Trollheart

Yes it does. Don't you recognise a magic couch when you see one?
No seriously: come and look for yourself. Honest. I will not! I'll keep my hands to myself. I am a gentleman.
You can trust me...

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

jadis

"haha just kidding... unless..?"

Women love it when you tell them in a jokey kind of way "come to my place but don't worry I'll keep my hands to myself". As long as you make sure to let them know it's a funny haha it's all good.

jadis

Tax, healthcare, immigration: why Dutch people voted for Geert Wilders

Marie, I wonder if commentators or the public in the Netherlands are making the link between this and the rallies we've all seen in Europe post October 7. That certainly seems one way to read "immigration", although obv I know the tensions over immigration policy haven't started last month. But looks like they may have boiled over into something pretty extreme.

Marie Monday

I haven't followed the situation in Holland close enough to have any idea about that, but I think it wouldn't have taken a strong push to take the immigration sentiments in Holland to this point; the xenophobia has been bad for a long time

__________________

jadis

I'm sure it's true. But, as I see it, attributing it all to the idea of "xenophobia" ultimately benefits the populist far right: it puts beyond the pale any discussion about migration & asylum that acknowledges the right of a political community to control the scale and reason that outsiders can join (yes, there's an inside and an outside, that's what citizenship means, that's not xenophobic).

If the far-right freak is the only one saying that there's a problem when there is a problem (with antisemitism, with acceptance of the political culture of liberal democracy, with respect for women's rights) then the problems will only feed off each other and multiply.

Marie Monday

Yeah obviously, but I'm lazy and not talking to one of those people so I can use a shortcut and just call it xenophobia, which is still boils down to if you have to generalise it

__________________

jadis

-

jadis

Yeah I know what you mean by laziness. I'm no stranger to it. But as a citizen of Canada I feel I can no longer afford it.

For decades I've seen and heard certain things in Montreal I knew were unacceptable but passed them over in silence because in the cool milieu you're not supposed to criticize what Arabs and Maghrebians have to say about "Zionists".

Today I think it's every decent person's duty to say "there is a real problem with antisemitism among immigrants from MENA and it has to be addressed." And whoever calls this statement "xenophobic" is a literal enemy as far as I'm concerned because, among other things, this person betrays all the moderate and decent immigrants who don't share these prejudices and have respect for Canada's democratic culture.

I know you share my concern about antisemitism. And probably agree that our democracies are more fragile than we've assumed. As I see it, we should not shirk the deeply uncomfortable converesations about what our liberal consensus has been tacitly cosigning for years.

Marie Monday

Yeah but that's not what I'm calling xenophobic. because it's not what most of the Wilders voters are concerned about. In general they are actual xenophobes.

__________________

jadis

I don't know anything about the Netherlands, obviously. But in general it seems like the debate about immigration in Britain, France and Canada is set up to be hijacked by racist demagogues like him and Farage in part because anyone rasing concern about the pace and scale of demographic changes and their effects on the political culture is wrongly branded a racist.