IMMIGRATION thread

[Montmorency]

And what do you base this on? I would put my money on nativism or some nebulous cultural maxim.

There is some intersection between what we said.

The 19th c. was driven by European states (and to some extent the US) transitioning to new economic modes while managing internal political activism and the export of ideology.

The 20th c. was about the maturation of super-populous industrial economies in need of resources and markets, the friction they experienced amongst each other as they developed weighty managerial states with both huge powers and huge obligations, and the sparking and steaming that resulted.

What we are seeing so far in the 21st c. is the genuine maturation of nationalism (which is ultimately inextricable from nativism) along increasingly fragmentary and incongruous lines, some being new and some being forged composites of ancient distinctions ...

And even this is but a subset of the 'pluralism saturation'. You see, there are too many identities coexisting at the moment, and in historical terms they are all absurdly powerful in the magnitude and scope of their expression, yet there is no clear way for one identity or its competing constituents (e.g. nerd, feminist, patriot, connoisseur, pervert...) to settle in amongst the rest; in other words, I'm drawing a parallel between national states bursting at the seams in the 20th c. on the way to establishing an international order.

So what we should see now is a culling of identities, including national identities. 'Everyone is queer' is not a stable circumstance, and we will see some kind of process of consolidation.

[Gilrandir]

Ms is a title for a female which doesn't reflect their married status. Thus, a marriage-neutral term, and it was used correctly in both circumstances. PFH was probably referring to the fact a 14-yr old cannot be married, and should be "Miss" anyway.

The titles (which grammatically are appositions) perform a differentiating/identifying function. For instance, Colonel Smith serves to differentiate him from Major Smith, His Highness is clearly different from His Majesty or His Excellency. Thus, titles presuppose at least a two member opposition. Calling any woman "Miss" cancels this opposition rule and doesn't differentiate the woman from others, so it becomes empty which is contrary to the funtion of the title.

You see, there are too many identities coexisting at the moment, and in historical terms they are all absurdly powerful in the magnitude and scope of their expression, yet there is no clear way for one identity or its competing constituents (e.g. nerd, feminist, patriot, connoisseur, pervert...) to settle in amongst the rest

If you mean that those identities can't coexist in one person, I don't think you are right. There is an idea of possible worlds (suggested by Leibnitz) which in one of its reading says that a person lives in different possible worlds: in one he is a father, in the second he is a teacher, in the third he is a son, in the fourth he is a husband, in the fifth he is a customer, in the sixth he is a lover etc. These epitomes don't exist simultaneously, one of them surfaces at a given moment (say, when you are spending time with your kids your are a father), while others "stand by". When you come to the office you stop being a father and your CEO epitome switches on. Curiously, different epitomes can be axiologically different - one may be a good CEO, but a bad father, a pleasant customer, but a horrible husband.

If we adopt this approach, the different identities you speak of may not be mutually exclusive - one can be a patriotic feministic nerd who is a connoisseur in pervert games.

[Montmorency]

The titles (which grammatically are appositions)

Appositions are something entirely different. Everything you said afterward is invalid.

If you mean that those identities can't coexist in one person, I don't think you are right. There is an idea of possible worlds (suggested by Leibnitz) which in one of its reading says that a person lives in different possible worlds: in one he is a father, in the second he is a teacher, in the third he is a son, in the fourth he is a husband, in the fifth he is a customer, in the sixth he is a lover etc. These epitomes don't exist simultaneously, one of them surfaces at a given moment (say, when you are spending time with your kids your are a father), while others "stand by". When you come to the office you stop being a father and your CEO epitome switches on. Curiously, different epitomes can be axiologically different - one may be a good CEO, but a bad father, a pleasant customer, but a horrible husband.

If we adopt this approach, the different identities you speak of may not be mutually exclusive - one can be a patriotic feministic nerd who is a connoisseur in pervert games.

What I was saying is that we are presently going through a period in which identity partisanship is intense in magnitude at the same time as there is a proliferation of identities that are similar in cultural importance and influence. What this means is that these identities, especially ones that explicitly conflict with each other, cannot settle easily into equilibrium as they are all too forceful with respect to each other. Furthermore, all of these identities are internally-riven with internecine contest over fundamentals. The world has never been more pluralistic, but the space for identities is too crowded, similarly to typical cases involving population groups/political units.

Think of how many cases we have today of Identity A partisans engaging in a vocal and public, even existential, struggle against partisans of other identities that they consider to be infringing or threatening their broad worldviews and ways of life. These identities are all very powerful in historical terms due to the confluence of population growth (i.e. more partisans), technological innovation (i.e. higher capacity to grow the identity convergently, divergently, or against other identities), and capitalist economics promoting an amenable environment (i.e. labor binds all identities together and lubricates the fault lines). On the other hand, partisans cannot find resolution as opposing identities are comparably powerful in the immediate circumstances. Identities do compete with each other (both within and across individuals), but multiple similarly-strong forces grinding against each other builds tension, so to put it simply we have:

1. Many identities
2. Many partisans
3. Limited capacity for identities in the current environment to dominate or decisively overwhelm each other.

So fear, anger, and other passion will continue to build up. Since the world wars powerful states have generally outsourced many of their powers to multinational corporations, and in return the corporations created an economic framework in which nations and states had incentive to focus on production and service above all else. Thus we see some people claiming that we have seen an unprecedented and perhaps permanent decline in violence and warfare. However, the modern economic framework has become badly frayed and people are left to focus on their identity partisanship and resistance against perceived hostile identities. An obvious outlet of that would be into nationalism and parochialism in general. Moreover, since it would be challenging for the economic and political orders to both recover and assuage tension between identities, the trend is really toward a 'meltdown' and subsequent stabilization. The most simplistic interpretation would be armed ethnic conflict leading to another round of large-scale wars in Europe and elsewhere, but the whole issue is further complicated by the fact that we cannot even begin to factor in the inevitable disruptive effects of climate change and new technologies...

I'm not going to comment on this thesis in the thread anymore - it's making me wince to read it.

[Gilrandir]

Appositions are something entirely different. Everything you said afterward is invalid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apposition

Apposition is a grammatical construction in which two elements, normally noun phrases, are placed side by side, with one element serving to identify the other in a different way. The two elements are said to be in apposition.

I may be wrong about many things, but the language (English in particular) is what I consider to be my special province.

However, the modern economic framework has become badly frayed and people are left to focus on their identity partisanship and resistance against perceived hostile identities. An obvious outlet of that would be into nationalism and parochialism in general.

If a nation has had its identity for quite a time, it (the nation) tends to grow acquisitive as to other identities. Thus the tendency towards internationalisation prevails. The nations who have been robbed of their identity and whose identities are in the state of shaping expose an opposite tendency - nationalism. In modern Europe both tendencies are evident within one supernational formation (the EU) which causes tensions were are witnessing.

[Montmorency]

I may be wrong about many things, but the language (English in particular) is what I consider to be my special province.

The article has no connection to anything you wrote. Which is why I pointed out that what you said was invalid...

[Gilrandir]

The article has no connection to anything you wrote. Which is why I pointed out that what you said was invalid...

If you didn't find any connection (though the definition of apposition was quite explicit), here's one more definition:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apposition

a grammatical construction in which two usually adjacent nouns having the same referent stand in the same syntactical relation to the rest of a sentence (as the poet and Burns in “a biography of the poet Burns”)

Ms in Ms Merkel performs the same identifying function as poet in poet Burns. It is true that they identify the person according to a different criterion (marital satus in the former and occupation in the latter), but the type of criteria doesn't change its identifying/differentiating nature.

[Montmorency]

No. Not at all.

You said this:

The titles (which grammatically are appositions) perform a differentiating/identifying function. For instance, Colonel Smith serves to differentiate him from Major Smith, His Highness is clearly different from His Majesty or His Excellency. Thus, titles presuppose at least a two member opposition. Calling any woman "Miss" cancels this opposition rule and doesn't differentiate the woman from others, so it becomes empty which is contrary to the funtion of the title.

What you said has nothing to do with apposition as you have cited it. Moreover, what you said is invalid. Titles and honorifics (indeed, any noun phrase) denote something in themselves, and their usage is not predicated on the existence of similar-but-distinct phrases. If that were the case, then a sentence like "The entity Angela Merkel is leader of Germany today" would invoke a paradox. I think you may be confusing yourself with some kind of distortion of Saussure's claim that "in language there are only differences without positive terms".