Come One, Come All
Speaking of “diversity” and its wonders, Heather Mac Donald ponders Germany’s ongoing experiment in self-annihilation:
There follows a horror-show catalogue of incompetence, dishonesty, and inassimilable monsters, with criminal records of prodigious length, pious newcomers calling for the murder of “every critic of Islam,” and in which the word machete crops up quite a lot.
A dark surrealism ensues, not least with regard to the convoluted ordeal of deporting uninvited visitors bent on one’s destruction. All set against gushing media coverage of a “Techno Parade für Toleranz,” and cheery posters reminding viewers of the approved attitude:
In terms of ideology, “diversity” seems to be the belief that the less we have in common, and feel we have in common, the happier we will be. An unobvious proposition, to say the least. Yet the word is mouthed as if it were a self-evident good, a “strength,” a moral imperative, a thing of which one could never have enough.
Update, via the comments:
Dicentra adds,
It seems to me we’ve strayed very far from the idea that an attractively developed society should – and must – be discerning about which kinds of newcomers it welcomes, lest it be flooded with incompatible tribes and the trash of the world.
The idea that the locals, the voting citizens, might want a good deal and ask, “What’s in it for us?” seems anathema to Our Betters. Likewise, the notion of a civilised society implying, quite strongly, “You’re lucky to be here. Behave accordingly.”
And so, instead, we get the routine airbrushing of crime news, and instructional videos in which ludicrous progressive women film themselves performing please-don’t-rape-me dances.
It’s a mental world in which everyone is expected to pretend that everything is fine and no grave mistakes were made, despite all available evidence. And in which the only real problem is not the ongoing, quite rapid degradation of German society, and other European societies, but those who dare to notice this unhappy transformation.
Ccscientist notes the please-don’t-rape-me dance, above, and adds,
The unrealism of such people and their peers, Our Betters, created a problem on a vast scale and which is dire in its implications – a problem that they are unwilling to fix or even clearly identify. And so, they retreat further into unrealism and absurdity, while expecting others – those on whom they’ve inflicted the problem – to become unrealistic and absurd too.
It’s the progressive way. In this and so much else.
Update 2:
Regarding the pretence above, Dicentra replies,
There’s also a weird air of displacement, of vehemently resenting those who notice the problem. And so, we get claims like this one here, in which BBC broadcaster Dan Snow denounces as “stunningly racist” even the suggestion that incompatible tribes exist. Because Mr Snow feels they shouldn’t exist, that they somehow ought not to.
And so, magically, they don’t. And only Very Bad People would say they do.
From the linked piece:
Mr Snow, since you ask, is married to the philanthropist Lady Edwina Louise Grosvenor, daughter of the sixth Duke of Westminster, one of the country’s richest landowners, with an estimated fortune north of £7 billion. Needless to say, Mr Snow does not live in, or anywhere near, the kinds of “diverse” neighbourhoods now being trashed and terrorised by competing tribes.
Tribes that apparently shouldn’t exist.
And the above, this farce, is pretty much a standard pattern.
Regarding Mr Snow, his practised obliviousness, and his rush to deploy accusations of racism, Dicentra adds,
Well, this is a pretty good summary of the phenomenon. It does rather capture the recurring dynamic:
Of course, reality is not always congenial, and what one might wish to be the case may be preferable to what actually is. I can see the appeal of a world in which everyone just rubbed along nicely with endless reciprocation and common ground. But pretending that’s the case, when it clearly, vividly, isn’t, isn’t a wise or moral way to behave.
Especially when the consequences of that pretence are imposed on others, who then, in addition, get badmouthed and vilified for daring to object. Say, people not entirely happy about the sudden ubiquity of Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose modes of expression involve machetes, or people who discover their doorsteps literally being shat on.
Update 3:
In the comments, EmC quotes this,
And adds,
Thing is, it’s by no means a trivial point. The fact that some – the Dan Snows of this world – might find the wording scandalous and gaspworthy is very much part of the problem, a measure of the decay in national morale. A nation whose inhabitants are no longer allowed to feel that their home is offering anything of value to newcomers, something for which one might expect appreciation and an eagerness to assimilate, is not on a happy trajectory.
This blog is kept afloat by the tip jar buttons below.
[ Post updated again. ]
See, this is why a comments section is a very useful thing.
As an Indian immigrant, I am genuinely annoyed by both her type, and the implication that she is somehow batting for “fellow Indians”.
Her tribe is not Indian or Hindu, it’s Western liberal, like anyone employed at the BBC or similar. She could care little, for instance, for the plight of Hindus and Christians in Pakistan and Bangladesh, but her tears flow for Palestine.
Incidentally, any normal Indian would tell you exactly what the Dalai Lama said – excessive immigration bad, certain immigrant groups especially bad even in moderation.
If you notice, her main concern is not Indians. It’s Africans and Middle East immigrants, as her first question shows.
The reason she brought up her Indian heritage is not what you think. The Dalai Lama would be very grateful for the sanctuary provided to him and his fellow refugees by India – with no ulterior motives, just like we did with Jews, Parsis etc.
She is being viciously manipulative here – as is typical of leftists – by using that against him, to try and guilt trip him into supporting mass immigration.
Again, there’s a signature assumption of imperviousness, an expectation of deference, as if these higher beings were unaccustomed to their pronouncements being challenged in a realistic way.
And so, Mr Snow, our BBC broadcaster, makes the fashionable noises, while safe in the knowledge that he is unlikely to find his own neighbours using their garden as an abattoir. And he, unlike others, is unlikely to discover that his doorstep is once again covered in human excrement.
And Mr Snow wafts through life, among his peers, as if his piety were unassailable.
“Our strength is in our numbers.“
Diversity is our strength <quiet part>against you</quiet part>.
People guilty of treason used to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
The Left believes that everyone in the world is morally entitled to “share” the West’s prosperity. Thus, there must not be any limit to immigration from even the most barbaric cultures.
As for the idea that we Westerners have a legitimate interest in preserving our own cultures, well, that’s raacist.
That – in huge letters at customs and immigration.
Your ridiculous ideology.
Thing is, it’s by no means a trivial point. The fact that some – the Dan Snows of this world – might find the wording scandalous and gaspworthy is very much part of the problem, a measure of the decay in national morale. A nation whose inhabitants are no longer allowed to feel that their home is offering anything of value to newcomers, something for which one might expect appreciation and an eagerness to assimilate, is not on a happy trajectory.
Given the crashing birthrates of the native populations across the Western world, there’s no need for his lot to increase their birthrates.
It reminds me of a discussion I had when Brexit was happening with an EU citizen working in the UK in some IT job. He was acting like he was the one doing us a massive favour by working here, and refused to accept that he should perhaps show some appreciation to the country that is allowing him to do that work and earn much more doing it than he could back home.
Pardon the emendation.
[ Post updated yet again. ]
Wow. What a smug little shit. WTF is that guy? He’s not Piers Morgan. Is he his protégé? Not a fan of Piers per se but I would be curious to know if he agrees with what that little shit (WTF is that guy?) is saying under Pier’s brand label.
OTOH, WTF is with whoever she is? Did she just pop in before going out clubbing? Doesn’t anyone know how to dress appropriately anymore? Even the not-quite-crazy people?
Gunga galunga… gunga, gunga-galunga. Then there’s this.
[ Recalls meme seen at Instapundit and elsewhere ]
Wanye Burkett weighs in again.
I recall arguing about this with fellow students who refused to accept that there could be such a thing as an incompatible culture. “Well, what about Nazi Germany? I asked. They retorted that it wasn’t really a culture since the regime did not last long. “Well, what if the Nazis had won WWII and were still in power today?” Their response was some sort of mumbling evasion.
It worked so well last time.
Kinda like when similarly I have pointed out to such people that Stalin killed double, Mao killed ten times as many, Pol Pot…etc. etc. etc. It’s not about logic and reason. It’s about the emotional hooks driven mostly by a perception that they are in the majority. Which if you go by expressions of public sentiment, they overwhelmingly are. Which is why it is so important to speak up.
He needs to be punched in the face with regularity. I’m not much of a face-puncher, but this guy is begging for it, so I’ll make a lot of exceptions.
Wow indeed.
Also, yes honey, the peek-a-boo neckline doesn’t help your credibility.
For a long time our society has asserted that the worst thing you can be is a bigot. Judging other cultures is hella wrong, because that’s what the invading white colonizers did. If they’d had even a smidgen of respect for the natives, so much damage and death could have been avoided.
Which, there’s some truth to it. A knee-jerk reaction to a foreign culture will deprive you of learning valuable lessons about humanity.
But it turns out that humanity has the capacity to enshrine some pretty awful stuff in our cultures. You’d be hard-pressed to find a culture on earth that didn’t enshrine one or more atrocities at some point. I don’t mean atrocities from the POV of Eurocentric value systems. I mean genuinely awful, because the damage done to people is measurable and visible.
Or are the boys involved in bacha bazi coming out unscathed?
Todays Leftists don’t seem to understand that it’s imperative to judge other cultures sometimes. But to them, cultures differ in costume and cuisine and language, maybe with funny little dances and quaint houses without indoor plumbing, and you don’t judge THAT.
Criminey, such unserious, shallow, immature people. How the hell do they end up in such high places?
Such necklines are only appropriate in those F A Hayek/Salma Hayek memes.
And yet the left endlessly demonizes everyone to their right as Nazis and white supremacists.
You have to admit it does much less damage to their amour propre to be hypocrites than to acknowledge the malevolence that undergirds their ideology.
Los Angeles wildfires:
No water coming out of fire hydrants because LA did not keep the reservoirs filled.
Also: No controlled burns, as a matter of fed and California policy, for many years.
But LA’s fire chief is an DEI hire (LGBTQ and woman) which is what really matters.
Soros and cohort?
It’s unbelievably aggravating, but even more so here. Not just because how much more life experience the Dalai Lama has, but also because the Dalai Lama knows exactly why you want to impose uncontrolled migration, far more so than any university grad in the West.
Because that’s exactly what China did in Tibet, to swamp and bully the local population. He has seen it happen to his people, and he knows exactly how the process works and the outcome.
For all the diversity etc bs, it’s the same process at work here in the West. It’s intended to suppress the locals, and there is a reason why they are so keen on less educated, often illegal, African and muslim migrants, because they are the ones who are genuinely hostile against western civilization and see it as the enemy.
I know leftists who passionately assert that China did nothing wrong.
The site’s CSS positioning seems to be broken. Or whatever tech thingie it is these days that manages page columns.
“our betters” in the current LA fires, the fires are raging through rather upscale neighborhoods in which no one ever thought a fire would happen. The reporter even said it out loud. Rather symbolic I would say.
That everyone everywhere should have access to western wealth assumes 1) that it was just luck, and not generations of hard work and orderliness that created it and/or 2) the West just stole all the wealth from poor countries.
I’ve got news for them. Most of the empire building countries, GB included, barely made a profit on their colonies or even lost money. The dutch made money but via trade, not theft. It has been argued that the colonies came out ahead due to investments the colonial powers made such as railroads, roads, and ports. Brits in India even established a civil service and schools.
Overplaying your hand. Or something.
Well, I say the reporter is making it up. NO one who lives in SoCal for more than a few years believes that. And the Palisades fire didn’t just take out rich people (James Wood lost his home) but there are a lot of working class people in the area who lost everything, too.
Newsom is screaming “climate change” but this is about criminal-level neglect and mismanagement of water resources, infrastructure, and forestry practices.
Oops.
In Mexico City, the train pulls you.
Love is love, or something.
Not a headline I ever expected to see.
That – in huge letters at customs and immigration.
And on the beaches.
I’m not seeing an issue. What’s the problem you’re seeing?
And yet Our Betters, those entranced by fantasies, are by and large the kind of deep thinkers who merrily import large numbers of men from incorrigibly backward countries – say, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia – and are subsequently bewildered when social disorder and violent crime rates – including rape, gang rape, and child sex crime – rise rather dramatically.
And who then flatly deny that anything untoward is occurring, and insist that anyone who sees otherwise is a Very Bad Person.
This misses the point. They are behaving accordingly – according to their culture. They’re incredibly lucky to be there, therefore, they should grab as much as they can from the stupid kuffar before they lose the opportunity. That is the culture of the middle east.
Are they bewildered, though? Do they even see those trend lines? Do they even pay attention to such things?
Or if they do, are they capable of being troubled by them?
Sociopaths tend to rise to the top of power structures. I can imagine them importing feral masses because of inducements from those who want Britain destabilized — or perhaps they also want the chaos, because chaos favors the tyrant. And so the brutality of the newcomers is the whole point of the exercise.
When people complain, they’re not refusing to see the problem — they know exactly what’s happening — instead, they’re annoyed beyond endurance. They don’t want the mass migration to stop, because they rather prefer the ill effects it has on the native population.
The result of the program is the purpose of the program. Even if the average copper isn’t in on the grand destabilization plan and instead is mesmerized by fear of bigotry and riots, those at the top are pretty happy with how it’s progressing.
Well, the mindset is so perverse, and so prickly, and its effects so hard to miss – even in everyday, but rather symbolic ways – that it invites suspicions of enemy action. Or perhaps some kind of cultural death wish.
I note that upthread the word treason was used. Which doesn’t strike me as entirely outrageous.
I think that nails it. But I think treason isn’t a strong enough word. I looked up the synonyms, and sedition, treachery, perfidy, and duplicity are featured, but they’re too gentle.
This is more like fratricide. This is more like being the Cordyceps fungus that infects your fellow creatures and zombifies them into suicide. This is like being the alien that bursts out of people’s chest cavity.
It’s about as vile as it gets. Just now I was watching Gavin Newsom glibly relate that yeah, fire hydrants will dry up on you with a fire this big. And ain’t it the biggest thing, yeah? As if he were marveling over the latest Starship test flight. He’s just the same kind of sociopath.
I suspect the above could be seen in a broader context of dishonesty and demoralisation.
I’ve had exchanges with people who are wary of abandoning the fashionable narrative about enrichment and vibrancy and so forth, and who would look down on any enthusiasm for patriotism or national identity, while struggling to suppress their own obvious disaffection with a rapidly changing neighbourhood, from which they now feel alienated.
Some have mouthed the expected pieties while quietly making plans to live elsewhere, somewhere less enriched, less vibrant.
Living with that contradiction, being immersed in it, doesn’t strike me as optimal, or indeed healthy. Yet it’s practically a signature of progressive psychology.
The sickest burn, so to speak.
I was just now marvelling at this.
Seen the same here. We should have an Olympics for hypocrisy.
Woooooow.
That is full-on 100% clownworld junk, right there.
Wotta maroon. Wottan ignoranimus.
“All of this can be found. At. U. R. L.”
See also Mr Dan Snow, above, or any number of his peers.
In the personal instances I was thinking of, it was a little surreal. In that it was made fairly clear, implicitly, that nothing was to be inferred, at least not out loud, and no acknowledgement of contradiction was to be articulated.
Again, as a mindset, a mental habit, it doesn’t strike me as ideal.