U.S. Politics: Trump of the Will

[DMC]

3 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

It compared all major parties in Western nations, and it’s findings were that the Republican Party was most closely associated with Marie Le Pen’s National Rally. Any idea which study that was?

Afraid not.  I know European comparativists often use the Manifesto Project to compare parties in different countries using some form of text analysis.  Never heard of them comparing the US to European parties, but that seems eminently doable - plus it's not my field so not like I'm on top of it or anything.  Actually, if you look at the twitter feed on that site (to the right), there's a link to a NYT writeup that sounds similar to what you're getting at.  Anyway, you might have better luck inquiring with @Rippounet about this.

[DanteGabriel]

What the suffering fuck is this gibbering horseshit. New York in the late 80s/early 90s (your definition of the "peak" of "Western" culture, whatever that means) was closer to a hive of scum and villainy than it is now. Holy fuck you're extrapolating entire theories on the nature of civilization based on secondhand anecdotal accounts.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

7 hours ago, ummester said:

Yes and departments of defense have nothing to do with starting wars.

They are only diverse until they become a new cohesive culture or collapse. If they cohere and multiculturalism spreads globally, it will remove cultural diversity, they is no way around that logic.

The whole point of multiculturalism is to maintain the diversity of merging cultures, as opposed to the old melting pot concept. Multicultural education, for example, emphasizes many things such as preserving and understanding the diversity of the cultures in a single nation. Multiculturalism is diversity and maintaining it.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

16 minutes ago, aceluby said:

What are you basing this on?  Movies? 

Dude, wait till he comes to our city and sees Uptown.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

24 minutes ago, DMC said:

Afraid not.  I know European comparativists often use the Manifesto Project to compare parties in different countries using some form of text analysis.  Never heard of them comparing the US to European parties, but that seems eminently doable - plus it's not my field so not like I'm on top of it or anything.  Actually, if you look at the twitter feed on that site (to the right), there's a link to a NYT writeup that sounds similar to what you're getting at.  Anyway, you might have better luck inquiring with @Rippounet about this.

Thanks for looking, I’ll have to check out the link when I have some free time.

And here I was hoping the response was about walking tacos. Given your avatar, I’m sure you’re well versed in them.

[DMC]

20 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

And here I was hoping the response was about walking tacos. Given your avatar, I’m sure you’re well versed in them.

Nah, never been a fan.  Gimme a tortilla to stuff everything in damnit!  Also, not sure what the Dead have to do with walking tacos?  Cuz stoners like walking tacos?

[TrueMetis]

1 hour ago, ummester said:

So you are an advocate for some global humanity?

I mean, humanity is global, and I find plenty of people outside my country who agree with my ideals, and plenty inside it who disagree. So yeah, kind of. Though maybe you're using some weird definitions here too.

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British culture is a thing by my definition  - English language and common law based on an evolution from ancient cultures, through Christianity and the enlightenment, to what Britain accepts as social convention now.

Okay, so now we've changed from values to common law. Except Scotland uses a hybrid system that's a mix of common and civil law. And Northern Ireland also has it's own distinct legal peculiarities. Moreover you've brought up "the west" as it's own distinct thing (and how, one wonders, with your definition can western and British culture exist simultaneously? Are you now allowing cultures to exist within each other? You objected to me doing so it regard to different cultures in England. Or is Britain not part of the west?) but the law varies incredibly wildly, so how can you be so concerned about the decline of the west when you've just defined it out of existence? (I mean technically you did that when you brought in the common language requirement, but that's a really stupid requirement)

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Yet, as I mentioned before, culture is a snapshot, based on history and present position. British culture is as definable as Japanese culture, or Chinese culture - based on the currently (and to some extent historically) shared ideas of linguistics and belief. Yes, there will always be outliers and variations but that does not negate that there is a general middle to the normal curve about which a given cultures language and values relate.

So, not really is what you're saying here. China is country of vast linguistic and ethnic difference. Chinese people speak over a dozen languages across four separate linguistic families. It actually kind of amazing, you could not have picked more opposite examples of cultures than China and Japan. The former a massively heterogeneous group, with very diverse languages and beliefs. The latter Japan, near totally homogeneity in language, and one of the most homogeneous in terms of belief.

The funny thing though is that you have, however unintentionally, hit upon the truth of culture. It's a conglomerate. Chinese culture exists yes, being made up of the dozens, hundreds, or cultures that exist within China. Combine Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, etc culture and you get the collective that is Asian culture. Same goes for British culture, it exists, as the conglomerate of Scottish, English, Irish, and Welsh culture. Which themselves are formed of their own smaller cultures. These aren't just variations within a culture, they are their own distinct cultures.

See that's the fundamental truth that we're only started to realize in the last few decades, all societies are multicultural. They can't not be. We can either let that truth divide us into ever smaller isolated groups, or realize that it's as stupid to divide "the west" from everything else as it is to talk about the massive differences between someone from Cornwall and someone from Northumberland.

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WHEN IN ROME, DO AS THE ROMANS DO - it really is that simple. Rome will change at its own pace, You never have the right to dictate that change. As soon as you try to dictate the rate of change, you hasten the collapse of Rome.

Rome of course being famous for it's ability to accept aspects of other cultures, and allowing it's conquered territories to basically keep running themselves as they had been. And it's collapse being in large part due to moving away from that kind of multicultural policy.

[Zorral]

The truth is that diversity of cultures within a nation or state and even communities (nation / state does not = 'culture'), strengthens in every way the cohesiveness of nation and state and communities, as we see when in a Nashville development, despite being named 'Hermitage' after uber racist and genocide kill, Andrew Jackson, tvillian's favorite, natch -- united to protect their neighbors from ICE agents. 

It's only political - economic rapists and pillagers, to create more power for themselves, and less for the rest of us, who foster hatred and division in order tear apart the nations / states and communities.

NYC is a remarkably peaceful and humane city on a human level (compared to so many other places that are a lot smaller than it) -- excluding the spectacularly bloated global billionaire pillagers who are trying to change our city from its diverse roots -- that pulls together remarkably well -- and is an endlessly fascinating, interesting, exciting place to live.  Rockford, Illiniois -- which is white and black, and has gone from its glorious abolitionist history -- to having activists who hate everyone who isn't 'white,' want the immigrant-descended Mexican families to move out.  Without the Mexican families and their catering and restaurants, all there is to eat is fast franchise food.  You couldn't pay me to live there, so boring and stupid -- and filled with haters and tvillian voters. It seems the more homogenous the place a person lives the more that person is terrified of diversity. like the troll who calls himself tellingly, ubermeister or whatever like that -- who has never been anywhere.  His idea of what NYC was like in the 1990's is preposterous.

How in hell does one get from this to the ridiculous belief that diversity means global and collapse of -- well whatever he's trying to say he's expressing very poorly, because this is just, again, silly argument.  Fascism is what wants no diversity and everyone to be the same, and deports and executes as many as possible who don't conform to this fascist standard of all the same.

 

[Mexal]

1 hour ago, ummester said:

Yep, you can try and accuse my philosophy of that if you want but I find your argument far more totalitarian.

Not once have I ever based the idea of culture on skin color - as noted previously in the threat, I am not even white.

As for New York - I have never been there - always felt too much like a hive of scum and villainy form my perspective. When human cities get too big, they are always as much a home to disease bearing rats as humans. We are meant to live in smaller populations than what our cities require to subsist. All that aside, New York, like LA, is not the US, right? Both places are the cesspools of what the US represents. I mean why else would 911 have occurred? I don't know if that was Saudis or Mossad or even the CIA - what I do know is that the twin towers were symbolic of US greed across the globe. What I understand is the symbolism, without relating to the individual human details - New York has been pinged as symbolically corrupt for a very long time. I mean, given this is a GoTs forum NY and LA are basically Kings Landing, in a symbolic sense.

[Kalbear]

Can we please fuck off with this culture conversation to another thread?

[Rippounet]

2 hours ago, Simon Steele said:

Multiculturalism is diversity and maintaining it.

This is what I wouldn't be entirely certain of, at least in the long run.

OTOH I can’t for the life of me understand why people (generally on the right) want to link culture and socio-economics. Like seriously, socio-economic conditions have socio-economic causes. Culture and cultural values are negligible quantities on the scale of a human life. Why the fuck do people want to blame cultural factors for political stuff is beyond me. I can only assume politics and economics are too complex for many to understand. But still why the entire schtick about civilization is so popular remains something of a minor mystery in my eyes. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

Nah, never been a fan.  Gimme a tortilla to stuff everything in damnit!  Also, not sure what the Dead have to do with walking tacos?  Cuz stoners like walking tacos?

Music festivals dude. Walking tacos are as essential as liquor and grass, among other things.

[Ser Reptitious]

4 hours ago, ummester said:

Late 80s/early 90s - because no subset of humanity had ever been as free. But we also sowed the seeds for our own destruction in that time, by re-enforcing corporate law introduced in the 70s. Greed - it fucks humanity up every time.

Thanks for your clarification. I agree that the (very) late 80s/early 90s were a great time, due to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the ensuing optimism around the world. But you're kind of all over the map here (as well as in subsequent posts). I suspect that you're limiting the "almost utopia" of that era to the "west" because that is where living standards were highest (not sure if Japan and South Korea count in your mind or not)? But you yourself keep talking about culture being a "snapshot in time", so once we start looking at how the "west" managed to accumulate that wealth through colonization/enslavement of large chunks of the rest of the world, does it still look so utopian?

And I'm not really sure where you are going with the "corporate law" train of thought in terms of culture, considering that laissez-faire capitalism (and the accompanying corporatism) seems to play a notable part in the U.S.'s culture. If western culture needs to be protected in its current state, isn't that part of it?*

 

(*to be clear, I don't thinks so at all, but your thesis of protecting current western culture seems to logically lead that way!)

[Rippounet]

3 hours ago, DMC said:

Afraid not.  I know European comparativists often use the Manifesto Project to compare parties in different countries using some form of text analysis.  Never heard of them comparing the US to European parties, but that seems eminently doable - plus it's not my field so not like I'm on top of it or anything.  Actually, if you look at the twitter feed on that site (to the right), there's a link to a NYT writeup that sounds similar to what you're getting at.  Anyway, you might have better luck inquiring with @Rippounet about this.

Yeah I also think Tywin is talking about the Manifesto Project:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunday/republican-platform-far-right.html

[Larry of the Lawn]

4 hours ago, ummester said:

Well, I'm not American, so it doesn't particularly bother me - however, what I understand about the US border crisis thingy is that a lot of the immigrants showing up aren't even from South America - so surely someone must be asking the question, how are they getting to the US border?

They're mostly from Central America, but sounds like your misunderstanding goes far beyond that distinction.

[mormont]

And so this US Politics thread ends, as so many do, not with a bang but with a digression into abstract musings that aren't really a discussion of US Politics at all. Time for a new one.