Quote:
Originally Posted by kool maudit
(* I will note that I count many of these delightful scarf-wearers among my friends, and have had many nice dinners where everyone at the table was from a different country and we spent the evening exchanging information about Canada, Russia, Egypt, Switzerland, Pakistan, or whatever the mix was in an entertaining fashion.
The fault of these people isn't that they enjoy this, it's that they think dropping 100,000 Moroccans into a working-class Amsterdam suburb will inevitably produce similar results.)
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It appears to be rapidly fading but a good chunk of both the élites and the general population in western countries are still in a fairly optimistic ethos. In Canada this is what leads us to think that because we've done all right with legal alcohol it's probably ok to go one step further and legaliza marijuana. It's also what leads the NHL to think that the success of NHL clubs in non-traditional hockey markets pretty much guarantees the eventual success of hockey in the desert.
Always being open to going one step further because nothing really bad happened at the previous level has become an important facet of our culture. There is even a pretty strong belief among many now that nothing bad will EVER happen.
Regarding immigration, it's of course extremely easy to find communities in the U.S. where most everyone is of a continental European non-anglo origin and is today living according to the anglo-normative "white American" stereotype.
Even in "old" (sic) Europe there are towns in places like the Hainaut region of Belgium where most everyone is descended from Italians who came 50-100 years ago to work in the coal industry but they're today all basically francophone Wallons like everyone else who surrounds them.
With a track record like that, it's no wonder that so many people are confident in the robustness of the "model".