Mhm… am I the only one to see a logical contradiction here? Either your claim isn’t a fact, but a personal claim, or it happens to be true.
And you’re moving your goalpost: your first statement
Now London and Paris seem to be equally, and Moscow, Berlin and Milan have turned to Bratislava and Tromso.
I’m interested: are you American or British? Just so I can put your arrogance about London versus the rest of the continent in the approriate context.
Well, I seem to have misunderstood your earlier answer to Freddys post
I understood elites to refer to universities and education. If you were talking about the general quality of a city instead, I still don’t know where you get this ranking from.
My name is not Fritz. Just for your information. But if you think I’ve gone off-topic talking about universities in other European cities besides London, feel free to contact a moderator for breaking the board rules.
I define “flyover country” as any areas that serve merely as obstacles or space holders between the places you actually want to go.
To me, New York is flyover country. I’ve been there enough to know I have no interest in going there again.
The Germans never had a flair for logic; that was left to the Poles and the Austrians. My claim is a claim about the “more globally important” binary relation over the set of European cities. Letting “>” serve as the symbol for this relation and “A” as the symbol of universal quantification, and letting L be London, P be Paris, and x be a variable, my claim was:
Ax (L>x or x=L)
Ax (~(P>x) iff x=L)
There is no logical contradiction in these sentences and I can easily think of a model that satisfies them (for instance, let the relation be “is less than” over the natural numbers including zero, then let L=0 and let P=1).
As the Kinder say: SCHEITERN.
You ask your typical graduate of ENS-Ulm or FUB whether they’d rather be hired to work in New York, London, or, ha ha, Munich, and I can tell you which one they are not going to pick.
ETA: After all, the magazine is called Nylon and not, say, Munsaw, for a reason.
Does this claim come from ignorance of guys like Immanuel Kant, or have you re-classified him from Prussian to Pole/Austrian? (He’s obviously not the only one, just the first one that came into my mind. You know, being famous for spreading enlightment and so on.)
And where do you get the idea that this is binary? Rankings that list 1st to 10th/100th etc. are problematic enough, but binary relation, that means, true or false?
Also, why are getting off topic to “globally important”? This started out about flyover country, not global importance. Maybe you could define global importance first, before you measure it?
Looking over your posts in this thread, I am starting to get the impression that the only thing you have to do is obsess over Bavarians.
I had to look up your abbreviation because I wondered why you referred to the university of the city of Ulm, but you probably mean the Elite university of Paris. And considering that Wikipedia says
I assume that the typical graduate wants to keep his safe civil servant job in Paris/France, instead of joining the hire/fire world in New York, but I don’t know for sure, because I haven’t heard what the graduates say.
I assume you mean FUB to refer to the Free University in Berlin. I don’t know if the typical graduate would prefer New York, London or Munich, because judging from graduates generally, it depends on the field, on the question of going into academia for teaching/research or into the private sector, and personal preferences. A graduate may choose Berlin over Munich because of his family, or go to New York for one year and then return. A graduate may choose Munich over Berlin because he wants to go to a private company there. He may choose Regensburg if that is best renowned for research into his special field.
I’ve never heard of that magazine, but then I’m not into pop culture. Do you mean to imply that the name is derived from the city of New York, and not from nylon stockings? Do you have any evidence for that?
Besides, what proof is one dinky magazine? Of course New York is better known internationally. That wasn’t the question.
You also didn’t answer my questions.
I think I’ve forgotten more Kant than you’ll ever know to begin with. He is not considered a logician. (Yes, he did write a book called Logic, it is not one of his works still read today.)
I get the idea that it is a binary relation because a relation that compares two items and returns a value of true or false is a binary relation. Maybe you should read a book on logic (not the Kant one though, you could read the Aufbau, it’s in Kraut) before you lecture me about it. KTHXBYE.
KTHXBYE.
You’re not playing anymore? Just after you showed me up so good! :dubious:
This is a thread about whether places are interesting or not; whether places have something there or something about them that would make people want to visit there. An American poster said that there were parts of your country which were sometimes regarded as such. He asked, very reasonably, whether there were parts of Europe which were regarded in the same way. I, among others, have contended that because Europe is many different countries with individual histories and cultures, in the main going back (in visible/visitable ways) further than one may find in America, there isn’t really a part of Europe that has nothing going for it.
You made a claim about several cities, one of which happens to be my home. Your claim was nonsensical, as evidenced by you now changing it so that Paris is now equal to London and your other examples have been changed from very large cities to really rather small ones. You are giving your opinion, no matter how much you say “it does happen to be true”. You may think so. I differ, so I gave my opinion, which I submit may be better informed, having spent more time in the cities in question. This thread is in IMHO because there cannot be any definite answer. However nothing you say will persuade me that within the parameters the original poster appeared to have in mind (and which were further established and defined subsequently, with no disagreement from the OP), a city like Bratislava with its beauty and attractions of all types (including, if you’re interested in education, a university of international renown) is just as “worthy” of a visit as London or Paris.
You seem to be getting very upset about the idea that we have a lot of variety of stuff in Europe. Maybe you should travel and see some of it, then you wouldn’t have to be so envious.
Well, congratulations, you have grossly misapprehended the topic of this thread. “Flyover country” does not mean “not the slightest bit interesting.” It is used by fashionistas to deprecate the parts of the United States that are not New York or Los Angeles. Its equivalent in Europe would be the most elite and fashionable and powerhousey of all European cities. This is London (the analogue of New York, the first city of its continent) and Paris (the analogue of Los Angeles, the somewhat lesser of the couple).
Regrettably, I have traveled to Europe. I rather wish now that I hadn’t so that I could crow about finding the Old World to be altogether dispensable to snooty continentals. Ideally, I would be wearing a Git-R-Done cap and a “Palin 2012” tee-shirt and a fanny pack and wolfing down a Big Mac and scratching my nards while doing all of this.
[Moderator Admonition]Could you tone down the snarkiness about eight notches? This is IMHO, not The BBQ Pit-try to be a little more civil.[/Moderator Admonition]
So you’ve chosen two parts of my post which you feel you can snark about, and ignored the rest? People like you can be very boring. Read back over the thread. There’s been a fair amount of discussion about what different people mean by “flyover country” and what the OP meant by it. I have not “grossly misapprehended” anything. However you do seem to have done. You seem to feel that it is necessary for you to attack and insult anyone whose posts do not agree with yours. No-one has insulted America or any of your precious places (what was it now, Omaha, that was so small no-one would have heard of it?), yet you seem determined to insult everyone and everywhere else. Have you ever actually lived in Europe? Have you ever really listened during a conversation with a European person? I know you have a problem with the Germans, but just to take one example, I think they’d be pretty amused to find that you think Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, etc., are just teeny blips on the map with no significance. Speaking purely for my own country, there are a fair few people in Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham who are giving you some funny looks right now. We don’t regard things the way you do, perhaps. You are determined that there will be some sort of elitist attitude similar to that of some people who live on the US coasts. I just haven’t experienced it at all (and since this is IMHO, I can only give my opinion, though I venture to say it’s an informed one). It’s no good saying that London’s a bigger city so nothing else matters. That’s just not how people see things here. Apart from anything else, it’s a whole lot of different countries. How people see the rural or suburban places in their own country is very different to how people see cities in other countries.
I’m trying to be very calm and explicit in what I say so that you can see that the only person getting snarky at the moment is you. Maybe it would cheer you up to know that the image you describe is precisely the one you are putting across?
I have a plan to use nukes to landscape Ireland into a beautiful atoll with hourly speedboats from Ballinsloe to Lucan port.
]
Well he may as well have. I thought his remarks unduly incendiary, or at least someone needs to give him a narrower paintbrush.
You know, some of us white people actually don’t listen to right-wing radio, or pay any attention to Fox News.
We finally elect a non-white, non-rural President and we still have to put up with these insults. Totally uncalled for, even without any desire to defend Wal-Mart. It would be like me complaining that everybody looks, sounds, and thinks alike between Frankfurt and Berlin.
I imagine few if any European towns are devoid of history and interest, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s enough to keep one’s interest for a long stretch of weeks. A large, bland appearing city in western America probably has more cultural assets at any given time than a thousand-year-old German university town. This is absolutely not to say that the German town isn’t interesting and worthwhile; merely that it’s inevitable that in a city of <100K inhabitants, you will come to a point where there is nothing more to see, at least as far as physical assets, museums, and so on are concerned. And there will be a limit to how much performing arts presentations can be sustained. I speak mainly from the perspective of a visitor or tourist, rather than a student or other resident staying for a long time.
I haven’t been to Denver, but I can certainly tell you that Berlin is as interesting and cosmopolitan as any city you’ll find.
If you’re comparing small European towns to big American cities, you’re probably correct. But what does that really tell us? In my experience, per capita European towns usually have far, far more of interest and history than most North American towns. In addition, that smaller European town is probably a lot closer to a bunch of other interesting towns and cities than the American city is, which adds even more to the imbalance.
So no, I don’t think there is much flyover country in Europe, at least not in the way there is in most New World countries. Maybe Belarus qualifies??
This I have to agree with you on. It’s laughable to hear a European complain that Americans all think alike, when there is faaaar more diversity of opinion (IMHO) in the US than anything I’ve ever seen in Europe. In that area, at least, it’s the Europeans who are the zombies.
And I loved that bit about white people. Because the white people in America all came from…Europe!! Including Germany.
Allowing for recent non-white immigration to Europe, white Americans are the same as Europeans. Except for that part about us living four thousand miles away.
To be fair, all constanze said was that the native people of your continent were, by and large, cleared off the land and left little trace, so the contention that your history didn’t start when white people arrived, though clearly true, didn’t mean that there was necessarily a huge amount of visible history left of earlier inhabitants. It is unquestionable that it was the arrival of white people which caused this to happen. That isn’t in itself an accusation of genocide so much as a historical fact which had material bearing on the discussion. To turn this round and start throwing comments about the Third Reich, calling her/him Fritz and saying that she/he should read certain books because they were written “in Kraut” is deeply offensive and unnecessary. But as I said, it’s none of my business. I am neither German nor American, Native or otherwise.
You’re comparing two totally unlike things. Of course a small town, by definition, has less in it than a city. Having seen all that there is to see in a place does not, however, mean that it wasn’t worth going there in the first place, hence doesn’t make the small town into automatic flyover country.
I invite you to consider the village where I (partly) grew up. It had at the time probably fewer than 800 inhabitants, including outlying farms, but it has an interesting Norman church with Saxon gravestones used in the construction and medieval decoration within, not to mention the two separate graveyards - one dating back centuries for ordinary burials, one a “cholera ground” from the nineteenth century; it has an interesting Victorian schoolhouse, still in use, of a type which you usually only see in open air museums; it has the remains of a castle, the main part of which was destroyed by Cromwell but which while it stood was the Archbishop of York’s palace and as such was the closest Cardinal Wolsey ever came to actually reaching his seat at York. See here: Cawood Castle - Wikipedia, though with the caveat that parts of it are not what I was told while I was growing up there. It has a swing bridge of interest to engineering/industrial history types. It is allegedly the place where Dick Turpin, the highwayman, swam the river on his horse Black Bess in an attempt to escape the law, which caught up with him and he was hanged at York a few days later (the swimming is the alleged part. It’s almost certain that this is where he crossed, since there isn’t anywhere else he could have for miles). This small village can show you archaeological evidence of settlement going back beyond the Vikings. It has sixteenth century pubs, still serving top-quality (award winning) beer and food. It is also home to one of the most important experimental horticulture/agriculture installations in the UK, if you don’t like old stuff. I’ll stop, because this is long, but there’s more. Would you just fly over it if someone offered you a chance to go there? Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t, but show me a place in America with that kind of length and breadth of history. One place with fewer than 800 residents, and the history needs to be unique to that town. Go.
No-one’s saying America isn’t interesting. I fully intend, as soon as I have the money and the time, to come and see it in as much detail as I possibly can, as I did with continental Europe. But big bits of it are quite empty, or quite new, or quite samey, in a way that Europe just isn’t. Things are older and closer together here!