Quote:
Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
The serious truth is that I see it both ways. Yes, some peoples seem to have ingrained national habits, and are somewhat subject to their own traditions. My late friend Rocky was a firm believer in national typecasting. He gave me a lot of grief over being too "German" in my thought patterns, while loving the fact that his thinking was pure "Italian". Of course he made fun of himself over that, but I loved to remind him that his own mother came straight here from Germany, so he was more "German" than I was.
That said, I'm not sure I really believe it all that much, any more than I believe in Astrology, and I wonder if our national "habits" really go back more than two or three generations. On the one hand we talk about national characteristics and claim them when it suits us and deny them when it doesn't, but on the other hand international media of all sorts have made us look at each other's cultures and adapt them wholesale.
How many Japanese today even think about the old ways, other than to wax nostalgic just like the rest of us?
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I think there is a grain of truth in these national stereotypes. I would never exaggerate attributing such "typical" characteristics to an individual only because of his or her nationality. But some differences there are, and they both come from history and a tradition of lifestyle habits and clture as well as to some degree being genetically inherited. No human born ever ha sbeen a tabula rasa. Neither regarding his "gender", nor his mentality. They may try to deny today for PC reasons and extremist feminism that there are difference sbetween boys and girls, but that is BS. Theyx also may try in the eU today to deny that there are different indentites and mentalities in the people of Eurppean local regions. I think that is BS as well. It is the great socialist (not social but indeed socialist) making-everbody-euqal-and-featureless engineering game they play, becasue justice to them is not an issue about quality, but quantity, and so everybody must be made equal in material form. So there are no preset biological and psychological sexes anymore, but arbitrary gender-roles only that can be defined by political education in any way seen as opportune. And so , there are no grown historic identities of the various people in Europe, but in mrpiocniple they all are of the same thinking, tickiong, feeling, and desire. The Scandiniavian has the smae mentality like the Italian, and the Portuegese is as self-analytical as the German, and so on. No differences - we are all equal, wonderful!
Remember Orwell'S 1984, when the interrogator is not happy with the deliquent finally, after long torture, answering "five fingers" when the interrogator shows him four and wants him to admit it is five fingers? He explains he does not want the subject to just say "five" in order to escape the procedure and ease his suffering, he wants him to indeed be convinced and make himself be convinced beyond doubt, and he wants him to have a perception where he
for real sees five fingers when being shown four.
That'S what PC and many other ideological modern schools do with us now, they show us four fingers and want us to make ourselves seeing five fingers. With PC, gender-engineers and the EUrocrats it is especially bad. I call it social-fascism now.