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On April 06 2015 16:05 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On April 06 2015 10:08 Nyxisto wrote:
Well there's a point to it though. Why insist on getting up birth rates if you can solve the problem via immigration if you don't think that 'natives' are somehow inherently better than immigrants. At a certain point you cease to have the pre-existing culture. Just ask the Indians about population displacement by a new peoples. Imagine German birthrates falling below 1, and making the rest up from immigration (and most immigration comes from 3rd world countries, which I can't fault the people for...). It wouldn't take more than a few generations before German culture becomes more and more displaced in your own country. That seems rather odd to me, to purposefully and willfully make that decisions to displace your own culture in favor of those coming from other potentially wildly different cultural backgrounds. Politically things would massively change. Being that I am half-Cherokee, my perspective on this issue is a bit more...closer to home so to say.
I don't see how genociding the native population is in any way shape or form the same as a culture changing gradualy over time, through immigration.
Culture in itself has no comparative quantifiable value. "German culture" if there even were such a thing, is not "better" than "other culture". Culture that exists now in the borders of Germany is more diverse and complex than ever before in the history of people living in that area at all. Do you know how it got to that place? Immigration. I rather have jews, turks, ghanans, irani, vietnamese etc. pp. bringing their influences here, than to be exterminated for some weird cultural integrity scheme only a retard bereft of any history of the world could come up with.
There is no monolithic "German culture", at every point that you could start, you see outside influence.
We currently have the -gidas and everything they proclaim as being part of occidental culture, is in fact brought here by immigrants, for instance claiming Germany is a christian nation (supposedly opposed to an islamic or merely muslim), when in fact it is neither and both, and every other expression of faith.
The whole issue you are overlooking is: temporal continuity.
Native Americans do not have that. Some tribes got genocided, some got marginalized, some got integrated, but none of them were part of a deliberate evolution over generations. It happened to quick and to bloody, because of overwhelming outside force.
When Germany got christianized, there was opposition, our original slavic and teutonic faiths got replaced, and people felt a loss. But it happened slowly over generations, and now everybody is fine with how it happened. So much so that every guardian of "German cutlure" proudly proclaims Germany to be a christian nation. Who are we to judge that 10 generations from now Germany has to represent something that we have no control over, when people then might be fine with it, and every generation in the process also has no major or violent disruptions it has to face?
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a lot of people would disagree with:"German culture" if there even were such a thing, is not "better" than "other culture"
there are cultures objectively better, more evolved, than other ones. the simpler way to see it is to look at it from an evolutionary perspective - there are thriving cultures of hunter and gatherer alive and kicking in the Amazonian jungle. would you want Germany to go back to that, to embrace it in a couple decades?.
also(pov anecdote), people who usually bash Amurica &co, usually consider its culture as inferior/depraved/enslaving.
overall, the culture changing gradually is not, or better said, was not a bad thing in the past but today that change, the direction in which it can be changed, can be controlled by humans and that should be at least questioned/discussed and not just left to que sera, sera type of attitudes.
there are no environmental factors that would drive the best/better culture to edge out in a culture vs culture clash.
shit people with first world problems adopting shit views because ... boredom?, should not be a viable cultural choice.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
try objectively defining what N-an culture is before jumping the shark. you can say 'hospitality is a good value to have' without then attaching that value to your ingrained nationalistic mythological identities.
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sure, jump on the globalization wagon. is that (in)your culture?.
i gave that extreme and very unlikely to happen example just to show that even when someone throws a blanket statement like the one i quoted, he still has some bias in that issue (like you, for that matter).
there was no point in defining ones culture aspects. if something/anything is different, there was a point to be made there. nationalism has nothing to do with it but you sure do love your greater evil agenda here.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
it's not the globalization wagon. i am suggesting that you are standing on shifting sands.
far from describing real objects, you are engaged in the construction of collective entities in the rather backward direction of having a conception of 'german' before knowing what that contains. this is telltale sign of the rationalization of a preexisting notion. until you realize this there is not much point in continuing this discussion, but then again, if you would realize this there is little reason for much of your posts overall.
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On April 06 2015 19:41 xM(Z wrote:a lot of people would disagree with: Show nested quote +"German culture" if there even were such a thing, is not "better" than "other culture" there are cultures objectively better, more evolved, than other ones. the simpler way to see it is to look at it from an evolutionary perspective - there are thriving cultures of hunter and gatherer alive and kicking in the Amazonian jungle. would you want Germany to go back to that, to embrace it in a couple decades?. also(pov anecdote), people who usually bash Amurica &co, usually consider its culture as inferior/depraved/enslaving. overall, the culture changing gradually is not, or better said, was not a bad thing in the past but today that change, the direction in which it can be changed, can be controlled by humans and that should be at least questioned/discussed and not just left to que sera, sera type of attitudes. there are no environmental factors that would drive the best/better culture to edge out in a culture vs culture clash. shit people with first world problems adopting shit views because ... boredom?, should not be a viable cultural choice.
Herder's notion of culture was in a way universal and idealistic, it applied to bushmen as well as to Germans, but German idealism of his generation also believed in an innate tendency towards self-perfection in all of settled creation, that the self-willed realisation of a better self was both the justification for, and the author of moral freedom. Moral freedom meant to the early apostles of culture precisely that: the ability and duty of each man, and each Volk, to follow a particular destiny. What made the Volk an organic reality was his psychological connection to others of his tribe; language being essential to the formation of consciousness, common language being the cause of a common consciousness. A Volk then was something different from the civic understanding of nationhood, it was a community incubated by the same mental and spiritual womb, hence the particularist connotation of the word "culture."
The elevation of "culture" to an intellectual status adjacent and rival to older ideals of "civilisation" gave enormous benefits to the mind of the 19th century. Among the most valuable, it gave the men of the 19th century a more mature sense of the importance of history. It shifted men's minds away from deductions of right reason, and broadened our imaginations and experiences, expanded our knowledge of the possible, while reinforcing our loyalty to the accidents of existence. The cult of "Culture" has its flaws and weaknesses, and like all ideas, it can coarsen into a straitjacket of idealised rigidity and systematised thinking.
Culture can very easily enslave as well as liberate, but its germs are now more necessary than ever. In my semi-literate generation, where culture has become that immediately-accessible thing rather than a difficult personal ambition, it is well to say that we have to recultivate how we think about culture.
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This discussion is stupid. If all culture have equal value, then it is reasonnable to defend the existence of the german culture. You don't need to believe that the german culture is above any culture to defend it... That was in essence Levi Strauss point of view in race & history.
Also, there are no reasons to discuss about "culture" when talking about birth rate. The culture is not reproduced through blood... But the birth rate is a good indicator of the state of mind of a country. When the birth rate is below 2, it just mean what it mean : that the society does not reproduce itself, with everything that it imply in regard to how this society view the future, and from and individual point of view, how the people are or not in capacity to create stable relationships.
When I see Germany current birthrate, I see a society that cannot give the situation to people to create stable relationships rather than anything else, a society that force women to decide if they want to be either a mother or a good working girl. Not a dying culture...
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Birth rate implicitly relates to culture, because at the centre of the idea of culture is the idea of adaptation, change and improvement over the original via self-renewal. The refusal to have children by the higher strata of German society reflects a situation where the former German motifs of self-perfection, Bildung and the achievement of freedom through struggle are no longer predominant. This de-culturisation of German "culture" occurs first in the immediate inner life, but it is also encapsulated by what happens across generations.
As for the immigration issue, the hostility to change via demographic pressure is easily understandable once you recognise that what is feared is the discontinuity and displacement of being swamped by foreign peoples. Mutual respect for cultural diversity prohibits that you should try to poach them away from their native hearths. What occurs then is a hodgepodge society which cannot be unified by its competing cultural continuities, even on a basis of common civic interests. The pragmatic solution will always be the de-culturisation of the whole; the displacement of emotional bonds forged out of a common memory and common experience by a secular dogma based on "freedom, democracy, rule of law," etc. This secular dogma then effectively displaces culture and sometimes even masquerades as culture itself, so that by an effective semantic displacement, no one is able to even remember what they have lost, for they will no longer possess a language to know it by.
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Immigration doesn't necessarily mean that we lose our culture. Immigrants can learn our language, read out literature ,adopt our habits etc.. It's not in anyone's genes. Most of them keep their own cuisine which is fine I guess , German food is awful anyway.
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@oneofthem
i associate/correlate culture with belongingness.
it's impossible for people living in an area to not get caught up in it, so to say (unless one actually lives in(-side) the internet).
house -> apartment house -> neighborhood(school) -> city(work place) -> province -> state -> continent -> world. you can't skip those intermediate steps and jump straight to - one culture to rule them all; or, if you're so anti-meta, - no culture to rule them all. it kills the psychological motivation of a person.
why it's so useless/unreasonable of me to use a preexisting notion of culture in an argument but for you, going against the same preexisting notion, so ... i don't know, righteous?.
if you have something better than culture that would fill that intermediate step in ones psychological development, then fill me in, but if you just point and say: no, you're wrong because X doesn't exist then ... you know, go fish somewhere else i guess.
as for me, as long as the word german will exist, i'll talk about a german culture.
+ Show Spoiler +everything is preexisting until we accept it exists; that is, unless you know where was the beginning and where it'll be the end
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On April 06 2015 23:16 WhiteDog wrote:
This discussion is stupid. If all culture have equal value, then it is reasonnable to defend the existence of the german culture. You don't need to believe that the german culture is above any culture to defend it... That was in essence Levi Strauss point of view in race & history.
Also, there are no reasons to discuss about "culture" when talking about birth rate. The culture is not reproduced through blood... But the birth rate is a good indicator of the state of mind of a country. When the birth rate is below 2, it just mean what it mean : that the society does not reproduce itself, with everything that it imply in regard to how this society view the future, and from and individual point of view, how the people are or not in capacity to create stable relationships.
When I see Germany current birthrate, I see a society that cannot give the situation to people to create stable relationships rather than anything else, a society that force women to decide if they want to be either a mother or a good working girl. Not a dying culture...
it's actually not that bad. From what I've seen and heard it's mostly a social stigma around the word "Rabeneltern" than it actually being pushing towards that direction.
There are plenty of chances for both parents to work in Germany, there are plenty of chances for mothers to work while the father stays at home, sure we're not quite where the nordic countries are but it's something. Maybe I'm biased towards thinking that way as both my parents worked fulltime (and I'm living proof that they had kids) and I really don't see a problem with it other than a mental one:
If you walk into a Kita (daycare center for kids?) you'll see that, at least in my experience, 90% of the parents there are mothers and almost all of them think it would make them a bad mother if they take (more) time away from their kid. It's really not all that much about it being a bad decision to have kids and work at the same time because it's not. It's peoples conscience telling them they'd be bad parents if they did that.
It goes both ways actually... if you don't work as a mother in Germany and just take care of the kids you're scared of being looked down upon because you don't work.
If you do work as a mother in Germany you're scared of being looked down upon as someone neglecting your kids.
That's more of a social issue of us being really judgemental than a political one.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
not sure why, given resource constraints, population growth is even economically beneficial overall. this tie-in with culture and national strength seems like advancing the intrinsic value of a strong race or ethnic group.
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On April 07 2015 00:37 oneofthem wrote:
not sure why, given resource constraints, population growth is even economically beneficial overall. this tie-in with culture and national strength seems like advancing the intrinsic value of a strong race or ethnic group.
Birth rate at 2.0 per woman is not population growth, it is reproduction. Completly different.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
meh. current birth rate is aggregation of individual choices and while there may be certain mildly bad consequences it's not that bad.
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On April 07 2015 01:13 oneofthem wrote:
meh. current birth rate is aggregation of individual choices and while there may be certain mildly bad consequences it's not that bad.
In some European countries the dependency ratio is expected to go way up, causing serious problems for social security schemes and public healthcare spending. Taxes will rise for young working adults who will then flee to greener pastures abroad, further exacerbating the problem. Pretty accurate description of what's starting to happen in Portugal.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
in that scenario the main culprit is the possible political response to demographic change, namely tax hike. aging as a problem in abstract could be addressed by other means, such as decreasing benefits payments, extending retirement, productivity growth etc
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He cannot understand, he comes from a country where retirement is per capitalisation and not repartition.
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Nobody understands because no one in modern society really cares about old people. It's an abstract humanitarian problem, not so much one of social, much less personal ethics.
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You can extend retirement, although it's already at 67. You can decrease benefits payments, even though 75% of them in PT get less than minimum wage (~500 EUR/month), and then you're also not really reducing the incentive to move abroad - in PT you discount 33% of your income for Social Security, the less you expect to get back the higher the incentive to move abroad. Problem is, pensioners and soon-to-be pensioners are becoming a bigger and bigger political force in these countries, so pandering to them is necessary to get elected.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
well in the case of portugal i'd say its economy suffers the same problem as other peripheral EU places, not all of which have demographic problems. (admittedly i don't know the extent of this for portugal)
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EPT
