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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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No sane person ever took sides in the Karabakh conflict aside from the respective diasporas, simply because the people involved are both identical and irrelevant

Not exactly. Armenians can at least point to their Christian history as a commonality and to the World War One-era genocide as something that many well-read Westerners have heard of. I'd guess that maybe 15% of Americans could immediately point to Armenia on a map of the world without help. When it comes to Azerbaijan, I would guess that it is more like 5%.

Also, probably because most countries never viewed Karabakh to be part of Armenia to begin with, because of Armenia's historical ties to Russia, and because Azerbaijan won both recent wars pretty quickly, Armenia did not benefit from anything even remotely approaching the amount of Western media PR that Ukraine has been getting.

I think the difference is that the Azerbaijanis aren’t really typecasted as Islamists, the first line of the Wikipedia page on Religion in Azerbaijan says “Azerbaijan is considered the most secular country in the Muslim world”, most elites don’t wear hijab etc. It’s clear to any observer that it’s a relatively run of the mill territorial conflict for that part of the world, Azerbaijan is a corrupt petrostate but Islam isn’t relevant and so it avoids the West vs Islam culture war conflict even as desperate Armenian boosters try to claim it as such.

Really? I'd personally think far more people would be able to identify Azerbaijan vs Armenia on a world map. Azerbaijan has the benefit of having a pointy bit sticking out into the Caspian (very memorable and easily identifiable) while Armenia really doesn't have much going for it, I'd imagine lots of people would confuse it for Georgia.

I can’t believe that you of all people are so wildly overestimating the geographical knowledge of the American populace.

Oh, I didn't mean like 30% of the American populace would be able to identify Azerbaijan, it was more like thinking 2% would be able to point to Armenia and get it right on the first try, while something like 5% would be able to do the same with Azerbaijan, my claim was (%age who get AZ correct) > (%age who get AM correct).

Besides, I never said I think the American population is uniquely dumb compared to the rest of the world, they're smarter if anything averaged over the whole rest of the world, it's more that I think modern western culture is what is bad. The hardware of westerners is fine (well, as fine as an average human's hardware can be), it's the software that's borked.

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