From - Wed Jan 2 17:11:49 2002 Message-ID: <3C332B80.767A9721@earthops.net> Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2002 10:47:12 -0500 From: Tiny Human Ferret Organization: copyright 2001 all rights reserved -- non-UseNet transmission prohibited. X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.17 i586) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.gothic Subject: Re: LOTR Soundtrack References: <491cc2d9.0112251136.40c2ef5@posting.google.com> <3c3174f0.2090030715@news.blueyonder.co.uk> <7M2bFwAfHEL8IwuH@ty-gath.demon.co.uk> <3c2db7ac.52368802@netnews.attbi.com> <3C2EE0F4.9020709@monkeybrains.net> <++HHJnAec8L8IwMZ@ty-gath.demon.co.uk> <8bxY7.138852$lV4.23130016@e420r-atl1.usenetserver.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.205.1.226 X-Trace: vienna7.his.com 1009986497 65.205.1.226 (2 Jan 2002 10:48:17 -0500) Lines: 85 X-Authenticated-User: tjh22isp Path: vienna7.his.com Xref: vienna7.his.com alt.gothic:835149 IHCOYC XPICTOC wrote: > > The United States of America is an object lesson. The country is livable to > the extent it benefitted from non-Anglo-Saxon immigration from the > nineteenth century to today. Generally speaking, the more immigrants, the > more livable the area. The food and the culture are going to be better, > whether it was Irish, or Jews, or Scandinavians, or Poles, or Lebanese, or > Portuguese, or Vietnamese who concentrated there. We have to trust the > people who moved here, that they did so because they liked the place. And > compare the places that benefitted less from any such influx of immigrants, > and who would want to live there? You are piling mistake upon misapprehension upon misconception here. First and foremost, at no time since the American Revolution has the United States _ever_ had a majority of Anglosaxons. Since shortly after the Revolution, the country has been, by the most slim of margins, Germanic, and that margin increased very rapidly. Most of the German immigrants rapidly became anglophone, and with the arrival en-masse of the Irish and to some degree the Scots and Welsh, the mainstream populations became increasingly german-scots/irish, often with a bit of French mixed in in the early days, and in later days increasingly we had a lot of other immigrants from the northlands, from Scandinavia to Poland. Later the Italians came, but always the Anglosaxons were the minority, increasingly so. Actual "pure english" anglo-americans are practically vanishingly rare these days, unless you get up into Canada. One of the major characteristics of early migration to the US was intermarriage of populations, a mixing of cultural elements, and as you say, everyone tended to benefit. Please remember that while there was some degree of enclave formation, generally this was the province of newly-arrived folks with established families. Great pressures existed and were intentionally exerted, promoting not just education, but publicly-funded education specifically in the English language. "E Pluribus Unum" wasn't just an ignored motto then, it was public policy. The US is _not_ livable solely to the extent that it became the dumping ground of the rest of the world, the US is livably today largely to the degree that a modified version of english Common Law became the legal foundation upon which all else was based. When each newly arriving group gathered enough members to start agitating for collective power, they ran up against the one thing that prevented the US from simply being the new battleground for old ethnic rivalries, which was the pivitol ideological and legal construct of all rights being entirely individual. One could vote as a bloc, and many groups did, however, one got no special treatment for being a member of a group. Insofar as this understanding has declined, so has declined the nation. The Constitution might tend to ensure protections to the minority, ameliorating a rush to bread-and-circusses by the majority, _however_ the Constitution does not at all ensure specific protections for _specific_ minorities. The US legal system tended to protect the individual from government interference, and promoted individual responsiblity and tended to effect emergence of systems which rewarded individual efforts. ("individual" as used here includes "single family units".) So long as immigrants arrive in the US in numbers sufficiently small, over sufficently long timeframes for the immigrants' culture to be understood, appreciated --and to the degree it contains elements harmful to the ways of life of the citizens, forced to adapt to the new country or otherwise convinced to isolate itself rather than impose a burden of social conflict -- in short, so long as we have a chance to grok the newcomers, as you say, it's all well and good and we as a nation grow culturally and we benefit. However, I defy you to go ahead and try to make a case that getting overrun is a good thing; instead of getting cultural growth and a mutual growing-closer into a common culture with a sense of shared citizenship, you get divisiveness and commonly you get an armed-camps feeling. Sure, when you import an entire culture wholesale in volume-discount, you might get slightly more-authentic food or music, but is it worth the animosity? Is it worth having entire parts of town where the citizens aren't welcome because the aliens have overrun it? Not much point in having an authentic ethnic restaurant if you can't get to it without getting a good beating at least, and they can't deliver to your neighborhood for about the same reasons. This is _not_ what you call "making things more livable"; it's quite the opposite. And no, I am _not_ making an argument for monoculture; the US hasn't ever had it, and probably never will, unless you want to call the melting-pot of US culture a monoculture. -- Be kind to your neighbors, even though they be transgenic chimerae. Whom thou'st vex'd waxeth wroth: Meow. <-----> http://earthops.net/klaatu/