There's just too many factors to prove cultural tendencies for certain crimes. We just don't know. Most studies show that the biggest factor is poverty. Which has nothing to do with culture at all.
[Consults the linked chart...]
Your immigrants from Vietnam and India are committing crimes at only a little above the rate of locals. In fact, they commit less crime per capita than immigrants from Denmark and Norway. Do you think Danish and Norwegian immigrants are poorer and have a harder time getting jobs in Sweden than Vietnamese and Indians?
The fact that that statistical difference exists at all I think proves my point.
Dude! If immigrant populations all committed crimes at about the same rate,
that would prove your point. When both an observation and the opposite observation prove your point, that's a sure sign that you're protecting your point with an unfalsifiability engine.
There's just too many factors, other than culture or ethnicity that come into play. It could be any reason for that difference. But my money is on that there's nothing inherent in Indian or Vietnamese culture that makes them less prone to crime than members of the Swedish or Danish culture.
What the heck does "inherent" mean? I hear this sort of argument all the time and never cease to be amazed that anyone thinks it's substantive. When someone gripes about immigrant culture oppressing women, someone else inevitably points out that this long predates Muhammad, that traditional Christian societies do it too, that Turkey is far more fair to women than Saudi Arabia, yada yada, in order to prove that oppression of women isn't "inherent" to Islam. Well? So what? Even if the immigrants are beating their wives for purely accidental reasons having more to do with events in the 1960s than with a thousand years of their forefathers reading the Quran, so what? You're still bringing in hundreds of thousands of wife-beaters! Likewise, whether the high criminality among Chilean immigrants is inherent to Chilean culture or merely has some remarkable non-culture-linked causal history, so what? It doesn't change the reality that if you bring in a hundred thousand more Chileans your crime rate is probably going to rise.
There is no culture FOR poverty.
Why do you believe that? All over the world we find communities living side by side where one does a far better job than the other of keeping themselves out of poverty. Chinese fled from war and Mao to all over Southeast Asia, and typically wound up a lot richer than the locals after a few generations.
So you think the goal of Chinese communism was to make everybody poor? You don't think that the goal was to make China rich but that they were just bad at it? Everybody has a goal to become rich. People are just differently good at it.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood. By "FOR", you meant "in favor of". I took you to mean "tending to cause", as in "He carries a gene for cystic fibrosis". My mistake. Let's try that again...
...the source countries of people more than three times as likely to commit crimes as Swedes are as follows: Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Chile, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Syria.)
... Most studies show that the biggest factor is poverty. Which has nothing to do with culture at all. There is no culture FOR poverty.
Why do you believe that whether a culture is FOR, i.e. in favor of, poverty, makes the slightest bit of difference as to whether poverty has nothing to do with culture at all? What makes you believe that no place is poor due to the culture there tending to cause poverty, by teaching its members behavior patterns that make them bad at becoming rich even though becoming rich is their goal?
How will it pay for itself when you have cops whose job it is to try to catch refugees getting jobs and stop them?
If we stop doing that. Right now Sweden is artificially making immigration expensi
But you aren't likely to stop doing that. The first plan you proposed for getting your government to stop doing that won't work -- it would have a political consequence your ruling parties aren't willing to live with. You haven't proposed a plan B. So as far as I can see, your stupid, short-sighted, self-interested rulers are going to keep right on stopping refugees from working. So the immigration won't pay for itself.
Are you still talking about the study of the Mariel Boatlift? As you pointed out yourself, the U.S. didn't stop Cuban refugees from getting jobs. How will this immigration pay for itself when you have cops whose job it is to try to catch refugees getting jobs and stop them?
Now I'm confused. Are you arguing for or against immigration? Now it looks like you are arguing for immigration.
I don't see what's confusing you. What in that quotation looks like I'm arguing for immigration? I'm saying Sweden won't do what it needs to do to make the immigration pay for itself, so the immigration will not pay for itself, so it's stupid for Sweden to bring in the immigrants.
Do you mean you're confused because I'm not arguing against immigration
into America? I'm pro-immigration to America. I've personally worked on several immigrants' legal cases. America knows how to absorb immigrants without it harming our country. But countries that can't figure out how to do that would be wise to take in few immigrants. Still confused?
True, the arrival of the Cuban refugees didn't suppress wages overall; but it had a brutal effect on the wages of the people they were most directly competing with for jobs: local high-school dropouts.
Market-protection hasn't worked anywhere we've tried it. I think it's silly to rearrange an entire society to suit local high-school dropouts. It's a shame some people can't take the pressure. But we've got welfare for people like that. But most importantly it's to no benefit for society if we encourage people to stay in dead-end jobs.
Agreed; I was simply pointing out that your earlier claim that there wasn't even a short-term cost isn't supported by more recent research. In any event, preventing a mass arrival of migrants doesn't "rearrange an entire society"; allowing them in does that. So we've identified a class in your society who will be hurt by the mass arrival. Is there a compensating benefit to a different class? Whom in your society will be helped by their arrival, other than the party their children will eventually vote for? I think it's silly to rearrange an entire society to suit local politicians.
I was inviting you to explain whatever moral theory it is that implies subjecting your own citizens to the negative externalities of bringing into your country hundreds of thousands of refugees, some half of whom are de facto Nazis, is the right thing to do.
My point is that culture is adaptable and in constant change. Move an Arab from the Middle-East to Sweden and he will adapt. He will not become Swedish. He will adopt a third culture. A cross-cultural culture taking the best from each. That's been the pattern whenever there's any immigration anywhere.
Why do you believe that? What stops the newly developing third culture from instead taking a mix of the good and bad parts from the migrants' home culture and a mix of the good and bad parts from the host culture? Does the mixing of cultures have the magical power to cause people to be able to tell good cultural practices from bad cultural practices and reject the bad?
Elsewhere you wrote:
We had plenty of gypsy visitors. They're not bad people. But they do steal. They steal because they have nothing and they're effectively shut out of society. If you give someone no options but stealing, they're going to steal. And you can't really blame them for it. People respond to incentives.
Because they are so marginalised and such targets by racists they are extremely tight knit. This is good and bad. Good because they help each other. Bad because they pressure each other into a life of crime. And weirdly they have extremely strong moral codes. Extreme. And punishments are extreme.
So were the stealing, the pressuring each other into crime, and the extreme punishments the best parts of the culture of India, the best parts of Swedish culture, or the best parts of the culture of one of the intermediate countries Gypsies' ancestors migrated into and then out of?
...because of the Ottoman empire and the mess left in its wake. After the Empire fell apart opportunists have exploited the post-Ottoman chaos and seized power. And that's pretty much where they're still at.
If that's true, what difference does it make? All it could show is that it wasn't defects in 1916 Syrian culture that caused the present misery. As you point out, culture changes. So a defense of 1916 Syrian culture is no defense of 2016 Syrian culture. A cycle of violence does cultural damage; now Syria is full of damaged people caught in a damaged culture that turns half of them into Nazis. If that wasn't their ancestors' fault, but the Turks' fault or the French's fault or whoever's fault, that's not a reason to think 2016 Syrian culture isn't going to harm Sweden.
And while we're on the subject of your moral theory... What on earth do you perceive the semantic difference to be between saying "The Wu's have a natural right to be compensated dollar-for-dollar for the destruction of their house." and saying "The government destroying their house and paying them only enough for them to buy a twentieth of a replacement house is inherently unfair."?
I mostly apply pragmatic ethics.
That is a testament to the remarkable power of perspective to alter appearance. To yourself you look pragmatic. From the outside, you come off as the very opposite of a pragmatist -- you come off as a puritan committed to principle-driven deontological ethics. Given Sweden's current situation, it is difficult to imagine a more pragmatic policy than shutting the gates. You say Sweden should keep letting more in, even if it hurts Sweden financially, because it's the right thing to do. How much more deontological can you get?!?
I'm a relativist at heart. Usually there's excellent arguments on all sides in any debate, and the ethically correct choice lands on desired outcomes.
And yet, over and over again, when someone contradicts your views, instead of seriously considering his arguments to see if they're excellent you just call him a racist. You told one guy, an individual who from the outside looks every bit as puritanical and committed and principled as yourself, that you thought he had no morals at all. All too often, "relativist" seems to mean, "There's no objective truth about morality, no fact as to who's right and who's wrong; therefore I don't need to take seriously the possibility that I'm wrong."
To take China as an example. At the time of the Chinese revolution no farmers (the people who actually did the work) owned the land they were working. It was all owned by hereditary landowners who's only occupation was to collect rents and pay taxes. China was in desperate need of a land reform. Ie a revolution. Everybody with any sense could see that. Respecting natural rights and property rights in a situation like that is just dumb-ass.
I see, so you're basically arguing that if anybody claims something is a natural right, but you recognize that respecting that particular something is immoral, then this proves natural rights don't exist? Have you considered the more moderate possibility that maybe natural rights do exist but an aristocrat getting to own a county-sized piece of real estate he didn't pay for happens not to be one of them? Do you likewise assume that when it turned out there were no canals on Mars, that proved space aliens don't exist? Maybe the peasants had a natural right to a reasonable division of the land. Or maybe there are no natural rights to own land since the land was already there and somebody just occupied it, but people still have a natural right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Do you feel that the self-evident desperate need for land reform meant it was okay to shoot a landowner's children?
Karl Marx summed it up really well. In a stable capitalist market where nothing much happens there will be a slow and constant move toward more and more resources in fewer and fewer hands. That'll always be the end result in any capitalist free market system.
I don't see any reason to believe that. Marx's analysis was based on the Labor Theory of Value, which is a steaming pile of dingos' kidneys.
Which is what had happened in China.
Calling Imperial China a capitalist free market system is ludicrous.
I think it's good to respect natural rights when there's a good reason to and I think we should ignore them when we have a good reason to. Pragmatic ethics.
And yet you keep arguing as though stopping refugees from settling in Sweden is automatically immoral, regardless of pragmatic considerations, exactly as if they had a natural right to reside there.
