Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that mainstream Islam, since then 1970s, has morphed into something closer to extreme ultraorthodox Judaism or an extreme branch of Christianity. And this is certainly an obstacle to integration. But it is not irreversible, and I think in particular rejection by a foreign host culture serves to reinforce that extremism. North Korean defectors have a lot of trouble assimilating in South Korea, despite speaking the same language. Their hard drives are formatted differently, their software is different. The goal of a host society should be to study where the differences present themselves acutely and how to alleviate the pain and rejection of individual emigrants without accepting extremism or compromising the values of the culture into which they have immigrated. This means teaching individualism and the importance of education and self sufficiency rather than doling out welfare subsistence, but it also means the mainstream culture must actively try to embrace the individuals who wish to become part of mainstream society. Europe fails in both.

W/r/t the failure of the US toward Black people, I completely agree with the sibling comment by user:avz and would have nothing more to add.

>The goal of a host society should be to study where the differences present themselves acutely and how to alleviate the pain and rejection of individual emigrants without accepting extremism or compromising the values of the culture into which they have immigrated.

Doesn't that presuppose the conclusion? That such emigrants should be received regardless of how fundamentally different their hard drives' formatting is? Why should that be?

If South Korea did not have strong familial and ethnic ties with North Koreans, it would never accept any NK defectors at all, and said differences in software would a big reason why. Heck, one can imagine the South putting up walls to prevent a large-scale influx of North Koreans after the Pyongyang regime collapses.

I like this coding analogy. Would they willingly accept 20 million people with bizarre and incompatible software? Yes but barely because it's in the same language? China has even less desire for the NK regime to fall, as the formatting and language would disrupt the balance in Manchuria.

But I'm not talking about what they want (whatever South Korea says they want about reunification). I mean what preparations are they making for absorbing that mass of people in the event that it happens... in particular, turning them from a faceless mass into prosperous and contributing individual members of a modern westernized society. South Korea has put a lot of study into that question, as did West Germany. So why can't France? They did control a good portion of the Muslim world for a couple of centuries, after all. What's the difference between the potential collapse of Algeria and the collapse of NK, or at least what is the plan for it?

No one wanted civil wars in Syria and Libya that would send millions of refugees to Europe, but there has been no systematic approach to integrating them and, let's say, updating their software. The prevailing view seems to be that this is temporary rather than just a fraction of what is to come. Anyone looking at the demographics can see that if Europe fails to inculcate its Enlightenment values into its immigrant population within a generation, those values will cease to exist. So I mean what is the real plan?

I am not sure if this argument holds for France and its Muslim citizens. Historically, France didn't "control a good portion of the Muslim world for a couple of centuries."

They ruled Algeria for about 130 years, and Tunisia and Morocco for less than half that. Syria and Lebanon for a measly 26 years. That's barely a blip in historical terms. Plus some bits of West Africa with Muslim populations. That hardly counts as "a good portion of the Muslim world."

So it's rather decades here, not centuries. And more like "strategic chunks", instead of "good portion". Let's not conflate limited colonial holdings with some kind of vast Islamic empire under French rule.

Maybe I exaggerated. But France controlled essentially all of Muslim west Africa at one point or another, and France's former colonies are the overwhelming source of their immigrant population. Outside of Quebec, the Francophone world is largely Muslim and African. For that reason, the analogy should hold: The people flooding into France were former subjects and partial citizens. South Korea views all Koreans from the North as citizens and has a plan for their integration, just like Israel views all Jews from Ethiopia or Morrocco or France as citizens; and has plans to absorb them. What is France's plan?

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