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Comment on John Howard says he ‘always had trouble’ with the concept of multiculturalism

surreptitiouswalk@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

What’s the difference between “respect their culture” and “Federation of tribes and culture”. Either you take the view that “respect their culture” means allowing people to retain and freely exercise their culture in public, e.g. speaking their language and celebrating their cultural events publicly, in which case it’s really indistinguishable to a federation of cultures. The alternative view is, people can only speak English and practice English cultural things in public, in which case is that really “respecting their culture”?

I suspect Howard is dog-whistling the latter, because Australia is doing the former, and it certainly doesn’t sound like he’s supportive of that, otherwise why would be have so much trouble with it?

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muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Language has nothing to do with it except that its extraordinarily useful to have everyone speak the same language the easiest way to achieve this would be to choose the language that the largest number of people speak so we will end up with English huh what a surprise.

As for difference in “respect their culture” and “Federation of tribes and culture” is simply that federation of tribes and cultures is needlessly putting people in boxes (makes it easier to win a vote by appealing to extremist boxes we witnessed this with trump) but other than that all its doing is dividing people based on ethnicity/religion/race doesn’t sound very equality-like to me. Maybe the solution is we let people have there federation of tribes and cultures and they are all equal but separate. Now where have I heard that one before.

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- surreptitiouswalk@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Forcing other people who have a shared language to not speak that language to each other sounds more divisive than allowing people to speak to each other in whatever they want to.
  
  But honestly why would you care? Does it bother you that you’re unable to eavesdrop on a conversation you have no part in? If they want to speak to you, then they’ll speak English.
  
  Also I didn’t notice anywhere in my post that suggested people shouldn’t learn to speak English. You put that up as a strawman argument.
  
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  - muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Bro im not claiming people should speak only english. My point was literaly that its irrelivant
    
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    surreptitiouswalk@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    And the other point is you talked about Trump, which is the height of irrelevant since we are talking about Australia. If you’re not Australian, get the fuck out of here. We don’t need US politics infecting our country.
    
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    surreptitiouswalk@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    its extraordinarily useful to have everyone speak the same language the easiest way to achieve this would be to choose the language that the largest number of people speak so we will end up with English
    
    I’m not sure how else I was supposed to interpret this. Maybe instead of being cryptic, just spell out what it is you’re saying instead.
    
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