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I will defend the opposite view.
Yeah, you have the language, the foods, the music, but those will eventually melt together. Even you provide a constant stream of new immigrants, and they willingly self-segregate, the million small markers of culture will eventually disappear. Only a few larger ones will remain, as a symbol of identity, like some Americans celebrate St. Patrick's day.
Which brings me to my second point. The larger empire will tolerate the harmless and meaningless traits of the constituent cultures, but not anything meaningful. You can keep the foods. You can keep the songs (most of them). You cannot enforce a community with your norms.
While the EU is nominally in favor of cultural diversity, it means they will subsidize folk dresses and bland exhibits with 27 flags. It does not mean they will allow an Eastern European country to be against gay
marriagerights. It does not mean they will allow a country to practice eugenics, or protect key industries. You might agree with these decisions, but my point is that the EU and ANZAC allow only surface level diversity.Because culture is downstream from economics and politics. Japan's building codes make it very easy to make tiny restaurants on the first floor, so their streets are alive with such restaurants. In the Middle East, the climate is dry and the laws forbid alcohol, so they have cuisine with figs and shisha bars everywhere.
Yes, you have a constant stream of immigrants that self-segregate in neighbourhoods, and that slows down the integration. It might take generations to melt them, but it is happening nonetheless, because the laws are the same, the economics are the same for everyone. The first generation will do everything the same as back home, the second will adjust, but their children will eventually meld.
EU is pretty much bound for death.
You can't keep such an organisation based on promises of prosperity going if its policies caused deindustrialization and impoverishment. The insane energy policies based on promoting nonexistent technology that directly lead to increases in natural gas use and present costs are quite important.
Furthermore, it's mostly international treaties that EU loves that its member states cannot stop being party to that have led to the situation where in France, they have 700k people with an expulsion order[1]. One of whom, portrayed as a 'homeless woman' raped and murdered a little girl and tried to sell off her organs for purposese of witchcraft, leading to some amount of acrimony at the moment.
I doubt it's going to last much longer than next 10 years.
[1]: it was a French-language video of a political discussion posted to Twitter. But, if you consider that in 2nd quarter of 2022, France ordered 35k people to leave country, and 3.5k actually left, you can see how the 700k is perfectly plausible.. Wikipedia shows similar amounts of noncompliance.
And then what? What do you expect to happen?
It's going to become a vestigial organisation, like e.g. the Holy Roman Empire was.
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Interesting points.
Starting from the end, I think you oversimplify the economics & laws angle. If humans were simple optimizers, then yes, they would all behave in a set of uniform, most optimal behaviors. There would be no new businesses, no new music, no new books, etc. Everyone in New York would just run laundromats, irish pubs, and sell hot dogs, to name a few things. But that's not really the case in reality--the laws, in the city and in most places in the US at least, are liberal enough for individuals to tinker, try new ideas, and find new ways of expressing themselves whether it's through commerce or art or whatever.
That's where I see the beauty of liberalism--let it provide a minimal set of laws that ensure more or less stability and... leave the rest up to people. In practice, given zoning and licensing and bureaucracy, this doesn't exist, but even in the much faded, weaker version of it that we have, we still see a ton of creative destruction. Much of it is garbage, but that's the cost of having monkey brains hitting two stones together until they find just the right stones that give sparks. This process, though, is made stronger by a steady stream of immigrants--whether internal or external--even though yes, after some n number of generations, they will likely meld in. However, by then, they will have very likely left a mark on the place.
I'm not sure I get the argument about surface diversity. If I set aside the EU angle, I don't see why it matters for a country to be able to be against gay rights? Like, if you live in Liberaltopia, there's nothing stopping you from not associating with gay people. There's nothing stopping you from forming a group with other people and having each other promise that you will not do gay things or associate with gays. There's also no size limit imposed on your group--it could be just your friends or half the country. Why would you want the state to interfere and set up some laws against gay people's freedoms? Surely, if gayness is in anyway bad, well, then in the free market of ideas, gayness will fade away while your non-gay group will grow and prosper?
This applies to other topics around enforcing culture.
I don't know how you made that jump.
There are no ways to enforce these shared norms. Imagine you live in an imaginary, hypothetical world where heroin, or murder, or dumping your garbage from the balcony is legal and normal. You and a group of friends agree that this should change, and you "form a group" and "promise" not to do that. So what? Your kids are still hooked on heroin, there is still garbage on the streets, and there is still a chance of getting murdered, because there are others who didn't agree and defectors.
You need a method to enforce that new norm. "Form a group" and "promise" is insufficient.
Gayness, specifically, was an example, of something the larger culture will impose on the sub-communities. You don't need to argue if it's good or bad.
I made it from this argument: " It might take generations to melt them, but it is happening nonetheless, because the laws are the same, the economics are the same for everyone."
In other words, if everyone is influenced by the same economic and political forces, then everyone is being pushed toward the same set of outcomes. If you leave that process going for a while, then humans become grey uniform goo that settled into some local maximum, hence no "new" or "different" things can be made.
Ah, you see, I am not arguing for not enforcing norms, but for a minimal set of open norms that allow individuals to express themselves, whether it be owning guns, being gay, partaking of the shrooms, etc. But I'm afraid that it's easy to misconstrue this as a call for post-modern, "reality is subjective" free-for-all, but allow me the benefit for the doubt. I am against that.
I feel like we're talking about two side of freedom. You're talking about "freedom from" as in: freedom from rotting in thy neighbor's garbage, freedom from having your kids being sold heroin, etc. I'm talking about "freedom to": freedom to stick your penis into another man's asshole, freedom to inhale smoke containing nicotine or THC, freedom to worship whatever deity/ies you wish, etc. Would you agree that this is the case?
The way I see it, the latter form of freedom requires the first one. But, for the latter form to truly blossom, the first one must be kept to a minimum. So yes, murder, rape, harming children* and other unilateral infringements of individual freedom must be outlawed. Totally agreed here. But not much more than that. Otherwise, you would increasingly stifle human expression.
This is where I see the beauty of a place like NYC. A basic set of laws ensures that people are not murdered (at least frequently) and that the garbage is (more or less; recently, sadly, it's less) taken care of. But because there is not much more than that, people can live in any weird way they want to, whether it's being a drag queen or an ultra-conservative jew. This, I believe, is core to "globalist liberalism", and something that is well expressed in the Bill or Rights, which I'm not bringing up for its legal standing but for its spirit, the spirit of freedom of expression as long as that expression isn't about yelling fire in a crowded theater or stoning unbelievers.
So, going back to the example you gave, the one about the EU and gay rights in an Eastern European country, let's first take away the label of gay rights, because that's just the outer layer that's not important. It could be anything else like ethnicity or abortion stance, or whatever. We basically have two minorities, the one that is arguing that a norm against X should instituted as law, and one arguing that X should be permitted. This might be the crux of the matter: X does not damage the commons. It is not a unilateral infringement of others' rights. Thus, I am against instituting a ban on X and for allowing to people to segregate into cultural groups aligned with what they think about X.
Now, aside from that, which Eastern European country are you thinking of? I happen to be from that part of the world and a little bit of the various cultures that people it.
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Insofar as I’m concerned, some of the key elements of the Finnish culture are being silent on public transport, staying at extreme distances (comparatively) from each other while speaking, and not looking at each other in the eye while speaking. Despite some attempts by the Finnish cosmopolitan class to change these (starting from before Finnish EU membership), these don’t seem to be changing; the national characteristic of comfortable semi-autism is staying.
Cultures aren’t just colorful dresses and spicy foods, but they aren’t just politically charged culture war issues, either. There’s a lot of facets, some more and some less potent for change due to international exposure.
Is this where the Gondola meme comes from?
I think Finland Män is the best summary of the Finnish culture.
This makes me wonder how easily an English-speaker can read Aittokoski's phonetic Finnish-accent written English.
For what it's worth, I started cracking up as I read that copypasta thing out loud to myself.
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It looks to me as though most Eastern European countries are in fact against gay marriage. The EU has no problem with this as long as allow gay-married EU citizens to move freely through the EU. The European Court of Human Rights (which is not an EU body) has said that countries which grant rights to unmarried cohabiting straight couples (either automatically or through some kind of registered civil partnership) should extend them to unmarried cohabiting gay couples, but has explicitly not required gay marriage.
The EU is not run by American lefties.
you're right, I overextended with 'marriage'. Changed it to gay rights.
Though the ECJ does not care a lot about Romania's definition of marriage
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A bizarre assertion, given that, according to my count, 13 of the EU's 27 members don't allow gay marriage.
Eugenics is not part of the traditional culture of any country. The reason it's not implemented anywhere is a lack of popular support; it has nothing to do with the EU.
This has moved well beyond preserving culture and into plain economics. The EU does in fact protect traditional products. What the EU doesn't allow is protectionist restrictions that are meant to benefit one country's companies over those of another.
In Denmark, the Danish Cytogenetic Central Register, shows an average of 98% of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome before birth are aborted each year.
Denmark is also famous for exporting tall blue-eyed babies via sperm donation catalogues
So, examples of currently active positive and negative eugenics going on there.
And has the EU interfered in any of this?
Presumably not, but that's because both of these examples are poor ones, in each case coupling a small dose of what globohomo hates with a large dose of what globohomo likes, making it an aggregate win for the globalist homogenisers.
Abort disabled people? This is not globohomo. But look at it from the other side: abort disabled people, and we see that it is in fact smack in line with the no-questions-asked abortifactants on demand that the cosmopolitan class loves.
Encourage single mothers to have blonde blue eyed babies? Bad. Encourage single mothers to have blonde blue eyed babies? Good, smash the patriarchy, children don't need fathers anyway.
You're assuming certain modes of thinking from your outgroup to the point where you have to massage the assumed framing of those situations into quite tortured angles.
Compare: "Genocide white people? Bad. Genocide white people? Good, everyone knows white right-wingers love genocide. Now you see how anti-white tendencies in the West are an aggregate win for the white supremacists".
I don't think it's tortured at all. Furthermore, my proposal actually serves to resolve the contradictions of a brown-scare hegemony thumbs-up-ing eugenic abortions/inseminations. Where's your explanation?
Characterising my argument as
has to be some sort of strawmanning record. To speak plainly: I am suggesting that, in the cases I proposed, the noncentral effects (preservation of pro-choice norms, increasing the proportion of (biological) fatherless households) really do serve the homogenisers' purpose more than the central effects (anti-dysgenic abortions, pro-eugenic inseminations) harm it. You're going to have a difficult time arguing that a normalisation of genocide improves right-winger's chances more than literally committing white genocide harms it.
Admitting one doesn't have a good answer to a contradiction is strictly better for light-making purposes than throwing out a bad answer. And when one's best solution is "group X likes measure xY despite Y because x", I must assume they haven't looked very hard. For the record, my first assumption would be "the group is less X and more Y than Butlerian thinks if they like xY".
The so-called "globohomo" ideology has shown itself to be extremely intolerant of eugenics for the purposes of producing white blond blue-eyed children, so I hope you can see why I highly doubt tacking on "single mothers" suddenly makes it worth it.
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Didn't say it did, I was just pointing out that it was implemented somewhere, and is popular
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you're right. I changed it to 'gay rights'.
It's an example of an edgy policy that would never be allowed by the EU. It illustrates that the allowed diversity is only surface level.
You're needlessly adversarial.
Which is exactly what I meant (and said). Your point about protecting local cheeses kind of proves my thesis.
Finally - why are you doing this?
"Gay rights" is vague. What specifically does the EU prohibit, and how does it enforce the prohibition?
May I ask for a more realistic example? Something that a significant number of people in an EU country might actually support?
Yes, a trade bloc works to facilitate trade between its members. I am glad we agree. But what does this have to do with protecting cultural diversity?
I am from one of the newer EU member countries, and I don't think the EU is harming my country's traditions and culture. I feel like the EU is being misrepresented here, and I wanted to provide another perspective, lest this forum's mostly American readers get the wrong impression.
Death penalty/life imprisonment without parole. CoE deems both illegal and membership in it, and thus acceptance of ECHR authority,. is required to join the EU.
Yet at least in France more than 54% of the population is in favour of allowing the state to have the option to take someones life.
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That's the part that I tend to fear.
For our purposes I'd call it the "Disneyfication" of culture.
Disney will make a movie celebrating a few notable aspects of your culture.
Disney will add a ride/attraction/performance at EPCOT celebrating said aspects.
If you're lucky, Disney will build a whole resort complex somewhere that tries very diligently to emulate your culture and let people experience a glamorized version of it.
But once that's done, suddenly those are the only aspects of your culture that anyone knows about, and, arguably, are 'allowed' to care about. You've been very carefully and slowly hemmed in to a sanitized, corporatized, and, yes, homogenized version of your own history, which will be largely defined by food, language, and maybe some particular myth from your people's history, and you will be allowed to take pride in that aspect of it, but if you protest that there's actually more to it than that and that you want to be allowed to live your culture in its full richness, at best that will fall on deaf ears. Nope, we aren't going to acknowledge any of the more controversial aspects of your people's history, but you can always visit Disney World and have your culture sold to you in pieces!
Is that so bad? Maybe not. But once your culture is so contained, you can expect to see all 'authentic' vestiges of it eventually washed away and then... suddenly... the Disney version is ALL THAT WILL BE LEFT.
Can you give an example of this happening?
This is exactly what I'm arguing is not happening.
Disney and other popculture factory farms can produce a steady stream of easily digested drivel, but I cannot see it as something that would actually eat away real culture.
Who is doing the "allowing"? Who is doing the "hemming in"?
I can somewhat see your point working in a world that's very top down, where there is one or a handful of extremely powerful actors that does the allowing and hemming in. But I don't think that describes our world. Even within a monolithic industry like Hollywood, there are multiple actors vying for dominance, which tends to produce variety instead of destroying it.
Yes, I have experienced the sadness of seeing my friends and colleagues willingly abandoning their own reason and plugging into the pre-made stream of drivel produced by giant media outlets. But I have also experienced the joy of meeting individuals happily having their own original thoughts. (It's why I love themotte and the larger rationalist sphere).
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"Your culture sold to you..."
That's a sentiment that understands precisely where the woke are coming from, incidentally. Mentioning this because it comes up a whole hell of a lot in this forum.
Culture can belong to a whole people. "Cultural appropriation" is a real and troubling phenomenon.
Yes, but my issue is that a few people dressing up in a costume doesn't really rise to the level of appreciable threat.
I'm not nearly in favor of cultural segregation.
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Have you seen Muana? The producers went to great lengths to involve the relevant ethnicity in the production. But the story is about a young woman who feels compelled to shirk her duties to her tribe, then questions authority, and goes on a mostly solo adventure to save the environment. The main character is basically Greta Thunberg.
To the extent that these different people actually have a different worldview, this must seem really subversive. Imagine a high-budget movie full of American celebrity actors, shot in America, with pitch-perfect cultural references, about how fulfilling it was to serve the state, written by the Chinese government.
So this but played dead straight? I'd kinda love it.
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Are you referencing the Disney movie Moana? There's a much more conservative interpretation of that. It could be seen that recent generations ignored their traditions of seafaring and exploration in favor of living in a closed and confined space on their island. By restarting sea exploration, Moana is honoring her ancestors and continuing their culture over her parents.
Yes, I meant Disney's Moana, thanks for the correction. Good point about the "the radicals are the real traditionalists" interpretation. The movie could certainly have been more unambiguously pro-modernity, i.e. if Moana had taught the tribe to accept electrification or homosexuality.
I guess I'd still say that the important thing is that outsiders are writing a story in which the current way of life of the tribe is presented as wrong and in need of change (even if it's back to the past). However, maybe Polynesians tell similar stories about the dangers of stagnation and giving up seafaring. So, you made me realize that the story could plausibly not be very subversive, depending on the details of Polynesian's self-conception, which I know nothing about. But it just seems to hit the favorite beats of Western progressivism in such a cliched and recognizable way that I doubt that that's the case.
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That's actually the EXACT example I was thinking of when I wrote this. That and Coco.
Samoan/Polynesian culture proudly featured on screen... except, you know, no mention of the constant warfare and the patriarchal social structure this necessitates.
You get the Rock as a big and brash and ultimately nonthreatening cultural ambassador, and if you want to get the facial tattoos, that's just fine.
But don't ask what those giant studded clubs were for, nosiree.
I think Vikings are a bit of a counter-example to your thesis. It's well-known how destructive they were (in some time periods). Maybe it's because they're white, so no one feels the need to sanitize their history. And, the Icelandic sagas also let them speak in their own words, to some extent. Those stories are pretty much all about blood feuds and legal drama.
But they do, at least in media where the Vikings are put front and center. Here's a discussion of how Assassins Creed: Valhalla does exactly this:
https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-assassins-creed-valhalla/comment-page-1/
I don't think that example shows what it's being made out to show here.
I haven't played Valhalla, but the characters in the Assassin's Creed games are Assassins, a group engaged in a 2000 year old struggle with the Templars to decide the destiny of humanity, and whose creed involves the tenet "Stay your blade from the flesh of an innocent".
The goal isn't to accurately represent Vikings, it's to tell the story of Assassin's Creed, and one Viking protagonist not killing civilians (though in my Assassin's Creed runs plenty of innocent guardsmen get killed too) is just the history bending required to make the story fit.
The author addresses that criticism here: https://acoup.blog/2020/11/27/fireside-friday-november-27-2020/
The tl;dr; is that the majority of players only discover the historical fiction, and never meet the scifi aliens/templars/etc part of the game.
But from how he describes AC: Valhalla, it doesn't sound like it's just the protagonist who doesn't kill innocents. It's all the vikings. They come, build infrastructure, overthrow corrupt Saxons, and teach the locals how stupid Christianity is. (In real history the Vikings all learned how awesome Jesus is.)
Moreover, the complete whitewashing of historical scenarios is not something the Assassin's Creed franchise does in other circumstances. Black Flag (pirates!) does not gloss over the fact that most of the Carribean economy was based on slavery and the expansion pack has a former slave as the main playable character.
Here's an article about how much work Ubisoft put into correctly portraying the Mohawk and colonialism in AC3: https://techland.time.com/2012/09/05/assassins-creed-iiis-connor-how-ubisoft-avoided-stereotypes-and-made-a-real-character/
I haven't played AC3 either, but I'm willing to gamble that attempts by the colonialists to forcefully convert the Mohawk from their own religion to Christianity are not portrayed favorably (if portrayed at all).
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Perhaps that and the present-day descendants of said vikings, including their historical nations, are pretty well suborned to the successor ideology, not a huge amount of risk that they'll start forging an identity centered around their Viking heritage.
I don't think the Disney EPCOT version of Norway features much pillaging, though.
Also look at what Disney has done to Thor.
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