Who do you think will win the Vienna state election ?

[platypeanArchcow]

I'm sorry Hash, I have to de-lurk and barge in, because the stupidity in this thread is causing me insomnia.  Everyone ganging up on poor Antonio for staking out the sensible position.

politicus: I like how the literally the only examples you can come up with of places that have always been ethnically homogeneous are islands and frozen fuсking wastelands.  Everywhere else national territory has been a result of either 19th-century assimilationism (in Western Europe) or 20th-century ethnic cleansing (notably in Eastern Europe, but also pretty much everywhere else.)  There is nothing natural about the nation-state, it's a terrible 19th-century idea that has led and continues to lead to the deaths of countless millions of people.  Of course people should have the right to stay where they please and to form communities there, and access to the various protections that are accorded to minorities in a democratic society.  Why is it important to form a majority in "your" country?  Why is it harmful for other people to move in, assuming that economists are right that it's pretty much always economically beneficial?

Additionally, the conceptual confusion that nation-states engender between, say, ethnic Germans and natives of Germany seems to be a problem for a Europe that includes the children of immigrants.

Helsinkian: Surely you understand that there's a huge difference between a right not to have your land occupied by a country in which you have no stake and a right to a nation-state.  In theory, a one-state solution in which a democratic Israel relinquishes its claim to being a Jewish state and begins to represent all the people of Palestine would be a perfectly reasonable way to end the oppression of Palestinians.  In practice, of course, this is unworkable because after nearly a century of colonial relations the two peoples hate each other.  It's a weakness of democracy that it's unable to right wrongs that were perpetrated before it.  In North America we've "solved" this through genocide, making the original inhabitants an irrelevant minority.  But imagine if Jews had originally started to move to an independent, democratic Palestine, rather than to a British colony, and had themselves moved in as immigrants rather than colonists.  Then we would not be having this discussion right now at all.