Originally posted by Cythraul
Where exactly did I say that?! Methinks you like to try and read between the lines because arguing with me is easier if you dislike me.
No, I read between the lines to expose to others the subtext of what you're saying. You're vehemently anti-immigration (that's the "so long as they
stay over there" part) and you're just as vehement about hte notion of being "replaced" (that's the "I don't want them breeding in my neighborhood"
part)
I'd have a fragment more respect for people like you if you would stop trying to obfuscate your actual meaning. of course you know that if you didn't,
people would excoriate you.
Originally posted by TheWalkingFox
Of course by doing so one has to buy into your faulty premise that first, there is such a thing going on, and second, that it actually merits debate
if it is.
The statistics are not faulty and if it doesn't merit debate, why are you here?
I think that I can assume you've been on the internet long enough that you've seen this graph:
Clearly the statistics are not faulty; temperatures are rising, pirates are in decline. The fault isn't with the statistics, but rather the entire
premise of the graph; that is, the question of whether pirates are a factor in climate change.
This is the same as your argument. "Replacement" implies one static thing being removed and another static thing put in its place. So if I have three
apples, and remove one, then add an orange, I've replaced an apple with an orange.
On the other hand, if I have a jug of orange juice and a jug of apple juice, what happens if I pour the orange juice into the apple juice, while
pouring from the jug the apple juice is in? Does the apple juice get replaced, leaving me with a full jug of pure orange juice and no apple juice? No,
I end up with a apple-y, orange-y slurry of juice in a jug.
cultures and people don't get replaced. They
change. it's an important distinction, and the reason i'm here is to hopefully hammer through that
thick shell of panic and fear you've wrapped around yourself, and let some reality in.
Originally posted by TheWalkingFox
So I wanted to know what your "solution" would be..
Halt immigration and reinstate a dominant native culture, whilst affording immigrants and their offspring the same rights and privileges as anyone
else and helping them to adapt to native values.
Which again brings us to the question you so blithely dismissed earlier in the thread - what is the definition of any given culture? At what point in
history must we return to for say, English culture to be unquestionably, purely "English"? Name a date, please. Explain why this is the defining
moment of "English culture," if you will.
Odds are you can't accomplish this, for the simple reason that I outlined above - cultures are forever altering and changing, innovating, adopting,
and excising tradition and practice, style and look, language and habits.
Now if you can't accomplish this feat - and I assure you, you cannot, unless you do like a tabloid psychic and just ramble off a list of vague
positive traits you think define English-ness, which any person from anywhere would also use to define Anywhere-ness - how do you expect it to be
institutionalized, much less have that institutionalization enforced?
No-one is the same race as their parents? Only true for mixed-race children. What you're essentially saying, through the medium of
utter-nonsense, is that race doesn't exist. If you'll be so kind as to admit that then I can stop wasting my time with you.
Biologically speaking, race doesn't exist. For race to have any scientific meaning, there would have to be "pure" races, i.e, races that only exist
within themselves, totally divergent from any other neighboring races, ever since the point of the split from the larger group. Maybe,
maybe
the Tasmanian aborigines could have qualified as some sort of biologically useful race - they'd been utterly isolated from the rest of the world
population for something close to twenty thousand years - but due to disease, war, and intermarriage, that example no longer exists. The rest of the
world, however, has been so busy swapping genetic material back and forth that any attempt to draw a biological meaning for the concept of "race"
would be a pointless endeavor. Basically at some point in our genetic history, one of our ancestors is bound to have been quite different-looking from
the rest of out ancestors. And then when you consider the simple reality of things like genetic drift and sexual selection (i.e., casual mutation, and
varying standards of "sexy" appearance) well... You probably look
very different from an Englander of the 12th century, let's say.
However, Race does exist as a
cultural construct. I've pointed this out twice now, and you seem to ignore it every time. Basically, any given
culture has its own list of definitions for who belongs to what race... and htey're often wildly divergent. People in China can pick out Han, Miao,
Hakka, Koreans, Uigyers, and label them all, while to our eyes, they're "chinese" or perhaps "Asian." To Americans, the president is "black," but in
other nations, sometimes he isn't. Get what i'm saying? Race is a rather arbitrary categorization that variesfrom culture to culture. it does exist in
this context, but it's really hard to make it mean anything.
edit on 31/8/2011 by TheWalkingFox because: (no reason given)
