Re: Candorville 8-30-2005

In article <slrndhva7r.t7l.carlf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Carl Fink <carlf@xxxxxx> wrote:
>On 2005-09-07, Detox <detox665@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> I would also suggest that the particular nature of the average American
>> may have something to do with it. Remember, we _are_ the folks that
>> left Europe because we couldn't play nice with everyone else.
>
>My family (both sides) left because people couldn't get along with US.
>
>We're Jewish.

The Jews have managed, despite their history, to maintain a
presence in the Old World from China to Britain and from South Africa
to the Russias. Considering the circumstances, that's quite an
accomplishment.

It recently struck me that the New World provides a western
extension to the territories in Europe (and Asia) that provide temporary
refuge from the intermitent barbarian invasions from the east and the
south. And sometimes the north. Well, never the west, anyway. You can
count on a new wave of incomers every few centuries and some of them
will be better at prevailing and increasing their numbers than the
locals. It used to be that populations would get pushed towards the
Atlantic. Once they reached the ocean, they were pretty much screwed [1].
Assimilation or annihilation were the usual choices [2].

Take the Celts, for example. There used to be Celtic populations
on the mainland but two thousand years of, how to put this nicely? Courage
that far exceeded any actual ability to win reduced their unassimilated
populations mainly to pockets in Great Britain.

The New World had people who were _even worse_ at winning than
Celts and because of this, we have Canada. To be Scottish [3] is to be
able to say "We're marginally better at prevailing than the Beotuk" or
"armed with technology several thousand years more advanced than the
locals, we get our asses kicked slightly less often than we kick ass."
Of course, the fact that we were crawling with disease-carrying parasites
was also useful.

The Atlantic slows this process but it does not stop it: we see
wave after wave of incomers even now. The trick we in the New World
recently picked up (but the Chinese had for a while) is assimilation [4]:
populations may replace other populations but the nation-state survives.

James Nicoll

1: Aside from maybe the Basques, we all did this and so shouldn't complain
when it gets done to us. In fact, given the latter days of the Neandertals,
even the Basques probably did it.

2: In Taiwan, the locals picked option 3, which was to become Polynesians.

3: In the New World sense. The people in Scotland use this weird-ass "actually
born/raised/moved to Scotland" definition.

4: Speaking of assimilation, there was an article I read recently about
the solution to the question "Where did Argentina's black population go?"
In 1900, Argentina had lots of people who were called black. Now they
have very few. It turns out, based on genetic research, that they didn't
die out or leave or fail to reproduce. Instead, they just started calling
themselves white.
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
.

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