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I'm guessing that many of these are targeting Americans. One of the weird side effects of being from a melting pot country only a few hundred years old is a ye
by munificent 4y ago
I'm guessing that many of these are targeting Americans.
One of the weird side effects of being from a melting pot country only a few hundred years old is a yearning for connection to things that feel permanent and historical. "Owning" some land in Scotland and "having" a title may be appealing to an American who otherwise feels cut off from their Scottish ancestry or other longer-term cultural practices.
- dilyevsky 4y agoI don’t think it’s related to melting pot thing - new world history is just not that rich compared to european/asian ones due to its recency and (for the most part) lack of conflict
- ido 4y agoThere was a tremendous amount of conflict in the new world, just mostly not between countries (the conquest of the Americas had a death toll of 70-100m people).
- dilyevsky 4y agoSure but those are relatively few events (though large in magnitude) compared to stuff that was going on in europe/asia. And americas are fucking huge compared to europe and coastal east asia. Turns out when lota people are sandwiched in tight geography, competing for resources for thousands of years a lot of stuff happens!
- noSyncCloud 4y agoCounterpoint: New World history is/was just as rich and valuable; it was just systematically erased by one of the largest genocides in history spanning from pole to pole.
- dilyevsky 4y agoThey had 10% of world population at the time conquest began so just by that metric nah
- munificent 4y agoWhat level of population is required for one's culture to be considered interesting or worth preserving?
- dilyevsky 4y agoYikes, you always twist someone’s words like that in a discourse? All I said the history is not as rich which makes sense given there was like 10x fewer people here on a huge territory. But also North American tribes didnt even have much written down unlike the South American civilizations
- munificent 4y agoYou literally said that by the metric of population, their history was not as rich. I don't see how that's twisting your words at all. My point is that Native Americans do have just as rich and interesting a history as European countries. It was just largely deliberately erased by European settlers.
- fwip 4y agoWhat other genocides do you know of that killed more than 10% of the world population?
- bee_rider 4y agoIsn't that sort of related? People in the mixing pot want to find some rich historical legacy to connect to so they can feel distinct from the rest of the pot. Personally, I've always found it a bit silly -- the folks I most admire in my ancestry are the ones who looked around and said "Yeah current events are shaping up to be part of some nation's rich history, time to get the hell out of dodge." Rich history is largely made of poor people being shoved into the meat grinder of 'glorious' national struggles.
- Semaphor 4y agoEh, I’m German and almost bought a royal baker title some years ago. It’s mainly fun ;)
- troutwine 4y agoIt would have an appeal to me, because it's absurd. I'm an American and was raised up with the notion that royalty and monarchies are patently absurd, a feeling that has only grown as I've aged. Having a Lordship would be like owning a three-wheeled car or living in a house that looks like a giant seashell, to my mind. It'd be a funny thing to tell folks about at parties. I might even go about creating knights or whatever if the party was good enough.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoIt's pretty absurd in the UK, too, and no-one really cares about it. Where I grew up, Lord NotGoingToDoxxHim, Clan Chief of the MacDonalds, was the local TV repairman and satellite dish installer who drove an admittedly rather nice Volvo and had a house with a garden nearly as big as ours.