Reflections on FOSDEM [LWN.net]

Reflections on FOSDEM

Posted Mar 11, 2017 15:51 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Reflections on FOSDEM by Wol
Parent article: Reflections on FOSDEM

One person in one in England is a foreigner. There are really very few (read: no) pureblooded Picts and Celts left.

The only question is how far back you go. (In my case, to WWII and the last Kindertransport, so I'm kinda sensitive to rising racist nationalism :( )

to post comments

Reflections on FOSDEM

Posted Mar 11, 2017 16:08 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

Likewise. My family were lucky. Doktor Albrecht Paetz was very famous (look him up on the web, I was shocked at how many references I could find) and we were distant enough to avoid being classified as Jewish.

Cheers,
Wol

Reflections on FOSDEM

Posted Mar 11, 2017 16:24 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

Replying to myself - if Poles and Romanians and all the others want to come to Britain, and assimilate, and learn to play Rugby and Cricket and all that (I'm currently watching the Six Nations, we're 15-0 down right now :-(, I have no problem with that at all. Britain has always welcomed European refugees, and if they want to assimilate then that's fine.

What I do NOT want is people coming here, keeping their own ethnicity, and destroying my country in front of my own eyes. You can't stop change, but if it happens too fast you will get a backlash, that's what nix fears, and that's what I fear.

I think it was Michael Portillo (his family were refugees from the Spanish Civil War) who coined "the cricket test". And he could, because they were refugees.

At the end of the day, I want people who are patriotic, who believe in their own country. What I don't want is people who are nationalists - "my country is better than yours". And current international politics - both European and American (and yes, the description of Britain as "America's poodle" has been much too accurate for my liking in recent years) are doing their best to create nationalists of all colours.

Cheers,
Wol

Reflections on FOSDEM

Posted Mar 12, 2017 16:08 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

You realise that the "ethnicity" you are referring to is entirely cultural, and has changed radically virtually every century for the past half millennium or more? Rugby and cricket are less than 200 years old and most English play neither on a regular basis and don't even watch it much (football is the thing: India and Pakistan are the beating heart of cricketing life these days). 500 years ago we were burning people for being the wrong religion (and changing our minds about what religion that was every so often); five years ago we were burning people for running the wrong text editor (oh wait). This stuff changes all the time. Trying to keep it like it was when you were young is a strong sign that you have become an inflexible old fart, but not diagnostic of anything actually useful. It's certainly not a sign that your country is being destroyed: stagnation will destroy a polity far more certainly than ongoing change will.

Also, you're cherry-picking, unless you also want to bring back terrible food, post-war rationing, and workhouses, which were part of English culture for far longer than, say, the NHS ever was. What about wife auctions (legendarily used as a workaround for divorce being illegal, oh, we should ban that again too, it was illegal in England for far longer than it was ever legal so it must be right). These things were all part of the culture you aspire to, but apparently you don't want those bits.

Reflections on FOSDEM

Posted Mar 13, 2017 9:43 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

all the others want to come to Britain, and assimilate

You have to go back in history only 60 years. 200000+ Hungarians left for the West after the failed revolution in 1956, they assimilated without barely leaving a trace. For example my wife's uncle left at that time, none of his children speaks Hungarian. The welcoming country should make sure that the immigrants are not staying at the same place, in blocks, so they assimilate better, but that's all it takes. Remember, those people not only go to Britain, they also escape their own country (and sometimes traditions). Many of them leaving not only for financial reasons, but for "cultural" reasons.

Reflections on FOSDEM

Posted Mar 14, 2017 11:45 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

By the way, if I were you, I wouldn't worry about the Poles and Romanians. They mostly have fair skin, their second generation will blend in nicely with the natives (some family names will be strange, but that's all). I would rather worry about the immigrants arriving from parts of the world that used to be under British rule. They might have very different skin color even in their second generation which might cause conscious or subconscious prejudices in school (they'll get lower grades) and in the job market (they'll get bad jobs or not at all) and that leads to problems like the shooting at Bataclan. BrExit doesn't solve this problem, but might make it worse if you have to hire Yemeni bus drivers instead of Polish.

We're not talking about FOSDEM anymore

Posted Mar 14, 2017 13:45 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

This discussion, too, has reached it expiration date, I think; these are not issues that can be worked out on LWN.

Reflections on FOSDEM

Posted Mar 13, 2017 12:19 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Even the royal family is mostly of German extraction these days (and has been for a while). Remember that they had to have themselves renamed to “Windsor” in 1917 because “Saxe-Coburg-Gotha” didn't have the proper patriotic ring to it if you were currently fighting a war against the actual Germans, whose emperor also happened to be a cousin of the reigning king.