Diversity in America, why Liberalism is like a Religion

[Koalalion]

Jessi Danger

Actually, I can't remember where I read it but somewhere a sociological study exists indicating that diversity is a net negative for a community.

Which obviously is not a very uplifting study.

if I may be honest the study probably quite biased, but I don't actually recall anyone claiming that, really their must be an immediate benefit to having diversity.
I personally don't like arguments that say well we should be more homogenous, because that means our president is more likely to be someone who we think of as one of us.
Actually i'm more than somewhat inclined to disagree. in addition to that I don't think of myself as a cultural insider it seams obviously clear that i'm considered as an outsider effectively. and claims to the contrary at best are no different than publicity stunts by demagogues, though I hardly know who their trying to impress.
considering that diversity has a benefit, if one in additional to that agrees with the concept of dialectics than actually having a wide range of ideas is beneficial in selection of better outcomes.
indeed convergent outcomes might not be so beneficial, all else being equal.

In addition having a wider array of opinions a genetically diverse society is also more likely to be able to fight of new diseases,[actually that is why we have sexual reproduction]
diversity of cultural and philosophical ideas is overall beneficial.
speaking multiple languages allows one to consider a wider variety of views, to say the least.
however I find that diversity in itself is a good idea, and most certainly preserving ones own traditions is generally seen by a culture itself as a worthwhile activity, and doesn't impede the benfits of integration.

[Bush Punk]

Camera Stellata

Anyone on ED-P fancy a crack at the five benefit challenge though?

Lemme try this
1) It prevents homogenization and the loss of identity
2) It empowers the disenfranchised
3) It actively combats poverty
4) It undermines imperialism
5) It creates visibility for people who are discriminated against


Though something tells me that the person only wanted ways it would benefit white people.

[Quatermass]

Elinnia

Watch the video

Story: A 17 year old kid goes to college, a small liberal-arts school. All students must take a course in "Diversity Day", which lessons include "Are We Born Racist?” Am I A Racist?” and “Dear White People.” The freshman puts up flyer's around campus asking students to email him five benefits of diversity, aside from food and music. Instead of getting factual answers, he gets threats of physical violence. He is sent home under suspension for being "racist". His parents threaten to sue, and the college folds and admits he didn't do anything. Diversity day ends up being boycotted by other races because this student wasn't expelled.

Watch the video for the comments comparing liberalism to religion.

Before you start attacking me if you disagree, just watch the video and really think about it.

I watched it.

And I'm just going to call you a racist right now. On behalf of my Black Dad, my Puerto Rican best friend, and my white skinhead a**.

In no way does this video compare "liberalism" to a religion and rather promotes ethnic segregation, and forgets that this sort of outdated worldview, even if it was somehow a good idea, its simply impossible.

I think I should go on a few points-

White Privilege is a thing, and white folk need to accept it. Accepting White Privilege is not the same as giving in to White Guilt. Because our fathers, grandfathers, ect. Had a better place in society than those of other races, we were able to inherit certain things. Better access to education, sometimes money. Many of us start out middle class. It's just a fact.

This is because of the segregated housing market. Government sponsored acts which were made with the intention of giving our soldiers a home after world war two had racial language that labelled blacks as being detrimental to a community, often times forcing them into smaller, lower income, communities. After the racial language was removed, we had white flight. Racist and conniving real estate dealers playing off the fears of white people, making them sell their homes for less then market, so they can be resold. Jobs dried up. And all this is over, but it's an inherited problem. It becomes less of a problem every generation, but this ******** in the video needs to stop denying it.

Also, there are benefits to diversity. It ENRICHES our culture. It's not just food and music, but rather, how they interact with others. I mean, I'm from Chicago. This is a hell of a city for diversity. We've created a unique culture for ourselves, based on the Polish, Irish, and Italian Immigrants, based on the African American Population that came, and the Puerto Ricans that were flown in to work slave labor jobs, who were just as soon forgotten.

It's also a necessity. If one group has all the money, all the power, we have a problem. It needs to be shared, it needs to be spread, or else there isn't justice. Also, there just isn't enough Goddamn room.

The student got what he deserved. He wasn't questioning diversity, but promoting a racist viewpoint. One that doesn't belong in this world.

[Kaltros]

Quatermass

I think I should go on a few points-

White Privilege is a thing, and white folk need to accept it. Accepting White Privilege is not the same as giving in to White Guilt. Because our fathers, grandfathers, ect. Had a better place in society than those of other races, we were able to inherit certain things. Better access to education, sometimes money. Many of us start out middle class. It's just a fact.

Our white ancestors had very little privilege at all. They built the United States from the ground up, and worked to pass on a better world to their children. Over enough generations, that produced what you call 'white privilege'. Do you have something against whites giving their children a world better than the one they found?

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This is because of the segregated housing market. Government sponsored acts which were made with the intention of giving our soldiers a home after world war two had racial language that labelled blacks as being detrimental to a community, often times forcing them into smaller, lower income, communities.

You know, there might have been some truth in the claim that blacks were detrimental to the community. Look at Detroit, or Chicago, or New York City, or Seattle? Know who shows up in the criminal justice system more often than not? Far more often than their numbers in the general population would predict?

Quote:

After the racial language was removed, we had white flight. Racist and conniving real estate dealers playing off the fears of white people, making them sell their homes for less then market, so they can be resold. Jobs dried up. And all this is over, but it's an inherited problem. It becomes less of a problem every generation, but this ******** in the video needs to stop denying it.

White flight is pretty natural, if misguided. Sooner or later whites will run out of places to flee to.

Though it is an interesting assumption buried in that paragraph. Are whites integral to civilization? Is that why white flight is apparently wrong? Why can't the minorities pick up the slack after whites leave?

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Also, there are benefits to diversity. It ENRICHES our culture. It's not just food and music, but rather, how they interact with others. I mean, I'm from Chicago. This is a hell of a city for diversity. We've created a unique culture for ourselves, based on the Polish, Irish, and Italian Immigrants, based on the African American Population that came, and the Puerto Ricans that were flown in to work slave labor jobs, who were just as soon forgotten.

And how about Chicago's horrendous gun violence despite having some of the strictest gun control laws around? That's one of the unmentioned benefits of diversity, I suppose. Not to mention other types of crime.

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It's also a necessity. If one group has all the money, all the power, we have a problem. It needs to be shared, it needs to be spread, or else there isn't justice. Also, there just isn't enough Goddamn room.

If there's not enough goddamn room, how does it solve the problem cramming even more people together, people that are sometimes antagonistic to each other?

[Noogie]

Kaltros

Our white ancestors had very little privilege at all.

******** lost it right there. rofl

Never mind the technological and social advantages they had over the "savages", never mind the slaves they presided over for years thanks to the imperialism of their forebearers. My white heritage might be filled with the priviledged from England and Scotland and even criminals, but they definitely had a better time than the aboriginal culture they virtually wrecked over the next two centuries.

I'm not going to argue with you, because you have problems, but seriously, lol. Just lol.

[Quatermass]

Kaltros

Quatermass

I think I should go on a few points-

White Privilege is a thing, and white folk need to accept it. Accepting White Privilege is not the same as giving in to White Guilt. Because our fathers, grandfathers, ect. Had a better place in society than those of other races, we were able to inherit certain things. Better access to education, sometimes money. Many of us start out middle class. It's just a fact.

Our white ancestors had very little privilege at all. They built the United States from the ground up, and worked to pass on a better world to their children. Over enough generations, that produced what you call 'white privilege'. Do you have something against whites giving their children a world better than the one they found?

Wait, white folk built it? I thought the Native Americans were here, we stole it from them, then brought in a bunch of slave labor to ACTUALLY build it.

And no, there is nothing wrong with leaving a better world for the next generation. There is a problem, however, with denying that same thing to others. And that's the problem.

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This is because of the segregated housing market. Government sponsored acts which were made with the intention of giving our soldiers a home after world war two had racial language that labelled blacks as being detrimental to a community, often times forcing them into smaller, lower income, communities.

You know, there might have been some truth in the claim that blacks were detrimental to the community. Look at Detroit, or Chicago, or New York City, or Seattle? Know who shows up in the criminal justice system more often than not? Far more often than their numbers in the general population would predict?

Of course, there is also truth to the fact that in many areas we had a segregated job market that had already created income inequality. The connection is economic class, not race. This is why, before hand, you could argue that the same information pointed to Irish and Italians as being a major source of crime. Because they lived in a lower social class as well.

When the prejudice between different groups of white ended, so did the violence attributed to those groups.

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After the racial language was removed, we had white flight. Racist and conniving real estate dealers playing off the fears of white people, making them sell their homes for less then market, so they can be resold. Jobs dried up. And all this is over, but it's an inherited problem. It becomes less of a problem every generation, but this ******** in the video needs to stop denying it.

White flight is pretty natural, if misguided. Sooner or later whites will run out of places to flee to.

Though it is an interesting assumption buried in that paragraph. Are whites integral to civilization? Is that why white flight is apparently wrong? Why can't the minorities pick up the slack after whites leave?

Simply put, you can't pick up slack that isn't there. If the businesses leave, there are no jobs. If there is nobody making a substantial amount of money in the neighbourhood, there are no businesses.

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Also, there are benefits to diversity. It ENRICHES our culture. It's not just food and music, but rather, how they interact with others. I mean, I'm from Chicago. This is a hell of a city for diversity. We've created a unique culture for ourselves, based on the Polish, Irish, and Italian Immigrants, based on the African American Population that came, and the Puerto Ricans that were flown in to work slave labor jobs, who were just as soon forgotten.

And how about Chicago's horrendous gun violence despite having some of the strictest gun control laws around? That's one of the unmentioned benefits of diversity, I suppose. Not to mention other types of crime.

Don't pretend you know what the ******** is going on in Chicago. As I said, this is an economic problem. If there is no money, people find other ways to get it. It's also an issue of police. A bloody night in the Ghetto last summer meant more cops on the ******** Gold Coast.

Also, our Gun Violence comes mostly from Guns purchased legally in Indiana and brought over the border. It has nothing to do with strict- or lax- Gun Policies here. There is a high crime because there are few opportunities open to the people who need them the most.

Meanwhile, well, there is the lead issue- Lead Paint and lead runoff is poisoning people in communities where they can't afford to clean it up. This has actually been LINKED to violence in people, low test scores, ect. Besides being, well, poison. Poison the city isn't doing a damn thing about.

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It's also a necessity. If one group has all the money, all the power, we have a problem. It needs to be shared, it needs to be spread, or else there isn't justice. Also, there just isn't enough Goddamn room.

If there's not enough goddamn room, how does it solve the problem cramming even more people together, people that are sometimes antagonistic to each other?

Nobody's cramming people together. Rather, we are learning to live with one another. Because we ******** have to.

[Wendigo]

American cities, on the current plan, are actually really poorly organized. The bulk of our population is concentrated where there used to be factory work, in places where import/export used to be simplest thanks to the way import/export used to operate. With the factory work gone, so is most of the reason for funneling resource distribution toward those points, so city centers are becoming what they call "food deserts," with no fresh food brought in to stock supermarkets. The obvious result of all of that is spreading decay. Poverty-squalor-crime. Doesn't matter who lives in that city center, it's somebody our society has chosen collectively not to value.

[Kaltros]

Noogie

Kaltros

Our white ancestors had very little privilege at all.

******** lost it right there. rofl

Never mind the technological and social advantages they had over the "savages", never mind the slaves they presided over for years thanks to the imperialism of their forebearers. My white heritage might be filled with the priviledged from England and Scotland and even criminals, but they definitely had a better time than the aboriginal culture they virtually wrecked over the next two centuries.

I'm not going to argue with you, because you have problems, but seriously, lol. Just lol.

You're not looking back far enough. Most of Europe started out as savage barbarians, Gauls and Britons and Goths and a bunch of other tribes. Same thing with the ancient Greeks and Romans. But, over time, they built themselves civilization.

[Kaltros]

Quatermass

Kaltros

Quatermass

I think I should go on a few points-

White Privilege is a thing, and white folk need to accept it. Accepting White Privilege is not the same as giving in to White Guilt. Because our fathers, grandfathers, ect. Had a better place in society than those of other races, we were able to inherit certain things. Better access to education, sometimes money. Many of us start out middle class. It's just a fact.

Our white ancestors had very little privilege at all. They built the United States from the ground up, and worked to pass on a better world to their children. Over enough generations, that produced what you call 'white privilege'. Do you have something against whites giving their children a world better than the one they found?

Wait, white folk built it? I thought the Native Americans were here, we stole it from them, then brought in a bunch of slave labor to ACTUALLY build it.

Same difference. If the whites hadn't colonized, they couldn't have brought slave labor either. Though in the north and the west slave labor was not as widespread anyhow.

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And no, there is nothing wrong with leaving a better world for the next generation. There is a problem, however, with denying that same thing to others. And that's the problem.

Who's denying anything to others? Inheritance isn't a gift you catch you catch out of the sky. It's something you build and work for for your children. Equal opportunity does not mean equal results.

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This is because of the segregated housing market. Government sponsored acts which were made with the intention of giving our soldiers a home after world war two had racial language that labelled blacks as being detrimental to a community, often times forcing them into smaller, lower income, communities.

You know, there might have been some truth in the claim that blacks were detrimental to the community. Look at Detroit, or Chicago, or New York City, or Seattle? Know who shows up in the criminal justice system more often than not? Far more often than their numbers in the general population would predict?

Of course, there is also truth to the fact that in many areas we had a segregated job market that had already created income inequality. The connection is economic class, not race. This is why, before hand, you could argue that the same information pointed to Irish and Italians as being a major source of crime. Because they lived in a lower social class as well.

When the prejudice between different groups of white ended, so did the violence attributed to those groups.

There are still plenty of lower-class whites around. But they seem to be less criminal on average than blacks and latinos. It's probably a better argument to look at marriage and illegitimacy rates. Blacks and latinos have lower rates of marriage and higher rates of illegitimacy, which leads to broken homes and psychological damage to children who are later more inclined to become criminals. Blacks currently have the worst illegitimacy rates of all.

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After the racial language was removed, we had white flight. Racist and conniving real estate dealers playing off the fears of white people, making them sell their homes for less then market, so they can be resold. Jobs dried up. And all this is over, but it's an inherited problem. It becomes less of a problem every generation, but this ******** in the video needs to stop denying it.

White flight is pretty natural, if misguided. Sooner or later whites will run out of places to flee to.

Though it is an interesting assumption buried in that paragraph. Are whites integral to civilization? Is that why white flight is apparently wrong? Why can't the minorities pick up the slack after whites leave?

Simply put, you can't pick up slack that isn't there. If the businesses leave, there are no jobs. If there is nobody making a substantial amount of money in the neighbourhood, there are no businesses.

Chicagoans are all Americans, aren't they? Why don't they start their own businesses to fill in the gaps?

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Also, there are benefits to diversity. It ENRICHES our culture. It's not just food and music, but rather, how they interact with others. I mean, I'm from Chicago. This is a hell of a city for diversity. We've created a unique culture for ourselves, based on the Polish, Irish, and Italian Immigrants, based on the African American Population that came, and the Puerto Ricans that were flown in to work slave labor jobs, who were just as soon forgotten.

And how about Chicago's horrendous gun violence despite having some of the strictest gun control laws around? That's one of the unmentioned benefits of diversity, I suppose. Not to mention other types of crime.

Don't pretend you know what the ******** is going on in Chicago. As I said, this is an economic problem. If there is no money, people find other ways to get it. It's also an issue of police. A bloody night in the Ghetto last summer meant more cops on the ******** Gold Coast.

Also, our Gun Violence comes mostly from Guns purchased legally in Indiana and brought over the border. It has nothing to do with strict- or lax- Gun Policies here. There is a high crime because there are few opportunities open to the people who need them the most.

Aren't there still poor whites in Chicago? Why don't poor whites commit crimes as often as blacks?

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Meanwhile, well, there is the lead issue- Lead Paint and lead runoff is poisoning people in communities where they can't afford to clean it up. This has actually been LINKED to violence in people, low test scores, ect. Besides being, well, poison. Poison the city isn't doing a damn thing about.

That's one factor, but does lead poisoning always lead to more violent behavior? Or is that a more sporadic effect of lead poisoning?

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It's also a necessity. If one group has all the money, all the power, we have a problem. It needs to be shared, it needs to be spread, or else there isn't justice. Also, there just isn't enough Goddamn room.

If there's not enough goddamn room, how does it solve the problem cramming even more people together, people that are sometimes antagonistic to each other?

Nobody's cramming people together. Rather, we are learning to live with one another. Because we ******** have to.

That's not the wisest idea. racial/Ethnic tensions of people forced to live close together have ended in violence again and again in previous instances. Irish Catholics versus protestants, Tamils v. Sinhalese, Hindu v. Muslim, Black v. white africans in South Africa, Chinese/Japanese, and so on.

The idea of national self-determination of peoples was motivated in part by noticing the unending strife between different ethnic/linguistic/social groups in places like Austria-Hungary.

[Wendigo]

That's a mischaracterization of the violence in Northern Ireland. It's hard to separate religion, politics and geography in Ireland during the Troubles, but it wasn't about close physical proximity. It was about the loyalists being afforded more privileges by the British government, in an area where they were more numerous.

[N3bu]

If were going to be simplistic about it, the Balkans survived for decades in unity and then dissolved into utter chaos and violence when ethnic groups decided to not live together any more.

[Kaltros]

Wendigo

That's a mischaracterization of the violence in Northern Ireland. It's hard to separate religion, politics and geography in Ireland during the Troubles, but it wasn't about close physical proximity. It was about the loyalists being afforded more privileges by the British government, in an area where they were more numerous.

That may be, but loyalists getting more privileges wouldn't be such a big issue if the two groups lived on two separate islands. Close proximity just added more fuel to the fire, insult to injury.

And the seeds of the northern Irish loyalist movement were originally planted by English/Scottish invasion, it seems:

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In 1609, Scottish and English settlers, known as planters, were given land confiscated from the native Irish in the Plantation of Ulster.[31] Coupled with Protestant immigration to "unplanted" areas of Ulster, particularly Antrim and Down, this resulted in conflict between the native Catholics and the "planters", leading in turn to two bloody ethno-religious conflicts known as the Irish Confederate Wars (1641–1653) and the Williamite war (1689–1691), both of which resulted in Protestant victories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles#1609.E2.80.931912

[Kaltros]

N3bu

If were going to be simplistic about it, the Balkans survived for decades in unity and then dissolved into utter chaos and violence when ethnic groups decided to not live together any more.

Which decades are you referring to?

[Wendigo]

Kaltros

That may be, but loyalists getting more privileges wouldn't be such a big issue if the two groups lived on two separate islands. Close proximity just added more fuel to the fire, insult to injury.

But they wouldn't live on two separate islands, since they're two separate political groups among the same general population.

The real issue is that unionist/loyalist Irish and separatist/republican Irish had diametrically opposed goals for the future of Ireland. Geographical isolation between mostly Catholic republicans and mostly Protestant unionists actually contributed to the friction between the two groups, as the unionists were seen to dominate the Northeast while the republicans were dominant in the Midlands, so a Catholic in the Northeast would be persona non grata, and ditto for the Protestant in the Midlands. Only the Protestant in the Northeast had the government, therefore police and military on his side of the issue, so the Catholic in the North was particularly badly off.

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And the seeds of the northern Irish loyalist movement were originally planted by English/Scottish invasion, it seems:

If you didn't know about the Cromwellian conquest before, you should probably not, you know, be talking right now. You know about the Potato Famine? Yes, no? Ever read A Modest Proposal?

[N3bu]

Kaltros

N3bu

If were going to be simplistic about it, the Balkans survived for decades in unity and then dissolved into utter chaos and violence when ethnic groups decided to not live together any more.

Which decades are you referring to?

How about everything between 1920 and 1990?