This is such a hard issue. If documented rights abuses and limited protections are a reason for extending asylum, we could have most of the world in here as refugees, including the whole populations of the US, China and India.
On the other hand, it is a fundamental contradiction of European values to push people back into places where they are abused.
Then again, Russia has weaponized masses of asylum seekers with great effect.
I hope it’s not going to be Germany, the policies of their current conservative leadership is why we’re dealing with a lot of these fires.
They are responsible for making the EU reliant enough on Russia that they thought we would stand by and let Ukraine fall. They are responsible for the absolute state of Hungary. The migrant crisis. Bankrupting Greece in the name of austerity. I’m sure the list goes on.
That’s what Meloni wants to be but Trump seemingly prefers to speak to Macron. It must be Trump doesn’t give a fuck about ideology and only understands power.
That said, I don’t care what US oligarch cumrag Washington Post says about Europe.
I wonder if those protect from the Israeli spyware Hungary has been buying.
That’s the neat part, you don’t.
Welcome to the third world guys.
You can express a controversial view on any European campus (outside Hungary, at least) without fear of losing your tenure or your grant.
You can freely express any controversial view on Hungarian campuses, nobody cares at all. Most people in Hungary don’t care about the whole Gaza situation one way or another, with a slight exaggeration if you asked the average university student in Hungary where Gaza is, they would think you’re looking for some nightclub.
The only people who care about Palestine in Hungary are the far-right, Orbán’s far right being pro-Israel because kleptocrats stick together, while the extreme far right is pro-Palestine because they hate Jews. They usually won’t be university educated either.
As faculty, you can also express whatever views, a lot of people were straight up protesting the government at one point, but there is not much they can do with them legally and Orbán’s gang didn’t care enough to alter the laws for that.
Yeah, but if the tariffs would have stayed in place, we would have potentially caused a trade war with China, isolating us against the US and Russia.
If the minimum prices would have not been set, we would have lost additional industrial capacity, and while I loathe VW and BMW leadership, I feel for their workers.
Yes, some EVs will be more expensive, but compared to those other outcomes, it only affects people buying new cars.
That is an okay middle ground TBH
“people are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once” as a result of insufficient water pressure
How do US toilets work? It should be independent of water pressure, there is a tank of water that gets prefilled, right?
IDK, I imagine the US is lagging behind China in that, especially now, if we’re looking at foreign imports.
What I mean is that this could totally end with China going “fuck this, we subsidize food for our citizens” and Africa starving yet again.
Or, hopefully, food prices rising in the developed world while the only place the US would be able to sell being Africa, below normal prices, like it happened with Russia and India and oil. But then I’m expecting too much from the world.
Can that food be imported from elsewhere?
Less direct effects, people are not forced to retire off the stock market and layoffs are very regulated here.
So it’s going to be bad but not like the US.
Yeah, but these people or the current UK government is not the people who started that shitshow. Happened quite a while ago.
That said, they are still on the hook for continuing to support it and not even denouncing it.
The coalition of the willing stuff was for Ukraine, not for everything, so far.
Article 7 has been “increasingly likely” for the past 15 years.
Hungary withdrew from the ICC like yesterday so they have no jurisdiction.
Who? The only police that has authority in Budapest is the Hungarian one, the Chinese one and some probably GRU linked Chechen rando named Magomed.
I mean it can be controlled for that by checking different texts, such as something that was definitely not in the training set.
I actually spend quite a lot of time in Leuven these days, and looking at some of those houses and the general state of Belgium today … I can’t say that’s not likely to be true.
It’s just that the place kinda struck me as safe. I guess it’s not.
And that actually shines a light on another issue, the differences between parts of the EU. That is because you are describing the EU as an union of colonizers, it couldn’t be farther from the truth for countries like Finland, Latvia or Hungary, which have been colonies rather than colonizers for most of their existence. In fact, Hungary has mostly been behaving as a German colony for the past 20-30 years.
The way I see it, while the EU has member states with heavy colonial pasts, a lot - IDK even most? - of the others are in a tough spot because of this, as their societies are even less used to the multiculturalism that being a colonial power brings, and they are right IMO in saying “we did not fuck this up, it’s not on us to fix it”.
Finally, again the problem is that while reparations for colonial wrongdoings should happen, the priority should be stopping current neocolonialism. We can’t heal old wounds while inflicting new ones.
On the one hand, the current refugees are not coming to Europe from old European colonies, but from Russian ones. In fact, most of them come because of Russia bombing many of them as a last ditch attempt of a failing colonial power to maintain its exploitative hold on them. That is true of Syria or Ukraine.
I think it’s two separate issues, with migration being the shared aspect. Economic migration I think should be considered in the context of what you said, like people from ex-colonies should be helped by opening up the education system or the job market - in very regulated ways, mostly prescribing a very high minimum wage - for them, while people from eg. Syria should be helped by giving out asylum, but the two systems should be entirely separate. If anything, I think the costs associated by housing Ukrainian or Syrian asylees should be taken from frozen Russian assets, as part of the cost of rebuilding those countries.
Trying to “fix” ex-colonies, or completely opening up the country to economic migration creates neo-colonialistic dynamics IMO.