Bravokilo wrote:
Other cultures are demonstrably worse.
If you expose a child to a different culture, aren't you picking and choosing what parts of that culture to expose, i.e. you'll talk about Spanish history, but not the torture and killing of beef stock?
So aren't you just teaching the hypothetical child to apply their own bias and judgementalism to a culture which can only be really understood by being immersed in it's customs and language?
"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
Or, in this case what you mean by "culture".
At one level, "culture" is how a group of people address universal needs and unique challenges with the resources at hand. Eskimos used animal skins and whalebone. Modern Americans use synthetic polymers, duck-down and fiberglass.
Modern Americans benefit from the fact that, at least at the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, we have few unique challenges because our distribution system can move food (for instance) from a region that had good yields this year to places that had poor yields. Regression-to-the-mean implies that as the sample grows larger (or as the net seining resources increases in area) the magnitude of deviations from the mean (as a percentage) grows smaller.
At another level, "culture" can mean the commonly held beliefs and value-systems and default-responses to stimuli. At that level, our culture is being tainted by an inrush of envy-driven cultures as well as home-grown communists. A communist or a person driven by envy has no empathy and is driven by "feelings". They will destroy a hundred people for a chance to spit in Elon Musk's eye.
That brainless urge to destroy means that the system we have in place (invisible guiding hand and all that) is vulnerable to destruction whether by malice or by simplistic communist slogans (DIE).
We have a multitude of safety-nets in our society that makes the fulfillment of the needs on Maslow's lowest levels "seamless". That safety-net is under attack.
The best way to make a silk-purse out of a sow's ear is to sell the pig, plant mulberry trees and buy some silk-worms. If the safety-net is going to be shredded, perhaps we should give some thought to how we, our children and grandchildren might thrive when the net that we use to seine resources is smaller or has holes in it.
A very humble example: Southern Belle and Handsome Hombre had a conversation about the rice-pyramid-dumplings they had purchased. Handsome Hombre commented "This is a tamale!" It was a filling of chopped meat and vegetables, just like a tamale. It was encased in a layer of sticky-rice rather than cooked masa-dough (maize based). It was wrapped in banana leaves rather than corn-husks. It was served cold. In other cultures it would be a baloney-sandwich on Wonderbread wrapped in wax-paper or a meat-pie (pastie) in a tin-bucket.
Time is the ultimate resource. A portable lunch might save 10 minutes or 30 minutes of walking every day. That is time that could be used productively. The "tamale" uses abundant local resources to increase the percentage of time (and calories) devoted to productive work.
The sweetest meat lies closest to the bone (song)
Hunger is the best sauce. If you are hungry enough to pry every last fiber of meat off the chicken or squirrel carcass then you are pretty darned hungry. And the meat tastes awesome.
My Plan A is to never let chicken become this delicious. My Plan B is to have enough tools in my tool-box (including ones borrowed from other, poorer cultures) to make the transition smoothly enough to not spill my drink.
ERJ, I grew up at a time and in a place where there was not many other cultures at all - an occasional meal at a Chinese or Mexican restaurant was about it. My parents exposed us to others by saving money they could have used for other things to travel to other places to see other cultures.
ReplyDeleteMy children have been the beneficiaries of a very different world, where actual cultures are much more readily available. This has given them an introduction to wide plethora of things - not just food, but music and thought - that they have benefited by.
The important thing, I suppose, is to launch our children - or anyone - with a clear understanding of our own culture to have something to compare it by. To the origination of this post's point, it should be both the good and bad sides - of our culture as well. The opposite of that exposure is provincialism, the thought that one's own culture has no flaws or failures in it.
Joe, your last two sentences, paragraphs? Are the finest I've read today.
ReplyDeleteI have the same Plan A and Plan B myself.
I remember using wax paper to wrap sandwiches as a boy, when making my lunch for school. Mom was a vegetarian, so we had no baloney. Peanut butter and either jam or honey was what my sandwiches had. On the good side, Mom baked her own bread, so I had homemade bread.
ReplyDeleteAfter lunch, I'd carefully fold the wax paper and use it to wax a slide. Kids that would sneer at my homemade bread sandwiches would stand aside so I could make a slide much faster and more fun.
One way we extend meat is to add into mainly vegetable 'stir frys.' A leg and thigh de-boned, added to sliced squash - onions - peppers - cabbage fried in a wok over a bed of rice - so good. And easy to save some for a lunch plate next day. A 6 dollar roaster chicken can provide four meals minimum.
ReplyDeleteA demographic has emerged that claims to be supported and ruled by science and reason when it’s absolutely clear they have thrown both to the winds. Others followed suit, putting on fake airs of nobility, and piously virtue signalling to one and all as founts of morality. Sorry guys…but pull my other finger. It has bells on it.
ReplyDeleteThe third world is what it is because of the people that live there. There is nothing wrong with Africa. It’s just full of Africans. As California fills up with more and more Mexicans, it begins to look more and more like Mexico. Genetics are real, and culture is downstream from them. This is why we used to see colloquiallisms like “You can take the boy out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the boy.”
I’m not worried about it. Every day, more and more virtue signalling fakes run afoul of the jungle. They get raped, murdered, mugged, stolen from - all the things that are part and parcel of jungle life. Until white people get tired of living in jungles, cultural enrichment will continue. As for me… I am not moved by sanctimonious lectures from people that are insulated from race reality by their money, location or community. The world is what it is and we all take our chances in it.
"There is nothing wrong with Africa..."
DeleteDoes it make sense to think about next week if the bugs and humidity make it impossible to store food that long?
Snakes, diseases, bugs, poisonous plants, inability to store food, humidity that destroys metal...A future-orientation is of much less value in Accra than it is in Alberta.
High reactivity (jump first, then think) and present orientation selects within the culture independently of genetics.
There are elements of "the culture" that are not genetic and are more plastic...or would be if we stopped subsidizing poor behaviors.
All these things are true and have been burned in to the gene pool over the generations. The Magic Dirt insanity is expecting that behaviors that fundamental in both gene and culture disappear when someone moves from for example Somalia to Minneapolis.
DeleteThe only thing wrong with Africa or Mexico is the culture. John Ringo goes into some detail in his book 'The Last Centurion'.
DeleteAs evidence I'd offer Thomas Soule, who is much smarter than you, filthie. There are a few million others.
Your problem is that you have the CBS News mindset. CBS and its ilk only show bad black people (liberals, activists, and thugs), therefore, all black people are bad. There are 29,000,000 other black people that live the same lives we do.
Too many people who try to self-identify as 'conservative' are trying that Ubermensch stuff.
Well put! Too old to be a refugee, building plan "B" tools and relationships,
ReplyDeleteA little East of Paris
And yet the European cultures thrived and flourished under the exact same conditions, Joe. So much so, that when they mastered those things, they set sail for Africa and set up profitable colonies there.
ReplyDeleteWhy do the denizens of Africa fail to prep and invest in the future in America too? Were it not for welfare they would live a Neolithic lifestyles here too. Why is it, historically, that blacks have always been slaves, servants or criminals?
And why is it, the woke are feverishly re-writing history and tearing down historical monuments?
Acording to this source (https://archive.org/details/africanmiddleage00rola), Europeans stepping off the boat in Lagos or Accra had a life expectancy of about six-months, mostly due to malaria.
DeleteTrade-goods like blackpowder muskets and horses had a life expectancy of about one year. Horses to disease. Muskets due to a combination of blackpowder deposits, lack of cleaning and humidity rapidly breaking springs and roughing-up frizzens. Those were the trade-goods that Europeans traded for slaves to take to the Caribbean and other points in the Western Hemisphere. It was great for the Europeans because there was no way to flood the market due to the rapid attrition. There was an endless demand.
So while can point out areas in Europe where Malaria was endemic and places where it is hot and places where it is humid, none of them offer them in such overwhelming amounts in a single location.
I am not saying you are wrong, just that you and I have different pictures in our heads of the differences between Europe and Africa in, say, 1700 AD.
Guaranteed. The accounts and info I read were of the first white settlers and pioneers who would later become the Boers. (My great grandfather fought them) so I picked up a tiny smattering of his ideas on them too.
DeleteBriefly, a handful of whites went into Africa with wagon trains, flint and cap lock rifles, killed obscene numbers of blacks and established sprawling farmsteads and dynasties. As we see the whites decline in Africa, we also see it falling back into the old familiar savagery. The truth is blacks lived better under apartheid and segregation in Africa than they do now under self govt.
Let us have some objectivity and clarity: those settlers were not suicidal. They went there expecting a payoff. They were intelligent and weighed the risks just as you and I would have. And - they succeeded.
Agreed, too old to start over, so plan B, C, etc. as required...
ReplyDelete'Rice-pyramid dumplings' are called zongzi in Chinese - primarily a traditional festival food most commonly served during the Dragon Boat Festival.
ReplyDeleteCulture defines acceptable behavior, and therefore, unacceptible behaviour. When behaviour is not accepted, the use of force ensues, that's what failure to accept looks like.
ReplyDeleteMulticulturalism is just another name for war.
When two cultures coexist, peace is defined as the clear and mutually agreed upon border between them.
Bravokilo's problem is the assumption that his own assessment of Spanish culture is correct and that the Spaniards are wrong. And they will always be wrong until they conform to his opinion. This is nothing more than racism. Without respect for other peoples, their cultures, and our differences, we inevitably set ourselves up as their judge and ultimately their executioner.
ReplyDeleteHad the "tamale" experience with my Mexican-born wife 27 years back. Banana-leaf tamales are known as "corundas". I'm not a fan, as the banana leaves impart a bitter (to me) flavor. I do like my wife's cornhusk tamales.
ReplyDelete