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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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There is a lot more to be gained from travel than just an album of Instagram thirst trap photos. I’ve found travel to be one of the most enriching experiences of my life, personally.

I genuinely don't understand this and I've tried to. Maybe it's just innate human variability and some people are like me and incapable of 'getting it'. I also feel this way about most poetry and a dancing so I may just be weird. But I just don't understand what I'm supposed to find compelling about going to some place that I could already get the gist of in picture. I feel invariably like either a burdensome tourist or a mark for scams whenever I travel. Events or meeting specific people I understand. But I can't shake the feeling that events and meeting people would be strictly better if they came to me without the travel element.

Enh, I consider travel to be the great equalizer.

When you travel somewhere with an alien language, culture, and customs, and you are forced to engage with that culture on its own terms, your world expands. You learn about your preconceptions and biases, you get to challenge your worldview in a way that brooks no defense because you are literally in it. You could do the same at home, of course, or through a picture, but the layers of abstraction and distance that prevent you from doing so act as defense mechanisms.

There's nothing like it. I recommend everyone do it at least once, to spend an extended amount of time where you don't speak the language. Suddenly what is taken for granted falls away, and it's like rediscovering communication from first principles. What are the critical things, the meaningful things? What is helpful and useful, what is not? What is good - and not just good because I deem it so - what does this culture value, and how did they arrive at that belief?

Whether it is compelling or not is not a factor. You may even hate where you go, an experience I've had in several journeys. But it has left me with a greater appreciation for many things around me and an understanding that we were never going to be ready for the destabilizing effect of near-instantaneous global information transmission. It doesn't take a genius to value clean drinking water, but you will not quite look at it the same way as someone who's worn a stillsuit.

There's nothing like it. I recommend everyone do it at least once, to spend an extended amount of time where you don't speak the language. Suddenly what is taken for granted falls away, and it's like rediscovering communication from first principles. What are the critical things, the meaningful things? What is helpful and useful, what is not? What is good - and not just good because I deem it so - what does this culture value, and how did they arrive at that belief?

This just isn't my experience with travel, but I also haven't had the opportunity to live somewhere totally foreign for extended periods of time. Unless you have some cause, like a job or exchange program, this just kind of isn't practical. What is practical are a week or two of being a tourist which I have zero interest in and also what people are actually talking about when they say they love travel.

I don't quite get your complaint - you're saying you don't get the point of tourism and then you limit the definition of tourism to one that you personally don't agree with. It's entirely practical to spend a week or even a couple of days being immersed in a foreign culture. There are many ways to get immersed in an alien culture, many of which don't depend on any extended period of time, and best of all, they vary widely in price depending on how much you like yourself.

The point of tourism is to be a tourist. If you don't do any touring, then you're essentially paying a premium to fly in the sky and live in a serviced apartment. Granted, I enjoy traveling alone and not having to make allowances for anyone else, but I consider that part of the experience maintenance or work. Many people do indeed pay a premium to fly in the sky and live in a serviced apartment, but spending a tour with that sort of person for any length of time would give me allergic reactions.

I also feel this way about most poetry and a dancing

Maybe you're low in Big 5 trait Openness, though I think that's unusual among people who spend their free time on free speech message boards. Apparently they've found two aspects that aren't entirely dependent -- aesthetics and intellect, so maybe you're pretty low on the aesthetics side. Or you just haven't traveled to places that are right for you?

Tomorrow we might try taking the kids to a mountain, a ruin, and a lava field. My whole family gets depressed and angry if we stay near home for too many days in a row.

My understanding is that I'm quite open in that sense. I'm really open to the idea that there is some there there which I'm not getting. But poetry for instance. Mostly it's trying to express views I already basically understand into compressed formats. Cool, I appreciate it in the way I appreciate that certain picture formats take up less space on my hard drive. Instrumentally useful and when communicating very large ideas I will make use of its techniques. I even find some poetry useful as short hand. But I've never really been moved by poetry. Although I often struggle to even define what poetry is.

I'm not hugely into poetry, but my impression from the poetry I do like is that it's more like tuneless song, and that in the ancient world it was often chanted or intoned, and also used to aid memory. I really enjoy Byzantine and Arabic liturgical forms, for instance, traditionally chanted in 8 tones on a rotating schedule. There's an akathist tea I hope to be able to rejoin sometime, where women get together, publicly read an akathist in a circle, and then all have lovely aesthetic tea cakes with pretty cups and loose flowers steeping in glass teapots. Among somewhat modern poets, my favorite is TS Eliot, mostly because the words just sound so good, but even he has to be read aloud. Fundamentally, I think that poetry is more or less liturgical, rather than trying to express views in compressed formats -- it's meant for public ceremonies, and even things like preforming Shakespeare are more that than they are just hearing a story. My favorite Shakespeare class consisted almost entirely of just reading plays about King Henry around the room and then sitting there and letting the sound of the words sink in.