Just when I thought I was out, you pull me back in. Im too busy to keep this going so will just make a couple of quick points.
Finally, as despite my best efforts, your refusal to countenance the self evident has driven me if not to a book, then to an overlong post... .
Dont think I can be blamed for you writing overlong and verbose posts eeg. In any case, what appears to you self-evident often lacks any foundation or conforms simply to your own political perspective. Thats why evidence does sometimes matter.
I think you and I have different ideas of what evidence is. To me, evidence is not sociology departments trying after the fact rationalisations to cover over the mess that their ideology creates. .
i don't not care about evidence.
Not sure why youre so obsessed with sociologists in this post, although the lack of content and the long-windedness would put many a sociologist to shame. There is a lot of both quantitative and qualitative evidence that integration is working pretty well, that cultures are meeting and adapting and that things are therefore pretty ok. Now you might not care about that evidence in your desire to paint Muslims as an existential threat, but you cant say you dont care about evidence and then, for example, complain that the census is self-selecting. Its far from perfect but its the biggest data-set we have and it supports my view. No wonder you dont care then eh?
Some of what you write here is fine, but it doesnt actually say what the culture is today, what behaviours are expected etc. rather, it suggests as I suggested that culture changes, develops etc. The idea that we all have these same values is belied by the experience of people operating against these perceived values. For example, people using the same arguments as you often talk of obeying the law, paying taxes etc being part of our culture, then when the elites try to avoid the tax part of the social contract we dont say that they need to re-learn our cultural values, we say they have to be made to pay their taxes or face legal proceedings.
And it doesn't get more important stuff than this, because without those shared bonds you cannot have a free society - your attempt to present what I'm saying as some kind of prescriptive authoritarianism is a total inversion. Free society depends on broad consensus on basic principles and oiled by the trust formed through common cultural experience ; without these things, it cannot self regulate, and laws are required to rope people together, and coerce behaviour. This is why would be totalitarians attack the values that allow societies to function, and encourage license as a means to eroding liberty. .
The thing about this paragraph is, shared bonds. I agree on the need for shared bonds but where I see that lack of shared bonds is the Im alright jack out for themselves types versus those who think the community as a whole is important. I wholeheartedly subscribe to the importance of community and communities.
The same conditions arise - by accident or design - when people from different cultures we flung together without sufficient cultural common ground to allow them to integrate into a new whole. .
But the evidence suggests there is common ground, needs work but its there.
As for Isis numbers - maybe edinburgh uni sociology dept should send them a survey to fill in? In the absence of something like that you'll need to make do with intelligence estimates widely reported in the press .
Silly point re sociologists (again). I havent seen intelligence estimates and I have to say Im suspicious of the use of estimates as experts estimating is often no more than guessers guessing.
Many of these things would happen with zero immigration, .
Which is kind of my point, immigrants are the convenient scapegoat for wider economic and political problems/issues. Globalisation, political disaffection etc. its easy to point the finger at simple explanations and it allows people to continue to avoid the real conclusions re these processes.
Our respective approaches to this have diverging results - I've been able to anticipate many of the upheavals of recent years, while you have tabled theoretically elegant projections, such as globalised trade unionism. Different approaches, different results; is/ought.
Oh Christ this isnt youre predictive guru crap again is it. You, along with the worlds Marxists, real followers of Adam Smith etc predicted that capitalism would have a major crisis. Well done. Incidentally, I didnt project international work standards etc, as the global elites you remain very quiet about would fight it tooth and nail. What Ive said is that in an era of globalisation either complete free movement of people or international trade union enforced standards are required to confront the power and mobility of global capital.
This was far more than I intended to write. In your nostrdamus type way I predict you'll come back with another attempt to denigrate views based on a. attacks on academics and/or b. assumptions about common sense and/or c. a whole series of other assertions based on nothing but your own political starting point. I'll attempt to remain out of it now
