More blessings of diversity in the Anglophone world:
- In England, a prison officer with an unblemished 21-year record was sacked for insensitivity. He threw some keys hard into a metal chute and someone asked him about it. He said there was a picture of bin Laden at the bottom. Unfortunately, three Asians (the officer may or may not have been aware of them) were within possible hearing range and might conceivably have been offended. The moral seems to be that at least in the English prison system elementary sensitivity now requires treating all Asians as OBL fans worthy of respect as such.
- Concern about sensitivity may be well-placed. In Vancouver a 10th-grade Filipino boy was beaten to death by some East Indian schoolmates after an apparently insensitive exchange of taunts. The death climaxed a string of stabbings, machete choppings, throat slashings and the like among local multicultural schoolchildren. The only response to the outrages the story finds worth reporting was criticism of the Vancouver Police Department. I suppose the theory is that children can’t be expected to act in a fully responsible way, so if something goes wrong it’s the cops’ fault.
- Luckily, a sense of the need for sensitivity is spreading, although not without delays and temporary reversals. In New Zealand, for example, letter carriers were forced to overcome multicultural reluctance to deliver circulars expressing anti-immigration sentiments. (The most inflammatory: “We are being squeezed out of our own country.”) Where is anti-hate speech legislation when you need it?
There’s nothing mysterious about the foregoing. What multiculturalism means is abolition of the authority of any particular culture—of any informal and unforced system of habits, understandings and standards that enables people to live together cooperatively and productively. One would expect the result to be dissension, violence, and loss of public freedom. And that is exactly what these stories suggest.
What I find fascinating
What I find fascinating about the Vancouver incident, is what it shows us about “multiculturalism” – it ends up creating, amongst the offspring of disparate groups, new rivalries not even present amongst the previous generations. I mean, I’ve never heard of Filipino / East Indian animosity, and given how far apart India and the Phillipines are, I’d be surprised if these attitudes existed prior to immigration to Canada. Thus multiculturalism preserves old animosities (Hindus and Muslims, Muslims and Jews, Serbs and Croats, have all clashed here in Canada) whilst creating new ones. Thus the wisdom of those who rule us – “divide and conquer”, indeed.
BTW, on Canadian radio, I heard an East Indian community leader in Vancouver blame the incident on both Filipino-Canadian and Indo-Canadian youths feeling excluded from the broader Canadian society; thus, he blamed white Canadian racism as ultimately responsible. When all else fails, blame whitey!
Blaming whitey is always
Blaming whitey is always safe, as “official whitey” in any Western nation will jump to agree with you. Excellent point by Will S.: that encouraging mass immigration and multiculturalism not only transplants and exacerbates alien ethnic rivalries, it creates ones that never before existed. Not that any of that troubles our rulers.
What the fetish for inclusiveness has come to mean, especially as manifested in mass non-white immigration into our countries, is that we must exclude ourselves and suppress our traditions and way of life. We have become socially suicidal. If one were to judge today’s white race by those we elect to “lead” us, one could reasonably conclude that we deserve to become extinct. HRS
What I found horrifying in
What I found horrifying in the Vancouver situation was the inhumanity of the response. Young people repeatedly do monstrous things to each other and all anyone can think of to say is that there ought to be more cops. Is that the response of a human being?
There was also a lack of ordinary human reactions in the English prison story. The assistant governor claimed to be personally offended by a rather mild anti-Osama bin Laden comment. Had he been lobotomized or turned into a robot as part of his sensitivity training?
The whole system of multicultural sensitivity depends on the abolition of normal human concerns and reactions and the substitution of something bizarre that no-one really understands. People claim that will mean a better world. If you believe that you’ll believe anything.
I sometimes feel like I’ve
I sometimes feel like I’ve slipped into some insane Alice-in-Wonderland world; I’d sure like to find my way back to the world I remember. Saw this bizarre story the other day, about NYC cops charging a man after his kid popped a balloon:
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_844172.html?menu=news.quirkies
Unbelievable…
And then there’s the report
And then there’s the report on Drudge now of the girl kicked out of school for a year for having Advil in her purse:
http://www.shreveporttimes.com/html/AE0F03BF-76FC-4300-8564-695F1898F37C.shtml
Re the advil story: school
Re the advil story: school policy should be real simple. If a drug is legal for a student to possess outside of school, it should be legal on campus as well. If it is illegal for a student to possess some drug outside of school, THEN the school can take appropriate action. How hard is this for school boards to handle? Seems like a simple, common sense policy that would be easy to adopt and enforce. Has the radical leftism and/or authoritarianism of school boards and school administrators rendered them completely unable to think?
I can’t believe this girl got a one year expulsion for advil. I don’t even think bringing tobacco or alcohol would warrant that severe a punishment, unless perhaps it was a repeat offense.
Strange, is it not, when
Strange, is it not, when it’s easier for a minor girl to get an abortion than it is for her to get an asprin at school.
There is a legal liability issue at work here. Schools are downright enslaved to their terror of lawsuits, as well they ought to be. There is no liability so large as the care of other peoples’ children, and no issue on which people are more prone to file suit when something goes awry.
That, of course, is argument # 7,526,211 for homeschooling your kids.
I’m all for homeschooling,
I’m all for homeschooling, but unfortunately it is not a realistic option for most parents. Our tax system has made dual income a near-necessity for families to live a a middle class lifestyle. Moreover, I’m not sure that very many parents have what it takes to teach their children high school level content (the advil incident happened at a high school), especially for gifted kids. Also, there are many people who simply do not want to stay at home and school their kids.
As to lawsuits, I am somewhat skeptical that lawsuits are a major factor in a lot of these cases. Expelling a student for one year over Advil seems like the perfect way to expose oneself to lawsuits. Also, most high schools provide parking so students can drive to school; that seems like that is a much bigger potential source of liability than lack of regulation of a legal non-prescription drug. Moreover, even if a school were really concerned about lawsuits realted to misuse of over the counter drugs, a simple one or two-day suspension, or detention for violating school rules on OTC drugs would be sufficient punishment to deflect lawsuits.