Political discussions and other rants about useless things like culture

[stizzleomnibus]

I just finished a U.S. history class, which of course contains important details from the history of Europe. Ethnicity in Europe is so strange to me as an American. The only three ethnic groups in America are massive umbrellas, White, Black, and Hispanic. The weird thing about Europe is the completely arbitrary districting, which frequently packs separate groups into the same country. It is strange to me that many of these people don't get along; through American eyes, it is difficult to understand all of the conflict when people aren't even different colors on the outside (not that that makes Black-White racism acceptable; just visually understandable.

On one hand, I think that everyone in Europe and Asia should learn to get along. On the other, we should redistrict you fuckers until you don't have anyone to argue with. Redraw the Balkans, reunite the Ossetia's as one independent nation, give the Basque people a chunks of Spain and France. Moving South, redraw borders until the Kurds have their own nation, and move Israelis and Palestinians around until they don't care about each other anymore. The bizarre hodge-podge of that entire side of the world is a breeding ground for conflict.

 

[Maxim1110]

That's exactly how it is, and it's been like that for the past 1500 years, basically since the fall of the Roman Empire. There are many groups that do get along though. In The Netherlands, there's a big difference between people from the south, from the west, from the east, and from the north. And that's all within a country of like 200 x 300 km... But it gets better, if you look solely at the south, there's still much difference between those from Zeeland (Sealand, southwest), Brabant ("semi-Belgium", south) and Limburg (somewhere inbetween Dutch, Belgian and German, southeast). Of course there's jokes about other provinces, but generally all the different groups of people get along very well.

They're more alike though than Flanders and Wallonia are, except for perhaps the Frysians, who also have a language of their own. In that way, Belgium is way more fucked up than The Netherlands are, asides the Wallonia (French) and Flanders (Dutch) there's also Belgian Lorraine, which is basically everything in one big pile, with some German added. That area was originally German, but they had to cede that to Belgium after WWII.

 

[stizzleomnibus]

My history professor actually suggested that, instead of the huge clusterfuck of the Treaty of Versaille, the most sensible end to World War I would have been to just dissolve Germany. Germany as we know it was only a few decades old at the time. So many countries over there are completely arbitrary. In the modern age of European peace, the borders are frozen at the end of a more imperial age. Someone slapped together a bunch of empires, ruling several different regions and ethnic groups. In the U.S., we tend to think of words like "German" and "Italian" as ethnicities. Get into any of those countries, and you find numerous groups with unique names for themselves.

BTW, there is something that has always confused my about the Netherlands. I understand that the Dutch people are a major group of the population. But I am curious, is Dutch the proper way to describe things from the country? You have, for example an Italian government in Italy. Is the government of the Netherlands "The Dutch Government"? It is my understanding that "Netherlandian" is not a word, but not everyone in the Netherlands is Dutch.

 

[Maxim1110]

Yes, the Treaty of Versaille was one of the worst things that could've happened. Through making the requirements impossible to accomplish for Germany the Treaty essentially was one of the main causes for WW2.

To answer your question: yeah, Dutch is the proper way to describe anything from The Netherlands. It's like something from Germany is German and something from Italy is Italian. I have to admit I don't know where the term comes from, because in Dutch it is 'Nederland' and 'Nederlands'. The situation is highly similar to that of, to use your examples, Germany and Italy. Everyone is Dutch, but if you get into the country you will find many different ethnicities with the Frysians being the most important one as they also have their own language without it being a simple dialect of the Dutch language.

 

[Defiance]

Will comment on the rest later, but now a quote from my linguist colleague:

So let me explain: Duits/Deutsch initially was a term for everything "belonging to the people" (in contrast to "belonging to the government") it's from Germanic *þeodisk- (thus "theodiscus" in Latin texts). It appeared mainly in court texts when someone was quoted who was speaking in his native toung rather than in Latin. No matter where the speaker was from.
At around the year 1000 the term "diutisc" became restricted to everything culturally and linguistically German (not Germanic!) which was basically everything within the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation. The Scandinavian languages, Frisian (I'm not quite sure here) and English were not called "diutisc". There was no sense of "Germanic" because people didn't know or just didn't care.

All this "Germanicism" appeared in the rennaissance or maybe a bit later. (Educated) people from all over Europe began to bethink themselves of their "roots", the classical times. But since Germany never took part in what was so adorable about the Romans and Greeks, some built up their own past of heroic Germanics fighting against Romans and being proud of their Germanic identity. Which is just rubbish because in the antiquity there was no common feel of being Germanic or not. It was rather a term given by the Romans to everything east of the Rhine. Even Slavonic tribes counted as "germanicus".

 

[Maxim1110]

Hey Danny, I just read this on the In Flames website and since your from Costa Rica, do you know anything more about it?

Welcome to the jungle!

We're buying up a big chunk of tropical jungle in Costa Rica through our 500 dripping new Junglepax.
When we saw Junglepax, it was obvious that we need to get us some! Now you know where to find us when we retire. Machete chop! – In Flames

The In Flames collaboration buys 2500m² of rainforest in Costa Rica and injects 20% of the money to global aid.
Our fancy collab site is right here: http://junglepax.com/inflames


Get your Junglepax kids! http://junglepax.com/

Info:
Junglepax is a brand of online collectables, designed for the consumer market, injecting 90% to causes.
1 Junglepax buys 5m2 of tropical rainforest and ships 20% to, pax-specific, urgent global aid, all for the price of your take-away coffee.
A nice bite sized format of doing good. Small actions easy to make.

http://junglepax.com/

 

[Defiance]

Hey Danny, I just read this on the In Flames website and since your from Costa Rica, do you know anything more about it?

Haha no, I didn't know anything. For a second there I thought that they were actually buying part of the jungle, I thought "WTF? I thought only Gringos did that!"

But it's a great initiative, maybe this'll incite them to come here. And perhaps DT should follow their example in getting those "pax" (and coming here too).

 

[Maxim1110]

Yeah, they'll have to "inspect" their piece of jungle

But it's not just Americans, Chinese are engaged in buying parts of other countries as well. They recently tried to buy all the agricultural area of Madagascar, which luckily hasn't happened.

 

[Defiance]

Yeah, they'll have to "inspect" their piece of jungle

But it's not just Americans, Chinese are engaged in buying parts of other countries as well. They recently tried to buy all the agricultural area of Madagascar, which luckily hasn't happened.

Fuck, that's horrible. Can you send me some info? I'd like to write that in blog (which I hope you visit, if not…).

I mentioned the Gringos because they're the ones who come here the most (them and fellow Canadians). They come here to retire (i.e die ), and they keep buying pieces of land of Guanacaste (one of the seven provinces of the country, now famous for it's massive construction and economic growth. Until the economy collapsed, that is hahaha).

 

[Maxim1110]

I heard that in social geography class, so I don't have any articles but I'll google on the subject and I'll post some links here if I can find anything

EDIT: Not exactly Chinese, buy I did find this:
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2008/11/20/daewoo-to-buy-madagascar/
And this:
http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0525-hance_landbuys.html
This:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...olonial-rush-for-Africas-land-and-labour.html
This:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocolonialism#Sino-African_relations
And this:
http://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/china-and-neo-colonialism-in-africa.html

I suppose that will do?

 

[Zach.Zhang]

^:zombie:

 

[stizzleomnibus]

Did you ever notice how Africa is the most violent, underdeveloped continent in the world? Supplying arms to warlords maintains an atmosphere of destabilization, holding off the development of things like roads, schools, factories, and science. In this manner, global influence has been effective at stopping Africa from becoming a major part of the world economy. Think about it: in the competition between NATO and the USSR, Africa was never a factor. Now that Japan, U.S., E.U. and China are competing for economic leadership, Africa still isn't a factor.

If anything, helping to fuck over the people of Africa just means that China is coming of age on the world stage, engaging in the ancient art of imperialism.

 

[Defiance]

I heard that in social geography class, so I don't have any articles but I'll google on the subject and I'll post some links here if I can find anything

EDIT: Not exactly Chinese, buy I did find this:
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2008/11/20/daewoo-to-buy-madagascar/
And this:
http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0525-hance_landbuys.html
This:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...olonial-rush-for-Africas-land-and-labour.html
This:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocolonialism#Sino-African_relations
And this:
http://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/china-and-neo-colonialism-in-africa.html

I suppose that will do?

Thanks, I'll look at them thoroughly.

Did you ever notice how Africa is the most violent, underdeveloped continent in the world? Supplying arms to warlords maintains an atmosphere of destabilization, holding off the development of things like roads, schools, factories, and science. In this manner, global influence has been effective at stopping Africa from becoming a major part of the world economy. Think about it: in the competition between NATO and the USSR, Africa was never a factor. Now that Japan, U.S., E.U. and China are competing for economic leadership, Africa still isn't a factor.

If anything, helping to fuck over the people of Africa just means that China is coming of age on the world stage, engaging in the ancient art of imperialism.

Of course! What other way to thank the origins of mankind, than destroying the place we, in essence, all come from? It's only the natural thing for us humans to do.
"
But that's a great way to put it stizzle, as China (The Land of the Centre, 中&#22269 "becomes" an economic power, it's obvious that they want their share of that long-forgotten continent called Africa. Still, China's economy is a bubble, a lot of the loans are not registered, so boom will turn to bust any time now. When one thing goes down, the entire economy will suffer a collapse due to its rapid growth. But perhaps they'll emerge victorious and remove Japan from the 2nd place of the world's most powerful economies.

All at the cost of Mother Earth and "them" pretty pandas.

This article is pretty interesting too:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...iversary-marked-by-anger-and-controversy.html

 

[Defiance]

 

[Defiance]

Holy crap, the far-right won in Sweden. This tendency is not good, at all. More and more extremists are entering the political arena, all due to "immigration issues". If Europe were a better Union they'd help out the Middle-East, instead of assisting in the invasion.

 

[Maxim1110]

Hmm well they didn't exactly win there. Actually, they're doing a lot better than we do in TN. As from what I've understood, they just got enough votes to be able to get into the parliament, which is the first time this happens since the party was founded in 1988. Both of the other parties (central right and central left), refuse any possible coalition with the "Sweden Democrats". Furthermore, I heard there were massive demonstrations against the party in Stockholm and Gothenburg, something I would like to see here as well. I have heard though, that this party actually emerged from neo-nazis. This makes the fact that they actually do get votes even more disturbing.

 

[Defiance]

No, they didn't win. They got into parliament, which is bad enough. This is the far right, the extremists, so it's definitely not good that they even got in. I didn't know about the Nazi stuff, but I wouldn't be surprised.

 

[Northern Lights]

I wouldn't call them far right extremists, to be honest, not in their current incarnation. They are more of a "back to the good old Swedish folkhem days, where everyone danced traditional dances, went to church on Sundays, where the men worked and the women stayed at home and gave birth all the time and weren't raped by those islamic criminal brown people" paty. They're certainly racist, but they're more like a racist, socially conservative and economically incompetent version of the social democrats than they are totalitarian fascists. They do have their roots in neonazi movements, but they've made an effort to become more publically acceptable and at least officially don't want to embrace that sort of ideology. I think this is key to having attracted the number of voters that they actually did - after all, very few Swedes would support the foundation of a totalitarian regime. The average Svensson doesn't sit at home and think "it would be nice if we had some concentration camps to put all those unwanted people in", the average Svensson sits at home and thinks "everything's gone to shit and it's all the brown people's fault, I wish they would just go back home." I use brown people here rather than immigrants, because that's what it's really about. Finns are the biggest group of immigrants in Sweden, but of course we don't think of them as such because they're blond too and even worse affected by depression and suicide than we are, so they're ok. But as soon as there's some visible difference, they're immigrants who should go away because they come here and want to build minarets, have dozens of babies, rape our women, rob our elderly and live on our welfare while simultaneously taking our jobs, all this while speaking broken Swedish.

As much as I dislike the fact that this party is in parliament, and that it got so many seats, I do think it will go away. We've already had a racist party in parliament, in the early 90s Ny Demokrati also got around 7% of the votes. They have since become history, and I think it's likely that SD will, too, provided that the established parties can tackle the questions that have driven people to vote for a "missnöjesparti". High youth unemployment and an unsuccessful integration policy are two of the most pressing ones. Furthermore, SD has some truly ridiculous policies and ideas, and exposing these for what they are (such as their completely ludicrous calculations of the cost of immigrants and how much money we would save by throwing them all out) could help in making them go away. Ignoring them won't.

I'm also pretty uncomfortable with the demonstrations, the attacks against the SD websites and the publishing online of a list of names and addresses of supposed SD members (which turned out to be people who'd requested information material from them - which I assume will include a lot of politics students who will now be officially labeled as racists for doing research on xenophobia). The latter two practices are completely undemocratic and really only fit for the totalitarian society all SD opponents claim they want to avoid. If Swedes are going to take pride in being "the greatest democracy on earth", as we like to do, we better act as if we are. The same thing with the demonstrations: if 280 000 Swedes voted for SD, why are you demonstrating with signs saying "no to SD in parliament"? As much as we dislike it, now they're there and the best we can do is to expose them for what they are, not to somehow demand that they be excluded from parliament for having the wrong opinions. Don't people see what sort of precedent that sets? If people had taken to the streets to demonstrate against the left party being in parliament, we would've been horrified and immediately pointed out that this is how democracy works and that you can't ignore the will of the people.

This is the will of the people. As shocked as we may be that Swedes turn out to be less tolerant than we imagine ourselves to be, clearly the numbers that turned out for SD say something about our society. We better accept that and do something about it, but turning all our energies to effectively bully the party won't solve anything.

 

[Defiance]

^ Thanks for this instructive post, it's always good to have the Swedish point in all of this. Since all the info I get is from international sites/newspapers (papers? ), it's obviously biased, to a certain point.

It's true that they should be respected, since people voted for them, but that still doesn't mean that what they say or do is "the best thing" . Anyhow, I'm still quite surprised that they got so many votes and got into parliament; I guess that the anti-immigration sentiment is increasing a lot in Europe.

And heck, not just there, Costa Rica has a lot of immigration issues too. I sometimes don't like that so many Colombians and Nicaraguans come here, even if the latter have more excuse to migrate than the former.

 

[Maxim1110]

In one way it is true that they should be respected, in another way it isn't. If you think about it, it is pretty hypocritical: you need to respect them, but they don't respect many others (immigrants, especially from non-western countries in this case).