Preferring the company of someone with particular characteristics might be racist but that’s not what we are talking about. Imposing legal restrictions on the movement of individuals and offering unequal legal protections of other kinds based solely on characteristics like skin color, place of origin, or nominal membership in a religious group is simply unacceptable and indefensible in civilized society. It’s exactly the thing that should be given zero consideration.
Bigotry is just racism in another form. Call it what you like, it’s the EXACT equivalent of racism.
If not, they should be. I don’t know about you, but I think while you make a legitimate point, the UK would be better off with both explicit religious and ethnic preferences in terms of who it allows to immigrate to its country. Not quotas set at zero, but preferences.
+1000.
Congrats to the UK on making the right decision last night, BTW.
Yep. The EU is a broken, anti-democratic institution. They just got a major slap in the face. I’d hope that this is a catalyst for change, but we’re talking about continental Europe here. They’ll probably just fight another war.
Moronic bullshit. Japan is pretty regularly criticized for being racist or xenophobic.
They are, and it’s wrong. Japan is the one of the safest and most educated countries on Earth. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to keep the stupid out.
If the Swiss couldn’t handle the idea of the *Germans *being part of their ethnoculture, then they’d clearly be in the grip of a rabid and ludicrously extreme racial purity ideology. So yes.
The US had open borders for much of its history. When did it become a nation?
Sure makes it easy to spend on education when you don’t have to spend on, say, defense, huh?
Aha…immigrant = stupid now…interesting (?) point of view…
When I say “stupid” in this case, I mean the kind of stupid that brings problems mostly unfamiliar to Japan, such as littering, street crime, rudeness, etc. Japan is an island in more than just the literal sense. They are an island of 100 million civilized, educated people, surrounded by ruder, less educated people(and that includes us). They don’t need that shit.
Racism is wrong in most cases, especially when judging individuals. But some groups are less educated than other groups, have more crime than other groups, and don’t share the same values as other groups(that’s why it’s called culture). All nations have the right to maintain their basic character. In the US, we like disruptive change and we don’t mind a little chaos. That kind of thing would be death to the Japanese. They don’t reproduce fast enough, they’ve become very pacifistic since the war, and they are not equipped to handle the kinds of societal problems we have here in the US and that most other countries have. Introducing mass immigration to Japan would literally destroy Japan in a generation.
(That’s a link to my tweet quoting it, to save people linking to the BNP)
That’s the British National Party, an explicitly racist far-right organisation who many thought had collapsed. But they’re feeling punchy this morning.
Britain First also have an opinion about what this result means for them:
Broken link as you might not want this on your history:
http://ww w.britainfirst.org/we-did-it-britain-votes-to-leave-the-eu/
But I’m sure everything will be fine, and that Gove and Johnson can dismount this tiger without any difficulty.
Proud to be English today. We reclaimed the right to make our own laws without outside interference. Would Americans be content to surrender any part of their independence in such a way? (And, no, US states ceding part of their powers to a federal government is not the same. These were English colonies banding together, same language, same culture, same people. The EU contains a host of differing people, cultures and languages. Brussels is not the equivalent of Washington and the United States of Europe would not be akin to the United States of America.)
Firstly, go back and read what I wrote. Did I use the word “racist”? No I didn’t, because it’s inaccurate. Your attempt at pedantry fails.
Secondly, what the British did wasn’t “immigration”, it was “conquest” which is not what immigrants are doing to the UK so your attempt at false equivalence also fails.
Thirdly, allowing reasonable levels of immigration (which is not the same thing as “letting anyone in the world who wants to come live there do so”) does not require the UK to “surrender its identity” unless you define national identity in a very narrow manner.
But please - continue to respond to points I didn’t make with arguments that don’t apply. You’re doing great.
<sigh> Once again, that’s not remotely what I said. But if you’re opposing immigrants on the basis of race then yes, that’s pretty much racist by definition.
Racist? No. Pathetic, xenophobic and sad? Yes. I pity people like that.
Well…jingoist.
I’m sorry - I wasn’t aware countries had a uniform dress code. I look forward to your complaints about the refusal of the Amish to use zippers. And what’s with black kids and those baggy trousers?
But that’s all irrelevant to the point I made, which was that Muslims are more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violence. I’m gratified that you have at least agreed that this is worthy of condemnation, even though you immediately placed some blame on the victims for wearing those clothes in the first place.
Go do some reading on what people believed about Jews pre-WWII. The rhetoric we get now about “terrorists hiding amidst the Muslim immigrant population” almost precisely reflect the previous “anarchists hiding amidst the Jewish immigrant population” rhetoric of the 1930s and earlier. And that’s not even getting into the whole “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and “blood libel” and everything else people said about Jews. Also, West Indians (most notably Jamaicans) have been notorious for homophobic attitudes and violence, and the views of South Asians on women have not traditionally been any more enlightened that that of Muslims. These things have changed and continue to change now, but that’s in part due to their assimilation into British and global culture.
Concerns about immigrants, real or imagined, are a constant. Confirmation bias works against efforts to measure and address real concerns and dismiss false ones. And for someone who often complains about societal discrimination against his demographic, you’re awfully eager to discriminate against other entire demographics based on the behaviors of a minority of their members.
Quite apart from the fact that this isn’t true, it seems odd to suggest that the response to a lack of swift assimilation is to put up more barriers to assimilation.
If you want to argue that people incorrectly use “racism” when they mean “sectarianism” or “bigotry”, I’m right there with you. If you want to argue that sectarianism or other forms of bigotry are somehow more justifiable than racism specifically, then I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to differ.
It’s wrong to penalize entire peoples for the crimes of a few, but it’s also stupid to ignore differences between groups. I’m a Jew and I know very well that Communism and anarchism were much more popular among the Jewish community than among gentiles, and even today Jews are more likely to be socialistic than gentiles. Discussing politics at my synagogue is not easy, being one of the few libertarian/conservatives. About all we agree on is Israel.
Likewise, you’re going to see more violent fundamentalism among Muslim communities than in other communities. Not here in the US, but certainly in Europe and definitely in the Middle East. That does not mean we penalize Muslims, but it does mean that we recognize what is actually going on so that we can address the root causes.
Wait a second - I agree with all that. How is this possible?
It is not easy for a certain type of liberal to acknowledge any group differences. It’s not true that Islamic beliefs are just as benign a background faith for a population compared to christianity/buddhism/hinduism/atheism. Toss Islam into the mix, you are going to get more antagonism towards other groups. You are going to get more calls for state ties to religion, partly because that is built into the doctrine.
This does not hold for all or even most muslims, most muslims are actually FAR better than their religious doctrines would make them as people if they followed them to the letter. But for those that are not better, falling back to Islam for guidance is like a spark landing in a pool of gasoline vs a pool of water like a belief system like Jainism would create.
But you can’t say that, there is a liberal fetish and idiocy over equality of religion that has ZERO merit. Religious beliefs are a collection of ideas, and no idea should be presumed to be just as valid or beneficial as another. I do not care if it is believed by minorities, or poorer people. Ideas should NEVER be graded on a curve.
It’s bad enough having to absorb waves of migrants, but that alone would not have tilted the scales in the UK I don’t think. In the US most people want a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. But Islam on TOP of a large chunk of the migrants carries a stench precisely because of the associated additional problems with its adherents.
What makes you say Japan doesn’t spend on defense? In raw numbers they are 8th in the world and their 1% of GDP is similar to many NATO countries.
And 3.86% of their GDP on education (2012), which is actually down from about 5.75% in 1980.
Aside from that, looking at the latest military spending is ignoring the fact that the US took responsibility for defense post-WWII and for decades afterwards. Education spending is for the long-term, not just today.