Yep the Saudi guy is right. There is a reason why the 'west' killed Saddam and Gaddafi. This was a plan that started decades ago and we are seeing the first fruits now. It will not end well for the perpetrators.
People shoud read the parable of the wicked vinedressers.
You know, in June I teamed up with a couple of friends whom I hadn't seen in years. They are professors at fancy-name places in the US, and when the conversation turned to 'woke-ism' and 'migration', I gave them a short version of my hypothesis summarised here:
They both agreed whole-heartedly, and I suppose I should add one of them is a very progressive, very liberal (in the conventional sense of the term, not the current fad) church-going Anglican and the other one himself an immigrant to the US from the former Soviet bloc.
As a 'fun fact', it was a wonderful conference (on postal history), and the kicker came when that latter friend, upon listening to a hyper-woke PhD candidate from another fancy-name place whose paper was fully of that kind of lingo, leaned over and whispered into my ear: 'I just realised that I didn't miss that woke nonsense.'
Although I would have to be restrained and sedated to attend in the first place. I literally have zero patience for any of it anymore.
Sounds great there are some non-woke historians out there. Maybe you can get together and start your own Journal of Forbidden Topics.
Each author has a pre-set EU bail fund per published article. Although I bet you could find a country willing to host you to get around censorship laws. Sounds lit.
Yeah I lived there last year and heard some stories about the demographics in public schools. It was pretty stark. I work as a private tutor and even the private schools are swamped but it’s mostly from the influx of Ukrainians. The private school my students attended population probably increased by a quarter to a third in the last couple of years and from what my students relayed Russian was quickly becoming the majority spoken language there. Luckily my employer put me up in district 1 so I was spared the worst of it. Life is still pretty pleasant there (if you have the money).
I grew up in district 8, which was solidly (upper) middle class (disclosure: my parents are both the first university-trained graduates and the only ones in their boomer generation; both were born in the early 1950s), which meant I went to public high school with the kids of well-established upper middle class people, i.e., children of doctors, lawyers, factory-owners. Spoiler--I never fit in, which I only understood much later in life.
If you have money and a good job, life's pretty comfortable virtually everywhere; now, what we're seeing more and more is 'the banlieu' creeping into the these formerly very homogeneous districts. (My father remarked last summer that 'these things are creeping ever closer'.)
Private kindergarten and school registration has exploded in recent years, which of course fires up the death spiral of public schools (no difference there to, e.g., the US).
Add rampant inflation, and even retired federal officials like my parents are mentioning the price of eating out more and more often. They, too, feel it w/respect to discretionary spending (but they just bought a new car), so, I suppose your concluding sentence sums up the sentiments of that segment of the population very aptly.
And how are the Ukrainians doing, do you know? My experience with Ukrainians (over here in Prague) has been quite positive overall. I'm also something of a language nerd, so I like hearing all sorts of languages - as long as people are able to speak the local language, too, when necessary. :-) But as far as I can tell, Ukrainians are the immigrant group most likely to actually learn Czech. (I'm an immigrant, too, mind you, and yes, I did learn Czech.)
These were very much Ukrainians of the upper classes that I was dealing with. So they would be a bit trans national in that regard. They could literally live anywhere they choose. But from what I could gather a lot of them moved there because life in District 1 of Vienna is extremely pleasant. I imagine the working class/ordinary Ukrainians probably ended up in Poland and surrounding countries.
Well, other than the rule of holes ("umm, have you considered a moratorium on digging?"), I don't really know what to say. It'll take generations to integrate this population, and by the time that happens, it's entirely possible that Austria (not just Austria, obviously) won't exist as an independent country anymore, and the culture will be radically different. As for German: it's hard to learn a foreign language as an adult, doubly (actually, more like quintuply) so if you're monolingual and your native language is radically different from the one you're trying to learn. Children learn easily, but only under immersion conditions. But if most of the class doesn't speak the language, then is that really "immersion"?
As to language acquisition--I'm supremely biased here because I went to a good public school and we learned a bunch of languages there (English, Latin, French, and Italian) before leaving. I'd add that I've continued learning languages (adding Croatian, Czech, and now Norwegian).
Yes, it's hard to learn new things later in life, but a certain willingness must be presupposed. If you don't want to something, you don't.
I only had two languages in school (English and French). I learned both eventually, but I don't credit regular school for it. When I was growing up, it seemed to be generally accepted that no-one actually learns a language in a regular school, despite the fact that two languages (English and something else) is standard, plus Latin in high school (although I didn't have Latin because I attended a specialized high school). Parents regularly enroll their kids in private language schools where they (the kids) actually manage to learn English (obviously, the media helps tremendously); those who rely on regular school alone usually learn little. From what I've seen across Europe, many people speak decent-to-excellent English, but fluency in other languages (non-native to the speaker) is quite uncommon, despite the fact that almost everyone has in fact "studied" at least one other language. ("Studying" and "learning" are different things. I've "studied" six foreign languages at various points of my life, but I've "learned" only four of them.) Those who speak three or more languages generally do so because they are immigrants or belong to some sort of linguistic minority (e.g. ethnic Hungarians in various countries bordering Hungary). Exceptions exist, but are quite rare in my experience. (Maybe it's different if you hang around academic historians. That's a tiny group of people, though.)
And yes, of course, motivation matters a great deal, but there is such a thing is not having any clue how to learn a language and not believing you are capable of doing it. I also don't know what it's like in Austria, but the Czech Republic seems to be extremely nonchalant (or negligent, if you prefer) about the linguistic integration of foreigners. I ended up paying for Czech private lessons 100% out of pocket. Was it worth it? Why, yes it was. (I speak Czech now - yay.) But that's not really doable unless you have a fairly good income. Self-study is always an option, but it's slower and less effective, and if you've never successfully learned a foreign language before, it may well turn out to be hopeless.
I agree with what you said about being taught vs. learning (to speak, use) languages.
There's also the notion of 'un-learning' certain parts and losing one's previous abilities to speak fluently due to disuse and the like; it happened to my Italian (which I also took as a minor subject at the university level), which I don't hear often here in Norway and speak even less. My reading skills are still formidable, but reading and speaking are different beasts, so to speak.
I suppose my main 'insight' (if you'd like to call it that, would be that once you began learning a bunch of languages, any additional language isn't that hard to learn (because, as with other things in life, these, too, get easier over time).
I agree with your insight, but notice a corollary: it is difficult to successfully learn your first foreign language (unless you're a child in an immersion setting). You don't know what you're doing, and so you'll go about it in a suboptimal way, and you may think it's hopeless (meaning that you don't even try). That's presumably the case with all those Syrians et al. who cannot communicate with their kids' schools without interpreters. What do you (or more to the point: governments) do about it? There are various options, but the ostrich approach ("la la la, there is no problem") tends to be unhelpful.
Also, "easy" is relative. It still takes a lot of time. I'd say hundreds of hours to get anywhere and thousands to get legitimately good. The exact number of hundreds/thousands will vary depending on the learner, the language, the methods, and the standards.
I found the Norwegian approach rather useful: all kids get a 'right' to attend kindergarten (not all is well, for this typically means the kindergarten your kid is assigned to is often across town…) and there's a Norwegian-only policy in place. I don't know if that's a real policy or what happens, but it worked with my 3yo who learned fluent Norwegian within less than three months.
Oh, and, yes, at that time my kid spoke both German and English, and there were also kids in that kindergarten who also spoke both languages. It didn't prevent her from learning Norwegian.
There's no way something like this couldn't be done elsewhere.
Finally, as to the amount of time it takes to learn something, anything: sure, that's true; but I'd maintain that if you don't want to learn the language of the country you live in, you're welcome to return to your country of origin at any time.
I don't disagree with any of this per se. I would just point out that what works for 3-year-olds will not work for 30-year-olds. Also, numbers matter. Just how many kids in your daughter's group were German speaking? Maybe some, but probably not a majority.
And as I like to point out: there's a difference between what's possible and what's likely. As a practical matter, very few little-educated immigrants will do that [EDIT: invest 1000+ hours into a language] (sure, someone somewhere must have done it, but "someone somewhere" is not a viable policy), and the better-educated are a mixed bag. I know a number of highly educated immigrants who will practically brag about how well they can manage in their adopted country without speaking the local language. And I know others who complain that the locals don't speak sufficiently good English. (And there's a massive linguistic pet peeve of mine: holding the little educated to much higher language standards than the highly credentialed. "It's totally fine if Mr. Big Shot, PhD, hasn't bothered learning the language. But that janitor over there..." Gah.)
And someone seriously effed up with the 13-year-old boy. They just put him in a class with 6-year-olds? I assume he's a refugee and had never attended school before, but c'mon, a 13-year-old has no business being in a class with 6-year-olds. If there are no other students like him, just give him a tutor. It's better both for him and for the 6-year-olds (not to mention the poor teacher who has to deal with him on top of a class full of 6-year-olds).
Oh, I see. That's not quite as bad, but it's still bad. Three years is a big difference at that age. I'm guessing the kid feels humiliated for having to be in a class with much younger kids. And once you humiliate a kid, that largely destroys motivation for behaving better. What exactly should be done about it - well, you tell me.
All this was obvious in the late 1970s (in Sweden) when we switched from strict migration laws, to accepting asylum seekers from SA, Africa, MENA and parts of Asia, and dropped the forced integration policy that had been applied to gypsies since the early 1900s.
Crime statistics from 1970 to 1980 shows clearly that any ethnic group from any one of these areas, are at least 3:1 or more criminal than indigenous Swedes or Western Europeans. This was ignored, then hushed up, and the after the 1991 election, the gates were thrown open.
Ever since, all problems associated with unlimited and virtually demand-free migration has been increasingly papered over, creating a Potemkin-nation where official estimates are that at least 800 000 inhabitants are illiterate, in many cases so after 9 years of compulsory school, just to pick one example. Another more dire one is the daily shootings and weekly bombings. Yet more dire is the incidence of rape. From ca 300 cases reported/annually in the mid-1970s (with a +95% Swedish population and Finns, Norwegians and Danes being the major migrant groups), to close to 9 000/annually some post-2010 years.
(Note that there are no real official figures on this anymore, all such are obfuscated, so what we have is a "best guess" from 2016 when a private citizen spent over a year going through criminal reports, comparing them to people being prosecuted and finally to no. of convictions, and putting this in relation to the convicted's ethnicity and said ethnicity's proportion of the population total.
Also note that population increased from just below 8 000 000 in the late 1970s to 10 000 000 in the post-2010s, the majority of the increase consisting of migration of peoples from Africa, SA, MENA.)
Oh, and me writing this may constitute a crime in the Sweden of today. Think about that, and how that harmonises with the image our Foreign Dep. and such try to project. Potemkin Nation.
Consider checking out the following blog, it's run by a former intelligence officer by name of Johan Westerholm, a registered member of the Socialist Democrat party and one of their most vocal critics when it comes to migration, islam, organised crime and related and intersecting issues:
Not taking away from your superb comment, in fact today even the BBC shared about a 13 year old “hired gun” in Gothenburg - anywho - I have to admit I too read Lesbianisation 😂 not sure I can blame lack of sleep think in todays time it didn’t feel too far fetched…
Yep the Saudi guy is right. There is a reason why the 'west' killed Saddam and Gaddafi. This was a plan that started decades ago and we are seeing the first fruits now. It will not end well for the perpetrators.
People shoud read the parable of the wicked vinedressers.
You know, in June I teamed up with a couple of friends whom I hadn't seen in years. They are professors at fancy-name places in the US, and when the conversation turned to 'woke-ism' and 'migration', I gave them a short version of my hypothesis summarised here:
https://fackel.substack.com/p/why-they-hate-us-white-peoples-with
They both agreed whole-heartedly, and I suppose I should add one of them is a very progressive, very liberal (in the conventional sense of the term, not the current fad) church-going Anglican and the other one himself an immigrant to the US from the former Soviet bloc.
As a 'fun fact', it was a wonderful conference (on postal history), and the kicker came when that latter friend, upon listening to a hyper-woke PhD candidate from another fancy-name place whose paper was fully of that kind of lingo, leaned over and whispered into my ear: 'I just realised that I didn't miss that woke nonsense.'
If I hear a lecture with woke nonsense I have to restrain myself from doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE6lW8TazZM
Although I would have to be restrained and sedated to attend in the first place. I literally have zero patience for any of it anymore.
Sounds great there are some non-woke historians out there. Maybe you can get together and start your own Journal of Forbidden Topics.
Each author has a pre-set EU bail fund per published article. Although I bet you could find a country willing to host you to get around censorship laws. Sounds lit.
Yeah I lived there last year and heard some stories about the demographics in public schools. It was pretty stark. I work as a private tutor and even the private schools are swamped but it’s mostly from the influx of Ukrainians. The private school my students attended population probably increased by a quarter to a third in the last couple of years and from what my students relayed Russian was quickly becoming the majority spoken language there. Luckily my employer put me up in district 1 so I was spared the worst of it. Life is still pretty pleasant there (if you have the money).
Exactly.
I grew up in district 8, which was solidly (upper) middle class (disclosure: my parents are both the first university-trained graduates and the only ones in their boomer generation; both were born in the early 1950s), which meant I went to public high school with the kids of well-established upper middle class people, i.e., children of doctors, lawyers, factory-owners. Spoiler--I never fit in, which I only understood much later in life.
If you have money and a good job, life's pretty comfortable virtually everywhere; now, what we're seeing more and more is 'the banlieu' creeping into the these formerly very homogeneous districts. (My father remarked last summer that 'these things are creeping ever closer'.)
Private kindergarten and school registration has exploded in recent years, which of course fires up the death spiral of public schools (no difference there to, e.g., the US).
Add rampant inflation, and even retired federal officials like my parents are mentioning the price of eating out more and more often. They, too, feel it w/respect to discretionary spending (but they just bought a new car), so, I suppose your concluding sentence sums up the sentiments of that segment of the population very aptly.
And how are the Ukrainians doing, do you know? My experience with Ukrainians (over here in Prague) has been quite positive overall. I'm also something of a language nerd, so I like hearing all sorts of languages - as long as people are able to speak the local language, too, when necessary. :-) But as far as I can tell, Ukrainians are the immigrant group most likely to actually learn Czech. (I'm an immigrant, too, mind you, and yes, I did learn Czech.)
These were very much Ukrainians of the upper classes that I was dealing with. So they would be a bit trans national in that regard. They could literally live anywhere they choose. But from what I could gather a lot of them moved there because life in District 1 of Vienna is extremely pleasant. I imagine the working class/ordinary Ukrainians probably ended up in Poland and surrounding countries.
You write: 'I imagine the working class/ordinary Ukrainians probably ended up in Poland and surrounding countries.'
And Slovakia, Czechia, Romania, as I've discussed here:
https://fackel.substack.com/p/how-govts-are-obfuscating-the-problems
Well, other than the rule of holes ("umm, have you considered a moratorium on digging?"), I don't really know what to say. It'll take generations to integrate this population, and by the time that happens, it's entirely possible that Austria (not just Austria, obviously) won't exist as an independent country anymore, and the culture will be radically different. As for German: it's hard to learn a foreign language as an adult, doubly (actually, more like quintuply) so if you're monolingual and your native language is radically different from the one you're trying to learn. Children learn easily, but only under immersion conditions. But if most of the class doesn't speak the language, then is that really "immersion"?
As to language acquisition--I'm supremely biased here because I went to a good public school and we learned a bunch of languages there (English, Latin, French, and Italian) before leaving. I'd add that I've continued learning languages (adding Croatian, Czech, and now Norwegian).
Yes, it's hard to learn new things later in life, but a certain willingness must be presupposed. If you don't want to something, you don't.
Should be grounds for eviction or deportation…
I only had two languages in school (English and French). I learned both eventually, but I don't credit regular school for it. When I was growing up, it seemed to be generally accepted that no-one actually learns a language in a regular school, despite the fact that two languages (English and something else) is standard, plus Latin in high school (although I didn't have Latin because I attended a specialized high school). Parents regularly enroll their kids in private language schools where they (the kids) actually manage to learn English (obviously, the media helps tremendously); those who rely on regular school alone usually learn little. From what I've seen across Europe, many people speak decent-to-excellent English, but fluency in other languages (non-native to the speaker) is quite uncommon, despite the fact that almost everyone has in fact "studied" at least one other language. ("Studying" and "learning" are different things. I've "studied" six foreign languages at various points of my life, but I've "learned" only four of them.) Those who speak three or more languages generally do so because they are immigrants or belong to some sort of linguistic minority (e.g. ethnic Hungarians in various countries bordering Hungary). Exceptions exist, but are quite rare in my experience. (Maybe it's different if you hang around academic historians. That's a tiny group of people, though.)
And yes, of course, motivation matters a great deal, but there is such a thing is not having any clue how to learn a language and not believing you are capable of doing it. I also don't know what it's like in Austria, but the Czech Republic seems to be extremely nonchalant (or negligent, if you prefer) about the linguistic integration of foreigners. I ended up paying for Czech private lessons 100% out of pocket. Was it worth it? Why, yes it was. (I speak Czech now - yay.) But that's not really doable unless you have a fairly good income. Self-study is always an option, but it's slower and less effective, and if you've never successfully learned a foreign language before, it may well turn out to be hopeless.
I agree with what you said about being taught vs. learning (to speak, use) languages.
There's also the notion of 'un-learning' certain parts and losing one's previous abilities to speak fluently due to disuse and the like; it happened to my Italian (which I also took as a minor subject at the university level), which I don't hear often here in Norway and speak even less. My reading skills are still formidable, but reading and speaking are different beasts, so to speak.
I suppose my main 'insight' (if you'd like to call it that, would be that once you began learning a bunch of languages, any additional language isn't that hard to learn (because, as with other things in life, these, too, get easier over time).
I agree with your insight, but notice a corollary: it is difficult to successfully learn your first foreign language (unless you're a child in an immersion setting). You don't know what you're doing, and so you'll go about it in a suboptimal way, and you may think it's hopeless (meaning that you don't even try). That's presumably the case with all those Syrians et al. who cannot communicate with their kids' schools without interpreters. What do you (or more to the point: governments) do about it? There are various options, but the ostrich approach ("la la la, there is no problem") tends to be unhelpful.
Also, "easy" is relative. It still takes a lot of time. I'd say hundreds of hours to get anywhere and thousands to get legitimately good. The exact number of hundreds/thousands will vary depending on the learner, the language, the methods, and the standards.
I found the Norwegian approach rather useful: all kids get a 'right' to attend kindergarten (not all is well, for this typically means the kindergarten your kid is assigned to is often across town…) and there's a Norwegian-only policy in place. I don't know if that's a real policy or what happens, but it worked with my 3yo who learned fluent Norwegian within less than three months.
Oh, and, yes, at that time my kid spoke both German and English, and there were also kids in that kindergarten who also spoke both languages. It didn't prevent her from learning Norwegian.
There's no way something like this couldn't be done elsewhere.
Finally, as to the amount of time it takes to learn something, anything: sure, that's true; but I'd maintain that if you don't want to learn the language of the country you live in, you're welcome to return to your country of origin at any time.
I don't disagree with any of this per se. I would just point out that what works for 3-year-olds will not work for 30-year-olds. Also, numbers matter. Just how many kids in your daughter's group were German speaking? Maybe some, but probably not a majority.
And as I like to point out: there's a difference between what's possible and what's likely. As a practical matter, very few little-educated immigrants will do that [EDIT: invest 1000+ hours into a language] (sure, someone somewhere must have done it, but "someone somewhere" is not a viable policy), and the better-educated are a mixed bag. I know a number of highly educated immigrants who will practically brag about how well they can manage in their adopted country without speaking the local language. And I know others who complain that the locals don't speak sufficiently good English. (And there's a massive linguistic pet peeve of mine: holding the little educated to much higher language standards than the highly credentialed. "It's totally fine if Mr. Big Shot, PhD, hasn't bothered learning the language. But that janitor over there..." Gah.)
And someone seriously effed up with the 13-year-old boy. They just put him in a class with 6-year-olds? I assume he's a refugee and had never attended school before, but c'mon, a 13-year-old has no business being in a class with 6-year-olds. If there are no other students like him, just give him a tutor. It's better both for him and for the 6-year-olds (not to mention the poor teacher who has to deal with him on top of a class full of 6-year-olds).
Middle school is grades 5-9, i.e., the 13yo shares the classroom with 10yos.
You're of course correct about the messed up 13yo with online porn.
Oh, I see. That's not quite as bad, but it's still bad. Three years is a big difference at that age. I'm guessing the kid feels humiliated for having to be in a class with much younger kids. And once you humiliate a kid, that largely destroys motivation for behaving better. What exactly should be done about it - well, you tell me.
How TF would I know?
My 5th grader daughter is 10, and we are keeping an eye out on esp. online access, which is very different from her classmates.
I suppose that 'even' half a year--or unlimited online access--makes a HUGE difference.
I want to mention one thing:
All this was obvious in the late 1970s (in Sweden) when we switched from strict migration laws, to accepting asylum seekers from SA, Africa, MENA and parts of Asia, and dropped the forced integration policy that had been applied to gypsies since the early 1900s.
Crime statistics from 1970 to 1980 shows clearly that any ethnic group from any one of these areas, are at least 3:1 or more criminal than indigenous Swedes or Western Europeans. This was ignored, then hushed up, and the after the 1991 election, the gates were thrown open.
Ever since, all problems associated with unlimited and virtually demand-free migration has been increasingly papered over, creating a Potemkin-nation where official estimates are that at least 800 000 inhabitants are illiterate, in many cases so after 9 years of compulsory school, just to pick one example. Another more dire one is the daily shootings and weekly bombings. Yet more dire is the incidence of rape. From ca 300 cases reported/annually in the mid-1970s (with a +95% Swedish population and Finns, Norwegians and Danes being the major migrant groups), to close to 9 000/annually some post-2010 years.
(Note that there are no real official figures on this anymore, all such are obfuscated, so what we have is a "best guess" from 2016 when a private citizen spent over a year going through criminal reports, comparing them to people being prosecuted and finally to no. of convictions, and putting this in relation to the convicted's ethnicity and said ethnicity's proportion of the population total.
Also note that population increased from just below 8 000 000 in the late 1970s to 10 000 000 in the post-2010s, the majority of the increase consisting of migration of peoples from Africa, SA, MENA.)
Oh, and me writing this may constitute a crime in the Sweden of today. Think about that, and how that harmonises with the image our Foreign Dep. and such try to project. Potemkin Nation.
Consider checking out the following blog, it's run by a former intelligence officer by name of Johan Westerholm, a registered member of the Socialist Democrat party and one of their most vocal critics when it comes to migration, islam, organised crime and related and intersecting issues:
https://ledarsidorna.se/
On a lighter note, I miss-read "Lebanisation" as "Lesbianisation". I blame lack of sleep.
Not taking away from your superb comment, in fact today even the BBC shared about a 13 year old “hired gun” in Gothenburg - anywho - I have to admit I too read Lesbianisation 😂 not sure I can blame lack of sleep think in todays time it didn’t feel too far fetched…