The New Right Wing Talking Points

It would appear that we have a new rash of talking points escaping from the right wing:

Back here, I dissected what has to be one of the most meaningless "polls" ever released. I had thought that the idiocy would have died out, but no, we find ourselves having to listen to yet another idiot commentator talking about this poll as if it were some kind of gospel truth.

There used to be a book entitled "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics", but this is as close as I could find.

The next talking point that is being run around is the "multiculturalism doesn't work" saw, being dredged up in light of the recent arrests in Toronto. Before you make such a broad, sweeping generalization, we have to also look at the alternatives:

Attempting to achieve some kind of genetic/cultural purity? - oh yeah - it's been tried before. Remember the "National Socialist" party in Germany a few years back? Started something called WWII? Oh, and in case you missed it, that nasty little business in Rwanda more recently. Not only impractical, but fundamentally doomed to fail from the start.

The Melting Pot - unofficially the name for US cultural assimilation policy. How effective is it? Well - the 9/11 terrorists trained and lived in the United States; and Timothy McVeigh was about as "all American" as they come - I guess that doesn't make so much difference either.

Multiculturalism - Neither better nor worse than the melting pot notion. Canada's had it's dances with the loonier side of things a few times (say, the FLQ, for one example); and the UK has had its own experiences - whether you refer to last year's train bombing, or the actions of the IRA through a very long period of time.

The argument that multiculturalism simply causes subgroups of society to isolate themselves from one another, weakening the overall notion of nationhood. Quite frankly, this is a load of crap. It takes two or three generations for new immigrants to "merge" with the predominant culture in a new land - no matter what the "philosophy" in place might be.

The cry that "multiculturalism has failed" is a misguided attempt to justify a xenophobic direction in Canada's foreign and immigration policies. We have already seen the first shadows of such policy coming forth from the Harper government, and it apalls me.