This whole shitshow started when the city of Cologne, and the police, intentionally tried to keep the assaults out of the media, because they knew the xenophobic right was going to take the story and run with it and use it to turn people against refugees. That’s why it took almost a week for the first reports to start…

True, though people might think you’re referring to the character in Peanuts.

And in the meantime she has changed her mind. So your point is we should always judge people by the opinions they used to have, not by the ones they have now, even though those would be relevant for their presidency?

No mention of the very heated reactions from Russia?

Maybe because they were both dead? With the only exception of Lily’s second name, Luna, all the kids are named after dead people.

Thanks!

I’ll just copy an earlier comment I made:

Well, to be fair, no major public event had to deal with such a large number of sexual assaults before. Currently the police is also assumes that the attacks were coordinated, which has also never been heard of (at least outside of war crimes). What I’m trying to say is not that the attacks in Cologne are exactly the…

Really? May I ask for your sources because I’ve never heard that, at least not in Germany.

I stand corrected then. Funny how I didn’t get to hear about this even though I follow the major media. And no, I wasn’t purposefully filtering out anything.

Not that I’m aware of, at least. The point is, however, that what happened in Cologne (where I live, incidentally) was, in that dimension, unheard of. We’ve had immigrants, a lot of them Muslims, since the 1950s, and even if some of them were/are not lawful citizens, this kind of coordinated attack hasn’t happened…

Here in Germany, the main discussion has been about the racial / religious background of the attackers, i.e. people have been discussing whether we need to strengthen our boarders, whether we allow too many refugees in. The sexual assault was used to argue for harsher punishments for criminal asylum seekers. And quite…

Ageism + sexism = Agexism?

The police has arrested a few suspects and they are still investigating (one might say they do so even harder, with international news coverage on their backs). One thing does not exclude the other.

Many media sources around Europe are saying the German mainstream and state-owned media have been trying to silence this story for days.

We currently have 90 victims who reported, the police suspects that there might be more. It wasn’t just one attacker per person, they attacked in groups. A more conservative number of the attackers I read was around 200.

The only facts stated so far from eye-witnesses and the police are that they were 15-35 years old, drunk, and looked as if they came from Northafrica or the Middle East. Some of them spoke fluent German or French. No mention of their religious background.

Wasn’t it in front of the station?

It was quite crowded, that night in front of the train station, but apparently there was a group of about 1,000 drunken men, from which several smaller groups went looking for victims, surrounded them, assaulted and robbed them. Then they disappeared again in the crowd.

Exactly. Theon’s story arc in season 3 was purest torture porn, and I hated it. At some point, it no longer served the story and added nothing to the plot. Adding these scenes only for shock value is really poor writing.