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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31922 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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What specifically does, say, a Filipino need to do to join a Western nation?

Loyalty, understanding and acceptance of the nation's language, culture, and traditions, some knowledge of history wouldn't hurt either.

Why can't they do that?

Where did I said that they can't?

I don't feel like the people around me whose families come from Vietnam are any less Australian than someone like me whose family comes from Britain.

I'm a European immigrant to another European country. I've been here for about 10 years now, and in my opinion it would be ridiculous to pretend I joined the host nation. You might say that if I have kids, they'll be more a part of this place, but:

  • I'm skeptical. Other immigrants tell me that their kids don't belong either here, or back in their parents' country of origin.

  • I'd probably be more or less actively working against it. The values of the country I'm living in are weird and foreign to me, and I wouldn't want my children to adopt them.

Maybe Australia and Vietnam have so much in common that these issues don't come up, or maybe you filter out the non-Australian-like Vietnamese, but to be honest you're making it sound like there isn't really that much to being Australian other than holding a passport.

There's a lot to being Australian other than holding a passport. As is always the case with culture, not everyone embodies every aspect of it and there's plenty of similarities that can be found in other countries and cultures, but these are a sample of things that I think of as being distinctive elements of aussie culture:

  • sports crazy, particularly AFL/NRL depending on which side of the Barassi line you live on. Cricket is the unifier, it's kind of everyone's 2nd favourite sport.
  • giving your mates shit in a way that is friendly but would cross a line in some cultures.
  • being relaxed about things in general, "she'll be right".
  • a sense of being in it together, that both inspires people to help each other out when needed, and makes people resent those who are seen as letting the side down
  • highly egalitarian - no one thinks you're special if you've got a lot of money or status or whatever. One of my favourite examples is a bloke interrupting the prime minister's press conference to ask him to get off his lawn. Not in a hostile way or anything, just not a big deal.
  • oddly authoritarian - not in a hierarchical way, but in a "why are you being a pain and not following the rules like everyone else?" way. If you get done for something, serves you right for being a dickhead.
  • coffee obsession. I don't drink coffee and it's really socially awkward sometimes.
  • a strong aversion to accepting favours without "balancing the books" in some way.

Thing is, it's not actually hard to pick up these sorts of things. People do it easily and naturally. You sense the mood and attitude of the people around you and match it.

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