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Comment by demonshalo | Hacker News Reader

you don't have to be number one in order for conflict emerge. That is something leftists don't seem to understand. I would argue that when a society's homogeneity is in question, the social "survival mechanism" kicks in.

In other words, my argument is that in order to maintain internal peace, a society needs to be mostly homogeneous. Multi-cultural societies throughout history have always had major racism and other form of group-oppression. Traditionally, in order to maintain internal peace societies have exported that conflict in order to rally the citizens around the flag (example of this would be the US).

I might be wrong about this but I have never heard, read about or seen a single multi-cultural society that have managed to remain in peace for too long. The only exception to that are societies that are ruled by dictators with an iron fist (ex. Syria prior to the war). Groups did co-exist peacefully but they had to be forced to do so.

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The most multi-cultural areas of Britain voted to remain i.e. cities and university towns.

The areas that voted leave seem to demonstrate xenophobia in its fundamental form: fear of the other.

Leave voters clearly are not all racist. Unfortunately, though, a vocal racist minority has taken the referendum result as validating their views.

Racism should absolutely be called out where it exists.

Your argument that homogeneity invoked a social survival instinct needs strong references, otherwise it sounds like hand-waving legitimising of xenophobia. We're smarter than that.

There has to be some reason for Xenophobia. Plain "stupidity" might allow it, but doesn't explain it completely. This is global phenomena that has occurred over and over again for at least two millennia across all cultures.

What do you think explains it?

Same reasons the Jews were blamed when Germany was economically and spiritually crushed by the Treaty of Versailles.

Scapegoat? (Ironically term with Jewish origin.)

If this scapegoating phenomena is somehow built in feature of human beings, what/who would be the healthiest possible target for it?

If it's not built in feature, how can it be eradicated?

There is always a reason. There's always a neural correlate, a psycho-social construct, a genetic component, an environmental variable.

Of course there is.

It would be truly astonishing if there wasn't.

Finding it might prove hard, though. And anyway, so what? If we did find those neural correlates and genetic components we'd... do what, exactly? Invent a pill, a therapy?

In the meantime, we can rationalise simply that xenophobia is destructive, and we can determine effective interventions.

Should we tackle what our understanding currently allows, rather than waiting to uncover an explanation?

Legal racism has been dealt with and schools teach students that racism is bad all over the west. Apparently this is not enough as there is this fuss about racism in the western world.

If we go further fighting racism, what are those effective interventions? Can we even trust that current relatively good situation will continue? Is there any way to reliably export western anti-racism?

Racism is passed from parent to child. Taught. It isn't a phenomena, nor can a school cirriculum undo what is taught at home.

So the only thing we can anymore effectively do to racism is to take children to foster care?

Alternatively we just accept the current levels. Maybe express disappointment on Facebook.

> The most multi-cultural areas of Britain voted to remain i.e. cities and university towns... The areas that voted leave seem to demonstrate xenophobia in its fundamental form: fear of the other.

This is why I can't take the leftist arguments seriously. You refute phenomenon that have been taking place for thousands of years in order to glorify an ideology that you believe in without a single shred of evidence...

If you think that the fact that certain cities voted X compared to others who voted Y describes the sudden rise of nationalism across all of Europe AT THE SAME TIME, then you sir are in for a ride.

If by "you" you mean me, this has become rather personal.

I didn't claim to be "leftist". I'm not "glorifying" anything. I'm not sure what you think I'm "refuting".

If by "refute phenomenon (sic) that have been taking place for thousands of years" you mean "racism" I'm not refuting the fact that it exists, what a strange claim that would be. I don't really follow what you're saying here at all.

I certainly didn't claim that Brexit voting patterns describe (do you mean explain?) the rise of pan-European nationalism. So again I don't follow what you're saying here.

In fact, I believe quite the reverse direction of influence: that the rise in pan-European nationalism influenced a vocal minority of the vote who now feel legitamised.

I suspect that the rise in pan-European nationalism is due to people being worried about recession, austerity, crumbling national institutions, etc etc. and immigration has become a surrogate for that: There's only so much cash in the coffers; there aren't enough {houses,schools,hospitals,whatever}; immigrants consume a non-zero fraction of these resources; therefore reducing the number of immigrants will improve the capacity of these services.

The problem being, of course, that you could pick any scapegoat and substitute it into that equation equally well. Consequently, when people do pick immigration as their scapegoat of choice, I consider that xenophobic.

> you don't have to be number one in order for conflict emerge.

But that's what the anti-immigrationists were claiming - that the UK was taking in far too many immigrants and that the country was being flooded with immigrants.

Only about 5% of the population of the UK is an EU immigrant.

EDIT: London voted to remain. London is about 40% immigrant. Multi-culturalism isn't just about immigration, it includes different religions (London has a Muslim mayor) and other stuff, all of which London does pretty well at.

The problem is that immigrants have NOTHING to do with the woes of UK society, they are just a convenient scapegoat. I would argue that the social erosion that accounted for the protest vote of the disaffected was entirely due to the neoliberal program of the government that they themselves elected.

I did not use the word immigrants. Not even once. I was talking about homogeneity. A society without immigrants can turn heterogeneous as well. This has nothing to do with immigration, it has to do with cultures and ideas.

So you don't believe that the influx of immigrants into the UK was affecting its homogeneity?

I can't quite see how you can't see that remaining homogenous and accepting immigrants are opposite sides of the very same coin?

You can't say they have NOTHING to do with it when we have problems with lack of housing and other resources that are stretched.

There are easy fixes to these problems (build more houses), but its silly to say that immigration doesn't contribute to the problem.

Do some digging about Poland in XV century, it was a home of huge amount of peacefully coexisting cultures for few centuries.

New Zealand is a peaceful, multicultural society.

"New Zealand's crime statistics are compounded by the over-representation of Māori. Though Maori make up only 12.5% of the general population aged 15 and over,[28] 42% of all criminal apprehensions involve a person identifying as Maori, as do 50% of those in prison."

No matter how you interpret that, there is something fucked up:

"The figures lend themselves to extremist interpretations: at one end, some accuse the criminal justice system of being brutally racist, as either intentionally or unintentionally destructive to the interests and well-being of Māori as a people. At the other, there are those who dismiss the entire Māori race as constitutionally 'criminally inclined'."

NZ has quadruple incarceration rate compared ton Finland, Japan or Iceland, which you could claim to be homogeneous.

I said NZ was a peaceful society - it is. I said that NZ was multicultural - it is. I didn't claim that we have no racism and I agree with you that the over-representation of Maori in the prison population is a problem. However, it was only the first two claims that I actually made.

Yea so is Sweden, Norway and a ton of other places. FOR NOW... That is the whole point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass_(disambiguation)

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