Do you feel that people are more or less the same all over the world?

They play a brand of football, that spends more time in huddles etc, then playing the game that people pay to watch, while covering them selves in armour that King Arthur and the Knights of the round table would be proud to wear
.they play another game called baseball, while we indulge in another game called Cricket, which is like comparing playing drafts [baseball] against the game of chess[cricket]
The pads in football are for hitting with - delivering a blow, not receiving one. Like a boxing glove. And the tactics are the most complex in sports (hence the huddle). Meanwhile the baseball players manage to confront hardball pitches thrown from full windups without wrapping themselves in mattresses, hit them squarely without needing a ruddy canoe paddle, and navigate a rule book as thick as a phone directory in split second decisions at full speed. It takes thousands of innings and good coaching to make an average professional baseball player - chess, indeed - plenty of time to think, for sure. Plus surfing and beach volleyball and lacrosse and the Alaskan Olympics https://www.google.com/imgres?imgur...QMwhEKBgwGA&iact=mrc&uact=8#h=825&vet=1&w=550

And we don't - yet - play soccer, the goofiest and least interesting sport in the world.

So we get points there - a little cushion to keep our rating up while we figure out how many square feet there are in an acre, buy two complete sets of wrenches and drills for every toolbox, and pretend we always wanted to auger in with our Mars rover under 137 ft/lbs of thrust. Seismic studies.
 
And we don't - yet - play soccer, the goofiest and least interesting sport in the world.
.
You have my agreement on that score alone. ;)
I actually believe most Soccer players would do better in Hollywood/Bollywood judging on the number of times they feign injury etc from the most gentle of knocks. ;)
 
Do you tend to feel that people from Australia, New Zealand and the UK are not very different from those of us in the U.S. (insert your own country)?

I don't think that people from those three countries are tremendously different from Americans like myself. People from continental Europe seem more different. Those from non-Western countries are even more alien.

Does it sometimes seem that those from other countries just don't think as we think or that they must have a different moral framework or just don't "get it"?

I think that all human beings are pretty much alike (but perhaps not 100%) in their basic social instincts. But inherited cultures can lead to those social instincts being expressed in dramatically different ways. The Islamic world is an illustration of that.

Do you think that those countries that you tend to identify with just happen to speak the same language that you do and you are therefore able to better communicate with them than with those in other countries?

Being able to speak the same language is obviously important. So is coming from a similar historical background and sharing many of the same ways of conceiving of things.

We know that people the world over should all be, more or less, the same.

Why? I think that's an expression of a contemporary post-nationalist faith that's being promoted in all of our media and schools these days. Everybody is just the same. I'm not convinced that I believe it or that I should believe it.

The problem is that it kind of presupposes a single normative global culture, which always seems to be some leftish version of contemporary post-World War II Western culture, often its European or American variants. Other cultures, such as Islam and its God-revealed Law, are expected to conform to Western presuppositions. But many Muslims have no interest in doing that, hence the kind of problems that we see around us today. China is another culture whose communist-party rulers don't show much intention of conforming to Western ideals of liberty and democracy.

There's still something faintly imperialistic about the global liberalism that's supposed to be normative everywhere. Foreigners are always supposed to emulate us, there's no expectation that we abandon our supposedly more modern and enlightened values and copy them. Perhaps we need to be more cognizant of the world's cultural diversity.
 
Last edited:
There's still something faintly imperialistic about the global liberalism that's supposed to be normative everywhere. Foreigners are always supposed to emulate us, there's no expectation that we abandon our supposedly more modern and enlightened values and copy them.
That's on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in the conservative mind. On Wednesdays and Fridays, the problem is that the "liberals" are too ready to abandon the virtues of the Western Enlightenment and allow the backwards and benighted barbarisms of medieval Asian and pre-civilization African to corrupt the wonderful civilization they have inherited from the lovers of freedom.

I'm not saying there is no truth to any of that - just that its use as a political convenience and power point obviates the value of the insight.
 
Back
Top