Monday, February 20, 2017

The Swedish Hellhole

President Pigfucker is trying to justify his remarks about Sweden by suggesting it's a scary place with BAD IMMIGRANTS causing BAD PROBLEMS.

You hear these tales regularly from Americans who don't know anything. The Muslims have taken over! Hide your women! Even the most poverty-stricken immigrant neighborhoods in Europe are, by US standards, fine. The lack of guns and freeish health care tend to take the sting off the crime and poverty. I'd happily live in any of them. Years ago I spent a couple of months in one of those horrible immigrant neighborhoods in a major European city, warned away even by locals who said it was VERY DANGEROUS. It wasn't. The presence of poorer brown people does not actually make a neighborhood unsafe. Without guns, there are limits to what "unsafe" actually means.

Anyway, not denying that most places have poverty and associated problems, or that immigration can create tensions. Every country has their own unique brand of nationalistic race-linked identity, and while I won't defend the racism in our country I think "we" at least sometimes have a more sophisticated understanding of it and better language for discussing it than other countries often do. But I'd be quite happy to spend a few months in the worst urban hellhole in Europe, wherever that is, as long as I had decent enough public transit access.