5 ms·

> I think a lot of people live in their nice neighborhood bubble and have never stepped foot in FiDi or SOMA. We have similar problems here in the UK. A lot of

by kypro 4y ago

> I think a lot of people live in their nice neighborhood bubble and have never stepped foot in FiDi or SOMA. We have similar problems here in the UK. A lot of people are disconnected by class which leads to misunderstands and bad politics. I personally think this class disconnect contributed far more to events like Brexit and Trump in recent years than social media. Most of family are working class and things like mass 3rd world migration, homelessness, drug use, etc has caused huge problems in working class communities here in the UK. But when you try to raise these issues (as a working class person) you always get accused by some progressive middle-class person of racism, intolerance, or being anti-progress, etc. You basically have to wait for things to get so bad that middle class people are also impacted, then they'll stop slandering you and let you have an opinion. As an outsider it would seem San Francisco is reaching that tipping point now – it's not just poor people being impacted by these bad political decisions, but also the wealthy progressives responsible for them. Although from what I've seen in the case of SF it seems the progressives who caused the issues rather just flee than fix the problems they created.

walthamstow 4y ago
I can't imagine that anyone is taking you to task for saying that homelessness and drug use are a blight on any community. So let's take a look at the other list item... Poland and Romania are not the third world, nor are Spain, Italy or Ireland. India is borderline third world, but Indians are one of the most successful migrant groups in the UK. Nigerians, too, are seeing success in education, business, politics and sport. My partner works for a YC-funded startup founded by two Nigerian Londoners. So, by process of elimination, are you are saying that Pakistanis and Bengalis are a major source of problems? Hardly surprising that people accuse you of intolerance in that case. Would you like to be more specific? (And before you start up about class again: my dad drove a van for a living)
- Veen 4y ago
  It's not that Pakistanis, Albanians, Somalians, Iraqis and so on are more inclined to crime, but that many of those who chose to immigrate to the UK are from parts of those societies who are inclined to crime. No one is worried about educated professionals from those cultures coming here; but many are worried about uneducated young men in particular and the types of people who tend to be settled in working class communities. I know many Nigerian and Indian immigrants who work hard, pay their taxes, and don't make a problem. I also experience what it's like when a small town has a large number of uneducated, criminally-inclined Albanians settled in their midst—it's not pretty.
  - paganel 4y ago
    > but that many of those who chose to immigrate to the UK are from parts of those societies who are inclined to crime This doesn't get acknowledged in the West too much, that is that we (meaning countries that used to be East of the Wall) have outsourced many of our social problems to the West (which had created many of them in the first place in the '90s by ideologically imposing the Shock Doctrine therapies on us, but that's another discussion). The thing is that this situation also affects people from those countries/societies who are not inclined to crime, such as a close friend of mine who's now having to go through lots of procedures and loops before being allowed to sign for a rental contract (she's Romanian, her SO is Polish, they've just moved from London to Manchester). All those procedures and loops are applied by the real estate agency, so not by the British State itself, I presume because the people from agency have to financially secure their back based on previous negative (from a financial pov) interactions with people from Romania and Poland (I'm also from Romania, if it matters). Not sure what the best route going forward might be, because when you try to put yourself in each person's shoes you can understand why and how things are done in a certain way, no need to resort to "he/she is doing that because of racism/xenophobia".
    - noobermin 4y ago
      Again, this is because your definition of racism is "personal bigotry." What you are experiencing though is discrimination, whether justified or not, it is discrimination.
      - paganel 4y ago
        I didn't base my definition of racism/xenophobia on the personal bigotry of those involved, to the contrary, I explicitly mentioned that most probably some of the measures now in place that look like bigotry from the outside have been probably put in place for material (i.e. money/financial) reasons. In the case I mentioned, most probably that real estate agency lost money by dealing with Romanians and Poles in the past in a different way than it's used to lose money by dealing with local British people, that's why it put in place more complicated procedures for Romanians/Poles than it has for the locals. Yes, it is discrimination, but, again, in many cases it is based on pure material reasons, i.e. people not wanting to lose more money than they have to.
- FiniteField 4y ago
  >So, by process of elimination, are you are saying that Pakistanis and Bengalis are a major source of problems? Yes. Sorry but while it's unpleasant to say, that's just indisputable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telford_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telford_child_sexual_exploitat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_sex_abuse_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_sex_abuse_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcastle_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcastle_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keighley_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keighley_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddersfield_grooming_gang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddersfield_grooming_gang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banbury_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banbury_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aylesbury_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aylesbury_child_sex_abuse_ring Towns all over England have seen thousands of young girls be systematically raped while the police, councils and MPs have almost all turned a deliberate blind eye. Spurred on by the same misplaced sense of righteousness and/or guilt that presumably led you to write your comment full of obfuscation and finger-pointing, rather than sitting down like grownups and having a discussion that acknowledges the serious problems that have been caused by the UK's immigration policy that has resulted in whole parts of towns and cities being replaced by a foreign culture, instead of dispersing and integrating people carefully into the country. This is to say nothing of terrorist attacks, widespread intimidation against non-muslim practices, ethnic ghettos, parallel court systems, hymen inspection clinics, massive over-representation of genetic disorders due to traditions of inbreeding, etc.
  - walthamstow 4y ago
    > your comment full of obfuscation and finger-pointing Excuse me? A gang of your beloved Englishmen were in court just yesterday for systematically raping young girls. Must be because of the Pakistanis. https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2023-04-04/men-appear-charged-with-serious-child-grooming-sex-offences https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2023-04-04/men-appear-charg...
- odiroot 4y ago
  As of late, the drug gangs from the Balkans have been hitting the news most often.
- stametseater 4y ago
  "Third world" is really not a great term for these kind of discussions, it's a cold war relic. In the 'true' sense of this term, Ireland, India, Nigeria (and Sweden!) were third world countries, because they were aligned with neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact, while Spain, Italy, Poland and Romania were not. Somewhere along the line this term was misunderstood and repurposed into a euphemism for "underdeveloped" or worse, with racial undertones. Best to just drop the term from your vocabulary unless you're talking about the cold war.
- kypro 4y ago
  > I can't imagine that anyone is taking you to task for saying that homelessness and drug use are a blight on any community. I suppose the issue is more that it's hard to agree on what the problem is or how to solve it. Eg, is it drug use that's the issue or mental health? And how do you fix that? For example, a lot of people in my family abuse drugs – cocaine, ketamine, NO2, etc... But I also know a lot of middle class people who use these same drugs "responsibly". If you use a little cocaine every now then and you have the money for it then understandably you might see it as harmless. But then I also see the other side of this coin because I have family who spend all of their benefits money on drugs like cocaine and abuse it daily. This makes it really difficult to take a zero tolerance approach to things like drug use because you end up pissing off all the middle class liberals who like using drugs on the weekend and see banning drugs and regressive. They also simply don't understand the problem either. They commonly think bizarre things like people who failed school and who are probably < 80 IQ just need a bit of mental health support and they'll stop abusing drugs and get their lives on track... Similar things are true with homelessness. Everyone agrees people being homeless isn't good, but then what do you do about it? If you think people agree on this then why don't you try arguing for a zero tolerance approach to homelessness and see what people say? My guess is that people will start accusing you of not caring and arguing that it's not something that should be treated as a crime because these people really just need mental health support. But the truth is you're not going to fix homelessness by giving people mental health support. And again, this is so hard to explain to middle class people because they won't accept that not everyone is like them and that some people will just end up back on the street no matter what you do. And I think this is really the core of problem. Middle class people assume (perhaps reasonably) that everyone is like them and their middle class friends and that they will make good decisions with a bit of support. In my experience this just isn't true. As for 3rd world migration it's hard to know where to start... There are so many issues and this is such a complicated topic. To summerise: - Cultural incapability issues. Again, middle class people struggle to understand that not every muslim is like their friend Mo from university. And as you brought it up, yes, Pakistanis are obviously one of groups which are less culturally compatible with British communities. - Economic issues. I'm happy to expand on this if you like, but 3rd world migration in the UK has just been bad economic policy which disproportionately impacts the working class. - Crime. Again, very hard to talk about this because people don't like the statistics here... There are groups which are significantly over represented in certain crimes and calling working class people in communities which have to deal with these crimes intolerant doesn't solve the issue. To your point though, I think Indian migration has been great for the country – this is basically indisputable if you look at the statistics. I also agree that there are lots of great migrants from the 3rd world, which is what's even more frustrating about this... Instead of bringing over people that would have a net-positive impact on working class communities, we instead have an immigration system which selects for stupid stuff like being fit enough survive crossing the channel on inflatable raft, or lying about your country origin.
Jochim 4y ago
> try to raise these issues (as a working class person) you always get accused by some progressive middle-class person of racism, intolerance, or being anti-progress, etc. The problem is that almost no one tries to "raise these issues". Instead you get: > Migrants take ALL new jobs in Britain > The swarm on our streets > Migrants swarm to Britain > 3.8Million EU migrants allowed to stay here > Send in army to halt migrant invasion > 4,000 foreign murderers and rapists we can't through out > Illegals have landed That's after it's been sanitised for front page news. The fact is that those ideas were seeded by a right wing press, fire-hosing propaganda about how subhuman migrants are raping your daughters. The result was open racism and bigotry, not an expression of concern for job stability or integration.

by kypro 4y ago

walthamstow 4y ago

I can't imagine that anyone is taking you to task for saying that homelessness and drug use are a blight on any community. So let's take a look at the other list item... Poland and Romania are not the third world, nor are Spain, Italy or Ireland. India is borderline third world, but Indians are one of the most successful migrant groups in the UK. Nigerians, too, are seeing success in education, business, politics and sport. My partner works for a YC-funded startup founded by two Nigerian Londoners. So, by process of elimination, are you are saying that Pakistanis and Bengalis are a major source of problems? Hardly surprising that people accuse you of intolerance in that case. Would you like to be more specific? (And before you start up about class again: my dad drove a van for a living)

Veen 4y ago
It's not that Pakistanis, Albanians, Somalians, Iraqis and so on are more inclined to crime, but that many of those who chose to immigrate to the UK are from parts of those societies who are inclined to crime. No one is worried about educated professionals from those cultures coming here; but many are worried about uneducated young men in particular and the types of people who tend to be settled in working class communities. I know many Nigerian and Indian immigrants who work hard, pay their taxes, and don't make a problem. I also experience what it's like when a small town has a large number of uneducated, criminally-inclined Albanians settled in their midst—it's not pretty.
- paganel 4y ago
  > but that many of those who chose to immigrate to the UK are from parts of those societies who are inclined to crime This doesn't get acknowledged in the West too much, that is that we (meaning countries that used to be East of the Wall) have outsourced many of our social problems to the West (which had created many of them in the first place in the '90s by ideologically imposing the Shock Doctrine therapies on us, but that's another discussion). The thing is that this situation also affects people from those countries/societies who are not inclined to crime, such as a close friend of mine who's now having to go through lots of procedures and loops before being allowed to sign for a rental contract (she's Romanian, her SO is Polish, they've just moved from London to Manchester). All those procedures and loops are applied by the real estate agency, so not by the British State itself, I presume because the people from agency have to financially secure their back based on previous negative (from a financial pov) interactions with people from Romania and Poland (I'm also from Romania, if it matters). Not sure what the best route going forward might be, because when you try to put yourself in each person's shoes you can understand why and how things are done in a certain way, no need to resort to "he/she is doing that because of racism/xenophobia".
  - noobermin 4y ago
    Again, this is because your definition of racism is "personal bigotry." What you are experiencing though is discrimination, whether justified or not, it is discrimination.
    - paganel 4y ago
      I didn't base my definition of racism/xenophobia on the personal bigotry of those involved, to the contrary, I explicitly mentioned that most probably some of the measures now in place that look like bigotry from the outside have been probably put in place for material (i.e. money/financial) reasons. In the case I mentioned, most probably that real estate agency lost money by dealing with Romanians and Poles in the past in a different way than it's used to lose money by dealing with local British people, that's why it put in place more complicated procedures for Romanians/Poles than it has for the locals. Yes, it is discrimination, but, again, in many cases it is based on pure material reasons, i.e. people not wanting to lose more money than they have to.
FiniteField 4y ago
>So, by process of elimination, are you are saying that Pakistanis and Bengalis are a major source of problems? Yes. Sorry but while it's unpleasant to say, that's just indisputable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telford_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telford_child_sexual_exploitat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_sex_abuse_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_sex_abuse_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcastle_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcastle_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keighley_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keighley_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddersfield_grooming_gang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddersfield_grooming_gang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banbury_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banbury_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aylesbury_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aylesbury_child_sex_abuse_ring Towns all over England have seen thousands of young girls be systematically raped while the police, councils and MPs have almost all turned a deliberate blind eye. Spurred on by the same misplaced sense of righteousness and/or guilt that presumably led you to write your comment full of obfuscation and finger-pointing, rather than sitting down like grownups and having a discussion that acknowledges the serious problems that have been caused by the UK's immigration policy that has resulted in whole parts of towns and cities being replaced by a foreign culture, instead of dispersing and integrating people carefully into the country. This is to say nothing of terrorist attacks, widespread intimidation against non-muslim practices, ethnic ghettos, parallel court systems, hymen inspection clinics, massive over-representation of genetic disorders due to traditions of inbreeding, etc.
- walthamstow 4y ago
  > your comment full of obfuscation and finger-pointing Excuse me? A gang of your beloved Englishmen were in court just yesterday for systematically raping young girls. Must be because of the Pakistanis. https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2023-04-04/men-appear-charged-with-serious-child-grooming-sex-offences https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2023-04-04/men-appear-charg...
odiroot 4y ago
As of late, the drug gangs from the Balkans have been hitting the news most often.
stametseater 4y ago
"Third world" is really not a great term for these kind of discussions, it's a cold war relic. In the 'true' sense of this term, Ireland, India, Nigeria (and Sweden!) were third world countries, because they were aligned with neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact, while Spain, Italy, Poland and Romania were not. Somewhere along the line this term was misunderstood and repurposed into a euphemism for "underdeveloped" or worse, with racial undertones. Best to just drop the term from your vocabulary unless you're talking about the cold war.
kypro 4y ago
> I can't imagine that anyone is taking you to task for saying that homelessness and drug use are a blight on any community. I suppose the issue is more that it's hard to agree on what the problem is or how to solve it. Eg, is it drug use that's the issue or mental health? And how do you fix that? For example, a lot of people in my family abuse drugs – cocaine, ketamine, NO2, etc... But I also know a lot of middle class people who use these same drugs "responsibly". If you use a little cocaine every now then and you have the money for it then understandably you might see it as harmless. But then I also see the other side of this coin because I have family who spend all of their benefits money on drugs like cocaine and abuse it daily. This makes it really difficult to take a zero tolerance approach to things like drug use because you end up pissing off all the middle class liberals who like using drugs on the weekend and see banning drugs and regressive. They also simply don't understand the problem either. They commonly think bizarre things like people who failed school and who are probably < 80 IQ just need a bit of mental health support and they'll stop abusing drugs and get their lives on track... Similar things are true with homelessness. Everyone agrees people being homeless isn't good, but then what do you do about it? If you think people agree on this then why don't you try arguing for a zero tolerance approach to homelessness and see what people say? My guess is that people will start accusing you of not caring and arguing that it's not something that should be treated as a crime because these people really just need mental health support. But the truth is you're not going to fix homelessness by giving people mental health support. And again, this is so hard to explain to middle class people because they won't accept that not everyone is like them and that some people will just end up back on the street no matter what you do. And I think this is really the core of problem. Middle class people assume (perhaps reasonably) that everyone is like them and their middle class friends and that they will make good decisions with a bit of support. In my experience this just isn't true. As for 3rd world migration it's hard to know where to start... There are so many issues and this is such a complicated topic. To summerise: - Cultural incapability issues. Again, middle class people struggle to understand that not every muslim is like their friend Mo from university. And as you brought it up, yes, Pakistanis are obviously one of groups which are less culturally compatible with British communities. - Economic issues. I'm happy to expand on this if you like, but 3rd world migration in the UK has just been bad economic policy which disproportionately impacts the working class. - Crime. Again, very hard to talk about this because people don't like the statistics here... There are groups which are significantly over represented in certain crimes and calling working class people in communities which have to deal with these crimes intolerant doesn't solve the issue. To your point though, I think Indian migration has been great for the country – this is basically indisputable if you look at the statistics. I also agree that there are lots of great migrants from the 3rd world, which is what's even more frustrating about this... Instead of bringing over people that would have a net-positive impact on working class communities, we instead have an immigration system which selects for stupid stuff like being fit enough survive crossing the channel on inflatable raft, or lying about your country origin.

Jochim 4y ago

> try to raise these issues (as a working class person) you always get accused by some progressive middle-class person of racism, intolerance, or being anti-progress, etc. The problem is that almost no one tries to "raise these issues". Instead you get: > Migrants take ALL new jobs in Britain > The swarm on our streets > Migrants swarm to Britain > 3.8Million EU migrants allowed to stay here > Send in army to halt migrant invasion > 4,000 foreign murderers and rapists we can't through out > Illegals have landed That's after it's been sanitised for front page news. The fact is that those ideas were seeded by a right wing press, fire-hosing propaganda about how subhuman migrants are raping your daughters. The result was open racism and bigotry, not an expression of concern for job stability or integration.