Anyway, pass the bodhran and lets sing Danny Boy…

By the way are you on facebook Metta? Drop me an email at baggzagain@aol.com if so.

I had a dog called Monty as a kid, it was a mongrel.

The insuance is so much cheaper than on pure breeds. of course breed and race were interchangeable terms for the 19th and early 20th C hence stupid terms like ‘the English race’ and ‘half breed’

In Germanic languages breed of dog is still Rass.

Maybe we should bring back the word breed

‘eeeeeugh and what brrreed are you’

‘London breed ma’am if you please’

The Kennel Club is Nazi eugenics in full flow and in the name of pure breed and pedigrees they are producing hideous mutants about time that the RSPCA and the BBC have pulled out of crufts.

I would only have a pedigree if i was a nutter that wanted to subject my dog to a painfull life and an early death.

No Hybrid vigour is the future.

You are no more of a mongrel than I am so don’t try and claim the mongrel highground.

In any event my heart is certainly as black as yours.

I don’t accept that there is nothing xenophobic in wanting a balanced NON DISCRIMINATORY immigration policy.

Rather it is the failure of political elites t address this that is causing the rise of far right policies.

I have two degrees in Anthropology and I have been called a racist by Marko the moment I open my mouth (actually its just me really ben on the thread on Asylum and why don’t you read what I said on asylum).

Marko has no sociological sphistication so he dismisses these arguments as racist.

In fact only academics and a small section of liberal media and the ruling political class in Europe act tlike this and think that the declaration racist must be the end of the debate.

Britain is now a country that has a communalist seggregates social structure that can deliver the muslim vote to any party that bids the highest.

Our society is becoming politically fractured.

The simple way of putting this is this way.

I have never ever on HP ever argued for anything other than a fair non discriminatory immigration policy like that of the US and Australia.

You cannot argue that the Australian policy is racist just because there are some racist Australians who don’t want any foreigners.

It is a fair non-racist points based system that manages immigration (at faily high levels ) but with regard to the integration of people while they arrive.

Policies of unrestricted immigration with no criteria are racist because they have no concern for the welfare and integration of immigrants into what if not managed can be a hostile environment.

These people absolve them selves of any responsibility to look at obvious issues of a managed policy because if (hopefully never) there is a terrible backlash against immigrants they will simply wag their fingers while shouting racists.

Well I am not prepared to allow some people to enable this situatioon to come to pass, merely becaue they will examine nothing that questions their sense of moral purity as anti-racists and theri right to declare who and what is racist.

Sorry if I am a racist and I am introducing racistmand xenophobia into mainstream discourse then we can talk no further on this.

I will not be silenced on these issues and I hope some people will wake up before its to late.

I am tired of being shoved in the streets in London by angry people with a sense of entitlement and greivance and no sense of communal decency.

I am migrating however (for a long maybe indefinite period) to a country where people are not white and speak another language but treat me with impeccable politeness and after a time when I reciprocate first politeness then show myself to be a reliable person who respects their culture some become my friends.

Call me a racist if you like. Iam not just a person with a strong sense of social responsibility that gets pissed up the wall in England.

Oh God this is all spinning out of control.

I am always telling marko and any one els who will listen to read Benedict Andersons, ‘imagined Communities’ all ethnicities are imagined to the extent that in remaking they are made up. Myth is not history.

All claims to blood and mysticism and land I find highly suspect if not down right fascist.

I was trying to highlight the paradox of us individually feeling an attachment to place that feels to be something essential about us vs national clims.

I am a weak political nationalist and not an ethno-cultural nationalist. i recognise that my name a part of ethnic nationalist 18th C Celtic revival is a confection with no real continuity in Wales at all.

I find all those silly dances and made up words in european cultures and those lumpen vernacular styles all fake.

Ethnic nationalism is fake yet ethnic differences are true.

I am weakly tolerant to ethnic nationalism in the sense that it preserves a cultural heritage (Irish Music is a living tradition and endlessly experimental) and gives people meaning and identity.

As a humanist I do not think it is my place to rob anyone of that certainly not for cheaper cleaners.

Identity is not useless. It helps us get to the end of a sentence.

If I say how much nonsense a lot of cultural ethnic nationalism then marko tells me I am a racist.

If I say cultural ethnic natonalism can be found through a degree of autonomy and absolutely doesn’t need the creation of another ethnically pure (at least concept) of a state, Marko says I am a racist.

If I say we can have a rational non racist Immigration policy marko calls me a racist.

If i say that he does have connections to a place (in London) that he would feel sad to see destroyed. he says I am accusing him of being a communitarian and an anomic liberal, and its a pretence this concern for equality and I am a racist.

If I said shit was brown and snow was white hewould call me a racist.

He is a radical libertarian free marketeer (see the thread above on asylum) and his ideological rational for unchecked immigration is his right wing free market political beliefs.

I don’t see why he should get a free ride on what I think is absolutely a divisive and catastrophic rationale for immigration that is anomic.

He mentions having cheaper services he never says he is prepared to pay higher taxes to ensure the equal access to public goods and social integration, resulting from his policies because he would think the market can solve it and his pocket eill remain heavier.

Of course you have a profound attachment to place in London.

That was what I was trying to explain to Marko, he might think of himself as a free floating autonomous island but he is not.

We are all shaped by community so we all have a municipal duty to the common weal.

(It was that that made me feel Wels no songs of blubells and winsome wenches with the harp playing. Methodist socialism is still (just ) alive in Wales.

Hell I am a Londoner since I was 19 it is the only place I have lived in the UK .

There are places that bring tears of sadness to my eyes, or chuckles of wry amusement when I go to them. I have also observed one place in central London where I have lived off and on for over 20 years and it has changed and it is the reduction in community that I notice most.

This has always been a place of immigration and of change sometimes far greater than we have now (the Blitz is almost unimaginable).

But what we have now is a rate of change combined with the economic effects of 24/7 casualised labour high rents and property purchase prices and over stretched infrastructure.

I am a hybrid and I like hybridity. I am a polyglot and more than usually culturally adaptable and have always felt I could live anywhere.

But I couldnt. I could not live other than for a year or so in a conservative closed authoritarian racially and ideologically pure society that is anathema to me.

But other people are not me as I have learned harshly in my personal relatioships.

Immigration is hard its hard for the migrant of course most people would prefer to migrate as a group and to maintain their own customs and language and this is perfectly possible as long as ethnicity is seen in humanitarian terms not in terms of political right.

Some of the most meaningful people in my life have gone back home because they want an end to the stress, they want to understand peoples jokes while standing at a bus stop.

it also appears that as we age the familiar is more important to us.

So yes I have learnt (against the arrogance of my brattish youth) via the intermediary of learning to respect other culures where i have often been alone, the only white man for miles around, and what they tell me gives meaning, a location for their lifes narrative if you like.

And I feel that a gentle and inclusive English culture is necessary for English people.

After all the liberal elite who most insistently push multi-culturalism have a very strong sense of their culture and their englishness.

The public school elites from the top public schools will never feel their culture (replete with all the assumption and trappings of power)challenged no matter how diverse and anomic society becomes.

Immigration is not the problem but mass immigration purely for (discredited) neo-liberal radical market economics reasons with a society shaking from the effects of 30 years of anti community policy.

A confident outward looking nationalism which is based on a degree of security has no problem integrating migrants and engaging in the social acts of reciprocity, found in all stable communities, with the newcomers.

How could I oppose immigration when I have often been the stranger in a strange land. I have though I think developed some insight into the structural conditions that predispose to me being treated politely and those that lead to hostility and the perception of me as something not quite human and a thing to be ignored or fleeced,

Thats all I want a new civically aware participatory hybrid culture that allows people to merge or retian their cultures (host and guest as they see fit).

I don’t find your comparison to the Tibetan case a good one. One thing is the Chinese government trying to colonize Tibet in order to change its ethic composition, while relegating the Tibetans at best to a status of second class citizens and destroying their culture, another thing is Britain, a free country that because of its dynamism attracts people from all over the world.

Of course immigration is an issue any democratic government must pay attention, and it is a sovereign right of any country to decide who gets in and who doesn’t. However, in a moment when Europe is living an economic crisis which causes had nothing to do with immigration, immigrants are increasingly seen as scape goats. The image of the white sheep expelling the black sheep speaks for itself, but I wouldn’t be worried if such line of reasoning was restricted to the far-right. But it is disturbing to see how racist and xenophobic arguments are penetrating mainstream political forces and being interiorized by moderate people. As a friend of mine said when I told him I was moving for another country, it is not a good moment to be a foreigner in Europe.

Like it or not, the kind of arguments that you presented here reinforces that tendency of infiltration of radical political ideas in the moderate mainstream electorate.

Now about your British humour on your comments, although I clearly fail to grasp the subtleties of the language, still there is a difference between irony and sarcasm, and a difference between sarcasm and poisonous comments, but maybe I am too politically correct or too strict. But I really feel that certain issues, immigration and race being one of them are not to be discussed lightly but rather that it is best to measure one’s words and keep the speech in a more acceptable record, and above all never to make it personal. That is what the preview button is there for.

I may possibly develop a different kind of attachment. But I disagree that it is not possible to be attached to places in London (to be honest I find that a little insulting) and fear such such dismissals of a constantly-changing society which is just as much a part of my life as the sweet shop in Wales is to you,still invoke in me pictures of Serb Nationalists shelling the mongrels of Sarajevo. That is not to suggest in any way that you would be amongst them,but it may be some kind of an acceptance that the “pure” are always programmed to dismiss the “impure” as second-rate as Monty has been doing all thread

I have a certain disdain for a kind of academic you are right, I was one and I found it unbearably claustrophic in its disciplinary narrowness and interdepartmental conflicts.

A cloying sanctimoniussness about the place. Which is a shame because i am still commited to the norms of Scholarly endeavor but of a more renaissance kind.

I do regard the social and political sciences as having produced little of worth over the last 20 years except an obsession with identity politics at the expense of social solidarity, and an unhealthy obsession with denunciatory claims of racism.

In fact if you forget about the surface words of PC exactitude and scratch beneath to the logic such as it is you find an essentialinsg of cutlrue and race and ethnicity that is absolutely racist.

As I say if Tibetans are defending a proud cultre by defending themselves fromhan ethnic dilution but British people arguing against immigration are racist what exactly is going on?

Indeed many so called anti-racists supported the recent Tibetan riots that included some horrendoulsy vicious attacks on han Chinese.

In fact ethnic dilution is just a PC good victim word for immigration or Transmigration.

If you said British culture is being destroyed by ethnic dilution, everyone (including myself I admit) would dismiss that person as a racist.

I still find it hard to believe that a white person calling another a white boy is being racist as whiteness in this country is not a subordinate racial status.

If one black person calls another ‘Nigga’ you might say they have internalised the racism of their previously subordinate status.

Personally I hate it but in the US it is common among African-americans. I must admit i was pleased when a black friend called me a ‘dumb nigga’ (yes sometimes it is important not to pretend to be colour blind, thats another form of racism, to pretend to not see a difference you are immediately aware of is just silly and can cause rea offence).

He did admit however that he wouldn’t like it if i used the word to him’no’ he ‘laughed ‘you ain’t that much of a nigga’..

So my final point on this is yes I accept that I was exceptionally childish using an english schoolboy sort of humour, because i think Marko is primly uptight about somethings.

I do not despise him quite the reverse I know he is a good sort really I do not think he is hateful or badly intentioned. I do not despise him but some of his views.

So I was also self parodying in my satire, about my sexuality, my skin colour (he brought that up not me) and my body type (you would automatically think me fat, I put good money on it).

So a fat white boy calling someone who is white (and almost certainly less fat than me) is parodic not abusive.

Do you understand this mocking self mocking English humour Sarah.?

I do realise other people find it childishly unfunny, but what can I say? its like slapstick or Carry On films, its part of my culture, its naff, but I find it funny.

I gave him so many targets for free that he could have come back on. Shame he just wont play.

Well I should have said in acadme an accusation of racism stops all debate (that’s why after making the accusation marko says stop digging) but of course not with us stroppy types.

About ethnicity.

Well mine was allways problematic, as would anyones be if you were made to wear a leek to school.

And I reacted against my Father. But in the last couple of years since he has been ill and passed away I have ben there a lot more and I feel a lot more Welsh.

Undeniably when your Father dies you feel like a little boy, but if you go to a nearby village and find the same bubble gum machine on the wall of the same shop where it always was.

Well I am trying to write a prose poem it is so richly densely compacted in meaning.

I never thought I had an attachment to place but it is impossible not too, this is how we evolved.

Yous say there has always been change everwhere at all times.

Yes but not at the same rate. and further more big population movments are rare. Human beings traditionally (and still for most people) never move beyond a 40 mile radius of where they are born.

It ws always thus. In some of the MTt DNA testing of a 9,000 year old cheddar gorge skeleton a local history teacher gave a sample simply in order to help calibrate the test against a modern genome.

He turned out to be a direct descendent on the Maternal line.

I understand some of the human attachment to place now better.

I also think it is so hypocritical of those who would argue for displacement levels of immigration in some areas (that is what mass means) yet profess to feel something fo the displacement of palestinians or Kasmiris or Tibetans.

You often read in the liberal MSM of how the han Chinese are destroying Tibetan culture by ethnic dilution (ie immigration) and how we must support the poor tradiional Tibetans and their culture.

At the same time any fears articulated about mass immigration here is met with ‘deal with it racist’.

My afinity for Wales now is more to do with the fact that it preserves aspects of the social democratic communitarian world i was born into.

And of course I find my argumentative streak is just the norm for presbyterian traditions.

In fact if you move to the socialist republic of Sheffield I think you will rapidly develop an attachement to a place and its people that is simply no longer possible in most of London.

There is no East End of ‘Eastenders’

I think you will go, I think Mrs Graham is going to get her way and you will go trudgin over the moors with a sense that you have always lived there.

lets not blow this out of proportion.

I am white I have blue eyes but I can go very dark in the sun. It is curious but I actually change race if you will.

When I was in Venezuela recently I was a Gringo until I tanned then I became Brazillian (I have a slight Brazillian accent as I learned Portugese there before I learned Spanish)

I have an ethnic look somewhwere between Eastern europe and the middle east, many people think I am Jewish.

I am a hybrid but whatever I look like itis definitely not English.

Pikey, Gadj diddicoit etc are very pejorative so I s Gypsy. People call themselves travellers if they are non Roma, or Roma.

My Grandmother came from a settled and more or less integrated (easy because the south walians are often dark haired and dark skinned).

You must understand that my self revelations were not to score points to refut Marko’s accusation that I just didn’t like dark skinned people who spoke funny languages.

I find that unbelievably outrageous. How dare anyone say such a thing when they know nothing about a person.

He accused me of being a white person who didn’t like Black people and foreign cultures and languages.

That is fighting talk for me.

You accuse me of reverse racism. Well it is really just racism. If I were non white and made such comments but I did so because I knew exactly how he would react.

I find his attempts that you can hate white people and non white people for their skin colour and still be a racist.

Surely my point was if you hate all skin colours equally then you are not racist you just hate people.

That was the sole reason for those comments. Stupidly i thought marko would be trapped in a trap of logic and dissapear.

But know. You see he knows I am a racist really because I disagreed with hinm I must be.

Anything I say must be further proof to the witchfiner that I am a witch.

Oh he has one other line about class.

If anyone mentions class they are being chauvinist because class doesn’t really exist but (in a paradox only Marko can manage) they are also discriminating against him and prejudiced because he is middle class.

So this is a form of yes RACISM (I’m not kidding read the threads its all there).

Anyway
Desculpe si he pertubado os sentimentos de Vc. Abracos

But if you want to read something shocking why not read Markos post on the next thread up on Asylum and immigration where he states that he is quite happy to destroy the traditional culture of the UK as it makes services cheaper for the middle classes.

Really try and keep your haughteyness to your self.

OK you don’t like schoolboy childish insults and humour. Then don’t read them.

I am rather more concerned by the sticks and stones behind Markos arguments (such as they are).

I really do argue, as do others that his arguments which are nothing but the consensual neo-liberal market justification (as if that was not discredited) are the cause of the rise in BNP support and other anti-immigrant forces.

He is basically empoyed by the Henry Jackson Society (look it up please.

He is also prepared to accuse anyone who disagrees with him of Racism an accusation that in a work situation could easily lose them employment.

But you like so many others seem to think this is ok. WEll I don’t

I am sorry but I have nothing but contempt for such a person and will use childish insults to indicate my contempt and ridicule.

Just like he does for the BNP and anyone who disagrees with him.

I will insult someone who feels it is his entitlement to destroy the social cohesion of a society for the price of a few services.

So get out of the way. It is obvious you still havn’t read the arguments yet you feel free to judge me.

I do not feel judged I think you just look silly and humourless coming in like a school mistress saying ‘you disgusting little boy’.

Well yes it is little boy talk because he refuses to discuss like an adult I am now blowing rasberries, because this is the only level that gets to him.

He always steps first across an adult boundary of debate into personal abuse which he thinks he is entitled to because in his mind he has decided his enemy is a fascist.

BTW there was until recently a shop in London called ‘Dirty White Boy’ it is not racist because linguisticaly that phrase does not mean its black coloured opposite. Thats language for you.

BTW Calling someone a gypsy in Iberia does not mean exactly the same as calling someone a pikey or gypsy or diddicoit in England and Wales there are relatively so few Gypsies (more travellers) and they are so completely apart from society (living in caravans or by myth in houses where they have burnt all the doors) that they serve an exemplary role of the lowest level a person could fall to.

To call someone a pikey is to refer to their poverty, their shoes, their home and their morality and criminality it is allways a violent and abusive term. You could say I am a Gypsy no-one could say I am a pikey (unlike nigger or queer it is not capable of radical reappropriation)

Anyway I don’t want to have a conversation as you have a view of me that you will now like to maintain. Thats up to you.

I will apologise to Marko when he apologises to all the non-racist people he has abused who simply have a different view on how best to manage immigration in the long term interests of society and the migrants themselves.

I am an anthropolgist by training and worked for years in developing countries on development and health issues ( where I never encounterd the PC nonsense of Marko) where if you are a racist people wont work with you and the country doesnt let you come back,

10 years ago I retrained as a Barrister and the cases I have fought have only been legal aid or Pro Bono, in the areas of race, Sex and Disability Discrimination, Assylum, Immigration, Deaths in Custody, Actions Against the Police, criminal law.

A Barrister is paid by a solicitor, most of my clients were obviously not white. If you are racist the solicitor wont use you again and the clerks wont give you work.

But know a Henry Jackson revolutinary libertarian free marketeer feels he is entitled to call me a racist.

Well the silly little boy can fuck off.

Please stay out of our silly feud (bbut there is a serious issue behind it) because I think you are a decent thoughtful and compassionate person who jumped in (understandably when I look back at the last exchanges) at the bitter end of a dispute.

I do apologise for the way this thread has decended and the offense my words may have caused to others reading them de novo.

I will not apologise to Marko because he is stubbornly ignorant and he protects this with passive aggressivness (he is always such a victim) an apology has to be a mutual affair.

BTW I, My Mother, brother and sister are fat.