics that would be needed to check. Regardless, I would guess that most of the lefty types you have in mind share my impression that it's correct. Second: something can be a bad question as in #3 but still be a question it would be good, in principle and all else being equal, to know a good answer to. Third: appreciating the European-lefty mindset on this may be easier if you try replacing "what can we do about violent crime by Muslim immigrants?" with "what can we do about financial malfeasance by The One Percent?" or "what can we do about computer crime committed by evil hackers?". In all these cases, there are some actual crimes (and not-actually-criminal wrongdoings) that we'd be better without. In all these cases, people unsympathetic to the group being targetted are liable to overestimate the actual magnitude of the threat, and there are unscrupulous journalists and politicians stirring up fear to further their own agendas. In all these cases, trying to prevent those crimes and other wrongdoings runs the risk of messing with people's civil liberties. (But, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that these cases are parallel in every respect.)

yummyfajitas 11y ago
How large is the issue? I don't know. There don't seem to be much in the way of good crime stats. A quick google search suggests rape has risen 15x in Sweden since they started letting in large numbers of immigrants. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3317978/Torn-apart-open-door-migrants-Sweden-seen-Europe-s-liberal-nation-violent-crime-soaring-Far-Right-march-reports-SUE-REID.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3317978/Torn-apart-o... The issue is being lied about because rather than giving out stats to answer the question of how much of that 15x is due to immigrants, the Swedish authorities decided to stop tracking ethnicity of perpetrators instead. Similarly, witness the attempts by the mayor of Cologne to blame the victims and avoid disclosing the identity of the attackers. (A quick google search suggests similar incidents happened in a Stockholm music festival and other places.) The fact is that left wing Euro politicians control access to the data and are locking it down. They also make claims like "overestimate the actual magnitude of the threat" - but if the data supported that claim, wouldn't they release it rather than hide it? I'm not proposing any solutions. I'm not even claiming to have a solid grasp of the statistics (unlike, say, a similar discussion of US crime). If I'm wrong and Muslim immigrants to Europe actually commit crimes at the base rate, by all means post stats proving me wrong. I'm only saying that it looks like there is a real problem, and it looks like it's being hidden from us. Under such circumstances, people turning to the racist right is a pretty natural thing to do. At least these guys aren't liars, and see our problems, right? (Again, that last sentence is not my view. A quick search of my comment history will suggest that I'm pluralistic to a degree that only an extreme capitalist can be.)
- gjm11 11y ago
  > dailymail.co.uk If the Daily Mail published an article saying that snow is white, I would check the next winter in case I've been wrong all these years. In the present case, even if it weren't an issue perfectly calibrated to suit the Daily Mail's preferred varieties of shit-stirring, that 15x figure should cause doubt. Those immigrants would have to be impossibly rapey, or else the previous inhabitants (even though some of them were presumably immigrants) would have to be startlingly un-rapey. A more likely hypothesis is that something else changed; perhaps the Swedish authorities changed where they draw the boundaries between rape and other sexual assaults? Or perhaps some procedural change has made Swedes more willing to make accusations of rape? I can think of several other hypotheses, all of them more likely than that immigration made the rate of rapes go up by 15x. So, let's look a bit further. First of all: this comparison is between 1975 and 2014. Forty years is a long time, and many things have happened in Sweden (and everywhere else) since 1975. Why blame it on immigration? Well, because someone wants to blame it on immigration, so far as I can tell. Well. Did Sweden change its definition of rape, or its treatment of people who report rape, or its thoroughness in collecting statistics, or anything of the sort, since 1975? Yes, apparently they did. For instance, near the start of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_Sweden you will find this: "Sweden reformed its sex crime legislation and made the legal definition of rape much wider in 2005, which largely explains a significant increase in the number of reported rapes in the ten-year period of 2004-2013." And, a little further down, this: "Sweden also applies a system of expansive offence counts. Other countries may employ more restrictive methods of counting. The Swedish police registers one offence for each person raped, and if one and the same person has been raped on a number of occasions, one offence is counted for each occasion that can be specified. For example, if a woman says she has been raped by her husband every day during a year, the Swedish police may record more than 300 cases of rape." I know you've got a data-science background. Put on your analyst's hat for a moment and think about that claim of a 15x increase. Do you really find it credible? At all? There may indeed be lies being told about immigrants and crime. I would not advise you to assume that they're all coming from the same side.

rbehrends 11y ago

> And if you think I'm factually wrong, I'd love to see crime stats demonstrating this. Sure. Only recently, the German BKA released numbers [1] on crimes committed by immigrants. As you can see, until September last year, the number of immigrants (the red line in the first graph) increased faster than the number of crimes committed by immigrants (the green line in the same graph). Generally, immigrant criminality is dominated by petty offenses (shoplifting, fare evasion) and immigration-related offenses (such as forged passports). As far as nationality is concerned, immigrants from Balkan countries dominate the lists of suspects (on a per capita basis), while crime among Iraqis and (especially) Syrians appears to be disproportionately low. Note that this does not mean that immigrants do not commit less crimes than residents. Low socio-economic status alone means a higher propensity to commit crimes (and poorly integrated, low-income immigrants have been a concern since forever, whether that was Turkish guest workers [2] or the Russian-German immigrants of the 1990s [3]). But there is no evidence that Muslim immigrants are more likely to commit crime, either. In fact, technically the (predominantly Christian [4]) Balkan countries seem to be far more likely to turn out criminal immigrants. Note further that most of the suspects in Cologne seem to belong to or be affiliated with pre-existing crime groups [5] from Morocco [6] and Algeria, people who were either there illegally or were using the refugee crisis as a cover. While these should be deported, this is difficult, because their countries refuse to take them back. In general, traditional criminogenic factors seem to be plenty sufficient to explain immigrant crime, and that's really not all that surprising. Whereas ethnic and religious factors seem to be either sourced from anecdotes or the result of incidental correlation. Completely separate from that is the challenge of integrating such a huge number of immigrants into German society. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that had been botched twice before; there is the language barrier, widespread skill gaps, and the difficulty of cultural acclimatization to deal with. > The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems. If that hypothesis of yours were correct, then in Germany, this would not just be the establishment left, but also plenty of establishment conservatives. While politicians did botch the response to New Year Eve's events, the simpler explanation is that they were worried about attacks on refugees by the far right (which also promptly happened). While not exactly pogroms, far right violence has also been a persistent concern and many people still remember Solingen [7] and Rostock-Lichtenhagen [8]. I don't see anybody lying or otherwise dissembling about the problems related to integration; it is no secret that previous immigration waves were far from successful in this regard (as noted above), and nobody expects this to be a cakewalk. [1] http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/fluechtlingskrise-bka-stellt-steigende-kriminalitaet-fest-vor-allem-von-rechts-a-1062661.html http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/fluechtlingskrise-bka-... [2] Recommended reading on the situation of Turkish guest workers until the 1980s is "Lowest of the Low" ("Ganz unten") by Günther Wallraff. [3] Poor integration led to a crime wave among young white Russians and probably helped the Russian mafia strengthen their foothold in Germany. [4] Which, of course, has probably nothing to do with religion or nationality, either, but more with organized crime originating in Eastern Europe. [5] http://www1.wdr.de/themen/aktuell/vorfaelle-hauptbahnhof-koeln-fakten-100.html http://www1.wdr.de/themen/aktuell/vorfaelle-hauptbahnhof-koe... [6] Morocco in particular encourages emigration to Europe; it reduces unemployment and results in more cash transfers to Morocco. However, because Morocco is far from a free country, asylum requests still have to be taken seriously. [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solingen_arson_attack_of_1993 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solingen_arson_attack_of_1993 [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostock-Lichtenhagen_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostock-Lichtenhagen_riots