when there exists such a mixture of cultures, exactly what better connection is there than an agreed set of basic values ?
America was never 'racially' pure, let alone ethnically, or culturally. There have always been major disagreements between states.
None of those matter so long as no one but myself gets to decide what I can say, who I can associate with, and how I prefer to defend myself and my family.
America was never intended to be a "mixture of cultures", it was an Anglo colony that broke off. Even the founders that opposed slavery wanted to send them back to Africa.
Multiculti didn't really even exist as a concept till the 20th century, because it's so obviously stupid that it had to be drilled into everyone's heads with mass media propaganda over decades.
I'm not referring to multiculturalism when I say America was a mixture of cultures. There were more than anglos involved in the civil war, and in America after. You can easily identify different cultures and work ethics depending on if a city was more french or german. But they all gave up their ties to the old world to participate in one dominant culture rising in America, one of freedom and personal responsibility.
Multiculturalism came way later and the first obvious contrast with it is that it never required you to give up your old ties. That's how you have people like Ilhan Omar today proudly flaunting her foreign allegiance. It artificially puts every subculture on the same level as what should be the dominant culture and actively undermines it.
I mean even that early "mixture of cultures" it was all northern/western European and all Christian. The biggest split was Protty vs. Catholic. More or less all the people coming had interacted with each other regularly for millennia, had a lot of shared traditions and mythos, had languages that were similar enough in origin that it was relatively easy to learn English, had similar levels of collectivism/individualism, etc.
In short there was a common culture that already existed. Europeans knew each other already, even if a lot of them didn't necessarily like each other all that much. At least everyone involved celebrated Christmas and in roughly the same way - stuff like that is a strong unifier and it extended to all the traditional European festival times. Some of it is more particularly a given culture, like Mardi Gras being largely French Catholic, but the underpinning for the big crazy party is still the death and resurrection of Christ.
A lot different from bringing over people that really share nothing in common other than "people".
I disagree. The original ideas - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, right to bear arms, etc - those ideas, those principles ARE what held us together - no matter where you came from, or what other differences we might have had.
In the end, ideology - meaning the principles you live by - is the strongest bond that human beings can have as a culture.
Yeah, we're united by a common law. And we're being torn apart in spite of common law, not because of it. My ancestors shed far too much blood fighting tribalism for me to succumb to it now.
Not entirely, it's a stack of feedback loops. Genetics influence culture, but culture also influences genetics. In the same way natural environments have different selection pressures built in, think of how much selection pressure individual rulers have exerted on the subpopulations they rule through the ages.
Documents can be (and are) selection pressure in a world dominated by information.
Being a "nation of ideas" instead of a nation with a real connection is how we got where we are today.
when there exists such a mixture of cultures, exactly what better connection is there than an agreed set of basic values ?
America was never 'racially' pure, let alone ethnically, or culturally. There have always been major disagreements between states.
None of those matter so long as no one but myself gets to decide what I can say, who I can associate with, and how I prefer to defend myself and my family.
America was never intended to be a "mixture of cultures", it was an Anglo colony that broke off. Even the founders that opposed slavery wanted to send them back to Africa.
Multiculti didn't really even exist as a concept till the 20th century, because it's so obviously stupid that it had to be drilled into everyone's heads with mass media propaganda over decades.
I'm not referring to multiculturalism when I say America was a mixture of cultures. There were more than anglos involved in the civil war, and in America after. You can easily identify different cultures and work ethics depending on if a city was more french or german. But they all gave up their ties to the old world to participate in one dominant culture rising in America, one of freedom and personal responsibility.
Multiculturalism came way later and the first obvious contrast with it is that it never required you to give up your old ties. That's how you have people like Ilhan Omar today proudly flaunting her foreign allegiance. It artificially puts every subculture on the same level as what should be the dominant culture and actively undermines it.
I mean even that early "mixture of cultures" it was all northern/western European and all Christian. The biggest split was Protty vs. Catholic. More or less all the people coming had interacted with each other regularly for millennia, had a lot of shared traditions and mythos, had languages that were similar enough in origin that it was relatively easy to learn English, had similar levels of collectivism/individualism, etc.
In short there was a common culture that already existed. Europeans knew each other already, even if a lot of them didn't necessarily like each other all that much. At least everyone involved celebrated Christmas and in roughly the same way - stuff like that is a strong unifier and it extended to all the traditional European festival times. Some of it is more particularly a given culture, like Mardi Gras being largely French Catholic, but the underpinning for the big crazy party is still the death and resurrection of Christ.
A lot different from bringing over people that really share nothing in common other than "people".
I disagree. The original ideas - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, right to bear arms, etc - those ideas, those principles ARE what held us together - no matter where you came from, or what other differences we might have had.
In the end, ideology - meaning the principles you live by - is the strongest bond that human beings can have as a culture.
Yeah, we're united by a common law. And we're being torn apart in spite of common law, not because of it. My ancestors shed far too much blood fighting tribalism for me to succumb to it now.
Not entirely, it's a stack of feedback loops. Genetics influence culture, but culture also influences genetics. In the same way natural environments have different selection pressures built in, think of how much selection pressure individual rulers have exerted on the subpopulations they rule through the ages.
Documents can be (and are) selection pressure in a world dominated by information.