Why does the idea exist that you can mix together people from different cultures and get great results? Why was the belief that “diversity is our strength” advanced when it’s clearly not true?
Multiculturalism was invented by people who live in a monoculture they mistake for diversity. These are wealthy, hyper educated people who are members of the intellectual and financial elite. They don’t have culture in the either good or bad sense in which regular people have culture. They are completely deracinated, severed from any roots. They have a supporting cast of shrinks, coaches, and shamans to offset the costs of the deracination. It’s a nice life. But it breeds terrible cluelessness as to what happens to the brains and the souls of people who are torn away from their culture, language, food, community, familiar air, etc. Of course, it’s also profitable not to notice.
Clarissa's Blog 
People who have it all and an easy life just have to find some conflict or purpose to feel important about. I think we humans just have an insatiable desired for struggle.
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It’s the same urge that makes people who’ve always lived comfortably and never experienced anything really terrible… revel in action and horror movies.
-ethyl
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yeah, movies are actually a good and healthy way to feel some negative emotion in a controlled and healthy context.
People in Sweden internalizing white guilt when they didn’t even do anything wrong is just not healthy.
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ethyl
Well, I like a good action movies but I don’t need any damned horror crap ;-D
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I used to love action movies. Life happened. Now I can’t do those anymore, and even though I remember liking them, I am baffled by the appeal.
-ethyl
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Why does the idea exist that you can mix together people from different cultures and get great results? Why was the belief that “diversity is our strength” advanced when it’s clearly not true?
There’s another answer to that question, but for some reason WordPress isn’t letting me drop an illustrative link from YouTube. If you Google “Great American Melting Pot Schoolhouse Rock” you can find it pretty easily.
I surely can’t be the only US reader of your blog whose sense of national pride and identity got grounded in this concept from an early age, both through school and family lore.
Yes, the cartoon does leave out Spain as one of the US’s colonizing influences.
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Forgot to log in, dammit. Above comment from long-time reader known as Good Enough Professor.
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““Great American Melting Pot Schoolhouse Rock” you can find it pretty easily.”
The Melting Pot wasn’t mutlicultural. The idea was that different groups/individuals were at different stages in assimilating into the majority culture, maybe keeping a few interesting recipes or neighborhood holidays.
Multiculturalism is an entirely different beast. The idea is overtly that the newcomers are not expected to change in any significant way (beyond maybe learning the local language well enough to buy cabbage at the local supermarket).
And pushing the Melting Pot metaphor didn’t really happen until the 1970s (the video you’re talking about is from 1976). In the 1960s in most of the country immigrants were very small in number (I remember just two or three from my public school days).
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The melting pot goes back a good deal further, with Israel Zangwill’s play of the same name scoring a big hit in this country in 1909. The main character has a speech about America being God’s crucible.
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“The melting pot goes back a good deal further”
I’m talking about wide spread recognition. It was certainly not a current idea until some time after the 1964 immigration act. When I was growing up immigration was that thing from the past and not ongoing concern.
When/where I grew up there was a white/black division and among whites there was pretty much nothing remotely like ethnic awareness. When Northerners began moving in fleeing from their awful yankee states they brought some of that with them. I don’t think it was a good contribution….
“America being God’s crucible”
God, I hate crap like that.
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The Statue of Liberty and its base inviting in tired, poor, homelesswretched refuse goes back a lot further than the 1960s.
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“The Statue of Liberty and its base inviting in tired, poor, homelesswretched refuse”
The statue a gift from France to the United States was about achieving independence from England and abolishing slavery after the Civil War not immigration, a seconary chance association.
The poem in question was written as part of a fundraising effort for the pedestal in 1883 and played no part in the statue’s opening in 1886. After her death a friend led a campaign to make it part of the statue.
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This stupid poem is on par with John Lennon’s “Imagine” in terms of the damage it does to people’s brains.
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A commie zionist bitch wrote a poem and that means the country has to change its way of being completely.
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“A commie zionist bitch wrote a poem…”
Well, Georgist proto-zionist is a little closer–Emma was all in on single tax, and she died about 9 years before political zionism was a thing (although she definitely wanted what the political zionists wanted).
And as for “bitch,” well, she was a woman who looked out for Jewish refugees, so what else are we gonna call her, amirite? (I will not add “lol” to that passage, owing to the fact that I am not twelve.)
Overall, though, this summary is more accurate than the rather vile antisemitic hash you earlier made of the Leo Frank case. It does make me wonder why you bother to try to explicate Jewish cultural history–you don’t deign to look things up, and any and all Jews are clearly beneath your contempt, so what’s the point? Is it like the way mocksrr used to like to “own” the Christians? I always suspected you two might be the same person, sort of an Andy Kaufman-Tony Clifton kind of thing.
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“God, I hate crap like that.”
Fair. But it’s worthwhile to think of it from Zangwill’s perspective–his protagonist (the tellingly named David Quixano) survives the 1903 Kishinev pogrom and emigrates to America. He then creates a symphony celebrating the metaphorical melting away of ethnicity.
Misguided and problematic? Yeah, pretty much. But after a pogrom, one can imagine someone thinking, “God, I hate crap like that,” and then thinking of something that might prevent future pogroms.
It’s an interesting thought experiment–think about the crap you hate, and then trace where it came from. Chances are darn good that the crap you hate was a direct response to, well, even worse crap.
If we look at pogroms, purges, ethnic cleansings, and holocausts, we see a horrible yet logical extension of… what? Yes, our old friend, the nation-state. And if we look at thought police and thought crimes, we see the most cancerous form of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. And where did DEI come from? A response to racial exclusion and violence. So it goes.
Do we ditch the nation-state? Eh. Maybe.
Do we ditch DEI? Eh. Maybe.
The question arises, what would work better? And who do you need to make it work better?
Based on my field, I tend to put things theatrically. In the end, do we live in a world where we believe the perfectability of humankind is possible, but it must be done through failure and suffering? (That is, is life a tragedy?) Or do we live in a world where humankind is fundamentally ridiculous and absurd? (That is, is life a comedy?) I think that’s one choice we get to make, at least.
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Ditching the nation-state means welfare is gone. All welfare provisions melt away and we are left with the dog-eat-dog neoliberal competition where no adversity is cushioned off by the state to any degree.
DEI doesn’t come in response to violence. It comes in response to neoliberalism wanting to undo welfare provisions and appropriate the money for a small oligarchy.
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“DEI doesn’t come in response to violence. It comes in response to neoliberalism wanting to undo welfare provisions and appropriate the money for a small oligarchy.”
And in 2025, the small oligarchy running America thrives on being “anti-woke.” W.B. Yeats had a point: how can we know the dancer from the dance?
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Can you name any billionaires aside from the open borders fan Elon Musk who are not very left-wing and very pro-DEI?
By the way, the mortality rates for African Americans from gun violence and traffic accidents soared after George Floyd and stayed record-high for over 14 months. DEI literally kills black people. Does this information change your support for it at least a bit?
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“Can you name any billionaires aside from the open borders fan Elon Musk who are not very left-wing and very pro-DEI?”
Aside from Musk? That’s a pretty big “aside from.” And is the President of the United States another “aside from”? I don’t think this is the place from which you want to argue. People like Tim Cook (or “Tim Apple”) become woke or anti-woke as benefits their pockets.
As for DEI killing people, I think it’s an error to ascribe agency to an idea. Especially when police interaction, infrastructure disparities, and disproportionate essential worker status during COVID all contributed to the traffic accident numbers. But more importantly, DEI is an idea, or a series of ideas. We can implement them with intelligence, rigor, and compassion, or we can use them as ways to gain power. Leaders of nation-states should also govern with intelligence, rigor, and compassion. My support increases or decreases with whoever is using, misusing, or abusing their authority.
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“it’s worthwhile to think of it from Zangwill’s perspective”
Zangwill was no American (born and died in England). What did he know? Why should Americans accept his narratives?
“creates a symphony celebrating the metaphorical melting away of ethnicity”
Zangwill was a zionist which makes his ‘ethnicities should be fused’ a weird idea….
I have nothing against small-scaled immigration (based on cultural affinity more than anything) but that’s not what’s happening.
What happens to the one gallon melting pot when two gallons of new ingredients are added?
Supporting immigration so you can feel better about yourself does not good policy make.
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“Why should Americans accept his narratives?”
And why should President Theodore Roosevelt call out, “That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill!” at the play’s curtain? Many Americans did accept his narratives, and I’m sure many didn’t. If you like a narrative, you accept it, and if you don’t, you don’t, irrespective of the nationality of the source.
“Zangwill was a zionist…”
Well, he broke with Herzl over territoriality, so it gets a little fuzzy. But as humans, we aren’t always consistent. Or as Whitman writes, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes).”
“What happens to the one gallon melting pot when two gallons of new ingredients are added?”
Beats me. What am I, the Magic Chef?
“Supporting immigration so you can feel better about yourself does not good policy make.”
Does shrugging off suffering make a better one?
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Are the concepts so different? It’s not that hard to get from “melting pot” to the idea that what is meant by “majority culture” is going to get changed by the ingredients that go into it.
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Absolutely. It’s all in the numbers. 1/4 of a teaspoonful of sugar in a stew, and it’s still a stew. The sugar improves it. But if you drop half a pound of sugar into the stew, it becomes a dessert with meat and potatoes, so inedible.
A group can and does absorb. But slowly and in small doses.
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Unless the Civil Rights Act and the 1964 Immigration Act are repealed there is no future for America as a civilization AND a country, except for the dogs.
Make America Great Again simply means Make America American Again. A world without an American America means a bleak future for the rest of us.
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“Diversity makes us stronger” really means: “I want cheap nannies and gardeners”.
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Yes, and turn your carpenters and masons into serfs.
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Okay, gutless wonders, are the downvotes for observing that mass immigration destroys the families of the working class; or my noting that even a Doubting Thomas like myself prefers Christmas to a rather empty nameless winter holiday; or are you simply just a bunch of humourless AWFLS ;-D
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Tis the season for the grinches to come out of the woodwork.
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Well, enough grinching, I have to buy some unsalted butter to make a shortbread recipe that is probably a couple of hundred years old. The real secret is that it takes a couple of weeks to develop flavour (thus unsalted), and, of course, to make enough to have a few make it to Christmas ;-D
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I can’t presume to speak for all gutless wonders–although, side question, if we’ve got downvotes available, why quibble about their use?
So in my case, the downvote was not about mass immigration–there’s a lot of problems, and intelligent people can disagree about the best course of action.
However, intelligent people do NOT disagree about “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays.” I’ll try to be efficient:
a) If you are offended by someone telling you, “Merry Christmas,” you are a moron.
b) If you are offended by someone telling you, “Happy Holidays,” you are a moron.
c) If your comment references the non-existent “war on Christmas,” even jokingly, you have earned both my eternal downvote and my eternal middle finger.
Hope that’s clear.
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This right here is exactly how it should be. There is a dislike button, but it does no one any good to just hit it. If you decide to hit dislike, you really should do like Col. Potter did, and actually explain why you hit dislike.
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I agree. That would be very helpful because sometimes it’s very confusing.
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W. makes a fair point. I’m not always explicit in my dislikes, but I will try to be so in future.
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Col. Potter
Frankly, the whole point of entering into blogs such as this is debating or discussing differing points of view. Downvoting serves no value, unless one imagines that a “I frown upon thee” wannabe superior moral attitude somehow contributes to open discussion. In conclusion, let’s all try to remember ;-D
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OK, one upvote for “cactus up your ass.” Good thing I wasn’t drinking anything when I read it–wet keyboards can be very costly.
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