JC Political Thread - For all things political Part 2

And this is going to get really complicated and cause confict within ones self since we have people both coming from Israel and also those with Muslim backgrounds.

Part of me will no longer accept the right of another part of me to exist.

Seriously, multiculturalism is the most retarded concept ever. People CHOOSE to come here so **** they should adopt OUR cultural beliefs and laws.

Australia is losing it's identity because it's trying to change to cater for everyone who comes here.

 

Brainwash? No. Educate to live with and understand other cultures - remembering that such education should also work to educate other cultures to understand ours? Yes.

Consider too that many of those children are Australian; born to immigrants, but Australian nonetheless. Our real problem is to educate the parents to understand what their children are being taught, and therein lies the crux of the problem. As long as immigrants persist in maintaining their cultures and habits, they won't assimilate and we will resent them. And as long as we resent them, hostility will pervade. The idea is to educate the youngest and most malleable minds to understand that promoting racial vilification is a poor way for a nation to exist.

 

that is the time honoured way of intolerance.

no I’m not. And as I said I don’t know that multiculturalism can really work but it is a noble ideal. What both parties need to do is understand each other. Neither we nor other cultures are really even at that stage in any broad kind of way. “Seek first to understand and then to be understood”.

funny you should say that coz I don’t really think we have one. We have a way of life and certain ideals but I am not sure an Australian abroad would stand out as being particularly Australian except for his accent,.

That is even more widespread than race and culture. It is typical of how “we” (whoever “we” are, but I know it’s me) is expected to deal with all minorities or sensitive groups. Put their sensitivity first without expecting the same in return.

Yep, get in early before they learn about how their ancestors were killed or fought the ancestors of other cultures over issues neither can really remember. Or start to feel threatened by difference or things they don’t understand.

well it would be an interesting referendum question. I don’t think either side would have an enormous majority myself.

I don’t know exactly how widespread that was but I agree it is a ridiculous concept. Trying to act in a way so as not to offend someone who believes a particular fairy story yet not having them obligated to respect the fact that almost all religions are offensive to me.

I don’t know what the answer is. I think all religion is an insidious poison that has been abused by so many to cause untold suffering and continues to do so. Doing nothing may be undesirable but doing what we have for thousands of years is equally so.

 

Look, I have said I resent what has happened up till now and I don't like the way foreign "culture" is being forced upon us without any reference to us, but that is the way of government (Labor or Liberal) - we don't always get a say in the decisions they make but have to live with the outcomes of those decisions.

It IS logical to try to educate new arrivals to our lifestyle and standards, and it IS logical to try to get them to leave their prejudices at home. Yes, I understand your point that we seem to be doing all the bending over at present, while foreigners enter the country and behave towards us as if they never left their home country. I hate that, deeply. But they are arriving in their hundreds, if n ot thousands, every year, from many countries which have utterly different standards of social behaviour and different legal structures to our own. They are not going to all just chuck out everything they know and pick up our rule book from day one, and unfortunately, there are 365 "day ones" every year, because somebody new enters our society every day.

We won't shut the door on immigration - we all know that. Education is the first step towards reducing the cultural gulfs that exist between our western democracy and whatever they left behind. However, I do think that our laws should be much more stringent on offenders, particularly those who carry on like a pack of big tarts in the detention centres and protest when the umpire rules against them. That's when our laws are far too lenient, but I suspect that, regardless of whether it was Labor or Liberal in power, the coverage given to these incidents by the media, the international conventions to which we are a signatory, and the persistent presence of bleeding hearts like David Manne, will always ensure that we don't deal with those clowns the way many of us believe we should. At least by educating the children, we might see a greater degree of tolerance in future generations because the multitude of races and religions won't be the mystery to them that it is to us.

I am trying here to be as "tolerant" of the situation as possible. I'm not fence-sitting - I can appreciate the views of Minux and ClairBear and others; in fact, I share many of those views, but the problem won't go away just because we say it should and it won't diminish as the numbers of migrants (legal and illegal) grow unless our law makers take a stand and come up with policies that can address the problem. Obviously, education of the youngest generations is one such policy and should be at least given a go.

 

Before people end up saying at poll time. better the devil you know.

 

Meh - If I don't know anything about a subject I'll say so unlike many who post here.

Reaper

 

As a kid I loved it of course. What kid wouldn’t? But for a vast amount of people that’s all Christmas is. Gifts, eating drinking etc. The religious part of it means nothing. But I do agree that is part of our culture and should not be taken from our kids just because it doesn’t fit in with another’s religions beliefs.

 

I completely agree that our traditions are being overturned by pc bullshit, so that we don't offend the sensitivities of religions that don't give a stuff about them. Perhaps it works both ways to some extent. About 50 Indonesion fishermen in detention in Darwin recently set fire to their accommodation because they were not allowed to celebrate the end of Ramadan "in the manner they wanted to", according to the press. So, I guess, this will be seen as Australia preventing them from practicing their religious beliefs. Well, there's a good reason to burn the house down....not!

Cultural sensitivity isn't unique to Australia. America for years has celebrated Christian religious holidays by wishing people "Happy Holiday" rather than "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Easter". Those basic Christian holidays are seen as offensive to both the Muslim and Jewish faiths, so public recognition of them gets renamed. Utter bullshit, and probably the way things will go here if we let them.

I believe that the real objection Australians have to both the illegal boat people problem and this modification of our cultural and religious traditions, is that both seem to be accommodating the Islamic faith and allowing it to prosper and grow here, when we basically don't trust Islam. If those boats, for example, were full of European, Zimbabwean or South African whites escaping a brutal regime, we might not object so much but unfortunately, they don't and the countries from where they eminate are countries we know little about or don't trust.

 

Bring back cracker night! I loved that as a kid.

 

That was banned on safety grounds, not etnic ones.

 

Yep. The problem is Islam to many Westerners = terrorism or at least an extremist faith. Given the billions of them I am pretty sure it is not the case but the moderate ones have a hard time making their case. A case could be made for those who are actually fleeing their own countries that are governed by certain forms of that religion that maybe they don’t subscribe to those fundamentalists views. And those who set fire to accommodation do not necessarily represent the wishes of all of the detainees.
I still maintain that I am not convinced multiculturalism is an ideal that is practically achievable, especially where religion is involved. But those decisions are taken out of our hands.

 

Good point - I'd forgotten to include the financial queue jumper part of their activity - it is definitely a major factor in the Australian resentment towards them, but I feel the fact that they come from an Islamic background also contributes to the distrust of them.

 

If any of us found Australia unbearable we are free to apply for emigration to another country without fear of any backlash. What if these are people with families who want a better future for their children? What if the only way out of their country is illegally and those who are able will risk their lives rather than stay in their country. I have no idea what these people know of our country. Probably only what they are told like we do of their countries. What’s wrong with that? I can fully understand people who would do anything, pay anything and risk anything for their children. Practically as a country we of course cannot just accept everyone but I can’t be so cold as to completely dismiss all of these people because they don’t choose the legal or appropriate path.

A different view.
“under the ‘Pacific Solution’ a total of 1637 unauthorised arrivals were detained in the Nauru and Manus facilities between September 2001 and February 2008.33 Of those, 1153 (70 per cent) were found to be refugees and ultimately resettled to Australia or other countries”
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/sp/AsylumFacts.pdf