Lets assume we're talking about measuring contests based on culture.
Isn't there an inherent bias in the assumption that we are above that sort of thing? As in, we know how superior we are, so we have nothing to prove, and no reason to take offense when criticised by a foreigner?
I can guarantee other cultures most definitely compare play that game, all the time. An Indian room mate let me see a poem his friends sent him, calling India the jewel of the Eastern world, and all other asian countries as dung heaps (China, Japan, ect)
__________________ What CDTM believes;
Never let anyone else define you. Don't be a jerk just to be a jerk, but if you are expressing your true inner feelings and beliefs, or at least trying to express that inner child, and everyone gets pissed off about it, never NEVER apologize for it. Let them think what they want, let them define you in their narrow little minds while they suppress every last piece of them just to keep a friend that never liked them for themselves in the first place.
If you want my personal opinion. There is danger in assuming one's superiority over another based on where you are born or what culture you worn born into.
I also think there is a danger in placing one's own country on a pedestal. This often leads countries to engage in indoctrination and not allow themselves to properly judge themselves.
I also think people tend to over blow what they consider to be the superior aspects of their culture.
For instance America way overblows the idea it has the most free freedomest freeing country to ever free. It creates a false sense superiority.
But pride in a country, is that so bad? If you can't love your country enough to advocate for it, then who can?
China, India, the U.K., or Russia certainly won't.
__________________ What CDTM believes;
Never let anyone else define you. Don't be a jerk just to be a jerk, but if you are expressing your true inner feelings and beliefs, or at least trying to express that inner child, and everyone gets pissed off about it, never NEVER apologize for it. Let them think what they want, let them define you in their narrow little minds while they suppress every last piece of them just to keep a friend that never liked them for themselves in the first place.
You can for instance acknowledge you are doing something really good while acknowledging other people are doing it just as well.
You can acknowledge you do something poorly while understanding someone does it better.
You're focusing on the part where you might do something better that because you feel you did something better it makes you superior.
That is not true. You doing something better doesn't inherently make you superior. It just means you did something better than someone else. You could still have major faults in other areas.
At the end of the day you can feel you do something well and still not think yourself better than another entity.
Personally I'd ask you to define culture. Then I'd ask why you wanted to apply equal standards instead of equitable standards. For instance a poor but strategic country that has been conquered for centuries and is know as the graveyard of empires can hardly have the same standards applied as a post colonial country based on wealthy European ideals, rich in natural resources. Where the indigenous people were systematically slaughtered and a lot of its wealth was built on slavery and trade with the nations that it's society is based on right down to its language. But that's me from the Culture that ruled more of the world than any other and only has a little more than the population of California, burnt your Whitehouse down. While inventing gulags, most founding Science and Engineering and is still referred to by the French as perfidious albion. Oh, we also mapped the Mason Dixon line because Americans couldn't do the maths with an s.
Last edited by Old Man Whirly! on Aug 18th, 2021 at 01:03 AM