The study of Diversity .. The Robert Putnam Study

Or maybe we would do even more. If you examine most successful people you don't find lots of grinds and toilers; you do find those who call themselves "workaholics" but that is because they have found something they love to do. We should be free to do that and not have to spend most of our lives doing things we hate.

 

Yeah, but in the wise words of Michael Bolton on Office Space, no one would clean **** up if they had a million dollars.

 

The problem with that thinking is that is demonstrably untrue. People emigrate for a wide variety of reasons and they tend to prefer places with a high standard of living and a certain level of freedom for themselves. That doesn't mean they are necessarily in favour of diversity or democracy or even freedom for people they disagree with.

It is my observation of living in an incredibly diverse nation is that over time it is possible to assimilate such people provided their numbers are not too large. Even if they do not change their views, the next generation & the one that follows overwhelmingly do.

It is important for those of us who believe in the value of diverse communities to acknowledge such issues and work on ways to deal with them. Failure to do so turns the field over to people who want racial & ethnic discrimination to be front & centre in all immigration discussions.

 

That doesn't explain why some countries are safe and other countries are dangerous violent places to be.

You think that by moving everybody to the safe country everyone will be better off?

 

Shtity jobs are why we have robots, and there are people who LIKE to clean up

 

Not having open borders is not why some nations are violent and some not. Some nations with open borders are generally safe places, some with closed borders are not

Yes. It's what happened before in American history.

 

Great numbers of US, the people already here, are not in favor of diversity or freedom and democracy, should we deport all of them? We should let anyone who is willing to obey our just laws come here and make his contribution to our society, It's how we got to be the most prosperous and pleasant polity on the planet and how we will stay that way.

 

I read all published sci-fi when I was a kid, and the author and title are very familiar to me ... but I can't remember the plot, and it's just possible that I didn't read it. Certainly in the 50s sci-fi was the one 'respectable' outlet for dissident type thinking. There were some 'dystopian' novels at the time, mainly projections of a totally-corporate-dominated America ... I remember one novel which literally had the Senate peopled by Senators from various big corporations ... two decades later of course the Cold War liberal Democrat Senator from Washington State was nick-named 'the Senator from Boeing'.

Ha! Just Wiki'd the title ... I have never read it. I started reading sci-fi around 1956, and it was published eight years earlier, so was probably not so easily available where I grew up since it wouldn't have been in the new books section of the bookshops and maybe not in the library either. But, interestingly, 1948 is a bit early for the kind of corporate-America dystopian novels that came out in the late 50s ... I think it was perhaps motivated by the same thing that inspired Orwell's 1984, written at the same time -- fear of a general advance of totalitarianism, with the world sinking, as Churchill said of the possibility of a Nazi victory in 1940, "the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science". One of the founding editors of National Review, James Burnham, had written a theoretical forecast along these lines, The Managerial Revolution, during the war. (Burnham was a very intelligent and interesting man: first a communist, later a conservative, always theorizing and predicting about the future, and always ... wrong. Shows you how tricky it is to try to predict what will be happening more than a few years ahead, in any detail.)

 

SIGH!

There is an important & worthwhile conversation to be had here, one that will be crucial to the future of immigration. Your first sentence tells me you aren't ready or willing to have it. Pity. Give me a shout if you ever decide you are ready.

 

The whole problem with immigration comes down to this:

(1) most people, left or right, are in favor of 'fairness', and actually have no deep, settled objection to having an 'Other' in their neighborhood.

(2) Quite a few people of the 'somewhere' class have objections, deep but not necessarily articulated, to being the 'Other' in a neighborhood, to having the situation reversed. Thus the general consensus about 'numbers'. "It's okay to have a few, but we don't want to be swamped".

Of course, there is a contradiction here: if you don't want lots of 'Others' in your neighborhood, you won't care if they all cluster together somewhere else. On the other hand, that runs counter to what we want to happen with incomers, namely, assimilation, which, presumably, ghetto-ization discourages.

(3) If it's the case that some of the incomers will be undesirable -- blowing up our marathons, forming violent gangs, going on welfare -- then, again, most people, left or right, will agree that these particular would-be incomers shouldn't come in. (I exclude from this sensible view those [unrepresentative] ideologues of the Hard Left and Libertarian Right who simply want Open Borders, period.)

But ... there is generally no way of separating out these would-be undesirable incomers from the harmless ones. Yes, we can say 'background checks' but, given the corrupt and chaotic societies they're coming from, how likely are these 'background checks' to be really effective? Obviously, the Islamist bombers and shooters in the US got through, the members of M13 have made it through ... hell, our CIA and FBI couldn't even keep us from admitting a dozen dubious young men for 'pilot training'. Plus ... we have seen, with respect to ordinary crime, and becoming radical murderous Islamists, its often the born-here children of peaceful immigrants who go bad.

So .. Mr Trump is just expressing, in his crude and offensive way, the logic of the situation: stop the whole demographic.

If you're told, truthfully, prior to setting off on a ten-day backpacking hike through Yellowstone Park, that 99% of the grizzly bears in the Park who may come rushing at you have been genetically modified not to touch you, that they are completely harmless, and just want to be scratched behind their ears ... but that unfortunately 1%, who look identical to all the others, have not had the treatment and will tear you to pieces and bury what they don't eat in their food cache .... what will your attitude to a charging grizzly be, especially if you happened to be 'bearing arms'? [I could go on to caricature both liberal and conservative responses to this question. But I won't. No doubt some conservative who is crueller than I will do so.]

 

So you think there are not people already here who aren't in favor of democracy and freedom?

 

Poor guy is still working on his definitions. You'll have a long wait.

 

Of course not and you know that is not what I am saying.
I don't think any race should be persecuted or exterminated either like many of libs do.

 

Good. What ARE you saying then?

Not as long as I've had waiting for yours.

 

I actually provided them and you've been in breakdown mode ever since.

 

In the hypothetical scenario that everyone had a million dollars I am guessing wages would have to rise until everything returned to just the way it was before.

Or maybe we'd end up like Saudi Arabia and everyone would import cheap foreign workers and treat them like slaves.

The third option is we'd have enough money to robotize everything that could be robotized. In Japan they have a lot of vending machines.

 

The movie scene was about a hypothetical question: What would you do if you had a million dollars? Whatever you answer is what you should do for a living.

But I'm citing merely to point out that there are many jobs out there no one would do if not forced by economics. There would be no janitors (which Michael also said before saying the part I quoted, just remembered) if not for the economic incentive. It's not something people would opt to do if they could do whatever they wanted, e.g. in a situation where all of our needs are met regardless of what we do.

 

It's possible parts of society may not be as clean, but I suppose people would start having to clean up after themselves if they wanted things clean. That's traditionally how it's been in other countries with higher costs of low-skilled labor.

Tell me, how do you think low income areas stay clean since they can't afford janitors? (They may be working as janitors themselves)
Maybe that's why poor areas generally don't tend to look as clean.

 

Sounds like America would begin to resemble the third world, then. I'd add that this would happen in other, more critical areas as well.

 

I have a feeling all the needs in society would still be met, like before.
Likely working conditions and wage levels would have to greatly go up, and priorities would change.

 

No, it would just be more equal accross different levels in our society.

Somebody is already doing these jobs right now. What makes you think they'd be worse off? Think about that.

It's in Third World areas with inequality that you typically find tremendous levels of service because the cost of labor is so low. Think about all those food trucks and tamale vendors in Latin America.

 

No, you provided me repetition after repetition of your supposition that diversity was bad, but not one word about how diversity had all the baleful effects you attributed to it

 

The article I posted, and the study it was based on, didn't say diversity was bad. It said, that diversity in otherwise homogeneous but liberal communities could lead those otherwise liberal communities becoming a lot less liberal. My conclusion from that is the left are a bunch of hypocrites but you are free to derive your own conclusions, particularly since you reject dictionary definitions of words and just attempt to give them your own personal meanings.

 

And what personal meanings did I give them? Please include citations where you quote what I say those meanings are.