[lbo-talk] Triple Your Lizard

[wrobert at uci.edu]

I agree with you on the confusion.  Chris is saying something that
shouldn't be really surprising if you really thought about it (nor is it
something that is terribly interesting... sorry Chris)  The United States
has a more homogeneous culture than a recently formed confederation of
nation states as well as a subcontinent that was a labyrinth of different
forms of government (India) until 1949, and a former empire that only got
a strong central government around the same time. (More can be said about
the question of dealing with former imperial forms, and this no doubt
links up to the Russian Federation as well)  The U.S. has had a strong
national state form (with strong ideological state apparatuses) for well
over a century.  Which makes the comparison not all that useful.  For more
on this, I strongly recommend Ben Anderson's Imagined Communities, which
is a book that I find more and more useful as I read more.

        robert wood

P.S. I'm thinking about going with the wolf option....


> i tried understanding the point of this thread.
>
> basically, i guess the argument is that it is better to be rilly rilly
> diverse, with lots of different languages and cultures and it is BAAAAAAD
> to have only one or two languages and a couple of cultural-types.
>
> good to live in a big city like Paris, where people speak all kinds of
> languages.
>
> bad to live in any kind of big city in the u.s., where people only ever
> speak the official language, English.
>
> This badness / goodness is caused by waht, I'm not sure.
>
> or maybe it just is, embedded in, intrinsic to, the very essence that is
> the u.s., whereas every other culture/nation has something special about
> it
> at core, it's probably intrinsic to its cultural goodness -- china, india,
> europe, japan, brazil, canada, australia, the UK -- they are all, because
> they are not the u.s., HUGELY diverse.
>
> why? well, we don't know. it just is. probably something to do with the
> icky awfulness that it is to be america and americans.
>
> booo hiss. america bad. culture bad. people bad. language bad. it's all
> bad.
>
> awesome. i'm going to move to the culturally diverse australia now. where
> they speak 35 different languages and you can surely tell sydney from
> melbourne from canberra in a heartbeat. cultures are totally different and
> diverse. whee.
> yay.
>
> shag
>
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