Comment by m_a_g
1 day ago
London isn’t an example of cultural erosion—the pie has simply grown. The same applies to New York. Diverse cultures enrich London; they add to it rather than diminish it.
1 day ago
London isn’t an example of cultural erosion—the pie has simply grown. The same applies to New York. Diverse cultures enrich London; they add to it rather than diminish it.
Absolutely absurd. Why is it people feel the need to make out that western cities are somehow magically immune from the exact same detrimental effects that they happily accept about everywhere else?
"Enrichment" is a buzzword for the insulated elite happy that they have new things on their lunch menu, somehow ignoring all the negatives that come with it.
I can't help observing that Britain established a global empire (so vast in scope that they could truthfully say the sun never set upon it, until quite recently) and made it clear to the countries they colonized that Britain, and particularly England, was the center of civilization. We're surrounded by the artefacts of this empire, from Imperial measurements in the USA to Greenwich Mean time being the default timezone to which all others are calibrated.
If you establish a vast trading empire, and tell the often surprised new inhabitants of it that the empire requires their spices/ silks/ slaves, can you really be surprised that the more enterprising and adventurous colonised people gravitate toward the point of origin? Is it some sort of mystery that there should be more people from Algeria and Congo in France, or why there are so many Indonesian people in the Netherlands?
I feel a similar perplexity about many people in the USA making loud complaints about cultural adulteration despite a good quarter of the land having previously been part of Mexico and this being reflected in most of the place names (to take but one example). Some commentators object with an absolute straight face to hearing so many people speaking Spanish in cities with names like Los Angeles.
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Always amusing that lowering the percentage of natives in a culture is an improvement, "enrichment", "vibrancy", and so on, but only in one particular kind of direction...
And interestingly, the people who utter this ideology are usually from the natives - because fundamentally it's a type of narcissism - a kind of "I'll show you" or "I like you being hurt" that feels pleasurable or gives a sense of superiority.
Can't imagine this ever being tolerated within China and Russia though, perhaps that's why they're the current bogeymen.