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> Something like this: Honestly that comment doesn't read "racist" to me. Maybe the disconnect is taking "culture" too literally, or using "culture" when one

> Something like this: Honestly that comment doesn't read "racist" to me. Maybe the disconnect is taking "culture" too literally, or using "culture" when one really means "people" (i.e. a combination of culture and ancestry/descent). Also even though an entire culture can technically be transmitted memetically, that's practically not the case except in cases of early childhood adoption. Immigrant populations may tend to take on certain cultural characteristics (e.g. economic and political ones) of the population they get socialized into, but those characteristics may not actually be the ones particular individual cares the most about preserving (e.g. culture in a narrower non-anthropological sense, like religion and and attachment to certain literature). And even assuming a full memetic replication of a culture, I don't think the last member of a colonized people would be entirely happy that his people went extinct even if some of the colonizers fully took up his culture.

tuatoru 5y ago
> even though an entire culture can technically be transmitted memetically, that's practically not the case except in cases of early childhood adoption. The excellent blog ACOUP has just had a five-part series, "The Queen's Latin", in part describing mass cultural transmission from Rome to various ethnic groups in Europe. TLDR: it helps to have a culture that readily accommodates different religions and other regional variations. Cultures are not fixed for all time; they change all the time.
- oblio 5y ago
  The thing is, many countries have cultures based on opposition. There's a reason most national days are celebrations of an independence war. So for many of these countries you're asking for a lobotomy.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    It's long overdue for humanity to ditch the dangerous baggage that is Romantic nationalism.
    - oblio 5y ago
      Good luck with that! We're also not great at scaling trust.
      - int_19h 5y ago
        Well, it's a relatively recent invention, historically speaking, so I'm optimistic. And we already have some emerging polities that recognize its problems, e.g.: "We the people of Rojava in Northern Syria: Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmens, Armenians, Chechens, Circassians, among them Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and various other creeds and sects, declare that the nationalist State has placed Kurdistan, Mesopotamia and Syria at the heart of the chaos that is afflicting the Middle East and has brought acute crises and suffering upon the people. ... The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria is founded on a geographical concept" (https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of-the-Democratic-Federation-of-Northern-Syria https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of...) And yes, trust doesn't really scale well, which is why centralized governance in general is a big problem. But there are known techniques to decentralize it in ways that can still scale, e.g. council democracy.

tuatoru 5y ago

> even though an entire culture can technically be transmitted memetically, that's practically not the case except in cases of early childhood adoption. The excellent blog ACOUP has just had a five-part series, "The Queen's Latin", in part describing mass cultural transmission from Rome to various ethnic groups in Europe. TLDR: it helps to have a culture that readily accommodates different religions and other regional variations. Cultures are not fixed for all time; they change all the time.

oblio 5y ago
The thing is, many countries have cultures based on opposition. There's a reason most national days are celebrations of an independence war. So for many of these countries you're asking for a lobotomy.
- int_19h 5y ago
  It's long overdue for humanity to ditch the dangerous baggage that is Romantic nationalism.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Good luck with that! We're also not great at scaling trust.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      Well, it's a relatively recent invention, historically speaking, so I'm optimistic. And we already have some emerging polities that recognize its problems, e.g.: "We the people of Rojava in Northern Syria: Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmens, Armenians, Chechens, Circassians, among them Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and various other creeds and sects, declare that the nationalist State has placed Kurdistan, Mesopotamia and Syria at the heart of the chaos that is afflicting the Middle East and has brought acute crises and suffering upon the people. ... The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria is founded on a geographical concept" (https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of-the-Democratic-Federation-of-Northern-Syria https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of...) And yes, trust doesn't really scale well, which is why centralized governance in general is a big problem. But there are known techniques to decentralize it in ways that can still scale, e.g. council democracy.