Breaking News - Major Terrorist Attack In Oslo, Norway

[Ideologue]

Seems to me your stance is that if there is a general rule, no matter how absurd, it ought to be enforced on everyone.

Well, I'm kinda attached to that weird concept of people having equal rights.

Exactly. It should be illegal for all people to sleep under bridges, whether they are rich or poor.

Similarly, it should be illegal for all people to have immoral sex, whether they are men or women.

... that sort of reasoning, right?

If the interests protected were at all analogous, maybe.

[dps]

My point wasn't that you need immigrants.

Ok, but I specified that the part of your original post that I was responding to was the bit that said, "you cannot function without immigrants these days".  I said that I agreed with the rest of your post.

[Admiral Yi]

My point wasn't that you need immigrants. My point was that immigrants want to get in, and since you are living off their labour (due to the use of cheap labour by your corporations there), they will get eventually pissed off. So either you have to let them in or you have to build walls and man them with people with guns.

The part about people who want to immigrate being unhappy that they can't immigrate I can readily understand, as it's pretty tautological, but the thing about cheap labor making them pissed I don't get.

Are all those millions of Chinese who assemble iPads for us furious about it and desperately wish they were back on the farm planting rice?

[Martinus]

So either you have to let them in or you have to build walls and man them with people with guns.

We do both.

Which is my point.

So what's the problem? We've got all our bases covered.

You do. We don't. That's the problem.

[Admiral Yi]

BTW Norwegians, local paper had a pic of Prince Harkonen coming out of the memorial service, and his wife looked pretty reasonable.  Not up to Princess Tanning Bed standards, but pretty reasonable.

[Martinus]

According to his journal, the guy loved Dragon Age.

I want my Islamist terrorists back. They are alien, savage, foreign. This guy is too close for comfort. He is "us".

[The Brain]

BTW Norwegians, local paper had a pic of Prince Harkonen coming out of the memorial service, and his wife looked pretty reasonable.  Not up to Princess Tanning Bed standards, but pretty reasonable.

Drug chick?

[Ed Anger]

According to his journal, the guy loved Dragon Age.

I want my Islamist terrorists back. They are alien, savage, foreign. This guy is too close for comfort. He is "us".

You are only realizing he is homo now? He likes Dexter and True Blood.

I think this calls for a gay crackdown.

[citizen k]

According to his journal, the guy loved Dragon Age.

I want my Islamist terrorists back. They are alien, savage, foreign. This guy is too close for comfort. He is "us".

I don't know. I kind of like being a radical extremist. I feel like playing Baldur's Gate now.

[Admiral Yi]

Drug chick?

No, started with an M.

[The Brain]

Drug chick?

No, started with an M.

The Crown Prince marrying a drug-using single mom made Norwegians go "lolwtf" some years back.

[Oexmelin]

I think we Americans were not aware what we doing was multiculturalism so I think that is part of confusion.  When we hear the word it sounds like some sort of radical leftist thing people sneer at us for not doing.

If what we are doing is, in fact, what multiculturalism then we are for it!

Yes and no. It seems to me there are many factors that are different, and not very minute details - unless you consider minute details the actual interplay between an ideal, a rhetoric, a policy, and social behaviour. The United States has had a universalist narrative, an exceptionalist outlook on its own past, and a triumphalist tone over its present - at least when it comes to it being compared with "the rest of the world". Such a thing plays badly, and poorly, in many other countries, where exceptionalist narratives raise the suspicion of über-nationalism on the one hand, and where the adhesion to certain core values are deemed "universal" and therefore impossible to claim "nationally" on the other. People in this thread - and in many other threads - have already demonstrated how difficult it is to define culture and identity - and if such complex notion can only be reduced to "what you eat", then identity is a very superficial concept. The question in many countries is therefore how to integrate, how to make someone from outside "our own".

This is a question the US has had to struggle with in the past - namely with the treatment of the Natives, the end of slavery - and part of the answer was the American Dream. Regardless of its reality or success, it became part of the national narrative at a time when overseas immigrants could be shipped west, where the notion of human dignity or rights in the workplace was low. There is a reason why mafias and organized crime...organized around ethnic lines. Yet when these immigrants arrived, the US was already overwhelmingly an acculturation machine - because, to this day, the main source of population where the British Isles. Now, the US has to deal with a different situation, not necessarily because of the latinos themselves, but, I would contend, with the existence of mass media, different socio-economic context, etc. Yet, it has the historic resources of the reading of its own past.

Canada itself is also in a different situation. I am sure there are tons of reasons to be smug about various Canadian policies, but frankly, I would be prudent in setting it as an example, if only because, thanks to geography. immigration to Canada is highly selective, the problem of illegal immigrant very low, and a bigger magnet for immigration lies due south. In a sense, Trudeau's multiculturalism as a fancy version of "live and let live" served the same role as the inspiring "American values", or "American Dreams". It actually acculturates like the so-called melting pot (though it takes a longer time to do so - about a generation more) but serves as a somewhat unequal mobilizing device. That being said, the whole "reasonable accomodation" debates, however tame they may be, show that similar questions do show up in Canada as a country which can claim "immigrant background" but not really claim the same kind of universalist/exceptionalist vision of its own past (i.e., our debate on Canadian history being dull).

[Admiral Yi]

To pick a nit Ucks, I think The American Dream(c) was the marketing catch phrase in the post WWII era, whereas The Land of Opportunity(c) was more in vogue earlier while the west was being settled.

[garbon]

I'd say the large numbers of Africans and West Indians who came to the UK in the 60s have done quite well, to the point that now, large portions of the white urban working class youth in London have adopted an accent closer to Jamaican than cockney, and listen to music with definite Afro-Carribean origin.

Most immigrant communities from the Indian subcontinent are well integrated too, yet remain distinct.

I don't think most people would complain about Chinatown either, even though the signs are in *gasp* Chinese and you can't find a steak and chips anywhere.

Apparently that's terrifying enough that it can push someone to mass murder, and many others to sympathize with the motivation if not the action.

I think you both are still discounting the fact that Chinatowns are often scummy.

[garbon]

Yet when these immigrants arrived, the US was already overwhelmingly an acculturation machine - because, to this day, the main source of population where the British Isles. Now, the US has to deal with a different situation, not necessarily because of the latinos themselves, but, I would contend, with the existence of mass media, different socio-economic context, etc. Yet, it has the historic resources of the reading of its own past.

Is that accurate?