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Old 01-25-2011, 02:50 AM
Deckard
issue 37
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: South Wales
Posts: 1,244
Re: Dutch on verge of getting most right wing government in the EU, in dutch history
Quote:
Originally Posted by human151
saying everyone needs to have freedoms to do what ever they want, within the law. is one thing. Outside cultural forces changing the indigenous culture is another, and there should be a distinction.
Well not only would setting a distinction between the two require a list of what constitutes "indigenous culture" in the first place (not laws, but culture), it would also require a blind spot to all the cultural 'outside influences' you've accepted in the past, either knowingly or unknowingly.

My thoughts go something like this:
  • Unlike a country's legal system, its culture is NOT set in stone.
  • At any one time, a country's overall culture is dependent on the people in it and influenced by the sum total of what has gone before.
  • Culture is not and never has been uniform for everyone.
  • Citizens (immigrant or 'indigenous') should have equal rights, responsibilities and freedoms
  • That includes equal freedom to dress, eat, dance, sing, marry whomsoever they wish.
  • It also includes the freedom to oppose or dislike or even abhor alcohol, revealing clothes, consumerism, promiscuity and homosexuality.
  • However the LAW requires a tolerance of others who enjoy those things, and a freedom to challenge and be challenged back.

Find something disagreeable about an attitude or custom? Then oppose the attitude or custom - not people of an entire religion (because that's way too broad).

Also feel free to take your argument up with the government allowing the scope or scale of immigration that's sparking this apparently disagreeable cultural change. Address it at the immigration stage. Not at the "once they've got here" stage. Because once they've got here, they are citizens, and they have the same freedoms including the freedom to be different. That's not some liberal PC nonsense. It's quite simply that if they don't have that latter freedom - to be different - then they have LESS freedoms than indigenous people who also choose to be different or more culturally influenced from other countries.

Last edited by Deckard; 01-25-2011 at 03:08 AM.