Category Archive 'Multiculturalism'
05 Feb 2014

I Did Not Like That Coke Superbowl Ad

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I was sitting, reading a book on my eReader, yesterday over at Hunter’s Garage in Warriors Mark, waiting for new lights to be installed on the plow on my Ford pickup, so that the old truck could get its Pennsylvania inspection sticker, and my eye fell on a large box sitting on the office floor, which was labeled “horno de microonda”* and “sobre la gama.”** It also had a manufacturer’s name, but the identity of its contents was indicated to Americans in Central Pennsylvania entirely in Spanish.

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* “horno de microonda” = microwave oven — ** “sobre la gama” = over the range

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These days, you can’t purchase pretty much any product or appliance which doesn’t come with labeling and directions provided in Spanish and French with English looking like an afterthought alternative.

When I used the ATM machine in the local supermarket in Purcellville, Virginia, I used to find it mildly irritating that I had to specifically choose English as the language the transaction was going to be conducted in, ruling out choices like Vietnamese and Russian.

I don’t think that it is necessarily a bad thing that George Babbitt is making an effort to accommodate the needs of immigrants and visiting foreigners in American commerce, but I do think that the convenience and natural expectation of native-born citizens that our own national language would represent the default position ought to be respected.

There has been a good deal of discussion the last couple of days about language and legitimate expectation in connection with the Superbowl ad aired by Coca Cola, in which “America the Beautiful” was sung in nine different languages (Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Senegalese-French, Keres (a spectacularly obscure Amerindian language spoken in some of the Pueblos of New Mexico)… and English, which additionally featured (take that, reactionaries!) an interracial homosexual couple complete with adopted child.

Sanctimonious libs loved the ad for its alleged celebration of “diversity.” But their definition of diversity obviously excludes all normal, native-born Americans of European descent (except for about 4 seconds of a token cowboy). The America they find beautiful is the future brown-skinned majority, sexually-perverse, hijab-wearing, Third World-descended America which they are constantly predicting will shortly be replacing that objectionable earlier white, male-dominated, cis-gendered, European-descended oppressive America.

Coke’s America the Beautiful presented a 30-second vision of the American left’s multicuturalist wet dream fantasy, a brave new America composed of newly-arrived immigrants and minorities, dancing in our streets and eating our lunch, while taking self-congratulatory bows for replacing every last iota of pre-1960s American identity with their own, except –of course– for the 4-second-present cowboy at the beginning, who may really be just riding off into the sunset.

How could anyone possibly object? Aren’t we a nation of immigrants after all?

I’d say that the reason some people object is that immigrants today are commonly not what they used to be. When my own grandparents came here, around the turn of the last century, they came to escape the tyranny of the Russian Tsar and were willing to settle for a deal offering them the opportunity to take the most dangerous and unattractive kind of employment, working in the Anthracite coal mines, in return for citizenship and a New World of freedom and opportunity for their posterity.

My grandparents built their own schools and churches, read their own newspapers in their own language, and lived quietly in their own neighborhood. Today’s immigrants commonly expect special linguistic accommodation, special recognition and privileges, a welfare state, and immediate promotion into the American ruling class.

My grandparents wanted only the opportunity to make a living, the prospect of a better life for their children, and to be left alone. The American left seems to think that today’s immigrants deserve to star in Super bowl commercials. They believe the rest of us have an obligation to accommodate, recognize, and celebrate everybody else’s languages and cultures, everybody’s except, of course, for our own, the language and culture of normal native-born Americans of European descent.

Hurrah for Tagalog-speaking Filippinos, for the Senegalese and the Keres-speakers from the Pueblo, three cheers for sodomy, and to hell with the Mayflower descendants, the offspring of the pioneers who cleared the Wilderness and won the West, and screw all the Catholic European ethnics who built the modern industrial America and won the great World Wars.

15 May 2013

“Childish, Self-Aggrandizing Displays of ‘Sensitivity’ ”

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Bruce Bawer responds to the arrested development that results in liberalism.

If I’m curious about the psychology of [members of the commentariat of the left who, after events like the Benghazi Embassy attack or the Boston bombing, hurry to defend Islam]. it’s reflexive. It’s mainstream. Among urban types who view themselves as liberal-minded and sophisticated, it’s considered de rigueur to think this way about things like this. Certainly you’re obliged to think this way if you want to count on getting published in major establishment newspapers and at websites like Salon.

It’s necessary to fight jihad. But it’s equally necessary to fight this weed that has grown up among us – this decadent, despicable readiness to deny the reality of jihad, to relativize it, to make excuses for it, to blame it on us, on America.

These decadent characters take these positions, of course, because they’ve been marinated in multiculturalism and, in particular, have absorbed the all-important lesson that the great danger of our time is not Islam but the criticism thereof. Yet what made multiculturalism attractive to these people in the first place is that it’s tailor-made for spoiled, narcissistic grown children who don’t want to have adult enemies – that is, the kind of enemies who represent a real danger to them or that they might ever really have to fight. It’s tailor-made for people who cherish the notion of themselves as sensitive and understanding toward “The Other,” and whose enemies of choice are, basically, parental substitutes – people who draw clear moral distinctions, who talk about the need for security, and who make unequivocal assertions about the superiority of American freedom to Islamic tyranny.

Fighting the mental affliction – the terminal puerility – of the O’Hehirs may be even harder than fighting jihad itself. How do you repair a culture in which mature moral judgment and adult civic responsibility have systematically been replaced by childish, self-aggrandizing displays of “sensitivity”? How do you install a moral compass in a fully grown adult?

For that’s the problem, in essence: these people are missing certain working parts that are essential components of the civilized adult. First of all, they lack the imaginative capacity, and the sense of identification with their own country, to understand that the bombing in Boston wasn’t just an attack on the three people who died and the dozens others who were wounded, but was, in fact, an attack on them – and on their families and friends, their very lives, their children’s future. For all their mockery of America’s idea of itself as a “protected zone,” their supposed empathy for the jihadists is a luxury in which they’re able to indulge precisely because they think of themselves, consciously or not, as living in a “protected zone.” Like any baby in a crib, they feel safe, cocooned, impregnable – yet they don’t realize that the reason for this feeling of safety is that they’ve spent their lives in a country where the cops and the military have protected them from, well, people like the Tsarnaev brothers.

Like any child, they accept this protection as their due, their right. They take it for granted. But they don’t think of themselves as having any responsibility that accompanies this right – for example, a responsibility as citizens to the safety and well-being of the American people as a whole. No, as far as they can see, their only responsibility is to themselves. Indeed, if they can’t wrap their minds around the reality of the murderers’ dedication to the idea of jihad, and thus (in many cases) reject the possibility that it was indeed jihad that drove the Tsarnaevs to commit their heinous acts, it’s because they themselves don’t know what it means to be dedicated to anything outside of themselves – and to the preservation of their own self-image as sensitive, caring people who are too evolved to hate.

Yes, evolved. Yet of course, in reality, they’re the ones who are unevolved. Their relationship to adult moral responsibility is, again, that of small children.

Read the whole thing.

20 Feb 2013

Dalrymple (Harumph!) Reviews Zadie Smith

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Theodore Dalrymple/Zadie Smith

Old fogey, white male Theodore Dalrymple reviewing hip, young black chick Zadie Smith’s new novel, NW (as in North West London, specifically, apparently, NW6, Kilburn, once a working-class Irish neighborhood, now a lower-class varied multicultural district) promises an entertaining clash of values and perspectives.

According to Dalrymple, the celebration of the glorious diversity of it all —

Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock. . . . Polish paper, Turkish paper, Arabic, Irish, French, Russian, Spanish, News of the World. Unlock your (stolen) phone, buy a battery pack, a lighter pack, a perfume pack, sunglasses, three for a fiver, a life-size porcelain tiger, gold taps. . . . TV cable, computer cable, audiovisual cables, I give you good price, good price. Leaflets, call abroad 4 less, learn English, eyebrow wax, Falun Gong, have you accepted Jesus as your personal call plan? . . . A hundred and one ways to take cover: the complete black tent, the facial grid, back of the head, Louis Vuitton–stamped, Gucci-stamped, yellow lace, attached to sunglasses, hardly on at all, striped, candy pink; paired with tracksuits, skin-tight jeans, summer dresses, blouses, vests, gypsy skirts, flares. . . . Security lights, security gates, security walls, security trees, Tudor, Modernist, postwar, prewar, stone pineapples, stone lions, stone eagles. Face east and dream of Regent’s Park, of St. John’s Wood. The Arabs, the Israelis, the Russians, the Americans: here united by the furnished penthouse, the private clinic. If we pay enough, if we squint, Kilburn need not exist. Free meals. English as a second language. Here is the school where they stabbed the headmaster. Here is the Islamic Center of England opposite the Queen’s Arms. Walk down the middle of this, you referee, you!

— is tempered by the story of two black sisters, Keisha and Cheryl Blake. The former studies hard and becomes a wealthy and successful lawyer, the latter becomes an unwed mother living on the dole.

Keisha (who’s changed her name to Natalie) is unhappy, finding she has traded her life for a career and living only to work, while worrying about having relinquished her identity, her “authenticity.” Her sister Cheryl rejects her offers of assistance (and implicitly her familial connection and authority) preferring “independence” based upon state support.

All of which understandably lights Dalrymple’s fuse.

Natalie may not feel authentic, but this [fictional situation] certainly does. It illustrates how completely the state has smashed up family solidarity. Cheryl and the rest of Natalie’s impoverished family neither look for nor need Natalie’s help, though she is becoming a wealthy woman; they look to the state to provide. At one point, when Natalie criticizes the public housing where Cheryl lives, her sister responds, “If I wanted to get out of here I’d get another place off the council before I come to you.” For Cheryl, independence means being independent of people close to her and dependent on a bureaucratic apparatus. Nothing could be more socially atomizing, more promotional of the raging egotism exemplified in the [1995 murder of a Roman Catholic headmaster who tried to stop an interracial gang beating].

Dalrymple also has a few harsh words to say about Natalie’s class neuroses.

Natalie’s unease about her authenticity, with its undertow of guilt about her success, seems to me plausibly and truly delineated. The fact that she should feel this guilt means that she has thoroughly absorbed an egalitarian ideology, for there can be only one reason why to rise in a meritocratic society by your own efforts should occasion guilt. That reason is that one feels that everyone ought to be equal—equal in outcome—whatever one does or does not do. Though she has risen by her own merits, though what sixties radicals called “the system” has put no formal obstacles in her path, though her sister’s manacles are all mind-forg’d, Natalie cannot believe that she deserves her good fortune or that her newfound wealth is evidence of social justice rather than its opposite.

Dalrymple considers the kind of multiculturalism that Zadie Smith reflexively tries to celebrate as a social and cultural disaster featuring little mutual benefit, but rather the addle-pated surrender of Western civilization to barbarism on the basis of left-wing sentimentality and bad ideas. According to Dalrymple, Zadie Smith’s NW really offers

a bleak assessment of multicultural society, which ends not in cross-fertilization, as in fusion cooking, but in paranoia as a way of life, mutual incomprehension, egotism, and solipsism. A day-to-day tolerance of one another’s existence is an insufficient basis for an attractive or even a productive society. Something more is needed.

Interestingly, Dalrymple compares Smith’s community of fashion perspective to that of Catholic, anti-modernist French author Richard Millet, who recently published Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik [A Literary Elegy on Anders Breivik], who killed 77 promising young leftists at a Labor summer camp, as a kind of personal protest against the multicultural remodeling of Norway. Millet said that, though he did not approve of Breivik’s crimes, his opinion was that “Norway got what it deserved.”

I am quite interested in reading that essay, which is available, I find, only in French (via Amazon UK) in a collection of three essays titled Langue Fantôme. I have ordered a copy.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

27 Nov 2012

Sts. Cyril and Methodius to Have Halos and Crosses Restored

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The religious-symbol-neutered version previously scheduled for production.

Original story

After strong objections by the Catholic Church which were taken up in the national parliament of Slovakia by the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKÚ) and some representatives of the Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO) caucus to the elimination of halos from the heads of Sts. Cyril and Methodius and the removal of the image of the cross from the saints’ vestments, the Board of Directors of the National Bank of Slovakia has announced that the halos and crosses will be restored on the 2-Euro coins scheduled to be released in 2013 to commemorate the 1150th Anniversary of the Mission of Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs.

Slovak Spectator reported, however, that restoring those halos might preclude the Slovakian €2 coin being released throughout the European Union.

The NBS [National Bank of Slovakia, country’s central bank – ed. note] Bank Council approved the original proposal of the design, even though it realises that the new approval process may lead to frustrating the original goal of releasing the commemorative coin throughout the 17-nation eurozone,” said spokesperson for the bank Petra Pauerová, as quoted by TASR.

The European Commission earlier stated that the commemorative coin cannot contain crosses and halos in order to observe the principle of religious neutrality in the European Union. Later it was revealed that it was not the EC as such, but certain eurozone members that objected to releasing the coin with religious symbols.

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The same paper separately identified the countries who had a problem with Christian saints being depicted with such particularist Christian symbols as halos and crosses/

It was certain eurozone member states that expressed disagreement with the original artistic proposal for a Slovak commemorative coin depicting Saints Cyril and Methodius with crosses and halos set to be released in 2013, Andrej Králik from the Representation of the EU Commission in Slovakia said on Thursday, November 22.

The commission subsequently asked Slovakia to submit a modified proposal, which was later approved by the EU Council, Králik told the TASR newswire. He rejected statements by certain Slovak politicians who said that the case involved a ‘dictate of Brussels’ and ‘high-handedness of officials from the EU Commission’, describing these assertions as untrue and deceptive.

The commission stated that the removal of the religious symbols was due to the need to observe religious neutrality, as set out in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU. German MEP Martin Kastler earlier on Thursday revealed that the countries that had raised objections to the original Slovak proposal were France and Greece

19 Nov 2012

EU Censors Crosses & Halos From 2-Euro Coin Commemorating Sts. Cyril & Methodius

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Translated from Polish Catholic DEON.pl news item:

A Two-Euro coin design by Miroslav Hric to be released into circulation in May of next year by the National Bank of Slovakia (NSB) in commemoration of the 1150th anniversary of the arrival of the two saints in Moravia was changed.

Currently, there is the image of the two saints, and between them a double cross representing the national emblem of Slovakia. However, the symbol of the cross was removed from the saints’ vestments, and halos were removed from around their head. NSB spokeswoman Petra Pauerova told the Slovak newspaper “Pravda” that “the European Commission, assenting to the ‘request of some Commonwealth countries’ prescribed the removal of these attributes from the original coin design.” Since the coin will be released into circulation in all euro area countries, the project should respect the principle of “religious neutrality,” explained Pauerova.

The removal of those features from the Slovakian coins was announced on Sunday on public television and radio stations in Slovakia.

The Slovakian Bishops’ Conference in a statement did not hesitate to use the word “disgrace”. “The resignation of the key attributes associated conceptually with Saints Cyril and Methodius demonstrates the lack of respect for the Christian tradition of Europe.” indignantly remarked Church spokesman Rev. Jozef Kovaczik. He added the Church only learned that the two symbols would not appear on the Two-Euro coin via the media.

“In 1988, before the Velvet Revolution, the faithful in Slovakia risked their lives, preaching the doctrine of the two saints. Do we really live in a nation of law, or in a totalitarian system, which dictates to us what attributes we may use?” asked Rev. Kovaczik, noting that Slovakia is a Catholic country.

St. Cyril (926-869) and St. Methodius (815-885) were the first missionaries to the Slavs. It was to their mission that the Slavic portions of Europe owe the adoption of the Christian faith and their own roots in the culture of Europe.

These saints in both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church are called the Apostles of the Slavs, and came from Byzantium to the Moravian state in 862 A.D. at the request of the local ruler Rostislav. They knew both the language and customs of the Slavs, having dealt previously with Christianized Southern Slavs living in the area around the Byzantine Thessalonica. Both had already made a translation of the Bible into Slavonic, having for purposes of translation created a special 40-letter alphabet, the Glagolitic script.

Cyril and Methodius’ students continued their mission to the Eastern and Southern Slavs. The complicated Glagolitic script ultimately replaced in liturgical writings by the simpler Cyrillic alphabet, modeled upon the Greek alphabet.

Pope John Paul II gave Sts. Cyril and Methodius the title of patron saints of Europe.

In church iconography the saints are depicted dressed in pontifical garb as Greek or Latin bishops. Their attributes are a cross, a book and an unrolled scroll displaying the Slavic alphabet.

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The NBS web-site. announcing the winning design, says blandly:

The original competition design was modified in line with recommendations made within the notification and approval procedure conducted pursuant to Council Regulation (EC) No 975/98 on denominations and technical specifications of euro coins intended for circulation, as amended.

29 Sep 2012

It’s True, He Really Said That

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1:59 video

02 Nov 2011

The Treason of the Western Elites

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On the same subject, Fjordman marvels at Western political leaders actively supporting Islamic revolutionaries in the Middle East. It was Qaddafi versus Al Qaeda after all, and we supported al Qaeda.

Many ordinary citizens, when witnessing our so-called leaders supporting our enemies, wonder whether Western political elites have lost their grip on reality. What are they trying to achieve with such stupid and suicidal policies? Why do they want to export democracy to Islamic countries, even if this brings radical organizations with hostile agendas to power, at the same time as the democratic system is being de facto abolished in Europe by the European Union?

My personal view is that the cultural, economic and especially immigration policies currently promoted by the ruling elites throughout virtually the entire Western world are harmful to the long-term interests of the European peoples who created this civilization. One fundamental question that has been hotly debated on the Internet by dissident writers is whether this trend is entirely accidental, and exclusively reflects the purely impersonal forces of technological globalization, or whether there is also a purpose and a plan behind some of these changes. …

Today the ruling ideology is an absolute egalitarianism that if you analyze it closely actually amounts to saying that all cultures have an equal right to exist, except the European one which is evil.

Read the whole thing.

09 Sep 2010

Interesting Hypothetical

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Eric Erickson wonders what the elites would do if radical Muslims started demanding prayer in US schools.

09 Sep 2010

“This Is Where We Begin to Say No”

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Andrew McCarthy expresses the view, which I share, that the American people have gotten tired of hearing about how much deference we need to pay to the sensibilities of Muslims.

A tectonic shift is in motion: How fitting that its focal point is Ground Zero, the inevitable fault line between Islam and the West.

Only the blink of an eye ago, uttering the unpleasant truth that in terms of doctrine there is no such thing as “moderate Islam” resulted in one’s banishment from what our opinion elites like to call the “mainstream,” by which they mean the narrow-minded, viciously defended circle of their own pieties and fictions. You could say it, but your skin had better have an extra coat or two of thick: You were in for a fusillade of rage, the likes of which our candor-phobic elites would never dream of unleashing at our Islamist enemies — no matter how clearly those enemies announced their intention to destroy us.

The fusillade still comes, but now its blows only glance. The elites and their mainstream have been exposed as frauds: Being on the wrong side of enough 70-30 issues will do that to you.

Read the whole thing.

13 Aug 2010

Multicultural Bias of the Establishment

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Mayor Bloomberg and reputable members of the establishment in general view people objecting to the erection of mosque and Islamic cultural center in the vicinity of the fallen World Trade Center towers as bigots and yahoos, who irrationally insist on blaming the overwhelmingly larger body of moderate Muslims for the crimes committed by a small number of unrepresentative extremists.

The Muslim religious leader behind the Ground Zero Mosque project is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The defense of the Ground Zero Mosque project is intimately associated with
the identification of Abdul Rauf as a moderate Muslim, a reasonable representative of a different religious denomination who is not our enemy and who does not deserve to bear any sort of guilt for Islamic extremism or acts of terrorism.

Yet, Imam Abdul Rauf has made a number of somewhat controversial public statements.

On September 29, 2001, a mere nineteen days after the attacks, when asked by CBS if the U.S. deserved the attacks, Rauf answered: “I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened. But the United States’ policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.”

The interviewer inquired how the US was “an accessory,” and Abdul Rauf replied, “Because we have been accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.”

In a June interview this year with WABC radio in New York, Abdul Rauf evaded answering whether he agreed with the U.S. State Department’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization. “I’m not a politician. I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.”

Clifford D. May offers this completely devastating rejoinder.

No, actually, it’s quite simple: Whatever your grievances, you do not express them by murdering other people’s children. Not accepting that proposition does not make you a terrorist. But it disqualifies you as an anti-terrorist and identifies you as an anti-anti-terrorist.

A thought experiment: I am grieved by Saudi policies — for example, Saudi religious discrimination, oppression of women, and persecution of homosexuals. If I were to express these grievances by blowing up a Saudi kindergarten, do you think Imam Feisal would say (1) the Saudi Royal family must share responsibility for the carnage, and (2) whether or not I had committed an act of terrorism is a “very complex question”?

How can well-educated, sophisticated people apply such a preposterous double-standard in their thinking that they will perform gymnastic contortions to defend and apologize for a Muslim community leader with all sorts of unsavory personal connections and instantly exclude from legitimate discussion anyone who would criticize the symbolism of the Ground Zero Mosque project or question the bona fides of its organizer?

May explains:

[M]ulticulturalism and moral relativism, doctrines devoutly embraced by the intellectual classes, render “everything the equal of everything else.” As a consequence, some very smart people have “lost the ability to make the most elementary distinctions.” Except one: They reflexively regard those from the Third World as virtuous and those from the West as steeped in blame, shame, and guilt.

So if Imam Feisal says he’s a moderate, he must be a moderate. Why read his books or inquire into what he preaches in his mosque or with whom he associates on his frequent trips to Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and other exotic locales? Would we ask such questions of a Baptist minister building a church near Ground Zero?

25 Jul 2010

Sharia Law Comes To New Jersey

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Eugene Volokh quotes a New Jersey case in which a Judge Payne of the Superior Court, in the course of rejecting a restraining order against a Moroccan husband, adopted the interesting viewpoint that the husband’s cultural opinions immunized him from the laws of the state of New Jersey, allowing him to inflict non-consensual sex upon his wife.

While recognizing that defendant had engaged in sexual relations with plaintiff against her expressed wishes in November 2008 and on the night of January 15 to 16, 2009, the judge did not find sexual assault or criminal sexual conduct to have been proven. He stated:

    This court does not feel that, under the circumstances, that this defendant had a criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault or to sexually contact the plaintiff when he did. The court believes that he was operating under his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to, was something that was consistent with his practices and it was something that was not prohibited.

After acknowledging that this was a case in which religious custom clashed with the law, and that under the law, plaintiff had a right to refuse defendant’s advances, the judge found that defendant did not act with a criminal intent when he repeatedly insisted upon intercourse, despite plaintiff’s contrary wishes.

Happily, the Appellate Court reversed, but this judicial incident is undoubtedly only the first of what will become a trend of multicultural rulings from American benches.

The correct legal precedent, IMHO, is that expressed by General Charles Napier in connection with the custom of suttee in India. Napier told the Hindoos:

You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

15 Jun 2010

Why Americans Don’t Care For Soccer

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REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko
Japan’s Keisuke Honda (2nd R) scores against Cameroon yesterday

Liberal David Zirin says that the American Far Right, e.g. Glenn Beck and G. Gordon Liddy, don’t like soccer because it is a game popular abroad and they are racists and nativists.

Among adults, the sport is also growing because people from Latin America, Africa, and the West Indies have brought their love of the beautiful game to an increasingly multicultural United States. As sports journalist Simon Kuper wrote very adroitly in his book Soccer Against the Enemy, “When we say Americans don’t play soccer we are thinking of the big white people who live in the suburbs. Tens of millions of Hispanic Americans [and other nationalities] do play, and watch and read about soccer.” In other words, Beck rejects soccer because his idealized “real America” – in all its monochromatic glory – rejects it as well. To be clear, I know a lot of folks who can’t stand soccer. It’s simply a matter of taste. But for Beck it’s a lot more than, “Gee. It’s kind of boring.” Instead it’s, “Look out whitey! Felipe Melo’s gonna get your mama!”

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Ace responds with a far superior analysis. Americans don’t follow soccer because:

It is a low scoring game. (And we Americans are into fast and frequent gratification).

Our best athletes play football, baseball, and basketball. Who wants to watch low quality performers?

It requires an investment in time and attention to understand the point of any sport, and Americans are already otherwise fully invested.

And, leftie fashionistas like soccer, so we don’t.

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I watched small portions of some World Cup matches recently. I would add:

Soccer just looks strange. It really is foot ball. Watching people chasing a ball around, using only their feet, is a lot like watching a ball game played by some other species which unfortunately lacks hands and arms. I get an “I’m watching some kind of Special Olympics ballgame” feeling and start looking around for a cup to place my donation in.

Compared to American football, soccer is an exercise in pacifism. They just don’t tackle people. Americans like our own football because we like violence. We like to see people deliberately running into other people, hitting them, and knocking them down. We also like really big muscular guys. Americans would rather watch a bunch of 300+ lb. linemen crushing people than watch a bunch of slender fellows in short pants and high stockings running lithely over the grass.

Ace is right that soccer is also burdened with politics and symbolism. Americans know that our Obama-voting suburban elite deliberately has replaced American-style football in its own schools with multicultural, politically correct, non-violent soccer. The replacement of football by soccer is a metonymy for the community of fashion’s rejection of “hard, isolate, stoic” traditional American culture in favor of a less decidedly masculine internationalist alternative. New Canaan and Brookline are saying to the rest of America: “We don’t want to be provincial ruffians like you. We want to be Italian or Brazilian.”

Finally, soccer games are accompanied by what Dan Nosowitz aptly describes as the “grating, stab-your-ears-with-a-pencil drone of the vuvuzela,” an obnoxious plastic horn which was apparently first adopted by the Zulus of South Africa to replace their dreaded iklwa.


Vuvuzela

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