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I do not claim that material conditions are the sole driver of history, but they do play a major role. It can hardly be a coincidence that the same island that birthed James Watt also gave rise to William Wilberforce; nor that women's liberation saw wide success in the decades following the invention of the washing machine.
Some people may oppose the presence of foreigners as a terminal value, and would throw away a life of luxury with their neighbour of foreign extraction having equal comfort to live in poverty and toil as long as the other guy has it even worse, but I doubt that we would have made it as far as we have if that particular character flaw were universal.
If material circumstances were better in the Rest Of The World, I don't think there would be as many foreigners trying to move to the OECD countries.
I hardly think that the machines that allow so many of us to have the benefit of servants without any of us having to be the servants constitute 'the opiates of the masses du jour'.
No, some of it is a need for education; contra the wokists, the education needs to be on both sides. If a man immigrates from a country where the community considers decisions about who is allowed near a woman's nether regions to rest with her husband, father, or other male relative, with her preferences in either direction being considered irrelevant, he needs to be informed that, here, even if there is no father/brother/husband forbidding him to touch a particular woman, if she tells him to back off, he can either respect that on her sole authority over her own unmentionables, or he will have the same number of years to reflect upon his life choices as an indigenous European or European-American who did the same thing.
However, a lot of the ethnic tensions come from lingering memories of the nearly-always zero-sum pre-industrial world, in which we did not yet know how to raise ourselves except by pushing others down, and ties of colour or creed formed a convenient Schelling point for ganging up on the neighbours to take their stuff and make them do the donkey-work.
No, I am advocating the production of more physical assets. More energy, more housing, more trains, &c. Things that would be potentially useful even on a deserted island.
If that is the case, it is because they come from societies that have more recently emerged from, and have not advanced as far out of, the aforementioned pre-industrial zero-sum state. (The Green Party, as I have have stated passim and frequenter, are Not Helping.)
That would happen just as much in an ethnically homogeneous society. (Not that it would stay ethnically homogeneous; if everyone of extra-German extraction left Germany, it wouldn't be long before everyone in Bavaria who previously objected to the presence of Poles and Turks and Syrians started objecting to the presence of Saxons and Westphalians and Hannoverians [lumped together as Damp Russians].)
I don't consider that a 'win' so much as a 'good first step'; there are several more continents to get to.
You mis-spelled 'benefit'.
Yes, he who dislikes mass immigration from foreign cultures into a continent that fails at assimilation mus surely be a hateful bigot who just wants others to suffer. Something something ideological Turing test.
We Germans do not control the Rest Of The World.
There is no lack of washing machines, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners in Germany. I do assure you that household appliance shortages are not the cause for our deplorable xenophobia.
"Education", said the soviet. "New Man", he said. Yeah, I'm sure we'll social engineer our way out of this by telling so-called educators to push feminism even harder.
Great. The state of assimilation in Germany is such that urban youths without any immigrant background are converting to the more charismatic ways of our new countrymen. We are not making them advance out of their zero-sum mindset; they're convincing ours it's the better way.
Again, ideological turing Test. You won't believe it, but there are actual differences between having to live with different kinds of Germans and having to live with muslim arabs, subsaharan Africans and Afghans.
Look at any muslim country. Look at africa. Look, at the most optimistic, at Brazil. That is your future.
Disliking immigration as a terminal value is a character flaw. Opposing it as an instrumental value, in pursuit of some other goal, leaves open the possibility of some other route to the same objective.
I was more referring to the wealthier countries put together; the dismantlement of USAID was a bad move even from the perspective of forestalling long-term demographic change.
That was just one example; there are many other dimensions of material circumstances that can shift attitudes.
Something being tried and failing does not mean that it is impossible; otherwise, per Thomas Edison, I would be typing this by candlelight.
A pure redoubling of force on 'intersectional privilege patriarchy male-gaze blah blah blah buzzword buzzword buzzword' feminism is unlikely to be successful. An adjustment of methods, focusing on the sort of feminism that asserts that Women Are People In Their Own Right, Not The Property Of Their Husbands Or Fathers....
And that is the problem we need to solve; less economic precarity would, I believe, at least contribute to the solution, if it weren't being blocked by manglement worried that a lack of desperation in the workforce might possibly create limits to the social dominance they can wield in the workplace.
There was a time when the indigenous people of Europe were no better.
I hardly think that Brazil represents an absolute limit on the quality of life in a multi-ethnic society; and it is still much better than the last time ethnic supremacists were in charge.
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