Okay, this has to be one of the most unintentionally amusing stories I’ve covered, thanks in no small part to the lunatic ravings of the silly old fart who serves as the finance minister of Germany. The sheer stupidity of his statement is both breathtaking and mind boggling, leaving the reader scratching their head in amazement and wondering how anyone could conjure up such an outrageous statement. But then, maybe it was an overload of stupid.
Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble told a German newspaper this week that closing Germany’s borders would lead to incest. Wait, what?
“Isolation is what would ruin us – it would lead us into incest,” the finance minister told Die Zeit, doing a good imitation of a doomsday preacher.
So, let me get this straight… according to this moron, if a country were to shut it’s borders to mass immigration, it would lead to incest. Huh? How does that even compute, at all?
Okay, lets take a deep breath and take a step back here. If you aren’t attracted to a family member when the borders are open, logic would say that you aren’t going to become attracted to them as soon as the borders close. Incest only happens when the Westermarck effect is absent or very weak.
The borders open approach has only happened for the last few decades in the European Union anyway. By his bizarre logic, it would imply that all those people who lived during WW2 and all of history prior to that would have been secretly having affairs with family members. It would also mean that people would prefer to have relations with foreigners if available… again, not necessarily. While interracial relationships can and do happen, they are not a requirement for incest avoidance, the Westermarck effect does that for most people. Most people, whether the borders are open or shut, will have relationships with people outside their family and within their own cultural or racial identity. This isn’t xenophobia, it’s fact.
I’m not bothering to cover the rest of the article as it is about politics and therefore irrelevant to this blog. In conclusion, this laughable claim has more to do with political posturing than any form of sensible political debate. If he was trying to persuade people that it’s best to keep the borders open… wow, this is EPIC FAIL.
Consanguinamory 
Are people really this fucking stupid?
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Apparently so. To think a person this stupid is in charge of balancing the books for a whole country is frightening.
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I admire your activism but Wolfgang Schäuble doesn’t deserve your attention.
I’ve read the relevant parts of the interview in German. Firstly he didn’t use the German word for incest (‘Inzest’) but the word ‘Inzucht’. Its meaning is more like the English word ‘inbreeding’.
Its also really obvious that he didn’t mean that in a literal sense. He wanted to say that Europe needs immigration and closing borders would be a mistake. Therefore its more about the gain and innovation that immigration brings with it and not about family members having sex.
Nevertheless the way he said it is highly problematic and he was rightly criticized for that in Germany. Because using words like that and also words like ‘degeneration’ when talking about immigration is dangerous and has the undertone of racism in it.
Sadly Wolfgang Schäuble is an old man who talks rubbish on a regular basis.
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The way these guys talk it seems like they are itching to do something, and since they are itching to do it, they assume everyone is, and they assume the only thing holding people back is one or two things, and if those things (in this case immigration, in other cases it is laws against consanguinamory) change, then everyone will be making babies with with sibling or parent.
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Silly though the concept of xenophobia might be, if immigration, due to no borders, does get to the point where we don’t know anybody in our town or street of the same race or language as ourselves, and because of satellite TV and the internet, there is no need for anyone to learn English or talk to anyone who speaks English, and because it is now possible for immigrants to live in virtual ghettoes, ( communicating on trains and buses on iPhones only with their own kind in their own language and work in companies operated by their own kind or by themselves, some people may develop an aversion to having any dealings with these strangers who have no apparent interest in our culture or integrating into our society. Such open borders might, in some cases, might lead to situations where people are so isolated and prefer to mix only with their own family members, and thus have a greater chance to fall for a family member. And what happens their small isolated family if one of them falls for a stranger, who make have no ties to that community at all, and drags you family member away with them and seduces her or him into the ways of another foreign culture. Exogamy (on the edges) may be all very fine and dandy when it is your own culture that is rampant and dominant through imperialism and nation building,
but when your culture is being virtually extinguished through globalization, technological suicide, and division and atomization of society and the mass arrival of elites from elsewhere only wishing to repatriate capital to their home countries and or set up immigration companies of their own, endogamy may become increasingly more attractive:-)
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