[Colonol Dekker]

I'm all for an influx of immigrants as long as A- they contribute to society and bring skills or a trade.
 
And B- they are LEGAL.

[iamzack]

Allow everyone in that wants in (barring people with smallpox and such diseases) and you have no illegals. WOAH, PROBLEM SOLVED.

Anyway, white people all look the same to me, so I am very much in favor of immigrants. I'm sick of seeing the same douchey white guy and plastic white girl cloned all over the damn place.

[TrashMan]

More end of the world stuff?

End of the world? No. End of one culture...forming of another.

Oh hey, it's the conservatives showing that deep down, they're racists who fear change.

who'da thunk

Gotta love label-happy assholes.
That's right. Accuse anyone who sez something that doesn't feel 100% correct to you as racist. That's certanly a good way to talk to people. With all that jumping to conclusion and running off the handle, you must be in really good shape.


Things change, yes. But not all change is for the better. Change can be slowed down or accelerated. It can be natural or unnatural. And change unavoidably leads to loss of some things. Is it wrong to feel some sorrow cause you know some things will be lost? As natural as change is, so is the feeling of loss.


Also, not all immigrants adopt to the culture of their new country. They form enclaves (especially if there's a lot of them) and that affects the core culture.
Of course cultures themsevles change. It has changed in my own country for hunderds of years. But the very "core" of that culture was pretty much the same. Rampart immigration threatens to change the very core drasticly.

[Dilmah G]

Skilled migrants that speak the language of the country ftw. There are far too many foreigners over here that attempt to run businesses without speaking a damn word of English. The only time I'd ever be okay with an immigrant not speaking the language of the country is if they're refugees.  

[General Battuta]

Oh hey, it's the conservatives showing that deep down, they're racists who fear change.

who'da thunk

Gotta love label-happy assholes.
That's right. Accuse anyone who sez something that doesn't feel 100% correct to you as racist. That's certanly a good way to talk to people. With all that jumping to conclusion and running off the handle, you must be in really good shape.

To be honest, he's right. After a lot of time in the science of this field I've realized that everyone is a racist who fears change.

Conservatives just tend to put less effort into fighting it and more into justifying it.

[StarSlayer]

Actually what you should be more worried about is successfully integrating your immigrants into your culture and national identity.  Lets face it the Untied States wouldn't exist anymore if it didn't do a decent job of assimilating newcomers.  That's actually something many European countries are finding difficulty with.  In a lot of cases it seems more like segregated ethnic groups living in Britain, France, etc. rather then them just being British, French, what have you. 

[Flipside]

Even at the current Birth and Immigration rates, it would take centuries for something like this to happen, not decades. and considering I, myself, am descending from French Immigrants and Italian invaders (The Romans), it doesn't strike me as too terrible. The fact is that what people are scared of isn't 'dark people' in this particular case, it's 'Islam', and that's amusing, because you talk to teenagers born in the UK, the ones who are going to 'replace' us, and you'll realise that the UK habit of 'more important stuff to do' is contagious.

So yes, our future may very well contain 'dark-skinned' people, don't care in the slightest about that, but what it won't contain is the 'Islamic republic of Great Britain', that's a story invented by Americans to convince themselves of their own social 'superiority' over the UK.

[Mr. Vega]

All of you- shut up. Lib has a legit point. Normally assimilation takes care of cultural homogeneity, but if the birth rate fall low enough you have a situation resembling the late roman empire when they invited germans into the empire because they needed someone to work the increasingly vacant fields. Population and cultural replacement has happened lots of times in history.

If this was a Native American lamenting how the whites were reproducing too quickly and thus they were going to overwhelm his people, would you give him this same response? No; he'd get all the sympathy in the world. So stop being hypocritical. Cultural annihilation is a legitimate fear (unless of course, you think everything made by dead white men must all be worthless, like democracy, anti-trust lawsuits, and the Romantic Era of music. Yes, it sucks that you had to be a member of the privileged race and sex to be able to make this stuff. It's changing, slowly but surely. So stop boohooing the past and go write a piano concerto if you're a woman).

An the other hand, um, we should be reproducing at that rate. The population needs to decline if we're not going to run out of freshwater and arable land. It's just poorer cultures have just been unbelievably dense to this idea (Look at Africa, where they keep having babies right up till they die of starvation).

Also, if you're a sovereign nation, you can do whatever the **** you want with your borders. So why not close them? Does the western world still want the cheap labor but not the actual people? In America at least, there's just too much public support in favor of immigrants to pull that off (myself included, hell I have family friends who are illegals).

So yes, our future may very well contain 'dark-skinned' people, don't care in the slightest about that, but what it won't contain is the 'Islamic republic of Great Britain', that's a story invented by Americans to convince themselves of their own social 'superiority' over the UK.

No, we can claim that because we don't have cameras on the streets watching our every move. Hard not shake the image of British docility when you read about that.

I mean, it's not as bad a canada, where a misogynistic gunmen entered a classroom and ordered all the men to leave the room, when it was obvious he was going to kill all the women, and they just left, but you get the picture.

[General Battuta]

Cultural annihilation is not a legitimate fear when cultural power is determined by economic, technological, and memetic superiority rather than numerical force.

[Flipside]

Hahahaha!

So another attempt at claiming social superiority justifies the last one?

And people complain about the stereotyping of American society...

[Mr. Vega]

Cultural annihilation is not a legitimate fear when cultural power is determined by economic, technological, and memetic superiority rather than numerical force.

It all depends on whether there's enough immigrants to shield their children from the assimilating culture.

[Flipside]

Not really, a lot of the children from the assimilated culture are actually being assimilated into British culture, they will raise their own children in a mish-mash of both. The generation after that will be its own culture, the old 'hard-liners' will mostly die out on both sides at the same time, and though there will be new 'hard-liners', they wont be influencial enough over people who are a mixture of Eastern and Western culture.

[Mr. Vega]

Hahahaha!

So another attempt at claiming social superiority justifies the last one?

And people complain about the stereotyping of American society...

It's the first time in recorded history I have ever supported Lib (supported, not agreed with), but I'm saying he might have a legit right to be afraid if that's what he cares about.

And again, if he was a native american on a reservation, you would be giving him all the sympathy in the world. Yes, whites hold power now, but in fifty, a hundred years? Then what, will the removal of power make sympathy possible?

[Turambar]

you act like there's some kind of American culture worth protecting.

our culture is based on what giant multinational corporations decide they can sell us and that's pretty much it. 

[Flipside]

I don't care where he was raised, as I've said before, it's not about what colour someone is, or what religion, if he'd said that and had been born in the most famine-struck area of Ethiopia, he'd still be wrong. It's not about pity, it's about not looking at things from 'they are the enemy' point of view. And to assume that Eastern culture mixed with Western culture = Purely Eastern culture is just plain wrong, it's been proved time and time again throughout history that cultures don't merge like that.

Edit: And the fact is that cultures change all the time anyway, 'British culture' of the 1950's is, quite literally, a thing of the past, in fact, a society is in more danger is the culture isn't under permanent stress, change and evaluation.

[General Battuta]

Flipside's hit it on the head.

There's a concept in biology called hybrid vigor: crossbeeds are the most fit. The same applies to cultures. The most vigorous cultures in history have been built on constant intercultural exchange and population movement.

[Mr. Vega]

you act like there's some kind of American culture worth protecting.

our culture is based on what giant multinational corporations decide they can sell us and that's pretty much it.  

I am not saying Lib's argument is correct, I'm saying their are elements of his argument that are correct and you're not seeing it because you're dismissing him.

Also, you live in a culture where it's ok to say stuff like that, which is mostly due to the work of white (and a lot of black) men and women of the 20th century.

And I don't know about social superority, but as for cultural achievement: John Williams. J.R.R. Tolkien. Virginia Woolfe (because we're still waaay waaaay farther ahead on feminism than the rest of world, believe it or not). Richard Feynman. Jonas Salk. Isaac Asimov.

I'll add a few black american names too: Charlie Parker. Langston Hughes. Frederic Douglas. W. E. B. Dubois.

Yeah, just multinational corporations Turambar. Of course.

Yes, this is totally unfair, because no other cultures have been given the chance to produce a body of work like that the english speaking world.

That having been said, if there comes a day where composers abandon that leitmotif style used by Williams for cultural reasons I'm gonna be angry. Not very substantial a fear, and far off, I know. But it worries me.

[karajorma]

And again, if he was a native american on a reservation, you would be giving him all the sympathy in the world.

If the indians had had nukes and the white men had nothing but sticks I doubt that we'd be giving him much sympathy at all.

[Mr. Vega]

THAT'S MY POINT: Is what power you have, at this very moment, all that matters?

[iamzack]

I have sympathy for the native Americans just because they aren't being stupidly hypocritical.

Europeans didn't just show up and take land. They showed up, took land, wiped out entire tribes, and enforced mass assimilation programs where they effectively kidnapped native children and took them east to Christian boarding schools to be robbed of what was left of their cultural heritage.

And now the descendants of the Europeans are whining about just being maybe potentially outnumbered in the future? Give me a break.