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Don Peppino Infernacci's avatar

As just a lowly rank-n-file attorney and not a tenure-track big brain, I find it very hard to understand how Wurman operates publicly with such thin skin while availing himself to be an academic lapdog for this current administration, blatantly operating in bad faith with his scholarship. At some point, something's gotta give.

Michael Treece's avatar

When I think about people who lack the history and culture to participate in a democracy, I immediately call to mind the descendants of Klansmen.

Beau Baumann's avatar

I mean, if it takes centuries . . .

eyebones's avatar

It bugs me that both parties in this dialog talk about 'assimilation' like it is a good thing. The word might as well be 'erased', for the culture being so treated. It is saying "our traditions are better than yours, so yours must die." It is hard to imagine a less democratic approach. The receiving culture and the arriving culture both need to reach an accommodation for co-existence.

Everyone from every culture is capable of discarding historical traditional elements that prevent a happy accommodation. No culture has gotten to this point in time without having done so a zillion times.

Beau Baumann's avatar

I mean to invoke reciprocal assimilation. It’s not a normative judgment. It’s just the observation that when you go to a new place, a new institution, a new job, that place changes you at the same time that you change it. Just part of life.

I’m not talking about people acting white. That’s what I was getting at when I talked about immigrants asserting ownership over the Anglo-American tradition. The tradition is changed by the people.

Will Satire's avatar

This is adaption in evolution. And how oxytocin which bonds mothers to their infants also promotes ethnocentrism ain’t that weird.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1015316108

Ajit Banergzy's avatar

Haven't many countries copied American constitution and some literally with very different outcomes ?

Rob Schläpfer's avatar

Maybe read some good social science on this. You’re profoundly ignorant about how culture works. Start with Joe Henrich at Harvard — “The Secret of our Success” and “The WEIRDest People in the World”

Beau Baumann's avatar

Isn’t the WEIRDest People largely a story about how radically cultures and psychologies can be transformed by changing institutions. So, like, the back half of my post?

Rob Schläpfer's avatar

Uh, no. Maybe read it.

Beau Baumann's avatar

I’ll get right on that!

Rob Schläpfer's avatar

I’d say that’s psychological projection from an arrogant ideologue. But cheers. Fin.

Don Peppino Infernacci's avatar

Very cool to talk about profound ignorance in a field of study when you previously wrote this sentence just this month: "Climate change is a concern. But it’s not something to be alarmed or worried about. Yet for decades activists have used an inflated version of the science to sow fear."

Woof.

Rob Schläpfer's avatar

That is the science. Read the IPCC’s forthcoming assessment. Cheers.

Don Peppino Infernacci's avatar

Pretty bold of a guy with no advanced education in any relevant field to assert that the overwhelming global scientific consensus on the severity and potential remedies for anthropogenic climate change is wrong. Love your enthusiasm though. I just think maybe you shouldn't be lecturing scholars in their fields of expertise. Real blowhard stuff.