Would you object to a woman wearing a scarf if she's doing chemotherapy and has either little or no hair?
Reread my previous post please. I am not against the veil because I generally dislike scarves, but because it is a religious symbol which comes with a lot of implications, some of which I laid out above.
Lexicus said:
I think that we should try to move toward a world in which borders don't prevent people from living where and as they wish.
Lexicus, as you know I don't normally read your posts, let alone respond to them, since you usually don't seem interested in having an honest conversation about these issues. Yet in your last posts you seemed surprisingly open, and we are actually closer together than you may think. The overwhelming majority of contributors on this forum are likely to agree with your statement I quoted, including those strongly opposed to the current mass immigration. I belong to the more strident voices here, and I agree with it. To me the civilizational endgame can only be that we live in a kind of global society, governed by universal rules and laws, which are based on human rights and an open-ended discussion about how we want to live and what is beneficial for mankind. Just like people can move freely within their own country today, in this scenario people would be able to move globally, to find a place which fits their desires and where their skills are required. However, we probably agree that this world lies somewhere in the far future. We are talking about a few hundred years, at least. We also agree that, yes, we should indeed try to move toward such a world.
Where we disagree is how to engineer such a world. Your position seems to be to just start allowing unlimited mass immigration from the developing world into the West, as if were already in a situation where that was unproblematic. Yet this simply cannot work out, since the conditions for it aren't met in the slightest. In fact, I'd argue that it is counter-productive, since on the one side we have too many people who were socialized in backward, illiberal cultures, who cannot contribute to a modern society and who willingly or unwillingly will only be a burden to the European social welfare systems. On the other side we have the backlash to this, leading to the rise of nativist movements and potentially the return of racism to Europe. The current mass immigration is causing huge tensions in European societies that are more likely to lead to civil war than to peaceful and mutually beneficial co-existence.
No, to engineer the kind of world you want we first have to meet the requirements and overcome the obstacles that lie in the way. Why do you think I am so focused on Islam in my posts? Because Islam is one of these obstacles. As long as political Islam and traditional Islam are so virulent within the Muslim world there is no chance we will arrive at your desired scenario. As long as a fourth of our world's population adheres to an ideology which only accepts human rights as long as they are in accordance with sharia, which teaches that Muslims are superior to everyone else, which victimizes women, homosexuals, free-thinkers and non-believers, and which has the political goal to subjugate the entire world under this ideology, we will not be able to live in your world of open-borders. I have never understood why the left finds it so difficult to criticize Islam. Not only is it, at least in its mainstream conservative form, a so obviously illiberal and oppressive ideology which goes against everything the left classically has stood for, it also impedes on the progress that we on the left generally strive for.
That is not to say that Islam is the only obstacle to an open-border world, or even the most important (the global imbalance between our countries' political, social and economic development is undoubtedly even more relevant). There are many very difficult problems we have to solve, and the only way to do that is through vigorous and honest conversation. It is extremely unhelpful if every time we want to have these conversations about the problems we face today and how to engineer a better future, people from the left pop up and cry "racism!" or "xenophobia!", just because we acknowledge that the current mass immigration from the third world isn't working out. We all want the same thing, so why not listen to and learn from each other instead of assuming the worst of other people, just because they don't happen to share your point of view.
