Struggling With The Obvious

Newcomers do not merely “coexist” alongside you. They form political coalitions. They vote.

Even physical space in a city is to some extent zero sum. The old burger joint is either a burger place or it’s a halal shop. It can’t be both at the same time. And if the burger shop becomes a halal shop, then it’s not coexisting with the burger shop.

A city will have a character. It will look like something. The buildings will look like something. The buildings will contain various kinds of activities and if they contain those specific activities, then they don’t contain other activities.

Norms, too, compete. There will be rules around queuing, as in England. And as the English are finding out, people either queue or they don’t. You can’t have a situation where the people who queue coexist alongside the people who don’t.

What you see in our discourse is that wherever White norms come into conflict with immigrant or minority norms, the elite consensus is that the White norms are stodgy and oppressive and should just simply give away to the black and brown norms, which are superior.

These are all random examples, but this plays out in every detail. Immigration affects the most significant features of a culture’s ethos, its spirit, all the way down to its most trivial aesthetics.

If you change the people in a society, then you change the society. And you don’t just change it in random ways. You make it more like the people you’re bringing in and less like the people who are already there, proportionally.

Later in the thread, Cathy pivots to the empty truism that, well, you know, cultures change over time. What are you going to do? You can’t stop it.

But this is the position that because cultures sometimes change in ways that are unpredictable and difficult to control, we should not be allowed to prevent ours from changing in predictable ways that are really quite easy to control.

This is like saying, well, sometimes marriages drift apart naturally, honey, so I don’t really see why I shouldn’t be allowed to move my girlfriend into the house. 

If the word irretrievable sounds too emotive, consider the practicalities in the bus stop video. How does the customary courtesy prevail – how does it reassert itself – against a jostling mass of rude people? People whose attitude is screw the rules – and by extension, screw everyone else.

The considerate, including the elderly or frail or physically unimposing, will either have to start jostling too, or just stand back in muted dismay and wait for the next bus. Probably in the hope that the same thing doesn’t happen, or happen quite so badly.

So, one more time. Some things, when lost, may be irretrievable.