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That's great. I suggest it's probably not a huge factor for most people. But there's a huge amount of information embedded into culture - ideas, mannerisms, f

That's great. I suggest it's probably not a huge factor for most people. But there's a huge amount of information embedded into culture - ideas, mannerisms, forms of education, language, social strata - it goes far, far beyond 'language and cuisine'. Large scale immigration wipes that out and does not replace it with a new culture, rather, a 'globalized' set of values - and a Starbucks on every corner. So in the interests of having actual 'diversity' on planet earth, because as of today we are witnessing an 'extinction event' of culture, we might want to consider the impact of some of our policies. Immigrants (and FYI I've been an immigrant at stages of my own life) are mostly just regular people, and so we don't want to play into the hands of xenophobes or 'racial purists' or whatever, but at the same time, we have to recognize the imperative of culture itself. Is all.

emodendroket 9y ago
I think there's only a hair's breadth separating "shut the border to preserve culture" and "shut the border to preserve our ethnicity" considering how frequently rhetoric for the former slips into the latter. To be sure, a large group of immigrants can change the host culture (for instance, in American English we have any number of Yiddish-derived words that, in my experience, are not really commonly understood by English people), but I think the idea that the result has to be a homogenized, corporate, ersatz culture is wrong. Japan itself, as it exists today, is clearly the result of tremendous, unmistakable foreign influence -- most notably, but hardly exclusively, Tang Dynasty China and post-war America. Ultimately, I guess you could say that as a person married to a foreign woman of a different ethnicity I have some personal investment in the opposite ideal.
- alexasmyths 9y ago
  Admiring one's own culture, or the culture of another, and recognizing the value of them, isn't a 'thin margin' away from xenophobia, I think. FYI I live in an area where I'm a tiny ethnic minority English speaker among a sea of people who are of a different culture, including my GF and most of my friends. I've also lived around the world as an ex-pat/immigrant/minority. I think global mass immigration will lead to a single (or maybe a small group of), globalized, commercial civilization(s) without culture, and we will lose most of what makes us great. It's happening right now - and quickly. We will eventually defeat climate change - but once we lose culture, it will never come back. So that's a real thing. There's no reason that a nation must continue to have 'more people' so I don't see why people must continue with the arbitrary demands of 'more people'. The motivation for 'mass immigration' is mostly commercial and partly social - there are globalist forces who wish to move masses of poor people to rich countries. This is not a crazy Breitbart conspiracy, here it is on the UN's web site: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/migration/migration.htm http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/migration/migr... The title alone is Orwellian. And just as there are xenophobes/bigots out there, there many who relish the thought of wiping out successful cultures for various reasons. When we think about 'retirement' or even 'retiring early' often that's a little bit aspirational ... where would we want to live, if we had the choice? Well - people don't chose to live in the 'suburbs' near an 'IKEA' and a 'McDonald's' and a 'highway'. Generally, I think most people, from most backgrounds, chose to live in a place that has some kind of cultural context - either their own, or another, but certainly not the globalized Starbucks Suburbs. Our 'global policies' right now are focused very much on the material, not the things that ultimately matter to us because they're a little more intangible.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I honestly do not know what you're talking about. A lot of people choose to live in the suburbs. The idea that a new culture cannot arise from the blending of extant ones is contradicted by countless examples -- whether we think of the United States, Malaysia, Hong Kong, as obvious ones, or really any country on Earth. And I don't see anything particularly "Orwellian" about thinking about immigration as a solution to demographic challenges caused by aging populations -- indeed, my observation that this is what is currently happening across the industrialized world is where we started this conversation. There are, in fact, quite a few reasons why a country would want to avoid an aging society -- if nothing is done to address that problem, and you don't radically alter the economy to move to some post-growth planned economy the consequences will be catastrophic. Anybody with even a passing familiarity with Japan will know about the concern about its aging population. And one has to wonder, of course, why previous waves of migration were OK, but this time it's beyond the pale. A lot of the rhetoric you hear about the subject suggests the problem is the current migrants are somehow inferior people -- you can see, I think, why I'd associate this with racism and xenophobia.
    - alexasmyths 9y ago
      " The idea that a new culture cannot arise from the blending of extant ones is contradicted by countless examples" I didn't imply that new cultures could not be created by the blending of others. But it's glaringly obvious that this is mostly not what is happening in most places in the world. What I am describing is easily demonstrated in various ways: + The most obvious is the lack of diversity in language, and the 'Anglicization' of many places in particular. For example, there were dozens of languages spoken across France: Nicoise was spoken in Nice, Monegasque in Monaco. This is gone now, standardized into French or Italian. The European B-school, INSEAD, used to require English/French/German - now just English. + Architecture: using ironically Monaco as an example, the newest area of Monaco is indistinguishable from a North American suburb, which is sublimely funny because most of the rest of Monaco has a very specific and interesting aesthetic. + The suburbs of Singapore, Toronto, parts of Europe - are are starting to resemble one another in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. You can be in a shopping mall in either or and it might take you a few minutes to know in which country you are in. Same stores. Nearly the same food. Same soft drinks. Same products. Similar holidays (!). + The globalization of brands and commercial products is a huge thing. Have you been to North Africa? They are now plastering Monoprix stores across there with the exact same merchandise that you find in France, and frankly, pretty similar to what you find here. My father motorbkiked across North Africa in the 1970's and it was a very different place. Now - even the Tunisian youth dress effectively the same as the kids in Paris. In storefronts across the Magrheb, Coka Cola is trying to market people away from regular Tunsian tea - this 'works' for country managers because a $2 can of coke adds more to the GDP than a 50 cent glass of tea - even of those are not good measures of intrinsic value to Tunisia. Everyone - in every country - is now being conquered by a specific set of products band brands, representing an ever narrowing set of cultural ideals. ... and as for the UN objective - yes, it's nice that we care about people in the developed world. But A) There is no long term economic reasoning behind the need for 'constantly more people'. This is pensioner/ponzi scheme economic problem. Pension shortfalls based on perpetual growth scenarios are obviously unsustainable ... So ... B) Replacing one culture entirely with another is genocidal. There is no way to replace 10's millions of Germans with people from various parts of the world, and for Germany to be German. The German culture would be extinct, and they will have bequeathed a functioning state to a nice bunch of newcomers - who might speak German - but are not otherwise German. Were this to have happened over 100 or 200 years - possibly - this would be the evolution of culture. Sure - I get that. All cultures evolve and absorb over time. But on the scale that the UN is proposing - this is not about 'poor people becoming Germans' - it's about 'poor people replacing Germans'. As Germans are literally replaced - well - they disappear forever. This is Orwellian. The thing that differentiates 2017 from any period before is really one of scale. There has always been migration, there has always been movement - of course we all live in something akin to a 'compound culture'. But that is history - what's happening now is happening 'light speed' and there is no time for cultural acclimatization. Toronto - the most diverse place on planet earth - is absolutely not developing it's own cuisine, or it's own language, or behavioural norms, musical styles. It would - over time - in a more regular scenario. But culture takes time to form, and we're moving way too fast. Starbucks will not stop until they have 'total global saturation' - and neither will Amazon, Facebook, Coka Cola. They will displace everything in their path, change behaviours ideas and norms to conform with their own profit motivations. Government administrators everywhere are looking for GDP maximization and will focus on things that apparently 'increase efficiency' - like speaking English - but which mask an underlying existential cost of losing value due to lost cultural attributes - i.e. how much does the world 'lose' when people stop speaking Nicoise? And Monegasque? And various Aboriginal languages? And Slovak? It's hard to know, but it's something - and when you add it all up, it's a 'big thing'.

emodendroket 9y ago

I think there's only a hair's breadth separating "shut the border to preserve culture" and "shut the border to preserve our ethnicity" considering how frequently rhetoric for the former slips into the latter. To be sure, a large group of immigrants can change the host culture (for instance, in American English we have any number of Yiddish-derived words that, in my experience, are not really commonly understood by English people), but I think the idea that the result has to be a homogenized, corporate, ersatz culture is wrong. Japan itself, as it exists today, is clearly the result of tremendous, unmistakable foreign influence -- most notably, but hardly exclusively, Tang Dynasty China and post-war America. Ultimately, I guess you could say that as a person married to a foreign woman of a different ethnicity I have some personal investment in the opposite ideal.

alexasmyths 9y ago
Admiring one's own culture, or the culture of another, and recognizing the value of them, isn't a 'thin margin' away from xenophobia, I think. FYI I live in an area where I'm a tiny ethnic minority English speaker among a sea of people who are of a different culture, including my GF and most of my friends. I've also lived around the world as an ex-pat/immigrant/minority. I think global mass immigration will lead to a single (or maybe a small group of), globalized, commercial civilization(s) without culture, and we will lose most of what makes us great. It's happening right now - and quickly. We will eventually defeat climate change - but once we lose culture, it will never come back. So that's a real thing. There's no reason that a nation must continue to have 'more people' so I don't see why people must continue with the arbitrary demands of 'more people'. The motivation for 'mass immigration' is mostly commercial and partly social - there are globalist forces who wish to move masses of poor people to rich countries. This is not a crazy Breitbart conspiracy, here it is on the UN's web site: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/migration/migration.htm http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/migration/migr... The title alone is Orwellian. And just as there are xenophobes/bigots out there, there many who relish the thought of wiping out successful cultures for various reasons. When we think about 'retirement' or even 'retiring early' often that's a little bit aspirational ... where would we want to live, if we had the choice? Well - people don't chose to live in the 'suburbs' near an 'IKEA' and a 'McDonald's' and a 'highway'. Generally, I think most people, from most backgrounds, chose to live in a place that has some kind of cultural context - either their own, or another, but certainly not the globalized Starbucks Suburbs. Our 'global policies' right now are focused very much on the material, not the things that ultimately matter to us because they're a little more intangible.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I honestly do not know what you're talking about. A lot of people choose to live in the suburbs. The idea that a new culture cannot arise from the blending of extant ones is contradicted by countless examples -- whether we think of the United States, Malaysia, Hong Kong, as obvious ones, or really any country on Earth. And I don't see anything particularly "Orwellian" about thinking about immigration as a solution to demographic challenges caused by aging populations -- indeed, my observation that this is what is currently happening across the industrialized world is where we started this conversation. There are, in fact, quite a few reasons why a country would want to avoid an aging society -- if nothing is done to address that problem, and you don't radically alter the economy to move to some post-growth planned economy the consequences will be catastrophic. Anybody with even a passing familiarity with Japan will know about the concern about its aging population. And one has to wonder, of course, why previous waves of migration were OK, but this time it's beyond the pale. A lot of the rhetoric you hear about the subject suggests the problem is the current migrants are somehow inferior people -- you can see, I think, why I'd associate this with racism and xenophobia.
  - alexasmyths 9y ago
    " The idea that a new culture cannot arise from the blending of extant ones is contradicted by countless examples" I didn't imply that new cultures could not be created by the blending of others. But it's glaringly obvious that this is mostly not what is happening in most places in the world. What I am describing is easily demonstrated in various ways: + The most obvious is the lack of diversity in language, and the 'Anglicization' of many places in particular. For example, there were dozens of languages spoken across France: Nicoise was spoken in Nice, Monegasque in Monaco. This is gone now, standardized into French or Italian. The European B-school, INSEAD, used to require English/French/German - now just English. + Architecture: using ironically Monaco as an example, the newest area of Monaco is indistinguishable from a North American suburb, which is sublimely funny because most of the rest of Monaco has a very specific and interesting aesthetic. + The suburbs of Singapore, Toronto, parts of Europe - are are starting to resemble one another in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. You can be in a shopping mall in either or and it might take you a few minutes to know in which country you are in. Same stores. Nearly the same food. Same soft drinks. Same products. Similar holidays (!). + The globalization of brands and commercial products is a huge thing. Have you been to North Africa? They are now plastering Monoprix stores across there with the exact same merchandise that you find in France, and frankly, pretty similar to what you find here. My father motorbkiked across North Africa in the 1970's and it was a very different place. Now - even the Tunisian youth dress effectively the same as the kids in Paris. In storefronts across the Magrheb, Coka Cola is trying to market people away from regular Tunsian tea - this 'works' for country managers because a $2 can of coke adds more to the GDP than a 50 cent glass of tea - even of those are not good measures of intrinsic value to Tunisia. Everyone - in every country - is now being conquered by a specific set of products band brands, representing an ever narrowing set of cultural ideals. ... and as for the UN objective - yes, it's nice that we care about people in the developed world. But A) There is no long term economic reasoning behind the need for 'constantly more people'. This is pensioner/ponzi scheme economic problem. Pension shortfalls based on perpetual growth scenarios are obviously unsustainable ... So ... B) Replacing one culture entirely with another is genocidal. There is no way to replace 10's millions of Germans with people from various parts of the world, and for Germany to be German. The German culture would be extinct, and they will have bequeathed a functioning state to a nice bunch of newcomers - who might speak German - but are not otherwise German. Were this to have happened over 100 or 200 years - possibly - this would be the evolution of culture. Sure - I get that. All cultures evolve and absorb over time. But on the scale that the UN is proposing - this is not about 'poor people becoming Germans' - it's about 'poor people replacing Germans'. As Germans are literally replaced - well - they disappear forever. This is Orwellian. The thing that differentiates 2017 from any period before is really one of scale. There has always been migration, there has always been movement - of course we all live in something akin to a 'compound culture'. But that is history - what's happening now is happening 'light speed' and there is no time for cultural acclimatization. Toronto - the most diverse place on planet earth - is absolutely not developing it's own cuisine, or it's own language, or behavioural norms, musical styles. It would - over time - in a more regular scenario. But culture takes time to form, and we're moving way too fast. Starbucks will not stop until they have 'total global saturation' - and neither will Amazon, Facebook, Coka Cola. They will displace everything in their path, change behaviours ideas and norms to conform with their own profit motivations. Government administrators everywhere are looking for GDP maximization and will focus on things that apparently 'increase efficiency' - like speaking English - but which mask an underlying existential cost of losing value due to lost cultural attributes - i.e. how much does the world 'lose' when people stop speaking Nicoise? And Monegasque? And various Aboriginal languages? And Slovak? It's hard to know, but it's something - and when you add it all up, it's a 'big thing'.