Phosphorous_Rex
No bio...
User ID: 72
Phosphorous_Rex
2yr ago
As another easily-visible point of difference, many, but not all, of these food differences stem from religious differences, but even in a country with freedom of religion and nominal secularization, Germany remains a religious-ish country. The holidays are mainly based on Christian holidays, and depend on each state, including each state’s primary denomination. In a country with church bells commonly ringing despite the “quiet hours” laws, German are not as comfortable with the Muslim muezzin, the call to prayer. I went hiking in the Bavarian alps over the summer, and there every hilltop has a cross or small chapel on it. I am unsure what my colleague thinks of all this, but it’s easy for me to see how the undercurrents of religion in a nominally secularized country could cause conflict.
This colleague is going through the normal naturalization process now. They are taking an integration course, and learning the language. By the quantifiable measurements, they were working harder to integrate than I was. But every time we dealt with anything culturally German, they treated it as strange and foreign, while for me it was normal and comforting. The conflict was not over lack of knowledge, but about lack of internal motivation or identification. And although the integration course might be able to make them speak some German and learn about Germany’s cultural values, I don’t think it can automatically change someone’s internal identity. I can’t peer into their mind, but my colleague might always be from their home country, in their hearts, and no matter how much knowledge of German culture they pick up may treat it as a password to get what they want.
In Catholicism, I have heard the sacraments (baptism, communion, marriage, etc.) called “an outward sign of inward grace.” The physical act of the ritual does not itself bestow grace, but brings it to fruition. I think citizenship is a little like that: a legal declaration of a cultural fact. And while God may be infallible and omniscient, we humans are stuck in the world of, at best, Bayesian inference. Gaining citizenship says that we hope the new cultural identity will win the struggle inside your mind, that by virtue of being physically present in Germany, speaking enough German and knowing the German values, the German identity will overcome any other, or at least come to a peaceful sharing of identity; the certificate at the end is just a marker of something we hope went on inside your head.
But I didn’t go through any integration course, or have to speak any German, or anything like that. Germany didn’t have to give out citizenship to people in my situation. It has been that way for about 50 years at the youngest for those born in wedlock, and working fine. Why change it? Why take someone like me whose grandparent came from Germany, and give them citizenship? Besides the simplistic answer that some powerful lobbying group got it changed, I think there is a deeper reason why Germany would be willing to make that bet, that the German cultural identity could win out.
Retvrn to Heimat
My absolute favorite German word is Heimat, which means “homeland” maybe. It’s more than that, though. The Heimat is not just where one is from, but denotes a more significant cultural homeland. I like to make it a -hood word: the neighborhood might be the local people around you, while the nationhood is for everyone in your country or statehood for the state, the Heimat is the cultural home-hood or people-hood, the place where you belong; imagine the phrase “it’s not a house but a home” applied to a society. Germany is not “the nation my grandparent came from,” or “the nation I live in,” it’s “the home nation.”
The Heimat has some important qualities that make it so powerful. Let me paint in broad strokes here. The Heimat is less physical than temporal and cultural. The Heimat has qualities of timelessness, both in that it can never truly be reached and that it is always changing (I could return to my childhood home, but it will never be the same as when I was a child), but yet it always contains those essential homely elements. It covers that essential need of belonging to a society, ensuring that you are valued and appreciated. It is more rural than urban, more social than physical and more cultural than economic, but overlaps both. I would strongly associate words like idyllic or bucolic with the Heimat and less pure happiness.
The Heimat is, I think, incredibly resistant to quantification, but still vulnerable to it. I am reminded of Seeing like a State, where the state apparatuses have the power to disrupt the natural, organic processes that have served so well but fail to see why these processes work for the societies that created them. Then the state moves in and destroys what was valuable to those who lived in it in an effort to create value that it can see and tax. I would contrast the Rust Belt to the strong German manufacturing base, as destroyed versus preserved identities.
My colleague’s Heimat is not Germany, and it probably never will be; they grew up in a different country and have a strong sense of belonging to that country. This is not inherently bad and doesn’t make them a “bad immigrant,” and perhaps their children or grandchildren will grow up in Germany and see things differently. But they aren’t participating in the same culture that most other Germans are, even if they can get around as a permanent outsider. They may, like so many people, never feel like they fit in.
Why did Germany take the bet on me? I think the concept of the Heimat sheds some light there: Germany was betting that it was my Heimat. That this anchor would let me accept the German identity and thrive in it. That, however tenuous my connection, it would be enough to make it stick. That I would be in my home here. Germany is the one and only ancestral Heimat I get, even if I grew up in the US. When I told my father that I had the certificate, the story he relayed to me was about when his mother was on her deathbed and they were arguing about something political, and he said that he was an American citizen, and she told him no, that he was a German. You just can’t conjure up that connection based on economic principles or a preferred lifestyle. It’s not random, I didn’t weigh the pros and cons of being French vs. German, it just always was.
And critically, Germany will always be the Heimat. Someone who came here for a better-paying job might leave if the economy falters. Someone who came because they appreciate the German stereotypes of punctuality or organization would run after dealing with the Deutsche Bahn’s chronic train delays or after the first six-month wait to hear anything from the Foreigner’s Authority. Someone who came for politics might find that the political winds change, and what then? I think it’s entirely related to Germany discouraging dual nationality, such as in naturalization. No one can serve two masters it seems. But I’m stuck with it, as are most Germans, and that commitment adds value.
Finally, I feel that I should give another point of view of the Heimat, one that claims the concept of Heimat is inherently exclusionary. I would say that the concept requires some exclusion; I don’t think it would be possible for people to share all possible values with everyone, as some are in conflict with each other, but a core part of the conflict will also come from a conflict of identities in my view.
The point of Germany being the Heimat isn’t that I naturally came in knowing everything. I knew a little, but there was a huge breadth of culture that I had to adapt to even beyond learning the language. But because I already had some seed of the right identity, there was no conflict; I didn’t have to build up a new identity or destroy my old one, I only had to learn, like a child. So, although I still had to do the work, I haven’t felt the sense as much of “not belonging” or feeling too much like an outsider; it is a thing to learn not an obstacle to overcome.
Closeout
I hope that was enjoyable for everyone. I am just one little opinion awash in a sea of them, but I think my path to citizenship was also a bit unique. The StAG § 5 declaration is pretty new still but was a path to citizenship that was very unexpected for me; it felt like being handed a winning lottery ticket, something I didn’t necessarily deserve, but it still feels right now that it’s complete. I don’t speak much German, but I comfort myself in knowing that I speak more than most Germans did when they became citizens, and look forward to learning more. And for anyone else with recent German ancestry looking to do the same, the law is only available for the next 9 years.
As far as citizenship vs. identity goes, I stick to my thesis that citizenship is a hopeful claim by the government that you have implanted the right identity into your head to truly assimilate into that culture. And I think Germany is an interesting nation and culture to examine as it has a very different history of immigration compared to e.g. the US, UK or France. More broadly, the ideas of identity and belonging could be applied to other communities.
Phosphorous_Rex
2yr ago
Death by 1000 (Cultural) Cuts
An insightful and heartfelt Reddit comment put the culture-fit problem as something like a multitude of tiny interactions that cause friction for the immigrant and make it clear that they do not “belong” in that society. In the end, they’re left miserable and desperate for something that brings them comfort and familiarity, a sense of home in a foreign land. That’s hard to quantify, but we can work around it a bit and hopefully get some sense of it. To borrow a little from conflict vs. mistake theory, I see assimilation oftentimes described as a problem to be solved, a set of cultural ideas and language to learn. Germany’s naturalization requirements include B1 German language level and passing a 33-question test. That doesn’t seem like much; a B1 level may be 500 hours total of study, and I see timeframes of months for that. How can a rich American expat fail to integrate anywhere, when the skills they need take just a few months of work?
The mistake theory view treats assimilation like a set of instructions: cultural problem in, cultural solution out. It treats it like… well, like a language, you just have to learn it and speak it fluently to fit in. There should be no reason that one cannot assimilate into any and every culture, you only need to learn the cultural framework to give the right answers at the right time. I’d even say it treats it like a Chinese room of culture.
But the Chinese room substitutes external verification for internal motivation. Yeah, you can answer me these questions (thirty) three, but does that mean you understand them? Do you care about them? Even then, does it really make you a citizen? Why would a set of multiple-choice questions denote the bright threshold between our ingroup and outgroup, the citizens and the foreigners? To give you an idea of the test, check here, it includes such stumpers as “pick out your state’s flag” and “what was the war between 1939-1945 called?”. I took the test, despite speaking only minimal German, for a state that I don’t live in and passed with 21/33; it’s just not that hard.
What might a conflict theory view suggest? Well, one useful element from it is that the direction of movement is what matters; things never stay the same, conflict is pervasive over scarce resources. Then the struggle is not a matter of fact to be decided with a solution at the end, but a struggle of power. While conflict theory is based on conflict between social groups, I would apply it here to the internal conflict of assimilation: the immigrant, to adjust, does not need just to learn the language and culture but must internalize the “culture” in a generic sense; not a set of rituals to observe but a set of values to hold. Though we have an end in sight but are still missing the process for how to get there.
To take a stab in the dark, I think identity is a critical part. Inside of you there are two wolves. No, sorry… Inside of you there are multiple identities belonging to different communities, all with different ranges both in literal distance and figurative human connection distance. I would say that my immediate family is one, but then my father’s family and my mother’s family are different but also communities I belong to, and then my home town with some traditions, and then my state, and then my country, and then the Anglophone community, and so on with overlapping or conflicting portions. But if my immediate family prefers beer to wine, I can go most places in the US and get similar beers, and go to a pub in the UK and also get beer there, it looks to me like the communities overlap each other just fine. And in other ways they don’t; I will never understand the British obsession with pies. But I would contrast that experience to sitting down at a Chinese restaurant and seeing a dish in a script I can’t even sound out with the translation of “fried pig colon,” which is a little unsettling, no matter how good that dish may taste.
So why would that poor Redditor feel like they don’t belong, like this foreign country operated under completely different values, and why was it so alienating to them? The direct answer is stupid: it IS operating under different values, and they feel like they didn’t belong in the community, but importantly they themselves felt this, it wasn’t something forced on them by that community. The community only had to work within its own cultural framework for itself, and when they try to slot themselves in they just don’t fit. I don’t claim it is good or fair, but it is what it is.
So why do some integrate, and some not? How did my spouse, here with me, transition from depression to happiness? Part of it is always stress, and the energy-sapping ways having to work harder to do mundane things; as we adjusted and learned, everything became easier, and the major hurdles like waiting for residency cards were cleared. But I think a big part of it is being willing to start seeing yourself as part of a different community, and not just learning about it but adjusting yourself to accept it. In the conflict theory view, your disparate communities can only fight for power over your identity, of which there is only so much to go around; assimilation comes when something wins out to create an uneasy peace.
Why don’t children have as much trouble assimilating as they grow up? I’m sure some feel “out of place,” but I would bet that the even the unhappy child fits in better than an average expat. But children don’t have preconceived, fully-formed identities fresh out of the box, they grow and develop them over time, and when embedded in a culture they usually take up an identity that is compatible with it. But a child should still be suffering under these 1000 cuts, right? They still must learn the culture. But I suspect that for a child, having the identity in place, without competing with another established identity, means that they are just learning and feel at home even if they don’t know everything. For them, there is no identity conflict.
The Identity Conflict versus a National Identity
What does an identity conflict look like? How do these cultural wounds manifest? I’ll focus in on one topic here: food. Everyone eats, normally a few times a day, so it’s inescapable. But at the same time, food is heavily nationally coded; right now I can open up a delivery app and filter restaurants not just by price or distance but by nationality. We talk about “comfort foods” and “national dishes.” We reference “abuela’s” or “nonna’s” or “oma’s” cooking. I think it’s as good a point as any.
I can walk into a butcher shop in Germany and ask for Rinderrouladen, one of my favorite dishes that my grandmother made consisting of beef slices rolled up with mustard, onion, pickle and bacon; they will correct me that I must have meant the beef slices, I assent, and they produce the requested number of slices from the right cut of beef without me having to explain the details. They will then ask if I want the bacon slices for it too. We both know what Rinderrouladen is, what goes into it, and everything works harmoniously. I can walk into a grocery store and browse at all the different sauerkraut options, then have an old lady come up to me and give me advice as to which brand is best (the store brand, apparently). I can even travel to Dresden to stumble over Eisbein, a pickled ham hock, and find out that it is almost exactly like the Christmas ham we had back home. It’s uncanny, but it’s also unbelievably comfortable; Germany is constantly reinforcing that I belong, that this is like home, that I will never be left pining for a taste of comfort food.
One of my colleagues is Muslim, not Turkish but from the MENA region, and at least moderately devout, including eating halal food. They are perfectly nice, but the differences in food culture were obvious during a work trip. For one, they couldn’t eat anything all day because of Ramadan. Then, I was surprised to find how restrictive the situation can be; not only can they not eat any pork, but they couldn’t eat other meat because it wasn’t killed in the required fashion; their sad story was of eating pizza four days a week on the work campus because that was the only vegetarian option. And they naturally gravitated towards places that served food like theirs from their home, staffed by people who spoke Arabic like them and kept food halal like they required. They talked about how things were in their home country and how much easier dealing with the restrictions were, for example if everyone is fasting during Ramadan it’s a shared trial and the culture adapts to it. This seems to be a common experience, that’s clear just by reading the experience of many Turks in Germany, e.g. where the first sentence about Turks retiring in Germany reads, “The last cups of Turkish black tea had been drained, the platters of olives and goat cheese cleared, but the snowy-haired Turks lingered at the table.” Or read about the proliferation of the doner kebab! Food is a critical part of national identity.
Phosphorous_Rex
2yr ago
Well, I had meant to post your desired topic of discussion in the CWR or on its own.
I tried to crosspost it here, but we have a 20K character limit and the post clocks in around 36K. Sorry! Maybe later I can make a summary and post it again.
Phosphorous_Rex
2yr ago
I'm here too of course, and I'd be happy to chat about it anytime.
Phosphorous_Rex
2yr ago
My understanding of the mechanics of Stable Diffusion is very limited, but I don't think this "collage art" model is quite right. The computer doesn't really pull out whole chunks of images; it doesn't know what blonde, buxom or even woman are. But what it does have are statistical relations, so when it generates a bunch of noise it pulls out lines and shapes and colors based on those statistics, depending on the prompts, then makes a bit more noise on that drawing and draws again, and eventually it pulls a random-ish image from the noise. This reminds me of when I used to sketch, and I would lightly draw lines in pencil, then as the concept firms up you make your lines darker, until you're left with a fixed image that you can commit to pen. But that's all mechanical skill really; I can imagine scenes that I would never be able to sketch, much less bring to full art; the imagining and the art-drawing are separate to some degree. Is this better or worse? I don't know. But pencils and photoshop don't think either, and no one seems to mind.
But what has really made me ponderful is that the way Stable Diffusion creates art feels similar to the way I create art, and it appears to think somewhat how I think. Perhaps that's why its unrealistic mistakes go unnoticed sometimes, my mind fell into the same trap that it did and e.g. overlooked an extra finger, because my mind doesn't sit there and count fingers and neither does Stable Diffusion! It just takes what it sees and roughly maps the shape and position into the "hand" map and calls it a day. But even human artists have trouble with hands!
Phosphorous_Rex
2yr ago
I am old enough to have developed physical film in a real darkroom. Using negatives and developer was real work that took skill and helped build an appreciation for film photography. I think it was a really fun thing to learn, and I'm glad a did it, but oh boy is it useless now. Now, I can pick up my digital camera and have it automatically focus, adjust settings and snap off pictures at ~12 fps, apply all of the lens and color corrections and spit out gigabytes of jpgs onto a tiny memory card, then I take all of those photos and store them on my multiple-terabyte hard drive with backups in several locations.
I don't think the new-found ease in photography has rendered it inherently cheap, but has certainly opened the floodgates to a morass of shitty, low-level photography. I shudder every time I see a 'gram-girl (or boy) taking some basic selfie at a scenic location. But there is still a lot of photography to appreciate, pictures that take real work, not just in getting the right shot but in setting up the camera even now. No matter how smart the camera itself is, you still have to be at the location and looking the right way at the right time, and no matter how good it is at selecting a generically good setting itself, a skilled human can do better.
I installed Stable Diffusion a few days ago and, let me tell you, it's the real deal. My dumb, artistically-challenged caveman brain can put in 75 characters or less of generic prompts and in just a few minutes select from a slew of reasonably decent AI-generated art, select one and spend an hour refining it down to something I really like. It's the real reason I will be upgrading my several-generations old video card when the new 40XX series drops, not my habitual gaming, so that I can speed up that generation process. It’s absolutely blowing my mind, and I find it so very exciting to think about how I’ll be applying it to RPG or writing art.
But it’s still not magic. It has trouble taking very specific commands, it has trouble with anatomy, it has trouble with some prompts, it’s still limited in how many prompts it can handle, etc. It has a lot of limitations, many of which will most certainly go away with time, but for now I would liken it to having a decent artist who will immediately draw some art for you, but you can only communicate with them via tweets (less than that even!). Much of the skill in using it comes in through using other programs to clean up the images, removing artifacts and dropping the right “seeds” of implanted features for the program to take up. Another huge part is in getting a better feeling for how to give prompts and adjust settings to really get the most out of it. I expect the skill floor to raise up over time, so yeah, we’ll be inundated with reasonably good generated art.
This is already the case though! There are people who post on Imgur just dumps of elf art or pixiv manga art, endless seas of generic fantasy concept art, so much dross that fills DeviantArt with human-made but utterly indistinguishable work, work that people have pored so much time and effort into. Out of all that, only a few gems seem worthy of to keep around. How much worse can it get? I don’t see putting in prompts as really that terribly different now from entering terms in a search bar; that a human drew every line in one and not the other feels totally irrelevant.
Phosphorous_Rex
2yr ago
Ok, let's take take the example of infantry, as you brought up. We already have a weapon that is so dead simple any idiot can use it, a literal "point and click" weapon that can kill a human out to hundreds of yards. It's called a rifle, they've existed for hundreds of years, and mysteriously every professional army in the world is still spending time training basic infantrymen, practicing everything from marksmanship to tactics. Any idiot can kill an enemy infantryman, but everyone really still seems to worry about training when facing infantry and keeps training their own. Mutatis mutandis...
I don't even think it's right to claim that the Javelin works for any idiot without training. The US Army specifies 80 hours of instruction for using the Javelin. Here is an article about the current conflict, with a few choice quotes: "The bottleneck for this influx of aid is training." "In Western militaries, soldiers who operate these weapons undergo weeks or months of training before firing their first live shot." All of this training for the Javelin alone is in addition to all of their other training, of course. Mutatis mutandis for every other weapon system.
Even the Javelin is not exactly an "unassisted" weapon. The thing weighs about 50 pounds, with one missile! That gets split up, so you need an ammunition bearer if you want to have any other gear... uh oh, looks like you're not "unassisted" anymore. Mutatis mutandis... Are you going to pack a Stinger with them? That's another 35 pounds, probably have to give that to someone else. Maybe you'll need something like a SAW, better bring someone else to haul that around and ammunition for it. Maybe bring a few more people to keep an eye out while you set up your launcher, maybe someone to direct all these people... oh look, we're back to an organized group, better train them all together so that they're more than a gaggle of schoolchildren.
Every step of the way, trained personnel, and plenty of them, are needed. Warfare has not been "fundamentally reshaped," these new high-tech weapons are not a replacement for trained fighting men, even if it alters how the fighting is done, or the side with the better weapons has an advantage, just like every piece of technology before them. It's the same old claims of the past repeated ad nauseum that this time it's different. I'm unimpressed this time too.
Why would those be the thing that finally replaces the importance of capable fighting men? Why wasn't it metal weaponry (bronze or iron, your pick), or rideable horses, or heavy plate armor, or munitions armor, or gunpowder weaponry, or rifles over muskets, or fast-firing rifles, or indirect artillery, or mass motorization, or the modern tank, or precision guided weapons? What, fundamentally, has caused the ATGM to surpass all of these other advancements and so many more? Each has transformed warfare, but never to cut out the fighting man.
Materiel != Manpower.
Phosphorous_Rex
2yr ago
My superficial reading is that this offensive seems to lack many of the key features of the 100 Day Offensive. First, there is no reserve of fresh, high-morale troops that Ukraine is bringing to the fight, like the Allies did as the Americans arrived starting in 1917. Second, there seems to be no great tactical advantage that Ukraine has brought forth to help build momentum; no tanks, creeping artillery barrages, all the hard-won experience that the Allies were able to apply after years of warfare. Third, Russia is not in the position of Germany, a nation suffering under years of blockades and steadily eroding material conditions culminating in threatening by revolutions. The key factors that led to the 100 Days Offensive becoming the closing stage of the war aren't exactly in place it seems.
In turn, all your indicators seem to be generic "winning the war" signifiers. Of course, sustaining offensive momentum, taking many prisoners, reversing your enemy's gains, these are all signs that a group is winning a fight in any conflict. What would be interesting is if you could generate insight to tell if these things will happen; when could we expect this turnaround in the war's path? I have heard about many Ukrainian counteroffensives and I have seen many Russian gains reversed, but what makes you think that this time Ukraine will be able to sustain offensive momentum long-term at a critical pace?
It is possible! Here's the new post.
More options
Context Copy link