Who cares? It has absolutely no effect on you, while helping his group of people.
The world would be a better place if people worked on improving their own communities as much as they do policing to make sure nobody else is improving theirs.
Not necessarily. That model completely removes the individual and community as actors in society. What you are saying is that all accomplishment of a person is due to society "acting on that person" to make that person successful. Everything that happens can be labeled as discrimination with that kind of model, making it a completely useless model.
Is society "discriminating" against communities and individuals when some individuals and communities value education and spend more time studying than others?
Newborns may be blank slates, but college- and working-age people clearly are not. By the time we are ready to join the working world, we are already imprinted by what our culture tells us are "male" and "female" jobs, for example. I don't think of that as discrimination. It's discrimination if a female applies for a construction job and is passed over for being female, not if she never applies because she thinks construction isn't for her because that's something men do. But both lead to a lack of diversity.
I agree. It's important to realize that the rationalization of a lack of diversity in the workplace is explicitly based on racist theories about intelligence, and that the discomfort that many people feel is the fear of judgment if they openly express adherence to those beliefs.
They aren't on the margins, at all. Sanders said that white men don't know what it's like to be poor, the Colombia mattress girl was invited to the State of the Union, the president of Harvard was fired for saying that men may have greater variance in genetic traits than women.
Hundreds of millions in federal funding is awarded for professors to talk about how we need to "abolish whiteness"; it's the dominant belief system in academics.
Lena Dunham tweeted today that 'straight white men' are out-dated and need to be 'evolved' into better people, of course, with the leadership of women.
It was toungue-in-cheeck support for Hillary, but it's also just prejudiced, 2K up-votes, and a lot of people will buy into the casual bigotry of it. She can get away with it because she's a girl - and she knows she can - which makes it that much more cheeky, which is a Dunham thing - but still.
The Republicans spent the entirety of the Obama presidency trying to make sure Obama did not get any credit for anything good that happened, and would get blame for anything that wasn't good.
For instance, when we started recovering from the recession and would get good news on something like jobs or growth, the Republican message would be that the numbers were too low. The standard they held Obama to was that of boom times, ignoring that we were still recovering from the recession, and that much of the rest of the first world was still in that recession.
When health care costs would rise, the Republican message would be that it was due to Obamacare, completely ignoring that the increases were about the same or even slightly less than they had been before Obamacare. Nope...if your health care costs had been rising 5% a year for the last 10 years before Obama, and then rose 5% a year under Obamacare, the Republican message was that Obamacare made your health care costs go up 5%.
Republicans seemed to think that if they spent nearly 8 years telling people that things sucked, people would turn against Obama and the Democrats, and sweep Republicans into complete control.
Of course, that's not what happened. They successfully convinced people that things sucked, but the blame fell on all politicians, not just Obama and Democrats, making the GOP primary voters receptive to the idea of an outsider. Several of the major GOP contenders ran as outsiders (even Jeb Bush claimed to be an outsider...), but they all had extensive political careers and so Trump trumped them on the outsider thing.
What benefits do migrants bring to a country? Immigrants of some sort probably do most of the menial tasks that the vagaries of which uterus you emerged from let you avoid. They're also the doctors who treat you, your coworkers if you're in tech like most of us are, the people who cook both whatever trendy food you enjoy and whatever comfort food you enjoy. They're the people who actually believe in the fictions the West tells itself about what it is and what it wants to be. They're the people who work twice as hard as you do because they actually know the value of what you were born with and never appreciated like they did.
If we strip your comment from the emotional affect, you're essentially saying that immigrants are happy to do menial jobs that the locals do not.
How do countries without large immigrant (I won't even go to refugees) populations handle this? Switzerland seems to be doing fine. Japan isn't falling apart because there's nobody to cook. Most of Asia is doing fine without allowing any immigrants.
So on a strict analysis of whether immigrants are beneficial to the host population, your argument isn't made.
1. I don't think of foreigners who live in Switzerland as 'immigrants' (despite the article calling them that). They are foreigners who are residing in the country (and most of them come from Europe anyways). It's extremely hard to obtain Swiss citizenship.
2. All the talk about Japan economy doing badly is nonsense. If you believe that narrative (which is totally understandable as that's the conventional wisdom), I strongly suggest you read this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/the-true-st...
Basically many Japan watchers (ie people who live there and know the country intimately well) subscribe to this 'alternative' view.
I've asked this question probably two dozen times to various people, in as earnest and non-confrontational a manner as I can , and the only time I've been able to receive a response that departed from "You're a racist." was when I was told by my professor to leave the room.
As a resident of the eastern side of my street, why wouldn't forming an identity and political system based on east-dweller supremacy be in my interest?
I guess because the rivalry would have no meaning and no real benefits, and could lead to needless aggression. And because having conflicts with faraway people I'll never meet is bad enough; having conflicts with my neighbors is an unsettling proposition.
If the residents of the eastern side of your street were, on average, more intelligent, wealthy, and altruistic than those on the western side, while being frequently victimized by west side residents who proudly declared their resentment of easterners, then yes, I believe it would be in the eastern residents interest to form a community separate from the westerners.
Interesting. My well being is so intertwined with that of my neighbors that I don't know how well separating our communities would work. Would I have to build a wall down the middle of the street?
How permanent is that solution? If a child born on the opposite side of the street had access to good education, health care, and jobs, could they also become "intelligent, wealthy and altruistic," and if so, wouldn't it be in my best interests to help that happen? Or even for no direct benefit, wouldn't I just want to help because of that altruism you mentioned?
Conversely, if they are kept isolated from us, wouldn't it make it even harder for them to achieve that potential? If so, doesn't their enduring poverty and lack of intelligence and empathy mean that they're more likely to grow up to commit crimes on my side of the street?
The issue as I understand it is that having a discussion with a Trump supporter gives their views a platform and potentially exposes other people to them.
Arguments that wide-scale non-white immigration is detrimental to white societies, that the black-white IQ gap includes a non-zero genetic component, that biological differences exist between men and women, etc. cannot be refuted through rationalism, so we have to resort to other methods to prevent their spread.
>Arguments that wide-scale non-white immigration is detrimental to white societies, that the black-white IQ gap includes a non-zero genetic component, that biological differences exist between men and women, etc. cannot be refuted through rationalism, so we have to resort to other methods to prevent their spread.
The misconception that Trump and his supporters are racist, sexist, bigoted is why people will never understand why Trump supporters support Trump.
And this is the primary reason why no one has been able to stop Trump yet.
You can not stop Trump if you don't understand why people support Trump.
How are they going to achieve that? Naval blockade? Shoot on site? Millions and millions of highly motivated people are going to overcame anything short of overwhelming violence.
And yet, it will come to that: Europe just cannot take in tens of millions of people in a couple of years.
Once the social systems start collapsing, even the unthinkable (armed borders and the like) will become an option.
Nice? No. But what's the alternative, committing state-level suicide?
That's why the first rule of rescue is ensuring the safety of the rescuer: if the rescuer is down, there's no hope left for the victim. And if Europe goes down, that will not help any migrants, either.
Europe doesn't have the money or resources to maintain that for the decades and decades it would take. Resisting the inevitable is suicide, not the other way around. Is it going to be pleasant or easy? No, it's going to be difficult and fraught with upheaval, but it's the result of choices we've all made for decades. Time to pay the piper.
Well, that's what the common people in Germany are also asking themselves, but our beloved leaders (Merkel) are pushing the immigration over our heads for "humanitarian" reasons. And when I say "humanitarian", I mean "cheap labor for the industry".
Any concerns regarding massive immigration, cultural differences, homeland security, etc. are labelled as xenophobic hate-mongering, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
What do you think you could do to stop it, recognizing that this is going to be an escalating issue for decades to come? How exactly do you propose to close yourself off from immigration without becoming an utterly closed society?
The world would be a better place if people worked on improving their own communities as much as they do policing to make sure nobody else is improving theirs.