Go Humans! (A Reply to Unaccountable)

I was replying as a comment, but that tends to break the chain, so I'll 'bump' it to a post of it's own. For the uninitiated, Jay and I have jousted on this topic at length, so if I'm leaving any apparent non-sequiturs I apologize.

Says Unaccountable:
As you should be. It’s a *different* country.
One would think you (not you-you) have enough brains and respect for, in this case, Budapest that you would learn their bloody language.
Buuuuuuuuuuut, as you even note with signage at work: the US caters to the Spanish language speaking people. Fuck learning English!

My Retort:
From what I’ve seen, the effort to learn English is not lacking on the part of the recently arrived. I think the bilingual break room signs are a courtesy so that someone doesn’t commit a faux paus without knowing it. And I can attest that some of the Mexican immigrant crews we’ve had working in assembly (presumably legal immigrants, our HR department is pretty careful, and we pay competitive wages) have raised the bar for performance. For unskilled labor, a soft, fat ‘born here’ American benefits greatly when his/her performance has to stand up to someone who recognizes that $10/hr is pretty good for a job anyone can learn in a day.

As far as it being a ‘different country,’ I place a firm limit on the acceptable level of chauvinism I allow for nationality. Look at Iraq, the Balkans, Turkey, Palestine: at a certain point, when you get too insistent on boundaries, assimilation, and nationalism, it leads to genocide and civil wars. On the one level, it would be easier for the U.S. to get out of Iraq by dissolving it, letting it be Kurdistan, Sunni Iraq and Shiite Iraq. Three countries. But do that, and brace yourself for a repeat of what happened just a few miles north of there in the equally hodge-podge former Yugoslavia.

Says Unaccountable:
Then you’re in denial. You’re playing the small percentages. Those that come over to WORK, fine. While I think it’s outright ludicrous that there are jobs that ‘americans wont do’ – and that’s a whole other story- these immigrant labourers you speak of are the minorities of the minorities-that-will-eventually-be-majorities.
There are a great many that come over and then invite their entire clan to live in a 1- bedroom flat. Land of the free has many meanings.

My Retort:
There are definitely slacker immigrants. But I don’t see it as a greater proportion than the home-grown ones. For illegals, I’m sure there’s a higher percentage of people who get squeezed out of a job by an INS crackdown and find out that America on welfare and food stamps is better than working yourself half to death for less in Mexico. Some indolence is natural to humans, we all have it to a degree. But the ‘system’ can definitely raise the malingering quotient.

And yes, I'm aware that I'm in a narrow and shrinking majority as a honkey, a good reason for picking up a bit of Spanish so I can better understand newcomers to the melting pot. If I learn a few phrases, even badly pronounced, in conversation, a new American (legal or otherwise) may learn considerably more from me. You're an ex-pat, how many times have you had to say, basically, "I want the, how you say???" If no one in your area spoke any English, how fast would your German have caught up? And isn't there a significant proportion of Swiss (I imagine this varies greatly by region) who primarily speak French, and a handful who speak Italian, though that's probably on the warmer side of the Alps, not to mention a small Romany population?

Says Unaccountable:
Again with France, your citing a social problem for the *French* people living in France versus a situation of many non-French living in France. These social structures are in place. They will *not* change (see below in that they never should have been allowed to mutate to this stage).
Blaming the system for the actions is pretty weak. That’s their *excuse*, not their REASON.

My Retort:
They may or may not use it as an excuse, but in any case, the entitlement mentality in France is systemic. The recent rioters are more visible because they’re unassimilated (as was most of Europe’s pre-WWII Jewish population, and as is still the Romany of central Europe). Going back to the French Revolution, the French have been economically stuck in a socialistic mode whereby they try to reverse the aristocratic system and tax the wealthy so the poor might live as nobility. Except the pyramid doesn't yield the same largess to the recipient when you reverse the flow; and the more you penalize the creation of wealth, the less wealth there is to redistribute. I'd send you a copy of Frédéric Bastiat's 'The Law,' which spelled out back in 1850 what is still fucked up with France (maybe it's not fixable if they can't figure it out after 150+ years and two major wars), but it turns out, you can read it online, being public domain and all. It's a short book, but instructive and thought provoking.

I'm not excusing the Islamic rioters, but nor do I excuse the French Chefs who go on strike and throw eggs at the riot police because they only get more vacation time than any other service industry workers on earth and are paid not quite what French doctors. It's just funnier to see French riot police putting ketchup on the eggs as a counterblow than to see villages destroyed.

Says Unaccountable:
You’re the country with people adopting kids and throwing them in a “box”.
I’d say you’re welllllll past full-up.

No need to get to a point of Asia, like you cite, where people are crawling all over each other like ants and _then_ say, “Shit, we’ve gone too far”.

Perspective and securing the levee BEFORE it breaks, I understand, isn’t really an American concept, but that’s one of it’s many, many (many, many) problems.
Nip the potential-problem in the bud, then, if lucky, you wont have a real problem(s)

With all these political and social issues, if such action and thinking were actually done…we’ll we’d possibly have little to bitch about.

My Retort:
You and I have gone back and forth plenty on the population issue, and if you're going to cite news stories in the U.S. of abused/abandoned/murdered newborns, I'd point out that they are newsworthy because they're unusual. In the first place, most such babies are aborted, which amounts to the same in my book, but not in yours.

Second, I'd point to places like China, where abandoned babies are about as newsworthy as a non-injury rush hour fender-bender due to China's idiotic attempt to 'control' its population (a policy which, coupled with cultural factors, is leading to one horny group of young Chinese dudes who want to know where the girls went).

From Malthus to Orwell (I'm thinking in terms of 'Road to Wigan Pier' and 'Down and Out in Paris and London' not his dystopian fables), to Paul Ehrlich, there have been pessimists going back to the dawn of the Enlightenment who were sure we were going to outgrow our range.

What all such pessimists forget to factor in is exactly what you say causes the problem: humans adapt their environment as well as adapting to their environment. Our greatest catastrophes tend to come from over-shooting the one (i.e. DDT crop dusting) or underestimating the need to do the other (i.e. building major cities below sea level in hurricane prone deltas).

Where actual freedom of markets and movement of people flourishes (regrettably, the historical exception to the rule of totalitarianism, going all the way back to the first known civilizations), people figure out how to get more food out of less land, how to fit more people on less land, etc.

Americans could stand to learn a few lessons from cities like Tokyo which has had to learn to live with both the ocean's rage and volcanic/earthquake activity and support an incredible population density. Apply that level of human ingenuity and an acceptance of the natural forces you're up against, and you could probably support the entire 6 billion people on earth just in the Great Lakes watershed (presently only 43 million of the earth's population lives there).

As far as your rationale that more people means more stupid people, it also means more geniuses. It'd be nice if we could figure out some kind of way of predicting it, no one can drive in rush hour traffic and not fantasize about intelligence eugenics, but geniuses often spawn from morons and brilliant people often have dull and lazy kids.

War and engineered famines (such as the one going on in Africa right now, affecting almost 200 million people who could easily be fed to the point of having to worry about their cholesterol numbers) are not good at weeding out the stupid. The military has an annoying way of attracting otherwise bright individuals by pandering to an adolescent boy's natural fascination with fighter jets, bombs, aircraft carriers, belt-fed machine guns, and college money. Well, the American military does. Other countries tend to take everyone of age, which is no improvement, as those armies tend to be the ones that end up on the receiving end of 'shock' or 'awe' and the same MOAB makes cinders of the brilliant and the dull.

As far as stopping before you've gone too far, I say it's hubris to claim to see the edge. Just like prophets of doom claiming the end of the world is near will eventually be right, the people claiming the earth can't support more people will eventually, I assume, be proven right. What joy they'll have in their victory dance, gasping 'I told you so' as they, too, shed this mortal coil.

Personally, I'd rather root for my own team, 'Go Humans!' And may the hand of God, or avian flu or airborn ebola virus or whatever, strike me down if it is otherwise.

'Right, don't stand their gawking like you've never seen the hand of God before!'