The War in Tigray has been described as an ongoing ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Ethiopia against ethnic Tigrayans. …
During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, reports indicated that between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainians on the Russian-occupied territories were deported to Russia, including 260,000 children.
The people who think that way are wrong, that’s my point. I, and most of humanity do have “some mystical, longstanding connection between people and place”, and we are not “citizens of nowhere” as Theresa May said.
The people who think that way are dangerous to everyone else when they’re in power because they make the places we live unlivable. It doesn’t matter to them because they are “citizens of nowhere” and they have the means to move somewhere else whenever it suits them. They are basically locusts; the only difference is they don’t reproduce.
True enough. I always say humans are good and bad. Often at the same time.
Not all immigrants are the same. The smart thing is to be level-headed about who we let in. An Iranian professor is much better than 10s of thousands of Haitians.
You have a real talent for getting my points wrong. It’s like if I hold up a black flag and ask “what color is it” you say “orange”.
I used some human migrations as examples of how the “we are all immigrants” argument is flawed. The fact that every ethnicity is made of earlier peoples doesn’t mean we have to accept others. Human migrations throughout history are always chaos anyway. Three things always happened in huge numbers – slaughter, enslavement and rape. When Saxons invaded Britain they didn’t shake hands with the people already there, they conquered them. A few hundred years later the Normans did the same to the Saxons.
As for my ancestors, they were lucky. And capable. That’s the only reason I’m here and that’s how it always works.
Lausten,
Never forget that humans are an invasive species. Where we go things die.
We do not adapt our lifestyle to the environment. We adapt the environment to our lifestyle and our lifestyle is harmful to the ecosystem. (Hellstrom).
Thats claptrap. The Australian Aborigines have lived on that land in harmony for 60,000 years. It has taken the white man only 200 + years to destroy everything he touches.
I think you are assuming that prejudice is caused by people reasoning that too many immigrants is a problem. That’s not what the word means.
Ahh, I see. I don’t usually see that history presented as a way to show that the historian is wrong. That was confusing. I know that people feel connected to place, but the history tells us that we have no logical reason for that. It doesn’t make the feeling wrong, but it doesn’t make prejudice of people from other places right. I prefer “citizens of earth” instead of “citizens of nowhere”.
Interesting, although I don’t see the connection. I see people who claim to be from a place, destroying that place. It’s the illogical argument that we hear everyday, that a state claims they know better than a federal government, that they can regulate themselves. While in fact, they are extracting their resources and treated people like chattel.
Not sure if we’re on the same page here, but this is a problem. There is an elite that can fly anywhere, cross most borders without hassle, and find decent work where they want it. I know because I am one of them. I didn’t create that world though. I was taught that hard work pays off, but I was not taught that it doesn’t pay off for everyone. Figuring that out didn’t make it any easier for me to change the system.
cool
You have yet to even begin to address why Haitians are bad, why a certain number of them is bad, or recognize that there are professors in Haiti too. You speak of them as if they are dirty, poor, uneducated, and immoral. You have no evidence for that.
It means the concept of “others”, as you are expressing it, is flawed. To someone else, you are an other. So what? You don’t have an economic argument, a morality argument, or a criminality argument, so you draw a line at ethnicity as if it’s meaningful. It’s not.
I am glad that you agree. Aborigines are one of the few tribes who adapted to and remained in their local environment. They did not become “invasive” to other parts of the globe.
But I would not give a thumbs up on human behavior based on a million adapted indigenous Australian people, who have mostly integrated into the invasive culture of Europeans.
In fact, there are laws protecting Indigenous peoples from the invasive practices of European invaders, else they and their culture would have faced extinction, much like the American Indian culture, that are now fully integrated .
How has Western society affected aboriginals?
Indigenous people suffered a lot of injustices, such as being evicted from their traditional territories and being relocated to reserves and missions. They were also subjected to mass killings, and for those who survived, European colonists denied their customs and traditions. Jun 15, 2019 Impact of Colonisation on Indigenous Australians | Evolve Communities Pty Ltd
The problem is that we are approaching the limit of human beings that the earth can support. It’s going to get ugly in the next couple of centuries as we try to attain zero population growth.
Roger Ebert said it well, “I’ve never been able to get very enthusiastic about the notion that man’s duty is to do something even when there’s nothing to be done.”
You are awfully enamored with a fictional depiction of the future.
I don’t find any serious references to the movie. I did find a lengthy critique of the entire genre of pseudo-documentaries
What makes The Hellstrom Chronicle a uniquely
radical example of the horror pseudo-documentary lies in the ways that it plays
with the familiar.
Horror pseudo-documentaries traditionally combine horror and
documentary themes, tropes, and rhetorical strategies in ways that rely heavily
on the spectators’ savvy awareness of documentary, reality television, mystery
and horror conventions. While the traditional horror pseudo-documentary
renders the historical world strange, it does so through juxtaposing conjecture
and speculation with strings of unanswered questions and readings of evidence
that are often extracted from historical, archaeological, anthropological or
cultural contexts. Pseudo-documentaries can and often do work to subvert
their own claims to transparency by highlighting the rhetorical power of
documentary aesthetics and factual discourse, but they typically do little else
with the fevered sense of allusive textual and generic play they conjure up.
Gary D. Rhodes argues that in pseudo-documentaries such as the television
series In Search of … (1976-82; 2002), and Unsolved Mysteries (1987-2010), “the
question becomes the answer” (2005: 157). That is, the potentially critically
productive ambiguity inherent to an open “What if?” ending instead becomes
in pseudo-documentary a fulfillment of narrative conventions. Open endings in
the horror pseudo-documentary in particular serve a teleological drive to take
events that are explicable within the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology
or geography, and tilt them rhetorically towards the supernatural or
paranormal.
You are arguing a strawman here. I didn’t make an argument for humans. I argued that the Hellstrom movie is not science. It was made by movie makers, based on something they overheard somewhere that insects would take over. The future of how humans go extinct is not written and not so easily predictable. The movie doesn’t even address it seriously, it just puts up bug images and makes the occasional comment about nuclear war or something, something.
I can’t do anything about the destruction caused by my predecessors other than try to clean it up. I will have very little affect on the actions of people living 100 years from now, and virtually no affect on those 200,000 years from now, if we last that long. Vague fear-mongering of our inevitable demise does nothing to improve the lives of people being born today.
No, you need to understand the exponential function.
A 1 % steady growth per year yields a doubling of the total every 70 years.
A 2 % steady growth per year yields a doubling of the total every 35 years.
A 7 % steady growth per year, yields a doubling of the total every 10 years.
Only a 0 % growth (births = deaths) per year will yield a steady population.
Assuming a 1% annual growth, with a current population of 8+ billion , in 70 years that would grow to 16 + billion.
Somewhere along the line we need to stay at ~ 0% growth to stay at 11 bllion.
To get an in-depth understanding of the exponential function, I can really recommend this definitive lecture by Dr. Albert Bartlett (professor emeritus, RIP), who called this the greatest dilemma mankind will face in the near future.
