bootlegga bootlegga:
I understand what you're saying QBC, but at the same time, technology and globalization has helped mankind too.
I read somewhere that a learned man circa 1500 knew enough to fill roughly one page of a newspaper. Today, the average person knows far more than that, about dozens of topics and places. Technology has also granted us the gift of travel so that we may see foreign cultures far more easily. 500 years ago, it was a perilous, life-threatening journey to see Asia or the New World. Today, it's as easy as getting on a plane. Now we can marvel at places and events that used to simply be an entry in an encyclopedia or book. I can walk on the Great Wall of China or visit the Pyramids in Egypt. I know from my own travels, yes you can see McDonalds in Tokyo or Paris, but you can also see the Meiji Shrine and the Eiffel Tower. And trust me, a shopping mall (the few that exist) in Japan is nothing like one in Edmonton or Los Angeles...
To me this website is an amazing example of technology. It has connected all of us in a way that 25 years ago would have been impossible. That's truly incredible in my books.
Animals, cultures and languages and even civilizations have always disappeared, so this is nothing new. It is happening faster these days, but just like the woolly mammoths disappeared 10,000 years ago and countless cultures (ever hear of the Akkadians or Etruscans these days) have disappeared, it will continue to happen. Does that make it right? No, but it is the way of the world unfortunately.
Good post.
Personally, I think that the erosion of
cultural barriers between people has been a wonderful benefit of our modern world.
Look at this site where we bring together people from almost every major country in the world, we have the major world cultures represented, and we can readily exchange ideas with each other from the comfort of our homes and workplaces.
Give it a century or two and we may well have a world government not so much because the socialists imposed it on us (as they often try to do in the UN) but simply because the people of the world may no longer see themselves as separate from each other. A one world government might one day just be purely practical.
Absent the barriers of language and xenophobic cultures people will inevitably come together.
And what I say about the world in the future is eminently true at the national level today.
When people who come to Canada, for instance, become Canadian then Canada becomes a better place to live and is enriched by the contributions these people make to everyone else.
But when people come to Canada as
colonists to establish
enclaves of their respective languages and cultures and when they
isolate themselves from everyone else then of what benefit are they to Canada as a whole?
Who gives a rip how wonderful their culture might be if they won't share it with anyone else or worse, as in the case of the Quebecers, where they prohibit anyone else from sharing their culture and language in Quebec? How can anyone say these people contribute dick to to nation as a whole when their daily actions serve to set themselves apart from everyone else?
Heck, you want to see multiculturalism in it's purest forms?
Go to the Balkans.
Screw multiculturalism.
CKA Uber 
CKA Moderator 
