4 ms·

"I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" is a completely self-consistent position, it's just axiomatically taken as wrongthin

by mhh__ 1y ago

"I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" is a completely self-consistent position, it's just axiomatically taken as wrongthink by people who seem to think everything can be broken down into a logical deduction from high modernist axioms (so-called facts and logic are opinionated, everything requires a numeraire)

kelnos 1y ago
> "I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" If that is the position people hold, I think it would be good to understand why they feel that way. To me, holding that position just feels racist or xenophobic, but I'm hoping that there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But I just don't know, and don't know anyone who holds that view such that I can ask them.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  The Europeans I know who would be considered right wing, are completely concerned about culture and care not about race. That said, culture and race are highly correlated. Want to come in and assimilate? No problem. Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? No thank you.
  - bruce511 1y ago
    >> Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? So basically right wing Americans?
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      I have no idea, I'm in neither Europe nor the Americas.
- mhh__ 1y ago
  Many are racist but the deeper reason to be skeptical is that the current/dominant model assumes everyone in the world is basically fungible and can seamlessly integrate into the west without any particular guidance. That might have even been true decades ago when rates of influx were tiny, but now we live with a firehose under the assumption that there cannot be any hysteresis — we are a big planet, any new culture is a point mass. And that all these new populations get along (they don't). We invaded Afghanistan and started nation building on the assumption that within every Afghan is a Western liberal trying to get out. If you haven't seen it, please watch the Adam Curtis doc "Bitter lake" to see how much of a disaster this project was. We don't understand their culture at all. Those same people who planned that war brought about the current normal of historically flows of people every year. Some of them have explicitly said they wanted to do a cultural transformation project too but I'm prepared to say that was a relatively small group of extremists. Most of the world is very, very, different to the things westerners are used to. We don't have clans, we don't marry inside our families, we don't grow up wanting to make our parents proud anywhere near as much as in non-western countries (etc, "WEIRD" culture as argued in the now-famous book). Not all non-western countries are the same e.g. SEA famously quite compatible with our culture up to a point, but you'd clearly give a daughter very different travel advice if she was going to Morocco versus Inverness. If nothing else, is it not a bit weird to go to quite a few large European cities and find roughly the same distribution of people serving your coffee or waiting at your table? I genuinely wonder what the many Chinese tourists coming to London think when they go into a shop to buy some water or something and all the staff are new arrivals to Britain speaking (say) Hindi rather than English to eachother. And that's not to say they couldn't integrate at some point but at the moment the "purpose of a system is what it does" revealed preference is that we don't want them to.
  - mlinhares 1y ago
    Wild to think that the country that built the largest empire in the world would have people speaking multiple languages in its most important city. Also, this conservative thing of being bothered by people speaking a language they don’t understand amongst themselves shows the eternal entitlement they feel. Everyone’s actions must cater to me, I must understand and be able to participate in everything I want without having to do anything extra. It’s like people visiting the countryside in Brazil and expecting to find English speaking restaurant servers everywhere.
- laughing_man 1y ago
  Do you really not understand why people wouldn't want to live in a foreign country as they get older without ever having moved or been given the option? Would you want to learn another language at, say, age sixty not because you wanted to, but because you're having trouble conducting business anymore in the language you've always used? What if you didn't like the new food, and there very few restaurants left that serve the food you like? Is it really that hard to understand?
  - relaxing 1y ago
    The past is a foreign country. When you’ve lived that long you’ve already experienced changes in the way the locals look and talk. They probably hate that too.

by mhh__ 1y ago

kelnos 1y ago

> "I don't want my town/area to change demographically beyond my recognition" If that is the position people hold, I think it would be good to understand why they feel that way. To me, holding that position just feels racist or xenophobic, but I'm hoping that there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But I just don't know, and don't know anyone who holds that view such that I can ask them.

dotancohen 1y ago
The Europeans I know who would be considered right wing, are completely concerned about culture and care not about race. That said, culture and race are highly correlated. Want to come in and assimilate? No problem. Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? No thank you.
- bruce511 1y ago
  >> Want to come and bring your misogynistic, homophobic, violent culture? So basically right wing Americans?
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    I have no idea, I'm in neither Europe nor the Americas.
mhh__ 1y ago
Many are racist but the deeper reason to be skeptical is that the current/dominant model assumes everyone in the world is basically fungible and can seamlessly integrate into the west without any particular guidance. That might have even been true decades ago when rates of influx were tiny, but now we live with a firehose under the assumption that there cannot be any hysteresis — we are a big planet, any new culture is a point mass. And that all these new populations get along (they don't). We invaded Afghanistan and started nation building on the assumption that within every Afghan is a Western liberal trying to get out. If you haven't seen it, please watch the Adam Curtis doc "Bitter lake" to see how much of a disaster this project was. We don't understand their culture at all. Those same people who planned that war brought about the current normal of historically flows of people every year. Some of them have explicitly said they wanted to do a cultural transformation project too but I'm prepared to say that was a relatively small group of extremists. Most of the world is very, very, different to the things westerners are used to. We don't have clans, we don't marry inside our families, we don't grow up wanting to make our parents proud anywhere near as much as in non-western countries (etc, "WEIRD" culture as argued in the now-famous book). Not all non-western countries are the same e.g. SEA famously quite compatible with our culture up to a point, but you'd clearly give a daughter very different travel advice if she was going to Morocco versus Inverness. If nothing else, is it not a bit weird to go to quite a few large European cities and find roughly the same distribution of people serving your coffee or waiting at your table? I genuinely wonder what the many Chinese tourists coming to London think when they go into a shop to buy some water or something and all the staff are new arrivals to Britain speaking (say) Hindi rather than English to eachother. And that's not to say they couldn't integrate at some point but at the moment the "purpose of a system is what it does" revealed preference is that we don't want them to.
- mlinhares 1y ago
  Wild to think that the country that built the largest empire in the world would have people speaking multiple languages in its most important city. Also, this conservative thing of being bothered by people speaking a language they don’t understand amongst themselves shows the eternal entitlement they feel. Everyone’s actions must cater to me, I must understand and be able to participate in everything I want without having to do anything extra. It’s like people visiting the countryside in Brazil and expecting to find English speaking restaurant servers everywhere.
laughing_man 1y ago
Do you really not understand why people wouldn't want to live in a foreign country as they get older without ever having moved or been given the option? Would you want to learn another language at, say, age sixty not because you wanted to, but because you're having trouble conducting business anymore in the language you've always used? What if you didn't like the new food, and there very few restaurants left that serve the food you like? Is it really that hard to understand?
- relaxing 1y ago
  The past is a foreign country. When you’ve lived that long you’ve already experienced changes in the way the locals look and talk. They probably hate that too.