quote:

Originally posted by egregore:
Over 24 hours and BansheeOne hasn't popped in yet to say there's nothing wrong. A record.

quote:

Originally posted by justjoe:
I read an article about a year ago, written by a Swede, reflecting on the slow suicide of his country. I wish I had bookmarked it. What he said applies, I think, in a basic way to all of Europe: Swedes don't believe in anything. They blindly follow a socialist ethic of equality and diversity, but it is vague and superficial. And that's about it. Individual liberty, freedom, means little to them.

Religion is essentially gone, along with any altruistic spiritual values. Married couples are now a statistical minority, so coupling and begetting children is not connected to any abiding values of love and commitment.

Muslims have then flooded the country, and many of them fanatically hold a lot of beliefs, beliefs that-- however misguided-- they are willing to die for. A culture with a void where values should be clashes with a culture holding fanatical beliefs. It's no contest. The result is what several posters have mentioned, above. Crime skyrockets. The government puts out flyers telling women not to dress provocatively, and to be wary of possible rape.

Yeats expressed this powerfully in his poem "The Second Coming:"

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

The poem contains these lines, earlier:

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...."

America may well be the last bastion of the ideals of individual freedom. We still believe-- many of us, most of us, I think-- in the values enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. We won't be steamrolled as is happening throughout Europe, most especially England, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. We do hold sacred values for which we will lay down our lives.

I also agree with the poster, above, who says that this is how, eventually, you wind up with a Hitler. To me, that is the horror that Yeats sees being born:

"A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun...."

quote:

Originally posted by BansheeOne:

quote:

Originally posted by egregore:
Over 24 hours and BansheeOne hasn't popped in yet to say there's nothing wrong. A record.

I have little to add actually; I could have posted the charts in the OP myself, which pretty much tell the story. Though I would have added the information that they are for resolved cases, not overall crime reported to police, which is obviously higher. And I wouldn't have used a topic title contradicting what they show, or the Google-translated piece from the "Epoch Times"* as a commentary, which is desparately trying to spin the numbers into some sort of disaster - though it correctly states that the increase in sexual assaults is mostly a result of a legal change in 2016 that made stuff like unwanted fondling etc. which could previously only prosecuted as "insult" an offense in itself. That was actually a political result of the events of New Year's Night 2016 in Cologne, though feminists had long campaigned to enact this pursuant to the 2011 Istanbul Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence.

I'm waiting myself for the detailed yearbook of the 2017 National Crime Report to go online, which should be any day now; it will contain specific information on suspects for individual offenses by nationality, and by status of residence. I'm keeping track of German demographic and crime data in English on another board, but those are huge, detailed posts which are not popular here. But for those who are interested, the thread also includes a lengthy depiction of the official crime report's shortcomings, and coverage of a current rape-murder case with a refugee suspect on the last page.


* The ET is one weird outfit. I dealt with them when I was working for my former boss who was also president of the German-Taiwanese Society, since that fit into their anti-Chinese line as a paper run by Falun Gong. The story goes that they were originally a CIA project. For some reason, they have gone full-on into the anti-establishment, Europe-is-doomed field.