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Re racism: Read the "As I remember London" post, it's full of language and selective facts painting brown people as criminal. Re nation: a nation is the socially constructed identity I was talking about. It can be mono- or multicultural, and people from other cultures may be integrated, it's all vibes-based depending on the nation. But one thing is clear, if you're born into a culture you are part of the culture, and so through a civic nationalist logic you are automatically part of that nation. Also note that nation does not equal state or country. RE stone henge: that was ~6-4000 years ago, many thousand years before the Anglo-Saxons, so all we have to go on there is material culture, because it's prehistoric. As far as I can tell from a quick wikipedia read, a first part was built by neolithic farmers from a material culture associated with Anatolia, modern day Turkey. A second part may have been constructed by the Bell Beaker people (referring to material culture again) who arrived later. There was also an existing hunter-gatherer substrate before these other groups arrived. That substrate was mostly replaced by the neolithic farmer culture, which was in turn mostly replaced by the Bell Beaker culture. This replacement was a fairly long process, and the gene pool was also largely replaced during both of these transitions. Both of these transitions are long before the Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, etc., the labels we currently associate with Britain. And the last point is my mistake, I thought you were the same guy as before, but your statement's premise was contradictory. You can't replace yourself, can you. |
I didn't read it that way at all. I certainly didn't see him "painting brown people as criminal". I read it predominantly as the musings of a man afraid to lose his culture in the same way the Cockneys lost theirs. Now it's my experience that most fears are exaggerated - and perhaps his fears are exaggerated - but that doesn't mean they aren't legitimate. At the very least, they need to be heeded, because - as no one famous ever said - feelings don't care about your facts.
> a nation is the socially constructed identity I was talking about. It can be mono- or multicultural, and people from other cultures may be integrated
...or they may not be...
> But one thing is clear, if you're born into a culture you are part of the culture, and so through a civic nationalist logic you are automatically part of that nation.
All that is true, but as you just pointed out, there is not only one culture, so which culture are you born into, and is it compatible with the other cultures you have to live with? A nation also has to function; and for a democratic nation to function, it has to be united on the fundamentals. Regardless of the cause, it is quite clear to me that a good deal of trust has now broken down between different communities in my country. That needs to be addressed, not lazily dismissed as mere racism.
And leftists in particular have no business dismissing it as mere racism; because, if we want to get into causes, I'd just like to remind everyone reading this that the idea that we can and should divide and categorise people by their race has been aggressively and exclusively pushed for the last decade or more - and successfully mainstreamed - by the left. Now we all have to reap what they've sewn.