Re:Ununhexium weapons program, eh?
on
The Onion in 2056
·
· Score: 1
Not sure whether you were just trying to be funny or not but:
Ununhexium is one one six (atomic number 116).
Hexium would be just atomic number 6 (carbon).
If I were to desribe your country using derogatory words, you'd fell the same way.
Whenever someone on Slashdot bitches about America, the vast majority of the Americans are more than willing to join in. So, perhaps your statement is correct only as long as the country in question isn't the USA.
I'm saying that "the left" employs quite a bit of newspeak in the form of political correctness and revisionist definitions in order to suit their political ends. Interestingly enough, the people who are far too eager to compare anything that "the right" does to 1984 tend to just keep their collective mouths shut when it comes to these dubious actions of "the left." This is either because they did not truly understand what 1984 was all about, or because they believe the ends justify the means and therefore keep their objections to themselves. Either way, it does not bode well for them.
Thousands upon thousands of gay couples exist and have built families and shared committed lives together.
Good for them. What does that have to do with marriage? You can do all those things outside of wedlock.
In other words, they've adopted the lifelong commitment of marriage (they don't get many married-folk benefits from the government, alas).
Any why exactly should the government give people benefits for coexisting or loving each other? Marriage exists for two reasons: to bind the man to the woman so that he doesn't leave after he impregnates her and to allow the perpetuation of the society and culture by providing incentives for people to procreate and raise their own kids. Of course, marriage no longer seems to be fulfilling those criteria properly, but that just means that it should be reformed, not abandoned.
Even if you want to look at it backwards and say that equal-rights proponents are updating marriage to match the reality of gay couples, I doubt you could say in honesty that they were doing it for political reasons.
I'm saying that there is no longer a single word in the current English language (newspeak, if you will) to describe a contract between a man, a woman, and the state for the purpose of facilitating the creation and upbringing of children. This was once a concept that you could express with a single word. Revisionists, however, will say that this was never the case, and marriage was always between "two people who love each other very much."
"We have always been at war with Eurasia," I suppose.
All those quotes seem to be from the Old Testament/Tanakh, so while they are a good indictment of Judaism or literal interpretations of the Old Testament, it is more or less inconsequential against Christians, who (as far as I know) are supposed to take the New Testament (the part of the Bible written after Jesus) over the Old whenever they contradict.
That being said, Jesus strikes me as a socialist hippy so I never quite understood why people of that faith and Christians never got along better. I mean "turn the other cheek," "love everyone as if they were your brother/sister," and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" are part of both Jesus' suicidal teachings and socialist peacenik dogma.
The first place to start, as George Orwell would tell you, is by questioning people who want to change the definition of words in the language for political purposes.
Interesting that such a comment would probably never come up in a discussion about same gender marriage, no?
I have an ant farm. I could choose to micromanage every ant in that farm; however, I don't because I just don't care enough. If the ants erect a monument in my favour, I might reward them with more food. If not, they don't interest me enough to care about them, and they can do whatever they want, however they want. They just aren't going to get any help from me.
Except that neo-conservatives aren't all that religious. Religion has never been and probably never will be a central tenet of neo-conservatism. Just because neo-conservatives hate Christians a little bit less than they hate socialist peaceniks doesn't mean that they are the same thing.
Maybe you should look up what a term means before you use it. From wikipedia:
"But domestic policy does not define neoconservatism; it is a movement founded on, and perpetuated by an aggressive approach to foreign policy, free trade, opposition to communism during the Cold War, support for beleaguered liberal democracies such as Israel and Taiwan and opposition to Middle Eastern and other states that are perceived to support terrorism. Thus, their foremost target was the conservative but pragmatic approach to foreign policy often associated with Richard Nixon, i.e., peace through negotiations, diplomacy, and arms control, détente and containment (rather than rollback) of the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the process that would lead to bilateral ties between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the U.S. Today, a rift still divides the neoconservatives from many members of the State Department, who favor established foreign policy conventions."
Maybe if you think God should be some sort of socialist big brother.
The way I see it, God as you defined it is a libertarian. If you are over the age of maturity, and you tell me that you are going to shoot yourself in the face, and you then proceed to shoot yourself in the face, it isn't my fault that you shot yourself in the face; it is yours. Similarly, you still had the choice of whether your were going to shoot yourself in the face whether I knew about it or not.
Additional cash prizes went to the other top 50 finalists, who are working or studying in the United States and in 16 other countries, from Scandinavia to central Europe to Hong Kong, Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
I know we have the EC, but 'central Europe' is now a country? When did we get downgraded from a continent?
Scandinavia, Honk Kong and Korea aren't countries either...
The Gmail Notifier 0.3.3 plugin for Firefox is working for me just fine, so if they're actually trying to block third party notifiers, they aren't doing a very good job...
We're going to be the first to make an official launch
No, some individuals living within the same political borders as yourself could potentially be the first to do it. I don't see what you, me, or any other Canadian not working on any of these projects is doing to make them part of the "we." I think its time we stopped the nationalist bs. Do you honestly think it's only ugly when Americans do it?
On a related note, I think it would be quite ironic if Canadian citizens did win the X Prize seeing as the Canadian government and most Canadians (they keep voting for those guys) seem to detest private industry and much prefer government dominance. The X Prize itself is designed to privatize an industry dominated by the government, whereas Canadians are keen to have the government take control of industries dominated by the private sector. Nothing illustrates my point better than the 2004 Leaders Debate where Jack Layton was complaining that (get this) private clinics were operating in Gatineau and no one was doing anything to stop them. None of the other party leaders called him on it, which just goes to show where they stand on the issue...
Anyway, don't blame me. I voted for the Conservative candidate in my riding.
rm/etc/make.profile
ln -s/usr/portage/profiles/default-x86-2004.2/etc/make.profile
Thats it. The profile tells portage which packages to use. The only difference between gentoo releases are the new profile, and the GRP binary packages are rebuilt. Simple huh?
The parent is quite right, and unlike 2004.1, which used the 2004.0 profile for x86, 2004.2 comes with a new set of profiles. Here's some documentation covering the subject of profiles. The document hasn't yet been updated to reference 2004.2; however, it is still very useful. Anyways, if you want to update to the 2004.2 profile you can follow the parent's suggestions, or you might want to use the "new-style locations":
# rm/etc/make.profile
# ln -s/usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2004.2/etc/make.profile
where x86 should be replaced with your current architecture: alpha, amd64, arm, ppc, sparc, or x86, although not all of those architectures have 2004.2 profiles
Of added interest appears to be the/usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2004.2/gcc 34 profile, which automatically updates gcc to 3.4.1 on the next emerge -aDvu world.
Interesting that you should refer to people who live in Quebec as 'those bloody Quebecers' but then don't expect any reply. Should I understand that in addition to being a racist, you are also incapable of being coherent.
It was a bit tongue-in-cheek; I'm sorry it wasn't conveyed properly. By the way, are you so quick to call other people racists when they refer to other cultures, such as Americans, in a demeaning and offensive manner? If so, we really need more people like you; nowadays, in Canada, it's common to hear things that would be considered racist if said about any culture other than the Americans, yet no one says anything to those people.
There are French Canadians in all parts of Canada.
There are also Hungarian Canadians in all parts of Canada; however, that doesn't make those parts Hungarian Canada.
there are a lot of people all across the country who come from non English speaking countries and speak their native tongue very well
Yes, and the majority of those people also have a decent grasp of English; certainly more than have a decent grasp of French.
In case you can't follow your own threads let me assure you that these 'bloody Quebecers' don't really care if you don't speak French if you don't live in Quebec. Are you trying to imply that Quebecers would like everyone in Canada to speak French? If you are, you are sadly mistaken.
Whether they care or not doesn't change the fact that if it wasn't for their adherence to the French language I would not have had to learn French.
What you're espousing is the American way, not the Canadian system.
I never meant to create the impression that I was espousing the Canadian system (in fact, I'm not sure where you got that idea from); however, it should be noted that I am not exactly espousing the American system either for the simple reason that the American system has failed. As long as people refer to themselves as Latino-Americans, African-Americans, or whatever-Americans, (and yes, I realize that those are supposedly "ethnicities", however, cultures form around these fictitious divisions) a (successful) cultural melting pot does not exist.
I believe that diversity in language and culture is a good thing.
Then why are you so quick to want to sacrifice Canadian culture (yes, they used to have one before all this multiculturalism stuff got started) and American culture for the noble goal of multiculturalism. If you truly believe that cultural diversity is a good thing, aren't two more unique cultures a good thing? The move humanity should be making should be toward individuality and complete inclusion, not division and "communities" based on what one's ancestors did. But anyway, with the birth rate approaching 1 in Western Europe and far below the required approx. 2 required to maintain a stable population even in the US, which has the highest birth rate of any major western country, combined with the upcoming rise of both China and India as superpowers, and the inevitable decline of the US as a superpower, Western Civilization is bound to approach extinction anyway; the concept of multiculturalism is only accelerating this natural outcome a bit.
Plus Quebecoise girls are intrinsically hot.
Why is it that every time someone mentions multiculturalism, they mention hot/attractive girls/women belonging to other cultures/ethnicities/whatever? What is wrong with the women in the place where you live? This trend seems to be bordering on discrimination a bit.
When you say culture A is "better" than culture B, what metric are you applying?
Personally, I've never said any specific culture is better than any other specific culture; I merely wish to introduce the notion. There are plenty of metrics you could use i.e. contribution to the sciences, productivity, how they interact with other cultures, etc. There doesn't have to be one magical all-encompassing metric.
The Nazis were a political group, though you might make the (sketchy) argument that followers of a particular brand of politics constitute a culture.
And when the vast majority (yes, I know not each and every German was a Nazi) of the people of a country are devout followers of the beliefs of one party, that is a culture. But, if you insist, I'll rephrase my original statement, although the point remains: The moment you accept that "The beliefs of majority of Germans circa 1940 were evil by the standards that we would use today" you accept that all cultures are in fact not equal. There are other examples of cultures which are understood to be evil / inferior (especially among those with left leaning views, who at the same time believe in multiculturalism) see "The South", America, colonial England, cultures which supported the crusades, etc.
To make an analogy, if someone were to try to murder me, I'd fight back.
What if trying to murder you was a crucial part of their culture. Wouldn't fighting back be intolerant?:P Ok, this point isn't a crucial part of my argument, but I just thought I would throw it out there anyway.
It doesn't mean they're less of a person than I am,
Ok, now this point I want to contest. Are you saying that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were not lesser persons than yourself. I can understand being tolerant, but everything within reasonable bounds.
Political correctness is one thing. Tolerance and cultural sensitivity is another.
Well, at least we can agree on this point. I'm glad someone finally agrees that political correctness has very little to do with tolerance and cultural sensitivity. Political correctness is the antithesis of free speech, not of intolerance and insensitivity.
You are a moron if you don't see how language can be tied to culture. Please look up culture in a dictionary.
First, I'd like to mention that your argumentum ad hominem really displays your level of tolerance.
Yes, I understand that people generally relate language to culture. Yes, language may very well affect the manner in which you think; however, the main reason language is associated with culture is because people who can communicate with each other (speak the same language) share ideas and cooperate in other ways forming a culture. By the way, the definition of culture I use is "shared beliefs and values of a group: the beliefs, customs, practices, and social behavior of a particular nation or people."
Interesting that you had to learn French in a French community.
No, I learned French in an English community. I live in English-Canada (the vast majority of Canada) where almost all the people speak nothing but English.
I find it a bit funny that you prefaced that statement "Multi-culturalism is ok" with "Repeat after me." It seems that a lot of people have convinced themselves of the validty of this statement without giving it much thought. Repeat after me: "We are all individuals."
Do you believe standards are bad? Do you think a million different "standards" should exist merely for the sake of diversity? For humanity to be productive, we have to standardize on a language we all understand, be it English, Portugese, or Esperanto. Besides, the idea that language is tied to culture is nothing more than moronic. Yes, fractured languages "preserve" cultures in the sense that they prevent people of different cultures from sharing aspects of their cultures and integrating aspects of other cultures more easily into their own. In other words, fractured languages create artificial barriers among people preventing the natural mixing of cultures that would normally occur. Personally, English is my third language, and I am more than happy to speak and write it (I also had to learn French as my fourth in order to appease those bloody Quebecers).
Now that that is out of the way, we come the the subject of culture itself. Multiculturalism shouldn't be about artificially creating a thousand small cultures; it should be about merging the best elements of cultures.
Finally, I'd like to address the often mentioned concept that "all cultures are equal." The moment you accept that "Nazis are evil" you accept that all cultures are in fact not equal. I'm certainly not saying that American culture is the ueber-Culture which should assimilate all others (I'm not even an American), not am I implying that American culture is the best culture by any means. I merely wish that we would put all this politically correct garbage behind us and examine the situation instead of ignoring everything around us and repeating to ourselves that "Multi-culturalism is ok."
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure whether you were just trying to be funny or not but:
Ununhexium is one one six (atomic number 116).
Hexium would be just atomic number 6 (carbon).
If I were to desribe your country using derogatory words, you'd fell the same way.
Whenever someone on Slashdot bitches about America, the vast majority of the Americans are more than willing to join in. So, perhaps your statement is correct only as long as the country in question isn't the USA.
The greek orthodoxy is Christian. Google it.
I'm saying that "the left" employs quite a bit of newspeak in the form of political correctness and revisionist definitions in order to suit their political ends. Interestingly enough, the people who are far too eager to compare anything that "the right" does to 1984 tend to just keep their collective mouths shut when it comes to these dubious actions of "the left." This is either because they did not truly understand what 1984 was all about, or because they believe the ends justify the means and therefore keep their objections to themselves. Either way, it does not bode well for them.
Thousands upon thousands of gay couples exist and have built families and shared committed lives together.
Good for them. What does that have to do with marriage? You can do all those things outside of wedlock.
In other words, they've adopted the lifelong commitment of marriage (they don't get many married-folk benefits from the government, alas).
Any why exactly should the government give people benefits for coexisting or loving each other? Marriage exists for two reasons: to bind the man to the woman so that he doesn't leave after he impregnates her and to allow the perpetuation of the society and culture by providing incentives for people to procreate and raise their own kids. Of course, marriage no longer seems to be fulfilling those criteria properly, but that just means that it should be reformed, not abandoned.
Even if you want to look at it backwards and say that equal-rights proponents are updating marriage to match the reality of gay couples, I doubt you could say in honesty that they were doing it for political reasons.
I'm saying that there is no longer a single word in the current English language (newspeak, if you will) to describe a contract between a man, a woman, and the state for the purpose of facilitating the creation and upbringing of children. This was once a concept that you could express with a single word. Revisionists, however, will say that this was never the case, and marriage was always between "two people who love each other very much."
"We have always been at war with Eurasia," I suppose.
All those quotes seem to be from the Old Testament/Tanakh, so while they are a good indictment of Judaism or literal interpretations of the Old Testament, it is more or less inconsequential against Christians, who (as far as I know) are supposed to take the New Testament (the part of the Bible written after Jesus) over the Old whenever they contradict.
That being said, Jesus strikes me as a socialist hippy so I never quite understood why people of that faith and Christians never got along better. I mean "turn the other cheek," "love everyone as if they were your brother/sister," and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" are part of both Jesus' suicidal teachings and socialist peacenik dogma.
The first place to start, as George Orwell would tell you, is by questioning people who want to change the definition of words in the language for political purposes.
Interesting that such a comment would probably never come up in a discussion about same gender marriage, no?
From your link:
"The mebibyte is closely related to the megabyte (MB), which can either be a synonym for mebibyte, or refer to 10^6 bytes"
Or perhaps 1 048 576 flaws.
Well, the universe doesn't seem able to reproduce, so by your argument, it must have been created by some sort of creator...
Consider this hypothetical scenario:
I have an ant farm. I could choose to micromanage every ant in that farm; however, I don't because I just don't care enough. If the ants erect a monument in my favour, I might reward them with more food. If not, they don't interest me enough to care about them, and they can do whatever they want, however they want. They just aren't going to get any help from me.
Except that neo-conservatives aren't all that religious. Religion has never been and probably never will be a central tenet of neo-conservatism. Just because neo-conservatives hate Christians a little bit less than they hate socialist peaceniks doesn't mean that they are the same thing.
Maybe you should look up what a term means before you use it. From wikipedia:
"But domestic policy does not define neoconservatism; it is a movement founded on, and perpetuated by an aggressive approach to foreign policy, free trade, opposition to communism during the Cold War, support for beleaguered liberal democracies such as Israel and Taiwan and opposition to Middle Eastern and other states that are perceived to support terrorism. Thus, their foremost target was the conservative but pragmatic approach to foreign policy often associated with Richard Nixon, i.e., peace through negotiations, diplomacy, and arms control, détente and containment (rather than rollback) of the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the process that would lead to bilateral ties between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the U.S. Today, a rift still divides the neoconservatives from many members of the State Department, who favor established foreign policy conventions."
Maybe if you think God should be some sort of socialist big brother.
The way I see it, God as you defined it is a libertarian. If you are over the age of maturity, and you tell me that you are going to shoot yourself in the face, and you then proceed to shoot yourself in the face, it isn't my fault that you shot yourself in the face; it is yours. Similarly, you still had the choice of whether your were going to shoot yourself in the face whether I knew about it or not.
Additional cash prizes went to the other top 50 finalists, who are working or studying in the United States and in 16 other countries, from Scandinavia to central Europe to Hong Kong, Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
I know we have the EC, but 'central Europe' is now a country? When did we get downgraded from a continent?
Scandinavia, Honk Kong and Korea aren't countries either...
The Gmail Notifier 0.3.3 plugin for Firefox is working for me just fine, so if they're actually trying to block third party notifiers, they aren't doing a very good job...
We're going to be the first to make an official launch
No, some individuals living within the same political borders as yourself could potentially be the first to do it. I don't see what you, me, or any other Canadian not working on any of these projects is doing to make them part of the "we." I think its time we stopped the nationalist bs. Do you honestly think it's only ugly when Americans do it?
On a related note, I think it would be quite ironic if Canadian citizens did win the X Prize seeing as the Canadian government and most Canadians (they keep voting for those guys) seem to detest private industry and much prefer government dominance. The X Prize itself is designed to privatize an industry dominated by the government, whereas Canadians are keen to have the government take control of industries dominated by the private sector. Nothing illustrates my point better than the 2004 Leaders Debate where Jack Layton was complaining that (get this) private clinics were operating in Gatineau and no one was doing anything to stop them. None of the other party leaders called him on it, which just goes to show where they stand on the issue...
Anyway, don't blame me. I voted for the Conservative candidate in my riding.
From the article:
Price points and product names weren't discussed
So where did $199 come from?
# rm
# ln -s
where x86 should be replaced with your current architecture: alpha, amd64, arm, ppc, sparc, or x86, although not all of those architectures have 2004.2 profiles
Of added interest appears to be the
To upgrade from XFree86 to X.org:
/etc/portage/package.keywords
# emerge -C xfree
# ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge xorg-x11
The more correct way of doing this would be:
# emerge -C xfree
# echo "x11-base/xorg-x11 ~x86" >>
# emerge -av xorg-x11
Works fine for me using Firefox 0.9.1 on Gentoo.
Interesting that you should refer to people who live in Quebec as 'those bloody Quebecers' but then don't expect any reply. Should I understand that in addition to being a racist, you are also incapable of being coherent.
It was a bit tongue-in-cheek; I'm sorry it wasn't conveyed properly. By the way, are you so quick to call other people racists when they refer to other cultures, such as Americans, in a demeaning and offensive manner? If so, we really need more people like you; nowadays, in Canada, it's common to hear things that would be considered racist if said about any culture other than the Americans, yet no one says anything to those people.
There are French Canadians in all parts of Canada.
There are also Hungarian Canadians in all parts of Canada; however, that doesn't make those parts Hungarian Canada.
there are a lot of people all across the country who come from non English speaking countries and speak their native tongue very well
Yes, and the majority of those people also have a decent grasp of English; certainly more than have a decent grasp of French.
In case you can't follow your own threads let me assure you that these 'bloody Quebecers' don't really care if you don't speak French if you don't live in Quebec. Are you trying to imply that Quebecers would like everyone in Canada to speak French? If you are, you are sadly mistaken.
Whether they care or not doesn't change the fact that if it wasn't for their adherence to the French language I would not have had to learn French.
What you're espousing is the American way, not the Canadian system.
I never meant to create the impression that I was espousing the Canadian system (in fact, I'm not sure where you got that idea from); however, it should be noted that I am not exactly espousing the American system either for the simple reason that the American system has failed. As long as people refer to themselves as Latino-Americans, African-Americans, or whatever-Americans, (and yes, I realize that those are supposedly "ethnicities", however, cultures form around these fictitious divisions) a (successful) cultural melting pot does not exist.
I believe that diversity in language and culture is a good thing.
:P Ok, this point isn't a crucial part of my argument, but I just thought I would throw it out there anyway.
Then why are you so quick to want to sacrifice Canadian culture (yes, they used to have one before all this multiculturalism stuff got started) and American culture for the noble goal of multiculturalism. If you truly believe that cultural diversity is a good thing, aren't two more unique cultures a good thing? The move humanity should be making should be toward individuality and complete inclusion, not division and "communities" based on what one's ancestors did. But anyway, with the birth rate approaching 1 in Western Europe and far below the required approx. 2 required to maintain a stable population even in the US, which has the highest birth rate of any major western country, combined with the upcoming rise of both China and India as superpowers, and the inevitable decline of the US as a superpower, Western Civilization is bound to approach extinction anyway; the concept of multiculturalism is only accelerating this natural outcome a bit.
Plus Quebecoise girls are intrinsically hot.
Why is it that every time someone mentions multiculturalism, they mention hot/attractive girls/women belonging to other cultures/ethnicities/whatever? What is wrong with the women in the place where you live? This trend seems to be bordering on discrimination a bit.
When you say culture A is "better" than culture B, what metric are you applying?
Personally, I've never said any specific culture is better than any other specific culture; I merely wish to introduce the notion. There are plenty of metrics you could use i.e. contribution to the sciences, productivity, how they interact with other cultures, etc. There doesn't have to be one magical all-encompassing metric.
The Nazis were a political group, though you might make the (sketchy) argument that followers of a particular brand of politics constitute a culture.
And when the vast majority (yes, I know not each and every German was a Nazi) of the people of a country are devout followers of the beliefs of one party, that is a culture. But, if you insist, I'll rephrase my original statement, although the point remains: The moment you accept that "The beliefs of majority of Germans circa 1940 were evil by the standards that we would use today" you accept that all cultures are in fact not equal. There are other examples of cultures which are understood to be evil / inferior (especially among those with left leaning views, who at the same time believe in multiculturalism) see "The South", America, colonial England, cultures which supported the crusades, etc.
To make an analogy, if someone were to try to murder me, I'd fight back.
What if trying to murder you was a crucial part of their culture. Wouldn't fighting back be intolerant?
It doesn't mean they're less of a person than I am,
Ok, now this point I want to contest. Are you saying that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were not lesser persons than yourself. I can understand being tolerant, but everything within reasonable bounds.
Political correctness is one thing. Tolerance and cultural sensitivity is another.
Well, at least we can agree on this point. I'm glad someone finally agrees that political correctness has very little to do with tolerance and cultural sensitivity. Political correctness is the antithesis of free speech, not of intolerance and insensitivity.
You are a moron if you don't see how language can be tied to culture. Please look up culture in a dictionary.
First, I'd like to mention that your argumentum ad hominem really displays your level of tolerance.
Yes, I understand that people generally relate language to culture. Yes, language may very well affect the manner in which you think; however, the main reason language is associated with culture is because people who can communicate with each other (speak the same language) share ideas and cooperate in other ways forming a culture. By the way, the definition of culture I use is "shared beliefs and values of a group: the beliefs, customs, practices, and social behavior of a particular nation or people."
Interesting that you had to learn French in a French community.
No, I learned French in an English community. I live in English-Canada (the vast majority of Canada) where almost all the people speak nothing but English.
I find it a bit funny that you prefaced that statement "Multi-culturalism is ok" with "Repeat after me." It seems that a lot of people have convinced themselves of the validty of this statement without giving it much thought. Repeat after me: "We are all individuals."
Do you believe standards are bad? Do you think a million different "standards" should exist merely for the sake of diversity? For humanity to be productive, we have to standardize on a language we all understand, be it English, Portugese, or Esperanto. Besides, the idea that language is tied to culture is nothing more than moronic. Yes, fractured languages "preserve" cultures in the sense that they prevent people of different cultures from sharing aspects of their cultures and integrating aspects of other cultures more easily into their own. In other words, fractured languages create artificial barriers among people preventing the natural mixing of cultures that would normally occur. Personally, English is my third language, and I am more than happy to speak and write it (I also had to learn French as my fourth in order to appease those bloody Quebecers).
Now that that is out of the way, we come the the subject of culture itself. Multiculturalism shouldn't be about artificially creating a thousand small cultures; it should be about merging the best elements of cultures.
Finally, I'd like to address the often mentioned concept that "all cultures are equal." The moment you accept that "Nazis are evil" you accept that all cultures are in fact not equal. I'm certainly not saying that American culture is the ueber-Culture which should assimilate all others (I'm not even an American), not am I implying that American culture is the best culture by any means. I merely wish that we would put all this politically correct garbage behind us and examine the situation instead of ignoring everything around us and repeating to ourselves that "Multi-culturalism is ok."