Global Village

[Belfaborac]

Indeed. The desire to keep one's country or anything in it in its present state for perpetuity is at best a frightfully naive notion and indicative of a lack of understanding both of how the world works and how societies advance.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Belfaborac

Indeed. The desire to keep one's country or anything in it in its present state for perpetuity is at best a frightfully naive notion and indicative of a lack of understanding both of how the world works and how societies advance.

I don't think it's an issue of status quo vs advancement. I think it's an issue of self-directed advancement vs outsider-directed advancement.

[carpetmojo]

I finished watching, in Somerset, that fat chap with a bad case of puppy fat, and an ...... fashionable haircut in certain circles ... take over a few million people's lives, most of whom seem to be employed in the army or making nuclear bombs, just after watching a lot of other people building houses on other people's land illegally, on a TV that was made in China and Japan, wearing clothes made in a lot of Eastern countries, sitting on a Swedish designed, UK sold, sofa, listening to an Arabic news station, thinking ............ just where is the lunatic asylum - I need a holiday.

And a break from what passes for reality.

[Belfaborac]

Originally Posted by ApK

I don't think it's an issue of status quo vs advancement. I think it's an issue of self-directed advancement vs outsider-directed advancement.

There has never been such a thing as wholly self-directed advancement though, or even anything close to it; not since we swung down from the trees and became human beings. Change and advancement is almost always something we're pushed into, for the simple reason that people outside our countries are just as clever and smart as we are and there's a hell of a lot more of them. Hence most inventions, improvements and whatnot will always originate elsewhere.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Belfaborac

There has never been such a thing as wholly self-directed advancement though, or even anything close to it; not since we swung down from the trees and became human beings. Change and advancement is almost always something we're pushed into, for the simple reason that people outside our countries are just as clever and smart as we are and there's a hell of a lot more of them. Hence most inventions, improvements and whatnot will always originate elsewhere.

That sounds a lot like saying "since there are more of everyone else then there are of any one person, no one person matters." I reject that wholeheartedly. It reminds me of Douglas Adams's saying in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that the population of the Universe is zero, because if you divide an finite number of inhabitants by the infinite space of the Universe, the result is close enough to zero as not to matter.

[Belfaborac]

I can't see how it sounds like that at all, to be honest. It certainly isn't even remotely close to what I meant or wrote, which was that almost all change is, and has always been, driven from abroad/outside/elsewhere.

Edit: i.e. isolationism equals stagnation, always. All of human history bears this out.

[hidari]

Would have to agree with Belfaborac.....Apk....me thinks he was not implying what you have written..... Anyways...since most humans stopped being foragers from the age of Agriculture down to the modern era.....many changes have been forced on humans usually to eventual improvements but not always in a smooth manner....

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

I am sitting in an Italian leather couch in my Swedish house, designed by a Danish architect, reading a Japanese author about a North Korean dictator on an American Kindle, produced in China that I was able to convert through a software developed by an Indian, sipping my Brazilian coffee in a mug from Thailand, munching on some nuts from Kenya and dates from Iraq. Ohh, and I am listening to an Australian radio station playing classic music composed by Germans and Austrians on a WiFi radio designed by a Dutch company that produced it in Indonesia.

I guess Marshall McLuhan got it right.

300 years ago you could have been reading the words of an English playwright in a book published in the Netherlands describing the adventures of a Moor fighting the Turks for Venice...all while drinking coffee imported from the Ottoman empire.

If you didn't die of the plague imported from Finland...

[Kumabjorn]

300 years ago I wouldn't have been wealthy enough for that kind of life style. I would be toiling in my sweat as an apprentice with a black smith

Originally Posted by RainingLemur

I'm sorely disappointed by your lack of Canadian goods.

Canada exported the (i.e. Marshall McLuhan).

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by ApK

I don't think it's an issue of status quo vs advancement. I think it's an issue of self-directed advancement vs outsider-directed advancement.

No man is an island.

(Hmm... the theme from The Prisoner is running through my head now...)

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Belfaborac

No, I guess not.... The same could no doubt be said for the Anglo-Saxons when the Normans took over, or, if we go even further back, the inhabitants of Mari when the Assyrians sacked their kingdom around 1800 BC. Neither, however, has overly much to do with what happens today.

Originally Posted by Belfaborac

Indeed. The desire to keep one's country or anything in it in its present state for perpetuity is at best a frightfully naive notion and indicative of a lack of understanding both of how the world works and how societies advance.

Originally Posted by Belfaborac

I can't see how it sounds like that at all, to be honest. It certainly isn't even remotely close to what I meant or wrote, which was that almost all change is, and has always been, driven from abroad/outside/elsewhere.

Edit: i.e. isolationism equals stagnation, always. All of human history bears this out.

The self-contradiction of saying the event of the past don't matter today and that the lessons of the past apply to the future aside, these arguments entirely miss this point.
Yes, change is inevitable. So is death. That doesn't mean we should happily rush in to accelerating that result.

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

No man is an island.

"I am a rock. I am an island." -- Paul Simon.

As I said, favoring 'isolationism' was a bit of hyperbole on my part. Working to preserve what we hold dear of our individual and cultural distinctiveness in the face of outsiders trying to foist on us the metaphorically plague-infested blankets of their own dear-held beliefs is what I am talking about.

[Ekaros]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

If you didn't die of the plague imported from Finland...

Would have served him right ;D

Still, it is quite global, not that it's always a good or bad thing. It's mainly comes down on just how cheap sea can be to transfer goods. I heard on sneakers it can be a few cents... Now, if we just didn't globalise debt...

[Belfaborac]

Originally Posted by ApK

The self-contradiction of saying the event of the past don't matter today and that the lessons of the past apply to the future aside, these arguments entirely miss this point.

Actually there's no contradiction whatsoever. Your example (Native Americans vs. European invaders) was (basically) of a hostile invasion by a militarily and technologically superior enemy, as were mine. Neither of them were a relevant comparison to the cultural and technological cross-pollination which has taken place ever since the dawn of history.

Working to preserve what we hold dear of our individual and cultural distinctiveness in the face of outsiders trying to foist on us the metaphorically plague-infested blankets of their own dear-held beliefs is what I am talking about.

If the majority, or a significant minority, of the population does in fact hold dear the same things that you do, then those things will endure. If nobody gives a toss, then they'll go the way of the Do-Do. That's just the way it is and always has been, just as there has always been a small, but vocal minority who decries any change at all, usually on behalf of a made up majority they imagine themselves to represent.

Look at the UK, where archaic traditions and rituals abound despite serving no other real function than to signal the Britishness of participants and foster pride in those who observe. The same can be seen in most (probably all, I would imagine) European countries, where rituals and traditions dating hundreds of years or at times a millennium back are still carried out to this day. We've all been plenty culturally "polluted", mainly from the US, and yet geographical and cultural distinction persists.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Belfaborac

We've all been plenty culturally "polluted", mainly from the US...

Oh No You Di'nt!

Considering how "polluted" the Americas are from centuries of European incursion, I'd be careful about those remarks!