Yes indeedy, we have been worried about assimilation in our nation's past before now. You know how we assimilated them? We took a forty-year pause on any immigration* to make damn sure they would assimilate. We should do the same now. That way future generations can be just as blase and careless as you about assimilating immigrants. Or do you think that the US has Magic Dirt (tm) that magically assimilates, with no thought or effort on our part required? It is different. It's no longer 1848 and we no longer need millions of unskilled laborers to dig the canals. We need to figure out what to do with the unskilled labor we already have before we go importing more. There's 49 million of your fellow Americans on food stamps and we should figure out what to do with them before giving them more competition. *155 K per year in a nation of 120 million.
Don't be a criminal, get paid. WTF? What happened to don't be a criminal, don't go to fucking prison? DC might pay criminals to not commit more crimes http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...-to-not-commit-more-crimes.html?intcmp=hplnws
Sweet. We really have gone full-retard now haven't we? White collar crime has always paid, now street crime will pay as well. I guess we can look at it as another handout, right? If you are a convicted felon, we have made it almost impossible to get a job nowadays anyway, now this is some additional supplemental welfare to be good.
Sure, it's in our human nature. But the way I see it, the advanced intelligence that sets us above every other species on our planet allows us to resist that primordial nature and act ethically and decent toward each other. Throughout the ages we humans have slowly and gradually gotten better at treating our fellow human beings, but that progress has been hard-earned every step of the way. So as far as I'm concerned the "human nature" excuse doesn't hold any water.
So the countries who are accepting the refugees are the ones that need to suck it up and go against their nature while the refugees don't have to change their nature? Bullshit. Tolerance and acceptance are a two way street. Look at what's happening in Europe and give me one reason why it will be totally different here.
The fact that anyone read my post and thought "oh! Looks like a bunch of great ideas!" is scary in and of itself. I guess we aren't nearly as "evolved" as we'd like to think. You could take Andrew Jackson's speech on Indian removal and replace "Indian" with "Muslim" and it would sound exactly like a Donald Trump or Ted Cruz speech. His was given in the 1830s, and in 2016 we're repeating the same rhetoric, just about a new group. I wonder who we'll be calling savages in 20 years?
I think it's because in your well-written and researched post, you only focused on the bad shit white American males have done in the past, and completely ignored the horrific shit mostly brown Muslim males are doing currently. I've asked these questions before, on here and elsewhere, and never get a straight answer. Maybe I'm a bigot, but I'll ask again: When you read a headline that says someone was jailed or killed for blasphemy or homosexuality, or a child cut off his own hand because he accidently blasphemed and his community reveres him for doing so, or a woman gets raped and her punishment -- for being raped -- is being buried up to her chest while the community throws chunks of cement at her, or a girl is raped as punishment because her brother sexually assaulted another girl, or a woman has acid thrown on her un-veiled face, or is killed by her parents for liking the wrong boy, or a community tries to lower the age of marital consent to nine years old (I could go on)... Do you ever click on the link because you're curious as to whether or not religion was involved, or what part of the world it could possibly have taken place in? Have you ever been wrong or surprised? If you want to ignore those questions, fine. But I'll ask another: does any of that qualify as savage behavior, in your mind? If not, what does?
Stereotypes exist for a reason. When was the last time you thought, "man, those Germans are shitty drivers?" What? Never? Well, I thought we're all equal! Oh wait, there aren't enough Germans who drive like morons for us to make the general association of being a shitty driver to that nationality. But the same can't be said for other nationalities. And people generally don't seem to understand that that doesn't mean ALL members of that nationality exhibit that behaviour, just enough of them to have it appear on the radar and the association being made. Same goes for Muslims and "savage/barbaric" behaviour. Are all of them like that? Hell no. But enough of them are, or at least are being brought to our attention via the media (probably in an overly sensationalized non-representative manner) for them to appear to be like that, that the association is made.
And by "enough of them" we're talking in the neighbourhood of 200 million Muslims that are extremist/fundamentalist. People who believe that Sharia law should hold sway and laugh at gay people being hung from construction cranes. Like it or not, Islamic fundamentalists are the worst thing going today and fundamental Islam is the worst religion. It has nothing to do with bigotry and everything to do with naive morons thinking they're locked in a cosmic battle involving magical asteroids and night journeys, and any dissident whatsoever is a death sentence. Our culture is not different than theirs. It's better.
The worst part about people who ignore these glaringly obvious, current day atrocities, is that in their zeal to equate people who point out said atrocities with actual slaveholders from generations ago, they enable the current oppressors and abandon the most important people in the world: Muslim reformers. Maajid Nawaz gets emails from liberal-minded, free-thinking people living in these savage societies all the time, and they are disheartened when they find out that he -- a practicing Muslim who has the audacity to point out that Islam could use a teensy bit of reformation -- receives push back from secular, Western society. What do I mean by pushback? When he wrote a book on Islam with a white atheist, they called him a porch monkey. Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- a woman who underwent female genital mutilation, escaped both her family and barbaric society and lives under realistic death threats to this day -- should be the shining example of a modern feminist. But in a situation that would be hilarious if it weren't so sad, she has been banned from speaking at western liberal universities...by feminists. D26 and any co-thinkers: we get it. We really do. The West has done horrific things, and treated entire groups of people horribly. We're aware of Chomsky. But if you look back at any country's history, you'll see they've done the same. Humans worldwide and throughout time have been horrible to each other, but right now, one group is being the worst. And telling people who point out they're being worst that they're the same as our racist forefathers only enables the people who are currently being the worst.
Which U.S. presidential candidate offers the best foreign policy proposals to deal with these issues?
While it's a wonderful sentiment, thinking our intelligence makes us more evolved and civil doesn't make it so. People are assholes. Here's Farkhunda Malikzada, a 27-year-old Muslim woman falsely accused of burning a Quran, being killed by a mob in central Kabul as hundreds watched and filmed.
This whole argument is dumb to me. Here is why. On the one hand you argue that things are better in the West and people shouldn't be let in because they will fuck up all the good things we have going on. On the other you say people are assholes unequivocally. So which is it? Are we all savages? Or can we learn to be civilized human beings? And if you say we can't learn, what's your preferred solution to these problems?
I don't see this as a binary argument. Things aren't perfect here by a long shot but I can personally assure you that they are better than anywhere in the Muslim world when it comes to basic freedom. To your second point: isn't what is happening in Europe a good teaching moment? Something we can learn from without having to make the same mistakes for ourselves?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-...ewing-lethal-levels-breathable-nuclear-materi Do we have any SoCal folks here? Is this for real? What kind of notifications go out for something like this?
It just seems that in the first world we give up to easy. I have no problem with refugees/immigrants/etc... But if you come to America you should assimilate to us and not the other way around.." In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people." TR knew what he was talking about.
By and large assimilation happens, but it tends to happen generationally. Working with the Somali community for 10 years, their assimilation was pretty much the same as every other ethnic group that's emigrated to the US historically. Those people who were older and more set in their ways assimilated less and more slowly, the 1st generation born in the US were a mix of Somali & US culture, while their kids were pretty much 100% American. There's always going to be a contingent that tries to hang on to the old, traditional, ways, but as time passes their influence continues to shrink. This is how it's always gone before, and I'm unconvinced it would be any meaningfully different with the newest wave of immigrants/refugees.
This is true. My wife and I weren't entirely altruistic when we decided to take in a Syrian family. A major benefit of our actions will be that our children are going to grow up surrounded by those of different culture, different languages and different appearances. Intolerance, whether it be to race, culture, whatever, is learned or taught. We suffer through the early parts of immigration, but are ultimately bettered for it over the generations.
It's interesting... I've just recently had to drop a friend because she was hot. At least, she was. She's still not bad looking, by any stretch, but not like she used to be. 15 years ago she was the smoking sexpot that everyone in the bar wanted to fuck, so she got to slide on her looks A LOT. She never really had a normal job, and was your typical "beer tub girl", and she made a killing being a neck massage girl in strip clubs and at dances, etc. She never stripped, or hooked, but she'd make $100 a shot giving some drunk guy a neck rub. Fast forward to now, where she's 36, can't get a job, not even as a bartender or waitress, because she's not the young hot thing any more, can't rent an apartment on her own without her parent's co-sign, and she has this crazy uber-entitlement complex where everything has to be done her way or centred around her. She has no ability to carry on any kind of conversation other than what bullshit reality show is on television. She's still hitting on (and landing) 20+ year old guys who are looking for that one night stand, but there's no way in hell she'll ever get into anything resembling a healthy, mature relationship. It's sad, but looking back over time I can how it happened. She didn't grow as a person, because she didn't have to.. she was hot, and everybody gave her everything because of it. Her parents enabled this because they helped pay for everything (when they're near broke and living paycheck to paycheck themselves), banking on her making it as an actress. Yeah, no. As a result, she's stuck in her bullshit 19-year-old headspace when she's really pushing 40. Her life is so stressful right now because she literally needs to work at a rave or some other party time thing 4-5 times a month or she can't make rent. I think she's starting to realize that, because she's becoming toxic to her current friends, and her life is getting really, really shitty... as sad as it is to say, I wouldn't be surprised if she killed herself, the way things are going. It's bad enough that over the last few years I've seen less and less of her, and when I did it was more out of a sense of obligation due to how long I've known her. I had to sever ties with her fully over Christmas. Life can be fucked up sometimes.