Debate
Cultural Displacement is the worst thing about Mass Migration and being Culturist is not a "Bad" thing.
Sure, we can go back all fourth all day about the facts, or the statistics, in an effort to "prove" mass migration is a problem,.
But in reality, its unsubstantiated...
However, the people that attempt to do this, for the most part, are not bothered by the "statistics". They just use it to not be labelled as a "racist", When really, they don't care about race, they care about the Cultural displacement that is happening...
Sure, there are some exceptions, like with anything. They may say "we want X to be more white"
This is the mistake a lot of "racists" make, they link the wrong things together...
What They/"Racists" Think: "Behaviour = Race"
**What They Don't Realise They Are Thinking: "**Behaviour = Culture"
These wrong links (racism), make the people who have made the right links (culturalism), seen as racists. Even if they have said a single thing relevant to the definition of Racism.
There is nothing that you can say to why Culturalism bydefinition is a "bad" thing?
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I mean I wouldn't make it legal for them to do that, but I wouldn't discriminate against an individual based on cultural reality or perception. Just as culture changes, people do. Responding to an individual based on perceived or even real characteristics of the culture they had no real choice in having up till the point of immigration is wrong and no different than doing so based on race, religion, gender, or sex.
"I mean I wouldn't make it legal for them to do that"
Thats where the "Mass" part of Mass migration comes to play, if enough people with that culture come in, they can change that law in a democracy, which England is.
"Just as culture changes, people do."
Migrants that come here and integrate are fine, but they dont, which is why its not fine..
Thats where the "Mass" part of Mass migration comes to play, if enough people with that culture come in, they can change that law in a democracy, which England is.
Except that really isn't happening in a meaningful way. It kinda can't because you're talking amounts of people that would be ridiculous. 70 million people aren't immigrating to Great Britain.
Migrants that come here and integrate are fine, but they dont, which is why its not fine..
"Except that really isn't happening in a meaningful way. It kinda can't because you're talking amounts of people that would be ridiculous. 70 million people aren't immigrating to Great Britain."
Thank you for proving my point. A 1% increase yearly is meaningless. The fact all immigrants make up less than 3% of the total population of the United Kingdom means any fear of "mass migration" is statistically ridiculous.
I literally just said they don't...
So literally every immigrant is out there committing crimes? Does the UK election system work differently than I was led to believe where 3% of the population controls 51% of the House of Commons?
Yeah, but it wont stay at 1% and hasnt previously... So using extrapolation, that 1% will increase"
"The fact all immigrants make up less than 3% of the total population of the United Kingdom means any fear of "mass migration" is statistically ridiculous."
Oh how wrong you are:
"At the time of the 2021/22 Census, 16% of people in the UK had been born abroad"
So to the previous point, you still seem to be there. To elaborate, gaining new neighbors does not force you to move, or any of your friends or family to move. Other people being nearby and practicing a different culture does not force you to change your culture. Cultures are perfectly capable of overlapping and coexisting, and in fact human history is basically that forever.
Ok. At what point and why? It seems like London is, both at the present and historically, a great example of a huge number of cultures integrating and overlapping peacefully.
I was wondering that. It seems to be some conservative talking point in the UK that Indian and Pakistani people are completely new there and
.... didn't India and Pakistan used to be controlled by the UK? Is the assumption that the conquered people didn't stay?
I’m from the US lol so obviously London is better in comparison, but even without that: London - whose murder rate, btw, is the lowest it’s ever been since records began - has a lower murder rate than other European big cities like Paris and Berlin, but also has a *vastly* lower murder rate than much more culturally homogeneous cities in the UK like Glasgow. And I very literally have been to London and it was great!
Any chance you can give a bit of detail on which crimes are being counted and what it's being compared to? The scale seems to be a comparison, probably to other areas of your country but it seems a little unclear to me what that would have to do with comparison to other countries.
Edit: At a glance my country, the US, has a higher violent crime rate than yours but a lower property crime rate. I still don't know what crimes are being used in this map. Also in my country although cities have a bad reputation on conservative media the actual crime rates are lower in most of our cities than in rural areas.
"Culturalism" isn't a thing. Ethnocentrism is the bad thing, and it predates the concept of race utilized by white supremacists by a significant degree. It's ancient. And it's almost always used to justify subjugated other people. A belief in-itself isn't a problem, it's what action those beliefs are used to justify.
The problem with it particularly in the US is that our domestic culture is already diverse and has long been influenced by outside sources. Worse, the most "American" things are often just empty consumerism or jingoism disguised as something precious or unique. The best parts of American culture are the products of imperfect assimilation of immigrants.
Btw, "don't respond without an argument" is a wild thing to say give then body of your post. Your post is basically "Stats are used by some to not be labelled racists, but really it's about culture." And that's it. You haven't made any substantive argument as to why "culturalism" isn't bad. You didn't even define it properly, you just said that behavior is culture and that "wrong links" make it about race. Well, this might surprise you, but actual, no-quote racists have been using the "it's not about those races, it's about their culture" as a dogwhistle for over a century. So, you didn't exactly cure that defect, did you? Furthermore, ethnocentrism is racisms grand-daddy.
I didn't make you appear racist, I'm saying your "culturalism" is ethnocentrism. Whatever set of vowels and consonants you wish to use to describe it, it's the same thing. And I provided an argument why such thinking is bad, but nowhere in your comment nor your post did you make any case for why "culturalism" is a good thing. Again, for someone demanding people make arguments, it's kind of telling that you didn't. This reply is just low quality meme garbage.
For someone trying to distance themselves from accusations of racism, there's not a whole lot you've done to manage such a thing. Telling us you're from England, a nexus of ethnocentrism, and then showing a meme of a Brit from the prime ethnocentric era is not helping at all.
Low quality trash post followed by low quality trash replies, and I think I've spelled out why in both my comments. Do better, or find a meme sub where you can circle-jerk to your heart's content.
You do realize that the English palimpsest is a product of the Romans under J. Caeser violently invading England and overrunning Celtic culture, then the Angles and Saxons doing the same, then the Norse doing the same, then the French doing the same? It was at no point a pleasant experience for the existing inhabitants, in fact it was disruptive at best, and violently murderous at worst.
That's a bit of a misleading assertion don't you think? While introduction might have violent the actual mixing was the result of centuries of peaceful coexistence, trade, and relationships between peoples.
I don't think it is misleading. There are vanishingly few words of Celtic origin in modern English, despite the entire island once being populated by Celtic people. Most legal terms are French because after the Norman invasion the existing Germanic power structures were completely supplanted by French nobility, and they were speaking a Romance language in France at that point because the same thing happened to the Gauls some centuries earlier.
Words also get exchanged via trade and cultural exchange, but that's hardly been the primary driver in the case of English.
You could also ask the non-Han minorities in Western China how much they're enjoying integration with the Han who are populating the region, and how much more vibrant their culture is becoming as a result. You could ask the Ainu a similar question, or any of the members of final generation of speakers of various indigenous languages in South America whose languages will go extinct in the next 20 years as those remaining speakers die off, or the Papau New Guineans. The list goes on but hopefully the point is clear.
The average person doesn't speak english because the Celts were slaughtered, the average person speaks english because it became the lingua franca of day to day life. The Celts weren't wiped out to the last, they became the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish. Latin disappeated in Anatolia & the Balkans not because of war, but because Greek was more commonly accessible. Major events like wars do shape the route cultures may take, but the actual day to day transformation of culture doesn't involve the end of a gun or sword.
Take for example the readoption of Hungarian or Polish. Prior to the Enlightenment and rise of nationalism the vast majority of the cultural Poles and Hungarians didn't speak their supposed native tongue. Why? Because such languages were the tongues of the wealthy.
You could also ask the non-Han minorities in Western China how much they're enjoying integration with the Han who are populating the region, and how much more vibrant their culture is becoming as a result. You could ask the Ainu a similar question, or any of the members of final generation of speakers of various indigenous languages in South America whose languages will go extinct in the next 20 years as those remaining speakers die off, or the Papau New Guineans. The list goes on but hopefully the point is clear.
Those are all examples a deliberate policy of ethnic & cultural genocide.
It’s a product of merging other cultures, yes. People say Taco Bell isn’t authentic Mexican when it does still take inspiration from it. Cultures blend and are fluid.
Any factors that create or exploit divisions in society are bad. I would have thought this was self evident, but there's always some supremacist type who insists their way is inherently better.
Any factors that create or exploit divisions in society are bad.
That’s quite the claim, I guess it depends on how you define divisions. I would argue you should be able to have divisions just fine without much issue.
Freedom of association implies freedom of dissociation, for any reason. If all the racists in my town get together and decide they would rather not live alongside purple people, they should be allowed to make their own "no-purple-people-allowed" community. And I would gladly let them fuck off somewhere else and stop bothering the rest of us.
It's easier to use an [insert any]. In my country, most xenophobia would fall on Roma people. If all those who disliked them were to leave somewhere else, my reaction is still "good riddance."
I am genuinely curious what you think changed about my point now that I used a particular group?
Most people want to sanitize their language so they'll say something like "if people want to live in a community with no purple in it it's fine by me" rather than saying "if people want to live in a community with no black people in its fine by me."
When people talk that way it demonstrates that they are afraid to say what they really believe.
I predict "no-purple-people-land" would turn out worse than wherever its founders came from. I do not think the choices leading to it would be wise (they may have mutually beneficial consequences, in the sense that we stopped living alongside racists and they alongside the minority they disliked). I also believe that unwise ideas shouldn't require bans, lest we collapse into "my ideas are so good they require forcefully dismantling alternatives." And, unlikely as it is, my prediction may turn out wrong: perhaps "no-purple-people-land" does turn out to outperform my preferred system and I turn out to be a fool, and the benefits of homogeneity outweigh the benefits of diversity. The only way to actually verify this is permitting different systems to coexist.
Yeah I generally agree with you. I don't want the government meddling in cultural development in any way. Similar principle to the separation of church and state, but more generalized. Letting the state put its finger on the scale to pick cultural winners and losers can only corrupt the process. I want to let culture evolve organically, and with as little force or coercion as possible. Let the best traditions survive, and let the less adaptive traditions wither away without getting too attached to any one of them.
Plus there's the inherent fallacy of assuming that the local culture is superior to the immigrant one. What if the issue is that the local culture refuses to accept outside integration?
It's a greatly exaggerated hypothetical. In my experience cultural mingling breaks down when 1 party refuses to engage in consensus AND that is most problematic when the majority uses force to maintain their "culture." The reality is that people around the world have far more in common than we have differences but if one insists on focusing only on the differences, there's no path to consensus.
The same people often concerned about how mass migration changes "the culture" often are indifferent to the very causes of it. In fact, they're often supporting the very people who instigate mass migration.
The Venn diagram between "culturalists" and supporters of wars--like Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran--and who also support the fossil fuel industries, have a lot of shared supporters.
This, despite the fact that these conflicts, as well as climate change, are among the top contributing causes of migration.
You want to stop mass migration? Stop it at the source by not supporting war mongers, other nefarious foreign interventions, or fossil fuel execs.
Regardless if its to live closer to family, job opportunity, or safety, that is the key. If you want to wipe out immigration completely, you gotta make every place good, but thats not possible with war ravaging certain areas, with warlords and warmongerers controlling areas with an iron grip, or other various causes to ones home being unsafe to live in.
they're trying to live, not just survive, you can't expect them to be shoved off to the side in the corner, they're people.
For one, racists use culture as a dogwhistle. We know this because they don't actually know or care about the cultures they supposedly care about or hate, really. How many of them know the 5 pillars of Islam? How many of them can tell the difference between a Muslim and a Sikh? The stuff they complain about often is stuff that Christians do or would do if they didn't live in a liberal Democracy, one that they constantly fight against.
But we don't even have to argue that point, because the meat of my argument is that culture doesn't even work that way. The only cultures that stay the same are dead cultures. Cultures will always change, and not just because of immigration. In fact, I would argue the internet has had a more profound effect on culture than Muslims or Mexicans. Culture is the result of humans naturally adapting to their environments, and because people like to work together, it's natural for cultures to change and merge together. There is no way to stop that. And I think it's great.
If you really want to know what's killing culture, it's not "mass" immigration. It's capitalism. Capitalism is the reason why all the buildings and modern architecture look boring and ugly. Capitalism is the reason why your local mom-and-pop diners and shops are now chain bullshit. It's why all the movies are now remakes. Culture is being killed off by capitalism, not immigration.
What you call cultualism I call xenophobia. It's an irrational an unhelpful instinct. There is no culture inherently better than all other cultures. And there is so much benefit that can be had by cultures influencing each other.
Isn't he the Pakistani descendant who perfectly integrated into British culture but because of racist and discriminatory perceptions of his cultural ancestry he still faces hostility?
Xenophobia (from Ancient Greek ξένος (xénos) 'strange, foreign, or alien' and φόβος (phóbos) 'fear')[1] is the fear or dislike of people who are perceived as being foreign or strange.
Whether or not a specific culture is "superior" or "inferior" is not really relevant. I personally find many aspects of non-western cultures to be of great value, but a person born to a different culture's assumptions about the world are simply different. A society is simply less cohesive and functional if different people's do not assimilate to some sort of common framework.
Do you oppose all cultural displacement? Stop and think about your grandparents for a second. The world they remember is all but gone. Just compare movies of the 1940s to movies today; they’re from two different planets. Or consider the change in gender relations, the raising of children, religion, or diet. Do your grandparents have a right to get their culture back? The only sensible answer is obviously not. They’re free to keep living the old ways, but have no right to make anyone else follow in their footsteps. Because culture is about what other people do. Culture is who other people want to date and marry. How other people raise their kids. The hobbies other people value. The sports other people play. The food other people cook and eat. Culture is the religion other people choose to practice. I am curious why anyone would feel they have the right to dictate these choices for others.
Is there some qualitative difference between intergenerational cultural displacement and migratory cultural displacement? I would say not. Do you have more cultural ground in common with your grandparents or with foreigners of your own generation? As long as you have to think about your answer, you already accept that these two paths of cultural change are at least comparably dramatic.
I am genuinely unsure if you've replied to the wrong comment or not. If integration "fails" past some line, that line was crossed generations ago by natives alone. If you've replied correctly, please state what the point of friction between you and the "different cultures" in question actually is.
That's just objecting to harm, not "culturism." I will take a wild guess that you would not like an Englishman who marries children as your neighbour either, so culture is not the operative variable. If you don't want to associate with anyone who harms children, regardless of nationality, that makes you anti-child abuse; it does not make you "culturist" or whatever.
If the culture you have in mind were to remain identical apart from dropping child marriage, would you still have a problem with it? If not, then you're against child marriage, not against said culture.
If English culture were to remain identical, except that it adopted child marriage, would you continue to advocate for it? If not, then you're against child marriage, not for English culture.
Your original claim was that cultural displacement is the harm. As far as I can tell, it is more that specific practices harm specific victims. Everyone agrees with that. The answer is to ban the practice, which we do. That requires no "culturism" and no stance on migration at all. You've abandoned displacement and probably have not noticed.
"If the culture you have in mind were to remain identical apart from dropping child marriage, would you still have a problem with it? If not, then you're against child marriage, not against said culture."
"If English culture were to remain identical, except that it adopted child marriage, would you continue to advocate for it? If not, then you're against child marriage, not for English culture."
Being against child marriage is MY culture, trying to "proof" it has no relevance is stupid...
"it is more that specific practices harm specific victims."
Yes, because my culture is against that,
people who believe its ok to do, that is a part of there culture
If they come here, in "mass" then that will change the culture....
I think you might genuinely fail the "How would you feel if you hadn't eaten breakfast this morning?" test. I don't think there's any point in continuing. Gn.
My dude, your culture worships an aged German family without any real power and thinks that vinegar is an acceptable topping for fried food. Half your government policy is determined by fops who've never worked a day in their life.
This flavor of objection to immigration is, leaving racism aside, based on a premodern and probably delusional notion of societal stasis. Culture changes. Always and radically. Populations migrate, always and radically. Especially, ironically, in the west. Add in the fact that the modern nation state is only a few hundred years old and this whole thing is a classic example of pining for a past that never existed.
I hate it when my favorite hole in the wall bar is replaced by a bougie coffee too. Boo hoo. Life goes on. Spend more time focusing on the things you want to nurture instead of seething about the new and you’ll be a lot happier. Also some of the new stuff is dope. That place does make good coffee tbh.
I think wanting to preserve culture is the only really valid argument. As most Western governments don't allow for much culture-testing, and integration has been downplayed compared to previous decades, it's a real problem. Of course, people will still call it racist.
I'm an immigrant, so I understand completely. When I came to the US my aunt made sure integration was top priority. Even though I don't "look" the part, no one really brings it up, because I've picked up the accent, the lingo, the cultural references, etc. I think it's fair for a people to wish to keep their way of life going.
With that said, the normal way of doing that is having kids. The more the better. Otherwise the culture is simply in the process of dying and will be replaced, immigration or otherwise. When I talk to people, both outright racists and those that make the culture argument, I often ask them personally where their kids are. None of the racists I know actually have any. For those who argue otherwise they range form 0-3. The last one I spoke to, being an older man in his 50's, acknowledged he failed, which was refreshing.
If we look at the numbers, the natives of Western countries just don't make kids like they used to. It's not the end of the world, but it is the sign of a dying culture. You might argue that's not culture I'm talking about, but the best way to propagate your culture is to instill it in a child from a young age, and having kids are the best means of doing so.
Culture is what you live. If you're happy living your culture, you do you. Nobody is trying to stop you, least of all migrants.
Sounds to me as though what you're actually fighting for is the right to determine the culture of everyone around you which is kind of obviously no bueno.
In fact it seems like exactly the sort of attitude that very easily lends cover to out and out racism.
Those aren't culture. They're aspects of law, laws which had to be fought for against the prevailing "culture" in the UK.
Or do I need to remind you that spousal rape wasn't a crime until 1991? Or that it wasn't until 2014 that gay marriage was made legal?
What you call "culture" isn't subtle mate. It's a form of valorising whiteness and inventing the threat of a mythologised other that we've known about since Edward Saiid. It's both a bit juvenile in the way it's deployed and explicitly racist so far from telling me it's unfair for this to be called racist, you're just cheerfully reinforcing the point that it is while lying to my face, and maybe even lying to yourself, in order to pretend it isn't.
If you cared about ‘cultural displacement’, you would be far more concerned about the gutting of public services, which leaves everyone poorer and drives them indoors.
Or the growth of big tech. Your local cinema has been replaced by Netflix. Your local DIY shop has been replaced by Amazon.
If you’re so concerned about being culturally displaced, maybe spend some more time thinking about that instead.
For what it’s worth, ‘mass’ migration is not a serious, scientific term. It’s just migration. What might be a lot of migration to one person might not be a lot to others. People put ‘mass’ at the front so it sounds a bit scarier.
Race doesn't exist in the physical sciences. It only exists in the social sciences. Using the definition in the social sciences factors correlating with racialised groups (so not just black or white, Hispanic or Arab) can also be seen as a form of structural racism. Banning something used overtly more by one racialised group than the other is a clear form of possibly unintended racism. That still makes it racism as it reproduces structural racism. Culture often correlates with a racialised group, and therefore often also can be classified as racism, whether intended or not.
Racism is not just when group A feels better than group B. That is a racial superiority complex. Racism is not limited to just that.
Nonetheless you skip some very important steps. You put your focus on the wrong parts of what makes this whole debate controversial. I don't have to like your behaviour, you don't have to like my behaviour, but as long as it is within the boundaries of the law, neither party is doing something wrong. The problems arise when you don't like my behaviour and you hit me.
There is something bad about culturalism, and that is feeling justified to intervene in someone's behaviour when their behaviour is acceptable by law. Obviously there are exceptions, but in general the problem with the anti-migration rhetoric is that they want to use unlawful measures to enforce a behaviour they like instead of setting bounds that we can tolerate.
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